“Right,” she called, and Eddie hawed right, barely missing one of the increasingly rare sandtraps.
They finally stopped and Eddie lay down, breathing hard.
“Sleep,” Odetta said. “An hour. I’ll wake you.”
Eddie looked at her.
“I’m not lying. I observed your friend’s condition, Eddie—”
“He’s not exactly my friend, you kn—”
“—and I know how important time is. I won’t let you sleep longer than an hour out of a misguided sense of mercy. I can tell the sun quite well. You won’t do that man any good by wearing yourself out, will you?”
“No,” he said, thinking: But you don’t understand. If I sleep and Detta Walker comes back—
“Sleep, Eddie,” she said, and since Eddie was too weary （and too much in love） to do other than trust her, he did. He slept and she woke him when she said she would and she was still Odetta, and they went on, and now she was pumping again, helping. They raced up the diminishing beach toward the door Eddie kept frantically looking for and kept not seeing.
4
When he left Odetta eating her first meal in days and went back to the gunslinger, Roland seemed a little better.
“Hunker down,” he said to Eddie.
Eddie hunkered.
“Leave me the skin that’s half full. All I need. Take her to the door.”
“What if I don’t—”
“Find it? You’ll find it. The first two were there; this one will be, too. If you get there before sundown tonight, wait for dark and then kill double. You’ll need to leave her food and make sure she’s sheltered as well as she can be. If you don’t reach it tonight, kill triple. Here.”
He handed over one of his guns.
Eddie took it with respect, surprised as before by how heavy it was.
“I thought the shells were all losers.”
“Probably are. But I’ve loaded with the ones I believe were wetted least—three from the buckle side of the left belt, three from the buckle side of the right. One may fire. Two, if you’re lucky. Don’t try them on the crawlies.” His eyes considered Eddie briefly. “There may be other things out there.”
“You heard it too, didn’t you?”
“If you mean something yowling in the hills, yes. If you mean the Bugger-Man, as your eyes say, no. I heard a wildcat in the brakes, that’s all, maybe with a voice four times the size of its body. It may be nothing you can’t drive off with a stick. But there’s her to think about. If her other comes back, you may have to—”
“I won’t kill her, if that’s what you’re thinking!”
“You may have to wing her. You understand?”
Eddie gave a reluctant nod. Goddam shells probably wouldn’t fire anyway, so there was no sense getting his panties in a bunch about it.
“When you get to the door, leave her. Shelter her as well as you can, and come back to me with the chair.”
“And the gun?”
The gunslinger’s eyes blazed so brightly that Eddie snapped his head back, as if Roland had thrust a flaming torch in his face. “Gods, yes! Leave her with a loaded gun, when her other might come back at any time? Are you insane?”
“The shells—”
“Fuck the shells!” the gunslinger cried, and a freak drop in the wind allowed the words to carry. Odetta turned her head, looked at them for a long moment, then looked back toward the sea. “Leave it with her not!”