The Band walks to the end of the boulevard and into the town outskirts under the golden sun of late September, watched only now by the fleeting eyes of beasts and the spare gazes of dirty faced children as they run from their wake, in those gazes terror. Out here past the tents of the buffalo hunters most deserted and the rest occupied by flickering shadow shapes on their linen walls, along the brown dirt road and past rows of golden grass, past the infertile fields of desperate sustenance farmers in which grow mutant looking fruits and vegetables of autumn squashes and pumpkins and gourds yellow and sticking about like misshapen lemon bushels. They come through a row of shucking and wispy haired corn and to a crossroads marked by an ancient stone well on which Florence Merce sits smoking a cigarette.

“Howdy.” She says, looking The Knights up and down curiously.

“Why, yer a strange sight.” She says. Jesse looks upon her as a man would look upon a spirit or specter, with something approaching disbelief.

“We’re headed down the road now.” Jesse says. Florence looks out to the horizon where a dervishing inferno of flame and smoke is rising up into the air, the ashes of Rumrun drifting amidst the wind and fertilizing these barren fields.

“You did that?” She asks, seemingly non judgemental.

“That we did.” She nods slowly, looks Sunny up and down.

“I heard you boys were in some trouble.”

“We were.”

“And now?”

“Probably more.” Jesse says, casting a glance back to the fire where it reflects greek fire on his gray sealike eyes.

“You’ll be back this way?” She asks.

“Well. I reckon not.” Jesse says. Already his fellows are walking down the road five in a row, knowing he’ll catch up and leaving him to his talk.

“And what of me?”

“I reckon ye’ll have to get out of here too.”

“I reckon I will. Think I'll head South.”

“I’ll find you there someday.” Florence looks him up and down.

“I hope you do.” She says.

Out then onto the open prairie still without a word, walking six in file past watching herds of buffalos with judgelike eyes and ivory horns, past rearing prairie dogs come out of their burrows and old wreckages and graffitis of ill fated pilgrims, past ancient bones of buffalo and aurochs and other creatures gone to or near to extinction. By sunset the road has narrowed down to a weedy and ill maintained wagon wheel rut in a land in which humanity is not welcome, out here in the world between worlds, the wasteland cometh. Soon the prairie gives way to strange and mutant dunes, not quite desert where the last dregs of junipers and tallgrass and pink mimosas lay strangled by the sands. As the stars come out fresh and clear in this country, cast against the milky cerulean cosmos and moon of thin gold sliver cast like a stage prop against, The Band makes camp under the shade of the last lonely cottonwood, the prairies final vestige. To the West the great and stretching expanse of redrock desert, seeming a strange land undoubtedly cast under The Devils Thumb with its great and sweeping walls and plateaus and tableaus of sanguine orange stone and sand, poking out of it strange shrubs making it all seem a scene of some alien landscape. Far off in the distance the fire of Rumrun spread and leaping across the prairie, even further off Southerly the distant lights of wagon bound refugees fled away from the inferno.

Morgan strikes them a fire with tinder and they sit around it solemnly, all seeming drained completely of life save The Drifter who sits there looking fresh as any and stripped of his ridiculous suit jacket and hair clip. The Drifter reaches his hands over the fire and the flames seem to leap up to them as if drawn by a magnet, perhaps just a trick of the light or lonely wind.

“Who are you?” Jesse asks. The Knights now all gathered about the fire and wrapping their clothes about themselves in the cold of dying September.

“I’m many things.” The Drifter says, his gold rings seeming to glitter there as he turns his hands over the flame.

“Well. Why did you save us? Back there?”

“Because your fates have yet to run out. The clock has yet to hit midnight, in other words.”

“You speak in riddles.”

“As I always do. What I mean, young knight, is we still have a long road ahead of us. And a desperate road, it seems, a trying one. A baptism of which you have already begun.”

“You began it for us.”

“But I did not. You’ve already killed many, more than almost all men ever will in their lifetimes, all but a select few.”

“And why are we of that select few?” The Drifter strikes himself a cigarette over the fire and takes a long drag, closing his eyes as his black hair blows in the wind and the smoke twirls along its intertwining waves.

“Enough of the philosophy, I ask you. We’ll have much time to talk in the desert.”

“Without any supplies? We won’t live long.” Duncan says.

“You’ll find a way. The desperate coyote will eat its own leg off for food if it is starving, and man will go to similar lengths.” With that Jesse shakes his head and leans back into the sagebrush, pulling his coat over his eyes and waiting for sleep.

Feverish dreams cometh, strange and murderous in tint. Dreams of strewn corpses of long past, the corpses of his mother and father and then that of his sister that poor forgotten unfortunate, of blood and the smell of gunsmoke, those smells which define his life now and perhaps have and will forever. Born in violence, to die in violence. A vision of the dead face of Atticus Westminster the Innocent lying there bleeding from his skull, looking up at him here with accusing eyes. Premonitions of more corpses, of passing faces, of a warpath strewn with death at the end of which lies The Dark Tower as it looms there in its lightning embrace, coming from its top window light the color of roses. What lies there, he wonders? And wonder he will.

The next morning they file into the desert as dried out and dirty husks, already feeling dehydration and starvation crawl in to their shambling and wounded bodies. Without their guns and swords they are naked, defenseless, all around them seeming some looming of vague threat, poltergeists of sandbound violence on those stone walls which surround them in labyrinthian patterns, climbing cliffs on all sides on which scurries the improbable life of jerboas and scorpions and rooks cawing from the shades of fig trees. Jesse coughs and sees in there a faint crimson and turns to The Drifter as he walks point.

“We’ll die soon, Elijah.”

“You won't die.”

“There's no water out here, no food. No guns neither.”

“You’ll find a way, and I’ll help you find it.” He says, stopping there at the edge of a ridge and pointing far off into the distance. Jesse squints and follows his gaze and sees there the vague form of some long abandoned and decrepit farm of timber.

“There.”

“A well, do you think?” Sunny says, his form still stained with blood now dried to an unsettling maroon.

“A well. I’ve walked this road many times, and I remember well.”

“People?” Elijah closes his eyes a long moment, as if contemplating.

“No. Nothing but ghosts.” He says, and so they walk. Along the shade of valleys and craters of red stone where once great and ancient meteorites had carved their paths, their pearlescent metals still glittering faintly there in this virgin tract of desert. Watched by coyotes and jackals they walk upon a long and winding path up the hillside and to the shade of a plateaus edge on which lies The Old Farm, abandoned and of graying wood and tin roof, its crop rows wilted to mummylike black and soil dried out to salt. They come up through its old gate and past a scarecrow of wood and tin on which the very birds it once swore off roost and pick at its coveralls, up past old wheelbarrows and even a bleached skeleton there grinning at them with straw hat still atip on its head.

“How long this place been abandoned?” Duncan asks.

“I don't remember. A few lifetimes, I’d guess.” Elijah says, walking to the door. There he raps thrice and opens it after a long moment, rusted hinge coming undone easily and out of the house coming a ripe scent of guano and dust.

“Goddamn.” Sunny says, blinking hard.

“That’s fucking foul.” Giles says. The Drifter turns back to them and grins.

“I never did say it’d be pleasant.”

“No, I suppose you didn't.” The five knights walk there into the house, nothing more than a single high ceilinged story and loft dusty but preserved by time, in the eves hanging a cauldron of bats all of brown fur and pug face, fast asleep with their paper mache like wings folded there origamically.

“I’d suggest a soft step here.” The Drifter says, raising a finger to his lips and moving there to the kitchen. There in the center of the main room sits a round table in the center of which is an archaic looking musket and around which are six skeletons, all with holes through their jaws and out the backs of their heads. The youngest of the skeletons is tiny, nothing more than a child and dressed in a schoolgirl's clothes. Nesting in the cranium of this skeleton an eclipse of papery moths.

“How do you know of this place, Elijah?” Jesse asks, inspecting around for sources of water. He finds a ragged door which leads into the rear courtyard and sees there a stone well, whistles for his fellows and they gather there to look.

“Intuition.” Elijah says.

“You never been here before?” Sunny asks.

“Maybe I have. I’ve been many places, and this might be one of them.” Elijah says, lighting himself a cigarette and sitting there with feet kicked up on the central table around which the macabre family sits. He reaches a hand up and takes the broad brimmed and bullet punched hat of the patriarch, wipes it off, and puts it atop his head.

“He really never talks straight, does he?” Giles says. The Knights walk out there into the courtyard and find there two ancient burros mummified by desert sand and with vacant eyes long since plucked out, attached to them a plowing cart. Giles looks over the edge of the well and grimaces, reaches a hand in. When he brings the hand out it is covered in a black-red fluid which looks nothing at all like water.

“Goddamn. We can't drink this.” Giles says. The other knights sniff at the well and come to similar conclusions.

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“Looks like blood.” Duncan says, swiping at the water and stirring its murky rhodophyted surface, the algae a color to match the fluid. When he does so it whirls unnaturally and up comes a blackened skull.

“Oh, Christ.” He says, pulling his hand back. Morgan shakes his head and walks back through the door with his fellows in tow, something furious in his face as he leans over the table towards The Drifter. He sweeps one of the skeletons onto the floor where it breaks apart like an ill assembled puzzle and sits there.

“You trying to poison us?” He asks.

“No such thing. That water is perfectly drinkable.” Elijah says.

“It has a corpse in it.” Duncan says dryly, looking about the place with anguish.

“And?”

“We can’t drink water with a corpse in it.”

“But you must. What other options are there?” The Knights grow silent.

“None, I suppose.”

“Then, you must.”

“And what of you?”

“I ain’t thirsty.” Elijah says. The Knights each take the skeletons off of their chairs and carry the bodies out to dump them amidst the sage in the courtyard, then return and sit there all around the table a grim rendition of The Round Table itself all covered in road dust and blood, six picaros of chapped lips and drying eyes. The day grows long and the heat longer in that confined space and soon the knights are coated in sweat, swaying in delirium as they reach the ends of their patience. As The Sun sets gradiently crimson violet in The West, streaming through the windows and casting them in it’s haunted light the bats begin to stir and it is by their waking patterns Jesse is transfixed, the flapping of their numerous papery black wings hypnotizing as they shake and tremble in their freshly awoken throes, preparing to take flight there through the chimney of the place, a great and round thing of brick on the ashen walls of which the patterns of scraping wings are evident.

“We have to drink from it.” Jesse says, as if in a trance. Duncan moans.

“We’ve got no choice.” Sunny says. Morgan shakes his head.

“I’d rather die.” He says.

“Then I suppose you will die.” Sunny says, standing up shakily, his complexion feverish underneath its crimson mask. He walks and then runs out to the well, and Jesse follows steadily. When he emerges out into the surreal light and scene he sees Sunny taking greedy gulps from the water, gasping as he throws the dark stuff all over his clothing and face, whooping in some barbaric sort of triumph. Jesse holds himself a moment longer then joins Sunny at the well, taking a sip of the stuff and finding beneath its coppery taste refreshment, taking long sips as the rest of The Knights join them all save Morgan. Elijah soon stands at the doorway with Morgan still at the table, grinning as he watches The Knights sipping from the well like dogs. At some point Duncan pulls out the skull and tosses it at Elijah's feet, where he kicks it off into the sage still smiling. Eventually Jesse begins to vomit and he pulls away from the well, gasping for air as he meets eyes with Elijah.

“You bastard. You enjoyed that, didn’t you?” He asks, standing up and swaying almost drunkenly toward The Drifter with his face still stained with blackish crimson muck.

“I did no such thing. All I did was bring you to it and watch.” Jesse meets his gaze a long moment and spits at his feet, pushing past and walking to his brother.

“Morgan.” He says. Morgan does not respond, his head slumped there.

“Morgan.” Jesse walks to Morgan's side and drops down, sees his brother is unconscious with a thin stream of spittle falling from his lips.

“Ah fuck. Boys!” Jesse calls, panic rising cottony in his throat.

“Boys!” He yells, heart beating so hard in his chest he can feel it like a fist reaching up around his neck. Through the door comes Sunny first with his red stained ghouls face dropping its grin upon the sight of Jesse cradling his brother, then Duncan who runs to the boy and pulls him up in his great arms, his strength then evident as he raises him like nothing more than a rag.

“Shit. He’s still breathing.” Duncan says as he rushes out to the well, laying Morgan there with his red hair all asplay on the dusty stones and scooping out great gulps of water down his mouth. Jesse holds his head up, leaning in close to hear the faint breathing of his brother. He looks to Elijah and sees The Drifter is too smiling, reaches down to his phantom gun and discovers nothing there. As Jesse is still being revived slowly but surely Jesse rises and strides towards The Drifter, raising his fists before him.

“Easy now boy. You ain’t so big.” Elijah says. Jesse walks towards him and shoves The Drifter into the wall, finding suddenly an almost unquenchable desire to kill the man. Instead he raises a fist and brings it down into Elijah's face and The Drifter only grins, pulls him back as easily as one would pull off a fly and tosses him there onto the cobbles.

“Easy now.” Elijah says. Jesse rises with blood dripping amidst his hair, raising his fists again for another vain attempt at a strike, stopped when Sunny grabs him from one side and Duncan from the other. The freshly revived Morgan stumbles up to the scene, whispering into his brother's ear.

“Calm down. Not now, not yet.” He says. Jesse grimaces.

“You bastard.” He spits.

“Calm down now. If it wasn't for me you’d be dead.” Elijah says. Jesse shakes his head and shrugs off his holders, walking back to the table where he finds a flask of gin set out before his seat. He undoes its cap and downs half the bottle, his face peeling back in a snarl as he does. His fellow knights gather around the table and at the opposite end Elijah sits, looking Jesse up and down with something strange in his eyes. Morgan sits at Jesse’s side and puts a hand on his brother's shoulder.

“You alright?” He asks in a whisper.

“I’m just fine.” Jesse says, leaning back into his chair and passing Morgan the flask of gin. There they sit in a long and tense silence, listening to the bats rustle and watching them swoop off over their heads in duos and triads, flying up the chimney then out into the night sky with their shrieks and clicks ringing loud around the enclosed space. It is then with the bats swooping overhead amidst the high vaulted eves that Elijah leans over the table.

“Your dispatch.” He says. A shuffling on seats.

“What of it?” Sunny asks.

“What do you know of it?” He says.

“Enough. Dispute between two families over a tract called Grant’s hill. Nothing complicated, just cattle land around Fortune.”

“Is that all you know?”

“What else is there?”

“Perhaps I have something that would interest you then.” Elijah says. The Knights lean over the table, curiosity overcoming spite. A bat lands in front of The Drifter and climbs up onto his shoulder, where Elijah strokes its puglike head gently with one hand while taking a drink from the flask with his other hand. The Drifter still does not seem thirsty.

“What’s of interest?” Jesse asks.

“Let me begin with a story, for that’s the only way what I tell you will make sense. And, the night is still young, so I have much time to tell it.” Elijah says. Outside the bats are shrieking now, rising and climbing in dramatic spirals through the desert air like a swirling black stormcloud, completely vacated from the home. In their place only silence. Elijah clears his throat.

“Let me tell you of the story of a family of bushwackers, I believe they were called The Grin’s, though I remember not exactly. It’s been a long time since I’ve told their story and an even longer time since I’ve heard it.” Elijah clears his throat, The Knights now enthralled, almost hypnotized as The Drifter begins to speak.

“I encountered the corpses of The Grins for the last time in a land far Northerly, a wild land where it snows nine months out of the year, along a pass of blue mountains in which trade is only possible in the spring. And trade was done, with this pass between two cities again of which name I cannot remember. Now those cities are gone to dust, but that is another story entirely. I wandered there for many springs and winters, the alpine air refreshing to my boots and my lungs and never feeling as if I would tire. Upon one of those springs I encountered the household of The Grins, then nothing more then a humble waystation on the roadside. A waystation where very little business occurred, I tell you, the mountaineers and traders very rarely daring to stop in that dingy little roadside shop upon which the lights were rarely ever lit. I, however, found myself daring enough to enter. I walked to their door and knocked there thrice, waiting for an answer to which I found one. It was there I met the first of The Grin patriarchs, again a man whose name I have long since forgotten along the road, though I believe it may have been Abel.” Jesse shivers and Morgan shifts in his chair, Elijah takes another drink.

“I talked to him there over wares, I believe tobacco of poor quality which I bought out of pity, and then over dinner after he invited me being a hospitable man. He was ecstatic at my presence, as humble as I appear, for I was his first customer in nearly two months. Two entire months, I said, how do you sustain this place? I don't, he said. I asked him then how he made his money and he said he didn't, that him and his wife-then pregnant-existed only off of their garden and donations from passerby when he went to occasionally beg by the roadside. I asked him why, and he said well, simply, because he didn’t get any business. I asked him if he had considered any other trades and he said no, and I asked why. He said because his father had manned this shop and his father before him and even his father before that, on and on for as long as anyone of relation could remember, and he was the sole heir of his name. I asked him how often people passed his waystation by and he said everyday in the spring and even sometimes the winter, always looking but never entering.” The Drifter takes another drink, emptying the bottle. He does not look drunk.

“And so I asked him if he had considered robbing them. An ignoble trade, but a profitable one. He paused and considered and nodded his head along, in his hand a cup of wine of fine import, and said he would but his religion prohibited it. Catholicism, that is, although most all religions prohibit theft. I asked him then why he was a Catholic and he said again that his father was and his father before him and his father even, as far back as anyone could remember. I told him I too believed in God.” At this point Morgan interjects, disbelieving.

“You believe in God? You?”

“I did then. This was many years ago, you must mind.”

“And now?”

“Maybe I still do. Some days I do and some days I don't, I suppose. But that’s besides the point.” Elijah’s face seems to be shimmering by the freshly lit and scavenged candle, it’s features seeming in that flickering light to almost be made of wax itself, a beautiful and ephemeral mask there as he tells his tale.

“And I told him I too robbed, as I was at the time a highwayman, and that God would forgive those sins if it was for survival. I asked him then if he thought he would starve if he did not find a way to make a living and he said, after some pause, yes. So, I told him how he could go about robbing travelers. Along this pass there was a narrow chokepoint, barely even a wagon wide, where on either side were mounted thick bushes of scrub in which one could crouch and blend into the foliage there perfectly. I pointed this out to him in the dusk and he nodded, on his face a grim sort of determination, the determination of the desperate. He said to me, well, he said that he would get about robbing the next day. He asked me if he would need to kill and I said yes. It was the next morning I left and in that morning I did not yet hear a gunshot.”

“And it was five years until I came back to that waystation in the mountains, and when I did I knocked again thrice and it was opened not by Abel Grin but instead by his son, then only four or five but even then in his eyes the light of a murderer. I asked for his father and he called him and his father appeared and I did not ask if they had been robbing because I knew. I also did not ask who had acted as gunman because I knew that as well as soon as I looked into that boy's eyes. All murderers have a similar light visible in them-dare I say, even an enlightenment.”

“Do we have it?” Sunny asks. Elijah looks among them gravely.

“Of course you do.” He says.

“The enlightenment privy only to those who act on the side of death, who act as his scythe. For they are an extension of The Reaper himself then, and are, in a way, as much a part of the cycle of life and death as a roaming spirit is.”

“All that is to say, The Waystation Keeper confessed his son had killed nearly fifty men. At first they had taken to holding them at gunpoint and robbing them, but eventually they had found it easier just to kill and then take their belongings from their corpses. The Waystation Keeper said he would hold his own son at gunpoint-his own son-and make him do the shooting, for he couldn’t handle the toll on his conscience of pulling the trigger himself. I looked at the boy and asked him if he liked killing and he paused a moment and only shrugged. Well, I took dinner with them and wine, the boy drinking too-killing has a way of aging a man beyond his years-and left again.”

“I came back then five years later, when the boy was ten, and found that The Waystation Keeper had passed. Natural causes, cancer of the lungs, young but not too young.” Elijah looks the boys deep in their eyes.

“And this is the part of the story which is most pivotal. I asked then, to the boy, what he had done since his father had died without one to force him to kill. The Boy was free now, and could cease killing if he wished-they had collected for many years a small fortune from their robberies, as it was and is still a very profitable business. He gave me a strange look, and laughed. He said his father had died two years past and he had killed thirty men since then.” The Knights look amongst each other, then a chorus of questions comes.

“What was the boy's name?” Giles asks.

“What type of guns did they use?” Sunny asks.

“Did the robbed men fight back?” Duncan asks.

“What’s the point?” Jesse asks, and a silence falls. Elijah locks eyes with him.

“And what do you mean?”

“The moral, of your tale.” Elijah looks him up and down and then laughs, turning soon to a cackle as he leans back in his chair and his cheeks color.

“Why, there is no moral. There is no point.”

“But there must be.” Jesse says.

“Well, I suppose, inquisitive young knight, that the point is that murder is a habit. I have, by my admission, killed large scores of men, enough to fill perhaps several graveyards. I have lived a long, long time, much longer than my face betrays, and as such it is inevitable, and so I am somewhat of an authority on the subject-as I am authority on many other subjects, as a long life gives you a very, very long time to learn.”

“And, in my experience, murderers breed murderers, and murdering breeds more murdering. All of you are examples of the latter, with your hands already soaked in blood, and three of us are examples of the former.”

“And who are those three?” Sunny asks.

“I am the first. My father, although I have long since forgotten his name, was a murderer. He was hung for a killing he committed in a cantina in a heat of rage when I was only four years old. And the second and third sit across from me.” Elijah says. All eyes turn to Morgan and Jesse as if a spotlight has been shown on them.

“Do you know of the tale of The Black siblings?” Elijah says, his voice agonizingly calm.

“Don't you talk bout our family.” Jesse says.

“I won’t. But I find it no surprise Jesse here was the first to kill an innocent man among this contingent.”

“It was an accident.”

“And still a killing. Though I dare say much more innocent blood is to be spilled.”

“And why so?” Sunny says.

“Ah, Sunny. That brings me back to my original point, which is to regard the families of whose dispute you are to settle. The Whitmores and The Morenos, both exorbitantly wealthy and both possessing each of nearly nine hundred head of cattle, alongside investments in the very profitable oystering and crabbing industries of Fortune.”

“They killers?” Sunny asks.

“Killers, yes, most certainly, as most in the world of fine business are. Although they mask it so well I doubt it was in your dispatch telegram-all hidden as unfortunate accidents, even among daylight murder. Their hands reach deeper than you think, as they are among the wealthiest families in the kingdom. All the way to Dullwater, I dare say.”

“They connected to The Crown?”

“That they claim to be, both even claiming to be vaguely blood related to The King himself.”

“But, only one of them is on the side of The Crown. The other of these families is aligned with the democratic rebels which so harry The King and his royal attachments.”

“We might have some killing to do then.”

“That you may. That, I dare to say, you will have to, lest you be killed yourself. And it is there that my story rings important.”

“How so?”

“Murder breeds murder, and murder will breed murder.” Elijah says, and he is grinning.

Jesse lies in the loft listening to the blowing of wind along the thin roof and the far off screeching of bats, witchlike and vaguely demonic when rung and echoed along the mazelike canyon walls of this desolate land. He tries to sleep but cannot, staring only at the wall with a vague sense of dread prickling along his spine and dropping into the pit of his stomach. He hears behind him a creeping of feet up the ladder and turns to see a shadowy shape there. He focuses his eyes and sees there Giles LeClerc, tears streaming from his eyes.

“Giles?” He whispers.

“Giles.” Giles says, and kneels next to him.

“Hush now.” Giles says, and turns to lie under Jesse’s scavenged quilt sheets, pulling himself to Jesse as Jesse faces the wall, positioning himself so Jesse is at his back.

“I’m afraid, Jesse. Terribly afraid.” Giles says, Jesse smelling there the coppery sweet smell of his hair. He buries his face in there and wraps his arms around him.

“Of what?” Jesse says.

“Of dying.” Giles says. Jesse stays silent, pulls Giles in closer.

“Are you afraid, Jesse? Of dying?” Jesse opens his eyes and looks upon Giles, meeting eyes with him wrapped in the blankets. Eyes that remind Jesse much of Florence Merce.

“I wish I was.” Jesse says, and kisses Giles on the lips. They fall asleep in eachothers arms, heartbeats joined as one.