“I think, good sir, that I must offer my regrets and decline.”

“What?”

“You see, I’ve got my trusty sling aimed at your pleasant friend’s head—” Cuthbert began, and when Depape shifted uneasily against the bar, Cuthbert’s voice rose in a whipcrack that did not sound callow in the least. “Stand still! Move again and you’re a dead man!”

Depape subsided, holding his bloody hand against his pine-tacky shirt. For the first time he looked frightened, and for the first time that night—for the first time since hooking up with Jonas, in fact—Reynolds felt mastery of a situation on the verge of slipping away... except how could it be? How could it be when he’d been able to circle around this smart-talking squint and get the drop on him? This should be over.

Lowering his voice to its former conversational—not to say playful—pitch, Cuthbert said: “If you shoot me, the ball flies and your friend dies, too.”

“I don’t believe that,” Reynolds said, but he didn’t like what he heard in his own voice. It sounded like doubt. “No man could make a shot like that.”

“Why don’t we let your friend decide?” Cuthbert raised his voice in a good-humored hail. “Hi-ho, there, Mr. Spectacles! Would you like your pal to shoot me?”

“No!” Depape’s cry was shrill, verging on panic. “No, Clay! Don’t shoot!”

“So it’s a standoff,” Reynolds said, bemused. And then bemusement changed to horror as he felt the blade of a very large knife slip against his throat. It pressed the tender skin just over his adam’s apple.

“No, it’s not,” Alain said softly. “Put the gun down, my friend, or I’ll cut your throat.”

4

Standing outside the batwing doors, having arrived by simple good fortune in time for this Pinch and Jilly show, Jonas watched with amazement, contempt, and something close to horror. First one of the Affiliation brats gets the drop on Depape, and when Reynolds covers that one, the big kid with the round face and the plowboy’s shoulders puts a knife to Reynolds’s throat. Neither of the brats a day over fifteen, and neither with a gun. Marvelous. He would have thought it better than a travelling circus, if not for the problems that would follow if this were not put right. What sort of work could they do in Hambry if it got around that the boogeymen were afraid of the children, instead of vice-versa?

There’s time to stop this before there’s killing, mayhap. If you want to. Do you?

Jonas decided he did; that they could walk out winners if they played it just right. He also decided the Affiliation brats would not, unless they were very lucky indeed, be leaving Mejis Barony alive.

Where’s the other one? Dearborn?

A good question. An important question. Embarrassment would become outright humiliation if he found himself trumped in the same fashion as Roy and Clay.