And considering that he wasn’t an imposing physical specimen, you’d have to figure that he was at the very least a sharpshooter or a demolitions expert or a master of disguise, but he wasn’t. All he really had going for him were a pretty agile mind, an offbeat notion of morality, and a hunger for things that weren’t his.

Now, all of that was enough to bring him to Black Orpheus’ attention—but the thing that really interested the Bard of the Frontier was his accent.

It was the first one he’d ever heard.

Men had had accents when they were still Earthbound, and they would have them again in the future, thousands of years after the Inner and Outer Frontiers had been totally settled and civilized. But during the eras of the Republic and the Democracy and even the early Oligarchy, which spanned almost six millennia between them, every Man grew up knowing two tongues: that of his native world and Terran (and more often than not, the tongue of his native world was Terran). Out on the Frontier, where Men changed worlds the way their brothers back on Earth and Deluros VIII changed shirts, Terran was all anybody spoke: it had been carefully devised over a period of decades to be the kind of language any Man could pick up with ease, a language that was well-nigh impossible to speak with an accent.

So when Black Orpheus hunted up the Swagman and sat down to talk with him, the conversation wasn’t half a minute old before Orpheus knew that he’d been raised by aliens.

The Swagman never denied it, but he wouldn’t be coaxed into giving out any of the details. He liked the creatures who’d brought him up too much to want them to be studied and exploited by the creatures of his own race, and he knew that that was exactly what would happen if Black Orpheus incorporated them into his song.

At any rate, the balladeer was absolutely captivated by the outlaw’s explosive g’s and sibilant sh’s. He stayed on Goldenrod for a week or two, and some people say that the Swagman even took Orpheus on a raid with him, just to show him what it was like. They became friends, because in spite of his penchant for lawbreaking, the Swagman was a pretty friendly person. He saw Black Orpheus a few years later and didn’t even mention that Orpheus had hurt his feelings by giving him only a single verse; and Black Orpheus was so impressed that he was still on the loose that, without the Swagman’s requesting it, he sat right down and added another couple of stanzas, including one about the bandit’s fortress (which he insisted on calling a schloss in order to create a rhyme).