The gun vanished. “James diGriz, Bolivar diGriz, step forward. Accept these graduation certificates as tokens of your reluctant completion of all courses and of time served here. You are now alumni of Dorsky Military Boarding School and Penitentiary and I hope you will, like the other graduates, remember us with a little curse before retiring each night. I would shake your hands except my bones are getting brittle and I am laying off the hand-to-hand combat. Go forth with your father and join him in the battle against evil and strike a blow for me as well.”

That was all there was to it. A minute later we were out in the sunshine and climbing into the car. The boys left their childish possessions behind them in the school and entered the world of adult responsibility.

“They won’t hurt Mom, will they?” James asked. “They won’t live long if they do,” Boliver said, and I distinctly heard his teeth grinding together.

“No, of course not. Getting her release will be easy enough, as long as we can get to the records in time.”

“What records?” Bolivar asked. “And why did Dirty Dorsky help so easily? That’s not like him.”

“It is like him because under that veneer of stupidity, violence and military sadism he is still roughly human like the rest of us. And like us, he regards the tax man as the natural enemy.”

“I don’t understand,” James said, then grabbed the handhold as we snarled around a tight bend just a micrometer from the edge of the vertical drop.

“Unhappily you will,” I told him. “Your lives have been sheltered up until now, in that you have been spending but not earning. Soon you will be earning like the rest of us and, with the arrival of your first credit, sweat of your palms and brow, the tax man will arrive as well. Swooping in ever smaller circles, screaming shrilly, until he perches on your shoulder and with yellow beak bites most of the money from your grasp.”

“You sure turn a nice simile, Dad.”