The Crystal City Page 0,94

piece of paper or a dry sponge."

Marie heard somebody inside the house utter a curse, and a thick heavy piece of wood was flung out the door onto the lawn.

"Please let us come inside," she said. "My mother and my friends and I. Let us sit down and talk about how to do this without hurting anyone and without leaving you with nothing."

"I know the best way," said the old man. "Just go away and leave us be."

"We have to go somewhere," said Marie. "We have to eat something. We have to sleep the night."

"But why us?" he said.

"Why not you?" she answered. "God will bless you ten times for what you share with us today."

"If I'm going to die as soon as you say, let me leave a good place to my sons and daughters."

"Without slaves," said Marie, "this will finally be a good place."

Later, with the family not locked up, and everyone safely fed and sleeping, Marie had a chance to talk with Arthur Stuart. "Thank you for giving me the fog when I needed it, instead of waiting till I was in the house."

"Can't expect plans to work out when other people don't know their part," he said with a grin. "You done great, though."

She smiled back at him. She had done a good job. But she had never before known what it felt like to be told so. Not till this trip. Not till Alvin and Arthur Stuart. Oh, they had such powers, such knacks. But the one that impressed her the most was the power to fill her heart the way their kind words did.

A group of reds took Alvin back across the Mizzippy in a canoe-a much better journey this time. They took Alvin downriver a ways, to a place just upstream of the port town of Red Stick. The river took a deep bight there, so Alvin had only a short walk through pretty dry country to get to the town. Meanwhile the reds got away without being seen by any white man. Up north in the United States, reds were a common enough sight, seeing how they were the majority of people in the states of Irrakwa and Cherriky. But they mostly dressed like white folks. And here in the deep south, where the Crown Colonies had more sway, reds didn't show up much, specially not the ones from across river, who still dressed in the old way. It frightened the white folks to see them, those rare times they showed their faces. Savages, that's how they looked, and people reached for their guns and began ringing church bells in alarm.

But a lone white man, dressed like what he was, a journeyman blacksmith, and carrying a heavy poke slung on his shoulder, nobody paid no mind to him.

Besides, there was bigger news afoot. The governor's expedition had just arrived, and suddenly Red Stick was swollen with hundreds of bored militiamen, some of whom had lost their enthusiasm for slogging through back country and fighting runaway slaves. In fact, their enthusiasm waned in direct proportion to the amount of alcohol in their blood, and Colonel Adan wasn't such a disciplinarian that he didn't see the wisdom of keeping these men just a little likkered up. So they were in the saloons, with Spanish soldiers attempting to enforce a two-drink limit so they weren't too drunk to march. Nobody was looking to see the leader of the very group they came to destroy walking all by himself through the streets of town.

It wasn't much trouble for Alvin to size things up. He was pleased that none of the men from Steve Austin's company were there. Those were hard men who knew how to kill and didn't mind doing it. These men, by contrast, were quick to brag and boast about what they were gonna do, and what they had done, but the actual doing wasn't all that attractive to them.

Alvin toyed with the idea of walking right in to Colonel Adan's stateroom on one of the steamboats and telling him, you show up day after tomorrow right here and you can see us cross the river and leave you up to your necks in mud. But there was a good chance Adan would simply have Alvin hanged or shot instead of locking him up, and while Alvin could probably get himself out of it, what was the point?

Fighting the Unmaker in gator form had taken a lot of the combativeness out of Alvin. The