“To hell with your heathen feather and to hell with your cowardly counsel,” Pere Callahan said. He walked down the center aisle, stepping with the grim gait of arthritis. He wasn’t as old as the Manni elder, nor nearly so old as Tian’s Gran-pere (who claimed to be the oldest person not only here but in Calla Lockwood to the south), and yet he seemed somehow older than both. Older than the ages. Some of this no doubt had to do with the haunted eyes that looked out at the world from below the scar on his forehead (Zalia claimed it had been self-inflicted). More had to do with the sound of him. Although he had been here enough years to build his strange Man Jesus church and convert half the Calla to his way of spiritual thinking, not even a stranger would have been fooled into believing Pere Callahan was from here. His alienness was in his flat and nasal speech and in the often obscure slang he used (“street-jive,” he called it). He had undoubtedly come from one of those other worlds the Manni were always babbling about, although he never spoke of it and Calla Bryn Sturgis was now his home. He had the sort of dry and unquestionable authority that made it difficult to dispute his right to speak, with or without the feather.

Younger than Tian’s Gran-pere he might be, but Pere Callahan was still the Old Fella.

Four

Now he surveyed the men of Calla Bryn Sturgis, not even glancing at George Telford. The feather sagged in Telford’s hand. He sat down on the first bench, still holding it.

Callahan began with one of his slang-terms, but they were farmers and no one needed to ask for an explanation.

“This is chickenshit.”

He surveyed them longer. Most would not return his look. After a moment, even Eisenhart and Adams dropped their eyes. Overholser kept his head up, but under the Old Fella’s hard gaze, the rancher looked petulant rather than defiant.

“Chickenshit,” the man in the black coat and turned-around collar repeated, enunciating each syllable. A small gold cross gleamed below the notch in the backwards collar. On his forehead, that other cross—the one Zalia believed he’d carved in his flesh with his own thumbnail in partial penance for some awful sin—glared under the lamps like a tattoo.

“This young man isn’t one of mine, but he’s right, and I think you all know it. You know it in your hearts. Even you, Mr. Overholser. And you, George Telford.”

“Know no such thing,” Telford said, but his voice was weak and stripped of its former persuasive charm.