"I think-" began January, and Fourchet raged. "Don't you back-talk me, you black whelp, I don't give a tinker's reverence what you think! " He flung the cigar to the spotless cypresswood floor. "I could get a dozen like you just walking down Baronne Street who'd leap on a dollar to suck my arse, let alone do as I'm asking you to do!"

"Then I suggest you betake yourself to Baronne Street, sir," said January quietly. "I'm sorry to have wasted your time."

"I'll make you goddam sorry...!" Fourchet thundered, but January simply raised his new beaver hat to the man, bowed deeply, picked up his music satchel, and walked through the rear parlor and out the back door. He could hear the man's enraged bray behind him as he crossed the yard and mounted the stairs to his room in the gar?onni?re, and only when he had shut the door behind him did he start to shake.

He was forty-one years old, he reminded himself-forty-two, he added, as of three weeks ago.

Simon Fourchet had no power to hurt him, beyond the crass physical violence such as the scum of the keelboats had practiced. The man was seventy years old and probably couldn't hurt him much. This is the child who is frightened, he thought, taking three tries to get his new kid gloves off. This is the child in the dreams, who is unable to walk away.

He found himself listening, heart racing, to the old man's shouted obscenities as he pulled off the coat and shirt his mother had lent him the money to buy, the armor of respectability that, more even than the papers in his pocket, said: This is a free man.

To Fourchet, January realized, he would never be free.

Only jumped-up.

To the Americans who saw him walking well-dressed about the streets, the Americans whose growing numbers were slowly swamping the older population of Creole French and Spanish, it was the same.

He fought down the impulse to change clothes fast and run. With his habitual neatness he made himself fold the coat and trousers into the armoire, and set the shoes neatly under the bed.