Trunk Hose struggled like a demon, neither ceasing to shout epithets nor repeating himself as they and the sword master Mayerling hustled him back through the curtain to the Theatre d'Orleans again. The American Pierrot only watched, dispassionately stroking his thin brown mustache beneath the rim of his mask. A Roman soldier, rather like a bonbon in gilt papier-mach6 armor, emerged from the passageway, flattening to the side of the arch to permit the ambulatory Laocoon to pass, then crossed to Pierrot in a swirl of crimson cloak. Pierrot made a gesture that said, It's what I expected.

Hannibal tightened a peg and touched an experimental whisper from the fiddle strings. "I'll put a dollar on a challenge by midnight."

"You think that Granger's gonna hang around wait for it?" demanded Uncle Bichet promptly. Whose uncle Uncle had originally been no one knew-everyone called him that now. He was nearly as tall as January and thin as a cane stalk, claimed to be ninety, and had old tribal scarring all over forehead, cheekbones, and lips. "I say by the time Bouille shakes free of his family over in the other hall Granger's out of here. And where you gonna get a dollar anyway, buckra?"

"And let people say he ran away?" contradicted Jacques unbelievingly. "I say eleven."

"That's William Granger?" Like everyone else who'd been following the escalating war of letters in the New Orleans Bee, January had pictured the railway speculator as, if not exactly a tobacco-spitting Kaintuck savage, at least the sort of hustling American businessman who came to New Orleans on the steamboats with shady credit and a pocket full of schemes to get rich quick.

That might, he supposed, be the result of the man's spelling, as demonstrated in his letters to the Bee's editor, or the speed with which his accusations against the head of the city planning council had degenerated from allegations of taking bribes and passing information to speculators in rival railway schemes to imputations of private misconduct, dubious ancestry, and personal habits un-suited to a gentleman, to say the least.