“You play a dangerous game,” Montreuil warned. “Do you know who I am? If you were a gentleman, I would call you out, sir.”

“Dueling’s illegal, Montreuil,” Sour Billy said. “Hadn’t you heard? And I’m no gentleman.” He turned back to the quadroon girl, who was standing up near the wall of the hotel, watching them. “Come,” he said. He walked off down the sidewalk, and she followed.

“You shall be paid in kind for this, monsieur, ”Montreuil called after him.

Sour Billy paid him no mind and turned a corner. He walked briskly, a swagger in his step that had been absent inside the French Exchange. The streets were where Sour Billy felt at home; there he had grown up, there he had learned to survive. The slave girl Emily scurried after him as best she could, her bare feet pounding on the brick sidewalks. The streets of the Vieux Carre were lined with brick and plaster houses, each with its graceful wrought-iron balcony overhanging the narrow walk, fancy as you please. But the roads themselves were unpaved, and the recent rains had turned them into a sea of mud. Along the walks were open gutters, deep ditches of cypress full of standing water, fragrant with filth and raw sewage.

They passed neat little shops and slave pens with heavily barred windows, passed elegant hotels and smoky grog shops full of surly free niggers, passed close, humid alleys and airy courtyards each with its well or fountain, passed haughty Creole ladies with their escorts and chaperones and a gang of runaway slaves in iron collars and chains cleaning the gutters under the careful watch of a hard-eyed white man with a whip. Shortly they passed out of the French Quarter entirely, into the rawer, newer American section of New Orleans. Sour Billy had left his horse tied up outside a grog shop. He mounted it, and told the girl to walk along beside him. They struck out south from the city, and soon left the main roads, stopping only once, briefly, so Sour Billy could rest his horse and eat some of the dry, hard bread and cheese in his saddlebag. He let Emily suck up some water from a stream.