Eddie and Jake were content to let her assume responsibility for the dickering, which Susannah did with relish. Took tried his very best to overcharge her for their gunna, but Eddie had an idea this wasn’t aimed at them specifically but was just part of what Eben Took saw as his job (or perhaps his sacred calling). Certainly he was smart enough to gauge the temperature of his clientele, for he had pretty much laid off nagging them by the time the trading was finished. This did not keep him from ringing their coins on a special square of metal which seemed reserved for that sole purpose, and holding Jake’s garnets up to the light and rejecting one of them (which looked like all the others, so far as Eddie, Jake, and Susannah could see).

“How long’ll ’ee be here, folks?” he asked in a marginally cordial voice when the dickering was done. Yet his eyes were shrewd, and Eddie had no doubt that whatever they said would reach the ears of Eisenhart, Overholser, and anyone else who mattered before the day was done.

“Ah, well, that depends on what we see,” Eddie said. “And what we see depends on what folks show us, wouldn’t you say?”

“Aye,” Took agreed, but he looked mystified. There were now perhaps fifty people in the roomy mercantile-and-grocery, most of them simply gawking. There was a powdery sort of excitement in the air. Eddie liked it. He didn’t know if that was right or wrong, but yes, he liked it very well.

“Also depends on what folks want,” Susannah amplified.

“Ah’ll tell you what they ’unt, brownie!” Took said in his shrill shards-of-glass voice. “They ’unt peace, same as ever! They ’unt t’town t’still be here arter you four—”

Susannah seized the man’s thumb and bent it back. It was dextrously done. Jake doubted if more than two or three folken, those closest to the counter, saw it, but Took’s face went a dirty white and his eyes bulged from their sockets.

“I’ll take that word from an old man who’s lost most of his sense,” she said, “but I won’t take it from you. Call me brownie again, fatso, and I’ll pull your tongue out of your head and wipe your ass with it.”

“Cry pardon!” Took gasped. Now sweat broke on his cheeks in large and rather disgusting drops. “Cry’er pardon, so Ah do!”

“Fine,” Susannah said, and let him go. “Now we might just go out and sit on your porch for a bit, for shopping’s tiring work.”

Six