At last he heard his voice say, “You could have held back one shell you knew was live. I wouldn’t put it past you.” And with that said he knew it to be true: he wouldn’t put that or anything else past Roland.
His Tower.
His goddamned Tower.
And the slyness of putting the saved shell in the third cylinder! It provided just the right touch of reality, didn’t it? Made it hard not to believe.
“We’ve got a saying in my world,” Eddie said. “ ‘That guy could sell Frigidaires to the Eskimos.’ That’s the saying.”
“What does it mean?”
“It means go pound sand.”
The gunslinger looked at him for a long time and then nodded. “You mean to stay. All right. As Detta she’s safer from . . . from whatever wildlife there may be around here . . . than she would have been as Odetta, and you’d be safer away from her—at least for the time being—but I can see how it is. I don’t like it, but I’ve no time to argue with a fool.”
“Does that mean,” Eddie asked politely, “that no one ever tried to argue with you about this Dark Tower you’re so set on getting to?”
Roland smiled tiredly. “A great many did, as a matter of fact. I suppose that’s why I recognize you’ll not be moved. One fool knows another. At any rate, I’m too weak to catch you, you’re obviously too wary to let me coax you close enough to grab you, and time’s grown too short to argue. All I can do is go and hope for the best. I’m going to tell you one last time before I do go, and hear me, Eddie: Be on your guard.”
Then Roland did something that made Eddie ashamed of all his doubts （although no less solidly set in his own decision）： he flicked open the cylinder of the revolver with a practiced flick of his wrist, dumped all the loads, and replaced them with fresh loads from the loops closest to the buckles. He snapped the cylinder back into place with another flick of his wrist.
“No time to clean the machine now,” he said, “But ’twont matter, I reckon. Now catch, and catch clean—don’t dirty the machine any more than it is already. There aren’t many machines left in my world that work anymore.”
He threw the gun across the space between them. In his anxiety, Eddie almost did drop it. Then he had it safely tucked into his waistband.
The gunslinger got out of the wheelchair, almost fell when it slid backward under his pushing hands, then tottered to the door. He grasped its knob; in his hand it turned easily. Eddie could not see the scene the door opened upon, but he heard the muffled sound of traffic.
Roland looked back at Eddie, his blue bullshooter’s eyes gleaming out of a face which was ghastly pale.
16
Detta watched all of this from her hiding place with hungrily gleaming eyes.
17
“Remember, Eddie,” he said in a hoarse voice, and then stepped forward. His body collapsed at the edge of the doorway, as if it had struck a stone wall instead of empty space.
Eddie felt an almost insatiable urge to go to the doorway, to look through and see where—and to what when—it led. Instead he turned and scanned the hills again, his hand on the gun-butt.
I’m going to tell you one last time.
Suddenly, scanning the empty brown hills, Eddie was scared.
Be on your guard.
Nothing up there was moving.
Nothing he could see, at least.
He sensed her all the same.
Not Odetta; the gunslinger was right about that.
It was Detta he sensed.
He swallowed and heard a click in his throat.