The men on the bus glanced at him and glanced away, but Nolan didn’t care. They would not challenge him without a reason, as long as he did not disrupt their ancient patterns. He remembered the street much better than he had thought. He rose for his stop the block before it arrived and swung easily off the bus. Yes, this little cluster of gaily decorated shops was exactly as he had recalled. And here was Cloverton, and he would walk until he arrived at 1811.

At the striped house with the slanted copper roof, he paused a moment before summoning the courage to knock. It was certainly possible Colt was not here, or would disbelieve him. Nolan had no idea what he would do next if that were so.

The door was answered by the same gorgeous, terrified young woman who had opened it to Nolan when he was here with Melina. “Colt,” Nolan said, firmly and slowly, and then remembered a few of the words Kit had taught him. “See Colt. I see Colt.”

The woman responded with a rapid flood of interrogative phrases, but Nolan just shook his head. “I see Colt,” he repeated. It crossed his mind, a wild thought, that Colt was dead and the woman thought Nolan must be hallucinating, but he had no other language with which to make his request known. Kit had not even taught him the word “please.” He had asked for it, and she had laughed. “Guldmen never use it, so you have no need to learn it,” she had replied.

The guldwoman before him answered again in a spate of unintelligible words, then suddenly ducked behind the door and disappeared. Nolan just waited. Perhaps she would fetch the young interpreter; perhaps he would be standing here the rest of his life. But no. Those were footsteps, and then the door was flung open, and Nolan was suddenly confronting the large blond man he had not seen in more than a month.

There was a moment’s dead silence. Nolan found himself wishing he had remembered how big Colt was, how deadly looking. Weeks of outlawry had intensified the underlying ferocity of his features, honed his reckless edge. He had always appeared dangerous, at least to Nolan; now he appeared lethal.

Colt spoke first. “You,” he said in that familiar mocking voice, “are the very last person in the city I expected to find at my door.”

“I was here once before,” Nolan said. “We left you messages.”

“Anyone could have guessed that that particular visit was Melina’s idea, and not yours,” Colt said. “But here you are, all on your own. I guess I have to ask you why.”