"May I put you to sleep?" the gunslinger asked.
"I'm not sleepy."
"I can make you sleepy, and I can make you remember."
Doubtfully, Jake asked, "How could you do that?"
"With this." The gunslinger removed one of the shells from his gunbelt nad twirled it in his fingers. The movement was dexterous, as flowing as oil. The shell cartwheeled effortlessly from thumb to index to index and second, to second and ring, to ring and pinky.
But the boy was asleep sitting up, his hands folded neatly in his lap.
"When I snap my fingers, you'll wake up. You'll be rested and fresh. Do you understand?"
"Yes."
Lie over then."
His father nodded. "That is worthy. Not moral, but it is not your place to be moral. In fact..." He peered at his son. "Morals may always be beyond you. You are not quick, like Cuthbert or Wheeler's boy. It will make you formidable."
There the gunslinger saw an arc of brown movement in the shadows. He drew, fired, and felled the rabbit all before Jake could begin to cry out in surprise. A moment later he had reholstered the gun.
The gunslinger was up and on the run. A bitter circle of moon had risen and he could follow the boy's track in the dew.
He let his mind coil out at her, the antithesis of emotion. The body that hung over him froze and seemed to scream. There was a brief, vicious tug-of-war between his temples-his mind was the rope, gray and fibrous. For long moments there was no sound but the quiet hush of his breathing and the faint breeze[...]Her hold loosened.
Without a thought and seemingly without a click of motor relays, the gunslinger had drawn his pistols. The boy cowered to his right and behind, a small shadowed. Roland fired three times before he could gain control of his traitor hands
Neither of them had any means of telling time, and the concept of hours became meaningless. In a sense, they stood outside time[...] The range finder in his head took them on steadily.
The gunslinger fired without allowing himself to think, before his spotty vision could betray his hand into a terrible quiver; the two heads were only inches apart. It was the mutie who fell, slitheringly.
The boy plunged, and one hand flew up like a gull in the darkness, up, up, and then he hung over the pit; he dangled there, his dark eyes staring up at the gunslinger in final blind lost knowledge.
"Help me."
Booming, racketing: "Come now, gunslinger. Or catch me never."
All chips on the table. Every card but one. The boy dangled, a living Tarot card, the hanged man, the Phoenician sailor, innocent lost and barely above the wave of a stygian sea.