Back on the road, a filthy-faced man with a spongy goiter and a woman without teeth tried to beg from them. Rapture made hardtack for them, but they continued lurking about, so that Hephaestus had to take a potshot at them with the horse pistol. By lantern light they discovered weevils in the flour.

The next day the horse pistol wasn’t enough. Coming into a clearing, they were surrounded. It was more an extended backcountry family than an organized gang of robbers, but robbery was what the interlopers had in mind. As outraged and aggrieved as the Sitturds felt, they were all in silent agreement that it was a blessing that the clan had no more malicious intent, for given the number of them and their pocky, lice-ridden appearance, their desires might have taken a very different and considerably nastier turn.

The leader, a gnarled salt-and-pepper-bearded git with a scar that ran from his left temple deep into his mess of grizzle, spoke in a broken-toothed accent they could barely understand, like a wild hill preacher, directing with a musket a weasel-quick boy of about sixteen and two older men with gopher teeth and eyes like toads, each armed with long, cruel skinning knives shoved in their rope belts.

With an unsettling politeness, they plundered the wagon of food and the best and most important of Hephaestus’s tools as three moonfaced women in sack dresses and threadbare shawls, and another fidgety male with an eyepatch, looked on without expression down the long barrels of well-used squirrel guns, and then melted back into the woods as suddenly as they’d appeared.

When it was over, Rapture burst into tears and stamped her feet, while Lloyd’s locked jaws clicked with fury. Hephaestus summed up the situation. “We’re still alive. Let’s keep moving. While we can.”