The Right to Arm Bears

The Law-Twister Shorty

“He’s a pretty tough character, that Iron Bender—” said the Hill Bluffer, conversationally. Malcolm O’Keefe clung to the straps of the saddle he rode on the Hill Bluffer’s back, as the nearly ten-foot-tall Dilbian strode surefootedly along the narrow mountain trail, looking somewhat like a slim Kodiak bear on its hind legs. “But a Shorty like you, Law-Twister, ought to be able to handle him, all right.”

“Law-Twister…” echoed Mal, dizzily. The Right Honorable Joshua Guy, Ambassador Plenipotentiary to Dilbia, had said something about the Dilbians wasting no time in pinning a name of their own invention on every Shorty (as humans were called by them) they met. But Mal had not expected to be named so soon. And what was that other name the Dilbian postman carrying him had just mentioned?

“Who won’t I have any trouble with, did you say?” Mal added.

“Iron Bender,” said the Hill Bluffer, with a touch of impatience. “Clan Water Gap’s harnessmaker. Didn’t Little Bite back there at Humrog Town tell you anything about Iron Bender?”

“I… I think so,” said Mal. Little Bite, as Ambassador Guy was known to the Dilbians, had in fact told Mal a great many things. But thinking back on their conversation now, it did not seem to Mal that the Ambassador had been very helpful in spite of all his words. “Iron Bender’s the—er—protector of this Gentle… Gentle…”

“Gentle Maiden. Hor!” The Bluffer broke into an unexpected snort of laughter. “Well, anyway, that’s who Iron Bender’s protector of.”

“And she’s the one holding the three Shorties captive—”

“Captive? What’re you talking about, Law-Twister?” demanded the Bluffer. “She’s adopted them! Little Bite must have told you that.”

“Well, he…” Mal let the words trail off. His head was still buzzing from the hypnotraining he had been given on his way to Dilbia, to teach him the language and the human-known facts about the outsize natives of this Earth-like world; and the briefing he had gotten from Ambassador Guy had only confused him further.

“…Three tourists, evidently,” Guy had said, puffing on a heavy-bowled pipe. He was a brisk little man in his sixties, with sharp blue eyes. “Thought they could slip down from the cruise by spaceliner they were taking and duck into a Dilbian village for a firsthand look at the locals. Probably had no idea what they were getting into.”

“What—uh,” asked Mal, “were they getting into, if I can ask?”

“Restricted territory! Treaty territory!” snapped Guy, knocking the dottle out of his pipe and beginning to refill it. Mal coughed discreetly as the fumes reached his nose. “In this sector of space we’re in open competition with a race of aliens called Hemnoids, for every available, habitable world. Dilbia’s a plum. But it’s got this intelligent—if primitive—native race on it. Result, we’ve got a treaty with the Hemnoids restricting all but emergency contact with the Dilbians—by them or us—until the Dilbians themselves become civilized enough to choose either us or the Hemnoids for interstellar partners. Highly illegal, those three tourists just dropping in like that.”

“How about me?” asked Mal.

“You? You’re being sent in under special emergency orders to get them out before the Hemnoids find out they’ve been there,” said Guy. “As long as they’re gone when the Hemnoids hear about this, we can duck any treaty violation charge. But you’ve got to get them into their shuttle boat and back into space by midnight tonight—”

The dapper little ambassador pointed outside the window of the log building that served as the human embassy on Dilbia at the dawn sunlight on the cobblestoned Humrog Street.

“Luckily, we’ve got the local postman in town at the moment,” Guy went on. “We can mail you to Clan Water Gap with him—”

“But,” Mal broke in on the flow of words, “you still haven’t explained—why me? I’m just a high school senior on a work-study visit to the Pleiades. Or at least, that’s where I was headed when they told me my travel orders had been picked up, and I was drafted to come here instead, on emergency duty. There must be lots of people older than I am, who’re experienced—”

“Not the point in this situation,” said Guy, puffing clouds of smoke from his pipe toward the log rafters overhead. “Dilbia’s a special case. Age and experience don’t help here as much as a certain sort of—well—personality. The Dilbian psychological profile and culture is tricky. It needs to be matched by a human with just the proper profile and character, himself. Without those natural advantages the best of age, education, and experience doesn’t help in dealing with the Dilbians.”

“But,” said Mal, desperately, “there must be some advice you can give me—some instructions. Tell me what I ought to do, for example—”

“No, no. Just the opposite,” said Guy. “We want you to follow your instincts. Do what seems best as the situation arises. You’ll make out all right. We’ve already had a couple of examples of people who did, when they had the same kind of personality pattern you have. The book anthropologists and psychologists are completely baffled by these Dilbians as I say, but you just keep your head and follow your instincts…”

He had continued to talk, to Mal’s mind, making less and less sense as he went, until the arrival of the Hill Bluffer had cut the conversation short. Now, here Mal was—with no source of information left, but the Bluffer, himself.

“This, er, Iron Bender,” he said to the Dilbian postman. “You were saying I ought to be able to handle him all right?”

“Well, if you’re any kind of a Shorty at all,” said the Bluffer, cheerfully. “There’s still lots of people in these mountains, and even down in the lowlands, who don’t figure a Shorty can take on a real man and win. But not me. After all, I’ve been tied up with you Shorties almost from the start. It was me delivered the Half-Pint Posted to the Streamside Terror. Hor! Everybody thought the Terror’d tear the Half-Pint apart. And you can guess who won, being a Shorty yourself.”

“The Half-Pint Posted won?”

“Hardly worked up a sweat doing it, either,” said the Hill Bluffer. “Just like the Pick-and-Shovel Shorty, a couple of years later. Pick-and-Shovel, he took on Bone Breaker, the lowland outlaw chief—of course, Bone Breaker being a lowlander, they two tangled with swords and shields and that sort of modern junk.”

Mal clung to the straps supporting the saddle on which he rode below the Hill Bluffer’s massive, swaying shoulders.

“Hey!” said the Hill Bluffer, after a long moment of silence. “You go to sleep up there, or something?”

“Asleep?” Mal laughed, a little hollowly. “No. Just thinking. Just wondering where a couple of fighters like this Half-Pint and Pick-and-Shovel could have come from back on our Shorty worlds.”

“Never knew them, did you?” asked the Bluffer. “I’ve noticed that. Most of you Shorties don’t seem to know much about each other.”

“What did they look like?” Mal asked.

“Well… you know,” said the Bluffer. “Like Shorties. All you Shorties look alike, anyway. Little squeaky-voiced characters. Like you—only, maybe not so skinny.”

“Skinny?” Mal had spent the last year of high school valiantly lifting weights and had finally built up his five-foot-eleven frame from a hundred and forty-eight to a hundred and seventy pounds. Not that this made him any mass of muscle—particularly compared to nearly a half-ton of Dilbian. Only, he had been rather proud of the fact that he had left skinniness behind him. Now, what he was hearing was incredible! What kind of supermen had the computer found on these two previous occasions—humans who could outwrestle a Dilbian or best one of the huge native aliens with sword and shield?

On second thought, it just wasn’t possible there could be two such men, even if they had been supermen, by human standards. There had to have been some kind of a gimmick in each case that had let the humans win. Maybe, a concealed weapon of some kind—a tiny tranquilizer gun, or some such…

But Ambassador Guy had been adamant about refusing to send Mal out with any such equipment.

“Absolutely against the Treaty. Absolutely!” the little ambassador had said.

Mal snorted to himself. If anyone, Dilbian or human, was under the impression that he was going to get into any kind of physical fight with any Dilbian—even the oldest, weakest, most midget Dilbian on the planet—they had better think again. How he had come to be selected for this job, anyway…

“Well, here we are—Clan Water Gap Territory!” announced the Hill Bluffer, cheerfully, slowing his pace.

Mal straightened up in the saddle and looked around him. They had finally left the narrow mountain trail that had kept his heart in his mouth most of the trip. Now they had emerged into a green, bowl-shaped valley, with a cluster of log huts at its lowest point and the silver thread of a narrow river spilling into it from the valley’s far end, to wind down into a lake by the huts.

But he had little time to examine the further scene in detail. Just before them, and obviously waiting in a little grassy hollow by an egg-shaped granite boulder, were four large Dilbians and one small one.

Correction—Mal squinted against the afternoon sun. Waiting by the stone were two large and one small male Dilbians, all with the graying fur of age, and one unusually tall and black-furred Dilbian female. The Hill Bluffer snorted appreciatively at the female as he carried Mal up to confront the four.

“Grown even a bit more yet, since I last saw you, Gentle Maiden,” said the native postman, agreeably. “Done a pretty good job of it, too. Here, meet the Law-Twister Shorty.”

“I don’t want to meet him!” snapped Gentle Maiden. “And you can turn around and take him right back where you got him. He’s not welcome in Clan Water Gap Territory; and I’ve got the Clan Grandfather here to tell him so!”

Mal’s hopes suddenly took an upturn.

“Oh?” he said. “Not welcome? That’s too bad. I guess there’s nothing left but to go back. Bluffer—”

“Hold on, Law-Twister,” growled the Bluffer. “Don’t let Gentle here fool you.” He glared at the three male Dilbians. “What Grandfather? I see three grandpas—Grandpa Tricky, Grandpa Forty Winks and—” he fastened his gaze on the smallest of the elderly males, “old One Punch, here. But none of them are Grandfathers, last I heard.”

“What of it?” demanded Gentle Maiden. “Next Clan meeting, the Clan’s going to choose a Grandfather. One of these grandpas is going to be the one chosen. So with all three of them here, I’ve got the next official Grandfather of Clan Water Gap here, too—even if he doesn’t know it himself, yet!”

“Hor!” The Bluffer exploded into snorts of laughter. “Pretty sneaky, Gentle, but it won’t work! A Grandfather’s no good until he’s named a Grandfather. Why, if you could do things that way, we’d have little kids being put up to give Grandfather rulings. And if it came to that, where’d the point be in having a man live long enough to get wise and trusted enough to be named a Grandfather?”

He shook his head.

“No, no,” he said. “You’ve got no real Grandfather here, and so there’s nobody can tell an honest Shorty like the Law-Twister to turn about and light out from Clan Territory.”

“Told y’so, Gentle,” said the shortest grandpa in a rusty voice. “Said it wouldn’t work.”

“You!” cried Gentle Maiden, wheeling on him. “A fine grandpa you are, One Punch—let alone the fact you’re my own real, personal grandpa! You don’t have to be a Grandfather! You could just tell this Shorty and this long-legged postman on your own—tell them to get out while they were still in one piece! You would have, once!”

“Well, once, maybe,” said the short Dilbian, rustily and sadly. Now that Mal had a closer look at him, he saw that this particular oldster—the one the Hill Bluffer had called One Punch—bore more than a few signs of having led an active life. A number of old scars seamed his fur; one ear was only half there and the other badly tattered. Also, his left leg was crooked as if it had been broken and badly set at one time.

“I don’t see why you can’t still do it—for your granddaughter’s sake!” said Gentle Maiden sharply. Mal winced. Gentle Maiden might be good looking by Dilbian standards—the Hill Bluffer’s comments a moment ago seemed to indicate that—but whatever else she was, she was plainly not very gentle, at least, in any ordinary sense of the word.

“Why, Granddaughter,” creaked One Punch mildly, “like I’ve told you and everyone else, now that I’m older I’ve seen the foolishness of all those little touches of temper I used to have when I was young. They never really proved anything—except how much wiser those big men were who used to kind of avoid tangling with me. That’s what comes with age, Granddaughter. Wisdom. You never hear nowdays of One Man getting into hassles, now that he’s put a few years on him—or of More Jam, down there in the lowlands, talking about defending his wrestling championship anymore.”

“Hold on! Wait a minute, One Punch,” rumbled the Hill Bluffer. “You know and I know that even if One Man and More Jam do go around saying they’re old and feeble nowdays, no one in his right mind is going to take either one of them at their word and risk finding out if it is true.”

“Think so if you like, Postman,” said One Punch, shaking his head mournfully. “Believe that if you want to. But when you’re my age, you’ll know it’s just wisdom, plain, pure wisdom, makes men like them and me so peaceful. Besides, Gentle,” he went on, turning again to his granddaughter, “you’ve got a fine young champion in Iron Bender—”

“Iron Bender!” exploded Gentle Maiden. “That lump! That obstinate, leatherheaded strap-cutter! That—”

“Come to think of it, Gentle,” interrupted the Hill Bluffer, “how come Iron Bender isn’t here? I’d have thought you’d have brought him along instead of these imitation Grandfathers—”

“There, now,” sighed One Punch, staring off at the mountains beyond the other side of the valley. “That bit about imitations— That’s the sort of remark I might’ve taken a bit of offense at, back in the days before I developed wisdom. But does it trouble me nowdays?”

“No offense meant, One Punch,” said the Bluffer. “You know I didn’t mean that.”

“None taken. You see, Granddaughter?” said One Punch. “The postman here never meant a bit of offense; and in the old days I wouldn’t have seen it until it was too late.”

“Oh, you make me sick!” blazed Gentle Maiden. “You all make me sick. Iron Bender makes me sick, saying he won’t have anything against this Law-Twister Shorty until the Law-Twister tries twisting the Clan law that says those three poor little orphans belong to me now!” She glared at the Bluffer and Mal. “Iron Bender said the Shorty can come find him, any time he really wanted to, down at the harness shop!”

“He’ll be right down,” promised the Bluffer.

“Hey—” began Mal. But nobody was paying any attention to him.

“Now, Granddaughter,” One Punch was saying, reprovingly. “The Bender didn’t exactly ask you to name him your protector, you know.”

“What difference does that make?” snapped Gentle Maiden. “I had to pick the toughest man in the Clan to protect me—that’s just common sense; even if he is stubborn as an I-don’t-know-what and thick-headed as a log wall! I know my rights. He’s got to defend me; and there—” she wheeled and pointed to the large boulder lying on the grass, “—there’s the stone of Mighty Grappler, and here’s all three of you, one of who’s got to be a Grandfather by next Clan meeting—and you mean to tell me none of you’ll even say a word to help me turn this postman and this Shorty around and get them out of here?”

The three elderly Dilbian males looked back at her without speaking.

“All right!” roared Gentle Maiden, stamping about to turn her back on all of them. “You’ll be sorry! All of you!”

With that, she marched off down the slope of the valley toward the village of log houses.

“Well,” said the individual whom the Hill Bluffer had called Grandpa Tricky, “guess that’s that, until she thinks up something more. I might as well be ambling back down to the house, myself. How about you, Forty Winks?”

“Guess I might as well, too,” said Forty Winks.

They went off after Gentle Maiden, leaving Mal—still on the Hill Bluffer’s back—staring down at One Punch, from just behind the Bluffer’s reddish-furred right ear.

“What,” asked Mal, “has the stone of what’s-his-name got to do with it?”

“The stone of Mighty Grappler?” asked One Punch. “You mean you don’t know about that stone, over there?”

“Law-Twister here’s just a Shorty,” said the Bluffer, apologetically. “You know how Shorties are—tough, but pretty ignorant.”

“Some say they’re tough,” said One Punch, squinting up at Mal, speculatively.

“Now, wait a minute, One Punch!” the Hill Bluffer’s bass voice dropped ominously an additional half-octave. “Maybe there’s something we ought to get straight right now! This isn’t just any plain private citizen you’re talking to, it’s the official postman speaking. And I say the Shorties’re tough. I say I was there when the Half-Pint Posted took the Streamside Terror; and also when Pick-and-Shovel wiped up Bone Breaker in a sword-and-shield duel. Now, no disrespect, but if you’re questioning the official word of a government mail carrier—”

“Now, Bluffer,” said One Punch, “I never doubted you personally for a minute. It’s just everybody knows the Terror and Bone Breaker weren’t either of them pushovers. But you know I’m not the biggest man around, by a long shot; and now and then during my time I can remember laying out some pretty good-sized scrappers, myself—when my temper got away from me, that is. So I know from personal experience not every man’s as tough as the next—and why shouldn’t that work for Shorties as well as real men? Maybe those two you carried before were tough; but how can anybody tell about this Shorty? No offense, up there, Law-Twister, by the way. Just using a bit of my wisdom and asking.”

Mal opened his mouth and shut it again.

“Well?” growled the Bluffer underneath him. “Speak up, Law-Twister.” Suddenly, there was a dangerous feeling of tension in the air. Mal swallowed. How, he thought, would a Dilbian answer a question like that?”

Any way but with a straight answer, came back the reply from the hypnotrained section of his mind.

“Well—er,” said Mal, “how can I tell you how tough I am? I mean, what’s tough by the standards of you real men? As far as we Shorties go, it might be one thing. For you real men, it might be something else completely. It’s too bad I didn’t ever know this Half-Pint Posted, or Pick-and-Shovel, or else I could kind of measure myself by them for you. But I never heard of them until now.”

“But you think they just might be tougher than you, though—the Half-pint and Pick-and-Shovel?” demanded One Punch.

“Oh, sure,” said Mal. “They could both be ten times as tough as I am. And then, again— Well, not for me to say.”

There was a moment’s silence from both the Dilbians, then the Bluffer broke it with a snort of admiration.

“Hor!” he chortled admiringly to One Punch. “I guess you can see now how the Law-Twister here got his name. Slippery? Slippery’s not the word for this Shorty.”

But One Punch shook his head.

“Slippery’s one thing,” he said. “But law-twisting’s another. Here he says he doesn’t even know about the stone of the Mighty Grappler. How’s he going to go about twisting laws if he doesn’t know about the laws in the first place?”

“You could tell me about the stone,” suggested Malcolm.

“Mighty Grappler put it there, Law-Twister,” said the Bluffer. “Set it up to keep peace in Clan Water Gap.”

“Better let me tell him, Postman,” interrupted One Punch. “After all, he ought to get it straight from a born Water Gapper. Look at the stone there, Law-Twister. You see those two ends of iron sticking out of it?”

Mal looked. Sure enough, there were two lengths of rusty metal protruding from opposite sides of the boulder, which was about three feet in width in the middle.

“I see them,” he answered.

“Mighty Grappler was just maybe the biggest and strongest real man who ever lived—”

The Hill Bluffer coughed.

“One Man, now…” he murmured.

“I’m not denying One Man’s something like a couple of big men in one skin, Postman,” said One Punch. “But the stories about the Mighty Grappler are hard to beat. He was a stonemason, Law-Twister; and he founded Clan Water Gap, with himself, his relatives, and his descendants. Now, as long as he was alive, there was no trouble. He was Clan Water Gap’s first Grandfather, and even when he was a hundred and ten nobody wanted to argue with him. But he worried about keeping things orderly after he was gone—”

“Fell off a cliff at a hundred and fourteen,” put in the Bluffer. “Broke his neck. Otherwise, no telling how long he’d have lived.”

“Excuse me, Postman,” said One Punch. “But I’m telling this, not you. The point is, Law-Twister, he was worried like I say about keeping the clan orderly. So he took a stone he was working on one day—the stone there, that no one but him could come near lifting—and hammered an iron rod through it to make a handhold on each side, like you see. Then he picked the stone up, carried it here, and set it down; and he made a law. The rules he’d made earlier for Clan Water Gappers were to stand as laws, themselves—as long as that stone stayed where it was. But if anyone ever came along who could pick it up all by himself and carry it as much as ten steps, then that was a sign it was time the laws should change.”

Mal stared at the boulder. His hypnotraining had informed him that while Dilbians would go to any lengths to twist the truth to their own advantage, the one thing they would not stand for, in themselves or others, was an out-and-out lie. Accordingly, One Punch would probably be telling the truth about this Mighty Grappler ancestor of his. On the other hand, a chunk of granite that size must weigh at least a ton—maybe a ton and a half. Not even an outsize Dilbian could be imagined carrying something like that for ten paces. There were natural flesh-and-blood limits, even for these giant natives—or were there?

“Did anybody ever try lifting it, after that?” Mal asked.

“Hor!” snorted the Bluffer.

“Now, Law-Twister,” said One Punch, almost reproachfully, “any Clan Water Gapper’s got too much sense to make a fool of himself trying to do something only the Mighty Grappler had a chance of doing. That stone’s never been touched from that day to this—and that’s the way it should be.”

“I suppose so,” said Mal.

The Bluffer snorted again, in surprise. One Punch stared.

“You giving up—just like that, Law-Twister?” demanded the Bluffer.

“What? I don’t understand,” said Mal, confused. “We were just talking about the stone—”

“But you said you supposed that’s the way it should be,” said the Bluffer, outraged. “The stone there, and the laws just the way Mighty Grappler laid them down. What kind of a law-twister are you, anyway?”

“But…” Mal was still confused. “What’s the Mighty Grappler and his stone got to do with my getting back these three Shorties that Gentle Maiden says she adopted?”

“Why, that’s one of Mighty Grappler’s laws—one of the ones he made and backed up with that stone!” said One Punch. “It was Mighty Grappler said that any orphans running around loose could be adopted by any single woman of the Clan, who could then name herself a protector to take care of them and her! Now, that’s Clan law.”

“But—” began Mal again. He had not expected to have to start arguing his case this soon. But it seemed there was no choice. “It’s Clan law if you say so; and I don’t have any quarrel with it. But these people Gentle Maiden’s adopted aren’t orphans. They’re Shorties. That’s why she’s going to have to let them go.”

“So that’s the way you twist it,” said One Punch, almost in a tone of satisfaction. “Figured you’d come up with something like that. So, you say they’re not orphans?”

“Of course, that’s what I say!” said Mal.

“Figured as much. Naturally, Gentle says they are.”

“Well, I’ll just have to make her understand—”

“Not her,” interrupted the Bluffer.

“Naturally not her,” said One Punch. “If she says they’re orphans, then it’s her protector you’ve got to straighten things out with. Gentle says ‘orphans,’ so Iron Bender’s going to be saying ‘orphans,’ too. You and Iron Bender got to get together.”

“And none of that sissy lowland stuff with swords and shields,” put in the Hill Bluffer. “Just honest, man-to-man, teeth, claws, and muscle. You don’t have to worry about Iron Bender going in for any of that modern stuff, Law-Twister.”

“Oh?” said Mal, staring.

“Thought I’d tell you right now,” said the Bluffer. “Ease your mind, in case you were wondering.”

“I wasn’t, actually,” said Mal, numbly, still trying to make his mind believe what his ears seemed to be hearing.

“Well,” said One Punch, “how about it, Postman? Law-Twister? Shall we get on down to the harness shop and you and Iron Bender can set up the details? Quite a few folks been dropping in the last few hours to see the two of you tangle. Don’t think any of them ever saw a Shorty in action before. Know I never did myself. Should be real interesting.”

He and the Hill Bluffer had already turned and begun to stroll down the village.

“Interesting’s not the word for it,” the Bluffer responded. “Seen it twice, myself, and I can tell you it’s a sight to behold…”

He continued along, chatting cheerfully while Mal rode along helplessly on Dilbian-back, his head spinning. The log buildings got closer and closer.

“Wait—” Mal said desperately, as they entered the street running down the center of the cluster of log structures. The Bluffer and One Punch both stopped. One Punch turned to gaze up at him.

“Wait?” One Punch said. “What for?”

“I—I can’t,” stammered Mal, frantically searching for an excuse, and going on talking meanwhile with the first words that came to his lips. “That is, I’ve got my own laws to think of. Shorty laws. Responsibilities. I can’t just go representing these other Shorty orphans just like that. I have to be… uh, briefed.”

“Briefed?” The Bluffer’s tongue struggled with pronunciation of the human word Mal had used.

“Yes—uh, that means I have to be given authority—like Gentle Maiden had to choose Iron Bender as her protector,” said Mal. “These Shorty orphans have to agree to choose me as their law-twister. It’s one of the Shorty freedoms—freedom to not be defended by a law-twister without your consent. With so much at stake here—I mean, not just what might happen to me, or Iron Bender, but what might happen to Clan Water Gap laws or Shorty laws—I need to consult with my clients, I mean those other Shorties I’m working for, before I enter into any—er—discussion with Gentle Maiden’s protector.”

Mal stopped speaking and waited, his heart hammering away. There was a moment of deep silence from both the Bluffer and One Punch. Then One Punch spoke to the taller Dilbian.

“Have to admit you’re right, Postman,” One Punch said, admiringly. “He sure can twist. You understand all that he was talking about, there?”

“Why, of course,” said the Bluffer. “After all, I’ve had a lot to do with these Shorties. He was saying that this isn’t just any little old hole-and-corner tangle between him and Iron Bender—this is a high-class hassle to decide the law; and it’s got to be done right. No offense, One Punch, but you, having been in the habit of getting right down to business on the spur of the moment all those years, might not have stopped to think just how important it is not to rush matters in an important case like this.”

“No offense taken, Postman,” said One Punch, easily. “Though I must say maybe it’s lucky you didn’t know me in my younger, less full-of-wisdom days. Because it seems to me we were both maybe about to rush the Law-Twister a mite.”

“Well, now,” said the Bluffer. “Leaving aside that business of my luck and all that about not knowing you when you were younger, I guess I had to admit perhaps I was a little on the rushing side, myself. Anyway, Law-Twister’s straightened us both out. So, what’s the next thing you want to do, Law-Twister?”

“Well…” said Mal. He was still thinking desperately. “This being a matter that concerns the laws governing the whole Water Gap Clan, as well as Shorty laws and the stone of Mighty Grappler, we probably ought to get everyone together. I mean we ought to talk it over. It might well turn out to be this is something that ought to be settled not by a fight but in—”

Mal had not expected the Dilbians to have a word for it; but he was wrong. His hypnotraining threw the proper Dilbian sounds up for his tongue to utter.

“—court,” he wound up.

“Court? Can’t have a court, Law-Twister,” put in the Bluffer, reprovingly. “Can’t have a Clan court without a Grandfather to decide things.”

“Too bad, in a way,” said One Punch with a sigh. “We’d all like to see a real Law-Twister Shorty at work in a real court situation, twisting and slickering around from one argument to the next. But, just as the Bluffer says, Twister, we’ve got no Grandfather yet. Won’t have until the next Clan meeting.”

“When’s that?” asked Mal, hastily.

“Couple of weeks,” said One Punch. “Be glad to wait around a couple of weeks far as all of us here’re concerned; but those Shorty orphans of Gentle Maiden’s are getting pretty hungry and even a mite thirsty. Seems they won’t eat anything she gives them; and they even don’t seem to like to drink the well water, much. Gentle figures they won’t settle down until they get it straight that they’re adopted and not going home again. So she wants you and Iron Bender to settle it right now—and, of course, since she’s a member of the Clan, the Clan backs her up on that.”

“Won’t eat or drink? Where are they?” asked Mal.

“At Gentle’s house,” said One Punch. “She’s got them locked up there so they can’t run back to that box they came down in and fly away back into the sky. Real motherly instincts in that girl, if I do say so myself who’s her real grandpa. That, and looks, too. Can’t understand why no young buck’s snapped her up before this—”

“You understand, all right, One Punch,” interrupted an incredibly deep bass voice; and there shouldered through the crowd a darkly brown-haired Dilbian, taller than any of the crowd around him. The speaker was shorter by half a head than the Hill Bluffer—the postman seemed to have the advantage in height on every other native Mal had seen—but this newcomer towered over everyone else and he was a walking mass of muscle, easily outweighing the Bluffer.

“You understand, all right,” he repeated, stopping before the Bluffer and Mal. “Folks’d laugh their heads off at any man who’d offer to take a girl as tough-minded as Gentle, to wife—that is, unless he had to. Then, maybe he’d find it was worth it. But do it on his own? Pride’s pride… Hello there, Postman. This is the Law-Twister Shorty?”

“It’s him,” said the Bluffer.

“Why he’s no bigger’n those other little Shorties,” said the deep-voiced Dilbian, peering over the Bluffer’s shoulder at Mal.

“You go thinking size is all there is to a Shorty, you’re going to be surprised,” said the Bluffer. “Along with the Streamside Terror and Bone Breaker, as I recollect. Twister, this here’s Gentle’s protector and the Clan Water Gap harnessmaker, Iron Bender.”

“Uh—pleased to meet you,” said Mal.

“Pleased to meet you, Law-Twister,” rumbled Iron Bender. “That is, I’m pleased now; and I hope I go on being pleased. I’m a plain, simple man, Law-Twister. A good day’s work, a good night’s sleep, four good meals a day, and I’m satisfied. You wouldn’t find me mixed up in fancy doings like this by choice. I’d have nothing to do with this if Gentle hadn’t named me her protector. But right’s right. She did; and I am, like it or not.”

“I know how you feel,” said Mal, hastily. “I was actually going someplace else when the Shorties here had me come see about this situation. I hadn’t planned on it at all.”

“Well, well,” said Iron Bender, deeply, “you, too, eh?”

He sighed heavily.

“That’s the way things go, nowdays, though,” he said. “A plain simple man can’t hardly do a day’s work in peace without some maiden or someone coming to him for protection. So they got you, too, eh? Well, well—life’s life, and a man can’t do much about it. You’re not a bad little Shorty at all. I’m going to be real sorry to tear your head off—which of course I’m going to do, since I figure I probably could have done the same to Bone Breaker or the Streamside Terror, if it’d ever happened to come to that. Not that I’m a boastful man; but true’s true.”

He sighed again.

“So,” he said, flexing his huge arms, “if you’ll light down from your perch on the postman, there, I’ll get to it. I’ve got a long day’s work back at the harness shop, anyway; and daylight’s daylight—”

“But fair’s fair,” broke in Mal, hastily. The Iron Bender lowered his massive, brown-furred hands, looking puzzled.

“Fair’s fair?” he echoed.

“You heard him, harnessmaker!” snapped the Bluffer, bristling. “No offense, but there’s more to something like this than punching holes in leather. Nothing I’d like to see more than for you to try—just try—to tear the head off a Shorty like Law-Twister here, since I’ve seen what a Shorty can do when he really gets his dander up. But like the Twister himself pointed out, this is not just a happy hassle—this is serious business involving Clan laws and Shorty laws and lots of other things. We were just discussing it when you came up. Law-Twister was saying maybe something like this should be held up until the next Clan meeting when you elect a Grandfather, so’s it could be decided by a legal Clan Water Gap court in full session.”

“Court—” Iron Bender was beginning when he was interrupted.

“We will not wait for any court to settle who gets my orphans!” cried a new voice and the black-furred form of Gentle Maiden shoved through the crowd to join them. “When there’s no Clan Grandfather to rule, the Clan goes by law and custom. Law and custom says my protector’s got to take care of me, and I’ve got to take care of the little ones I adopted. And I’m not letting them suffer for two weeks before they realize they’re settling down with me. The law says I don’t have to and no man’s going to make me try—”

“Now, hold on there just a minute, Gentle,” rumbled Iron Bender. “Guess maybe I’m the one man in this Clan, or between here and Humrog Peak for that matter, who could make you try and do something whether you wanted it or not, if he wanted to. Not that I’m saying I’m going to, now. But you just remember that while I’m your named protector, it doesn’t mean I’m going to let you order me around like you do other folk—any more than I ever did.”

He turned back to the Bluffer, Mal and One Punch.

“Right’s right,” he said. “Now, what’s all this about a court?”

Neither the Bluffer nor One Punch answered immediately—and, abruptly, Mal realized it was up to him to do the explaining.

“Well, as I was pointing out to the postman and One Punch,” he began, rapidly, “there’s a lot at stake, here. I mean, we Shorties have laws, too; and one of them is that you don’t have to be represented by a law-twister not your choice. I haven’t talked to these Shorties you and Gentle claim are orphans, so I don’t have their word on going ahead with anything on their behalf. I can’t do anything important until I have that word of theirs. What if we—er—tangled, and it turned out they didn’t mean to name me to do anything for them, after all? Here you, a regular named protector of a maiden according to your Clan laws, as laid down by Mighty Grappler, would have been hassling with someone who didn’t have a shred of right to fight you. And here, too, I’d have been tangling without a shred of lawful reason for it, to back me up. What we need to do is study the situation. I need to talk to the Shorties you say are orphans—”

“No!” cried Gentle Maiden. “He’s not to come near my little orphans and get them all upset, even more than they are now—”

“Hold on, now, Granddaughter,” interposed One Punch. “We all can see how the Twister here’s twisting and slipping around like the clever little Shorty he is, trying to get things his way. But he’s got a point there when he talks about Clan Water Gap putting up a named protector, and then that protector turns out to have gotten into a hassle with someone with no authority at all. Why they’d be laughing at our Clan all up and down the mountains. Worse yet, what if that protector should lose—”

“Lose?” snorted Iron Bender, with all the geniality of a grizzly abruptly wakened from his long winter’s nap.

“That’s right, harnessmaker. Lose!” snarled the Hill Bluffer. “Guess there just might be a real man not too far away from you at this moment who’s pretty sure you would lose—and handily!”

Suddenly, the two of them were standing nose to nose. Mal became abruptly aware that he was still seated in the saddle arrangement on the Bluffer’s back and that, in case of trouble between the two big Dilbians, it would not be easy for him to get down in a hurry.

“I’ll tell you what, Postman,” Iron Bender was growling. “Why don’t you and I just step out beyond the houses, here, where there’s a little more open space—”

“Stop it!” snapped Gentle Maiden. “Stop it right now, Iron Bender! You’ve got no right to go fighting anybody for your own private pleasure when you’re still my protector. What if something happened, and you weren’t able to protect me and mine the way you should after that?”

“Maiden’s right,” said One Punch, sharply. “It’s Clan honor and decency at stake here, not just your feelings, Bender. Now, as I was saying, Law-Twister here’s been doing some fine talking and twisting, and he’s come up with a real point. It’s as much a matter to us if he’s a real Shorty-type protector to those orphans Maiden adopted, as it is to him and the other Shorties—”

His voice became mild. He turned to the crowd and spread his hands, modestly.

“Of course, I’m no real Grandfather,” he said. “Some might think I wouldn’t stand a chance to be the one you’ll pick at the next Clan meeting. Of course, some might think I would, too—but it’s hardly for me to say. Only, speaking as a man who might be named a Grandfather someday, I’d say Gentle Maiden really ought to let Law-Twister check with those three orphans to see if they want him to talk or hassle, for them.”

A bass-voiced murmur of agreement rose from the surrounding crowd, which by this time had grown to a respectable size. For the first time since he had said farewell to Ambassador Joshua Guy, Mal felt his spirits begin to rise. For the first time, he seemed to be getting some control over the events which had been hurrying him along like a chip swirling downstream in the current of a fast river. Maybe, if he had a little luck, now—

“Duty’s duty, I guess,” rumbled Iron Bender at just this moment. “All right, then, Law-Twister—now, stop your arguing, Gentle, it’s no use—you can see your fellow Shorties. They’re at Gentle’s place, last but one on the left-hand side of the street, here.”

“Show you the way, myself, Postman,” said One Punch.

The Clan elder led off, limping, and the crowd broke up as the Hill Bluffer followed him. Iron Bender went off in the opposite direction, but Gentle Maiden tagged along with the postman, Mal, and her grandfather, muttering to herself.

“Take things kind of hard, don’t you, Gentle?” said the Hill Bluffer to her, affably. “Don’t blame old Iron Bender. Man can’t expect to win every time.”

“Why not?” demanded Gentle. “I do! He’s just so cautious, and slow, he makes me sick! Why can’t he be like One Punch, here, when he was young? Hit first and think afterward—particularly when I ask him to? Then Bender could go around being slow and careful about his own business if he wanted; in fact, I’d be all for him being like that, on his own time. A girl needs a man she can respect; particularly when there’s no other man around that’s much more than half-size to him!”

“Tell him so,” suggested the Bluffer, strolling along, his long legs making a single stride to each two of Gentle and One Punch.

“Certainly not! It’d look like I was giving in to him!” said Gentle. “It may be all right for any old ordinary girl to go chasing a man, but not me. Folks know me better than that. They’d laugh their heads off if I suddenly started going all soft on Bender. And besides—”

“Here we are, Postman—Law-Twister,” interrupted One Punch, stopping by the heavy wooden door of a good-sized log building. “This is Gentle’s place. The orphans are inside.”

“Don’t you go letting them out, now!” snapped Gentle, as Mal, relieved to be out of the saddle after this much time in it, began sliding down the Bluffer’s broad back toward the ground.

“Don’t worry, Granddaughter,” said One Punch, as Mal’s boots touched the earth. “Postman and I’ll wait right outside the door here with you. If one of them tries to duck out, we’ll catch him or her for you.”

“They keep wanting to go back to their flying box,” said Gentle. “And I know the minute one of them gets inside it, he’ll be into the air and off like a flash. I haven’t gone to all this trouble to lose any of them, now. So, don’t you try anything while you’re inside there, Law-Twister!”

Mal went up the three wooden steps to the rough plank door and lifted a latch that was, from the standpoint of a human-sized individual, like a heavy bar locking the door shut. The door yawned open before him, and he stepped through into the dimness. The door swung shut behind him, and he heard the latch being relocked.

“Holler when you want out, Law-Twister!” One Punch’s voice boomed through the closed door. Mal looked around him.

He crossed the room and tried the right-hand door at random. It gave him a view of an empty, kitchenlike room with what looked like a side of beef hanging from a hook in a far corner. A chopping block and a wash trough of hollowed-out stone furnished the rest of the room.

Mal backed out, closed the door, and tried the one on his left. It opened easily, but the entrance to the room beyond was barred by a rough fence of planks some eight feet high, with sharp chips of stone hammered into the tops. Through the gap in the planks, Mal looked into what seemed a large Dilbian bed chamber, which had been converted into human living quarters by the simple expedient of ripping out three cabin sections from a shuttle boat and setting them up like so many large tin boxes on the floor under the lofty, log-beamed roof.

At the sound of the opening of the door, other doors opened in the transplanted cabin sections. As Mal watched, three middle-aged people—one woman and two men—emerged each from his own cabin and stopped short to stare through the gaps in the plank fence at him.

“Oh, no!” said one of the men, a skinny, balding character with a torn shirt collar. “A kid!”

“Kid?” echoed Mal, grimly. He had been prepared to feel sorry for the three captives of Gentle Maiden, but this kind of reception did not make it easy. “How adult do you have to be to wrestle a Dilbian?”

“Wrestle…!” It was the woman. She stared at him. “Oh, it surely won’t come to that. Will it? You ought to be able to find a way around it. Didn’t they pick you because you’d be able to understand these natives?”

Mal looked at her narrowly.

“How would you have any idea of how I was picked?” he asked.

“We just assumed they’d send someone to help us who understood these natives,” she said.

Mal’s conscience pricked him.

“I’m sorry—er—Mrs….” he began.

“Ora Page,” she answered. “This—” she indicated the thin man, “is Harvey Anok, and—” she nodded at the other, “Zora Rice.” She had a soft, rather gentle face, in contrast to the sharp, almost suspicious face of Harvey Anok and the rather hard features of Zora Rice; but like both of the others, she had a tanned outdoors sort of look.

“Mrs. Page,” Mal said. “I’m sorry, but the only thing I seem to be able to do for you is get myself killed by the local harnessmaker. But I do have an idea. Where’s this shuttle boat you came down in?”

“Right behind this building we’re in,” said Harvey, “in a meadow about a hundred yards back. What about it?”

“Good,” said Mal. “I’m going to try to make a break for it. Now, if you can just tell me how to take off in it, and land, I think I can fly it. I’ll make some excuse to get inside it and get into the air. Then I’ll fly back to the ambassador who sent me out here, and tell him I can’t do anything. He’ll have to send in force, if necessary, to get you out of this.”

The three stared back at him without speaking.

“Well?” demanded Mal. “What about it? If I get killed by that harnessmaker it’s not going to do you any good. Gentle Maiden may decide to take you away and hide you someplace in the mountains, and no rescue team will ever find you. What’re you waiting for? Tell me how to fly that shuttle boat!”

The three of them looked at each other uncomfortably and then back at Mal. Harvey shook his head.

“No,” he said. “I don’t think we ought to do that. There’s a treaty—”

“The Human-Hemnoid Treaty on this planet?” Mal asked. “But, I just told you, that Dilbian harnessmaker may kill me. You might get killed, too. Isn’t it more important to save lives than worry about a treaty at a time like this?”

“You don’t understand,” said Harvey. “One of the things that Treaty particularly rules out is anthropologists. If we’re found here—”

“But I thought you were tourists?” Mal said.

“We are. All of us were on vacation on a spaceliner tour. It just happens we three are anthropologists, too—”

“That’s why we were tempted to drop in here in the first place,” put in Zora Rice.

“But that Treaty’s a lot more important than you think,” Harvey said. “We can’t risk damaging it.”

“Why didn’t you think of that before you came here?” Mal growled.

“You can find a way out for all of us without calling for armed force and getting us all in trouble. I know you can,” said Ora Page. “We trust you. Won’t you try?”

Mal stared back at them all, scowling. There was something funny about all this. Prisoners who hadn’t worried about a Human-Hemnoid Treaty on their way to Dilbia, but who were willing to risk themselves to protect it now that they were here. A Dilbian female who wanted to adopt three full-grown humans. Why, in the name of all that was sensible? A village harnessmaker ready to tear him apart, and a human ambassador who had sent him blithely out to face that same harnessmaker with neither advice nor protection.

“All right,” said Mal, grimly. “I’ll talk to you again later—with luck.”

He stepped back and swung closed the heavy door to the room in which they were fenced. Going to the entrance of the building, he shouted to One Punch, and the door before him was opened from the outside. Gentle Maiden shouldered suspiciously past him into the house as he emerged.

“Well, how about it, Law-Twister?” asked One Punch, as the door closed behind Gentle Maiden. “Those other Shorties say it was all right for you to talk and hassle for them?”

“Well, yes…” said Mal. He gazed narrowly up into the large furry faces of One Punch and the Bluffer, trying to read their expressions. But outside of the fact that they both looked genial, he could discover nothing. The alien visages held their secrets well from human eyes.

“They agreed, all right,” said Mal, slowly. “But what they had to say to me sort of got me thinking. Maybe you can tell me—just why is it Clan Water Gap can’t hold its meeting right away instead of two weeks from now? Hold a meeting right now and the Clan could have an elected Grandfather before the afternoon’s half over. Then there’d be time to hold a regular Clan court, for example, between the election and sunset; and this whole matter of the orphan Shorties could be handled more in regular fashion.”

“Wondered that, did you, Law-Twister?” said One Punch. “It crossed my mind earlier you might wonder about it. No real reason why the Clan meeting couldn’t be held right away, I guess. Only, who’s going to suggest it?”

“Suggest it?” Mal said.

“Why, sure,” said One Punch. “Ordinarily, when a Clan has a Grandfather, it’d be up to the Grandfather to suggest it. But Clan Water Gap doesn’t have a Grandfather right now, as you know.”

“Isn’t there anyone else to suggest things like that if a Grandfather isn’t available?” asked Mal.

“Well, yes.” One Punch gazed thoughtfully away from Mal, down the village street. “If there’s no Grandfather around, it’d be pretty much up to one of the grandpas to suggest it. Only—of course I can’t speak for old Forty Winks or anyone else—but I wouldn’t want to be the one to do it, myself. Might sound like I thought I had a better chance of being elected Grandfather now, than I would two weeks from now.”

“So,” said Mal. “You won’t suggest it, and if you won’t I can see how the others wouldn’t, for the same reason. Who else does that leave who might suggest it?”

“Why, I don’t know, Law-Twister,” said One Punch, gazing back at him. “Guess any strong-minded member of the Clan could speak up and propose it. Someone like Gentle Maiden, herself, for example. But you know Gentle Maiden isn’t about to suggest anything like that when what she wants is for Iron Bender to try and take you apart as soon as possible.”

“How about Iron Bender?” asked Mal.

“Now, he just might want to suggest something like that,” said One Punch, “being how as he likes to do everything just right. But it might look like he was trying to get out of tangling with you—after all this talk by the Bluffer, here, about how tough Shorties are. So I don’t expect Bender’d be likely to say anything about changing the meeting time.”

Mal looked at the tall Dilbian who had brought him here.

“Bluffer,” he said, “I wonder if you—”

“Look here, Law-Twister,” said the Hill Bluffer severely. “I’m the government postman—to all the Clans and towns and folks from Humrog Valley to Wildwood Peak. A government man like myself can’t go sticking his nose into local affairs.”

“But you were ready to tangle with Iron Bender yourself, a little while ago—”

“That was personal and private. This is public. I don’t blame you for not seeing the difference right off, Law-Twister, you being a Shorty and all,” said the Bluffer, “but a government man has to know, and keep the two things separate.”

He fell silent, looking at Mal. For a moment neither the Bluffer nor One Punch said anything; but Mal was left with the curious feeling that the conversation had not so much been ended, as left hanging in the air for him to pick up. He was beginning to get an understanding of how Dilbian minds worked. Because of their taboo against any outright lying, they were experts at pretending to say one thing while actually saying another. There was a strong notion in Mal’s mind now that somehow the other two were simply waiting for him to ask the right question—as if he had a handful of keys and only the right one would unlock an answer with the information he wanted.

“Certainly is different from the old days, Postman,” said One Punch, idly, turning to the Bluffer. “Wonder what Mighty Grappler would have said, seeing Shorties like the Law-Twister among us. He’d have said something, all right. Had an answer for everything, Mighty Grappler did.”

An idea exploded into life in Mal’s mind. Of course! That was it!

“Isn’t there something in Mighty Grappler’s laws,” he asked, “that could arrange for a Clan meeting without someone suggesting it?”

One Punch looked back at him.

“Why, what do you know?” the oldster said. “Bluffer, Law-Twister here is something to make up stories about, all right. Imagine a Shorty guessing that Mighty Grappler had thought of something like that, when I’d almost forgotten it myself.”

“Shorties are sneaky little characters, as I’ve said before,” replied the Bluffer, gazing down at Mal with obvious pride. “Quick on the uptake, too.”

“Then there is a way?” Mal asked.

“It just now comes back to me,” said One Punch. “Mighty Grappler set up all his laws to protect the Clan members against themselves and each other and against strangers. But he did make one law to protect strangers on Clan territory. As I remember, any stranger having a need to appeal to the whole Clan for justice was supposed to stand beside Grappler’s stone—the one we showed you on the way in—and put his hand on it, and make that appeal.”

“Then what?” asked Mal. “The Clan would grant his appeal?”

“Well, not exactly,” said One Punch. “But they’d be obliged to talk the matter over and decide things.”

“Oh,” said Mal. This was less than he had hoped for, but still he had a strong feeling now that he was on the right track. “Well, let’s go.”

“Right,” said the Bluffer. He and One Punch turned and strolled off up the street.

“Hey!” yelled Mal, trotting after them. The Bluffer turned around, picked him up, and stuffed him into the saddle on the postman’s back.

“Sorry, Law-Twister. Forgot about those short legs of yours,” the Bluffer said. Turning to stroll forward with One Punch again, he added to the oldster, “Makes you kind of wonder how they made out to start off with, before they had flying boxes and things like that.”

“Probably didn’t do much,” offered One Punch in explanation, “just lay in the sun and dug little burrows and things like that.”

Mal opened his mouth and then closed it again on the first retort that had come to his lips.

“Where you off to with the Law-Twister now, One Punch?” asked a graying-haired Dilbian they passed, whom Mal was pretty sure was either Forty Winks or Grandpa Tricky.

“Law-Twister’s going up to the stone of Mighty Grappler to make an appeal to the Clan,” said One Punch.

“Well, now,” said the other, “guess I’ll mosey up there myself and have a look at that. Can’t remember it ever happening before.”

He fell in behind them, but halfway down the street fell out again to answer the questions of several other bystanders who wanted to know what was going on. So it was that when Mal alighted from the Bluffer’s back at the stone of Mighty Grappler, there was just he and the Bluffer and One Punch there, although a few figures could be seen beginning to stream out of the village toward the stone.

“Go ahead, Law-Twister,” said One Punch, nodding at the stone. “Make that appeal of yours.”

“Hadn’t I better wait until the rest of the Clan gets here?”

“I suppose you could do that,” said One Punch. “I was thinking you might just want to say your appeal and have it over with and sort of let me tell people about it. But you’re right. Wait until folks get here. Give you a chance to kind of look over Mighty Grappler’s stone, too, and put yourself in the kind of spirit to make a good appeal… Guess you’ll want to be remembering this word for word, to pass on down the line to the other clans, won’t you, Postman?”

“You could say I’ve almost a duty to do that, One Punch,” responded the Bluffer. “Lots more to being a government postman than some people think…”

The two went on chatting, turning a little away from Mal and the stone to gaze down the slope at the Clan members on their way up from the village. Mal turned to gaze at the stone, itself. It was still inconceivable to him that even a Dilbian could lift and carry such a weight ten paces.

Certainly, it did not look as if anyone had ever moved the stone since it had been placed here. The two ends of the iron rod sticking out from opposite sides of it were red with rust, and the grass had grown up thickly around its base. That is, it had grown up thickly everywhere but just behind it, where it looked like a handful of grass might have been pulled up, recently. Bending down to look closer at the grass-free part of the stone, Mal caught sight of something dark. The edge of some indentation, almost something like the edge of a large hole in the stone itself—

“Law-Twister!” The voice of One Punch brought Mal abruptly upright. He saw that the vanguard of the Dilbians coming out of the village was almost upon them.

“How’d you like me to sort of pass the word what this is all about?” asked One Punch. “Then you could just make your appeal without trying to explain it?”

“Oh—fine,” said Mal. He glanced back at the stone. For a moment he felt a great temptation to take hold of the two rust-red iron handles and see if he actually could lift it. But there were too many eyes on him now.

The members of the Clan came up and sat down, with their backs straight and furry legs stuck out before them on the grass. The Bluffer, however, remained standing near Mal, as did One Punch. Among the last to arrive was Gentle Maiden, who hurried up to the very front of the crowd and snorted angrily at Mal before sitting down.

“Got them all upset!” she said, triumphantly. “Knew you would!”

Iron Bender had not put in an appearance.

“Members of Clan Water Gap,” said One Punch, when they were all settled on the grass and quiet, “you all know what this Shorty, Law-Twister here, dropped in on us to do. He wants to take back with him the orphans Gentle Maiden adopted according to Clan law, as laid down by Mighty Grappler. Naturally, Maiden doesn’t want him to, and she’s got her protector, Iron Bender—”

He broke off, peering out over the crowd.

“Where is Iron Bender?” the oldster demanded.

“He says work’s work,” a voice answered from the crows. “Says to send somebody for him when you’re all ready to have someone’s head torn off. Otherwise, he’ll be busy down in the harness shop.”

Gentle Maiden snorted.

“Well, well. I guess we’ll just have to go on without him,” said One Punch. “As I was saying, here’s Iron Bender all ready to do his duty; but as Law-Twister sees it, it’s not all that simple.”

There was a buzz of low-toned, admiring comments from the crowd. One Punch waited until the noise died before going on.

“One thing Law-Twister wants to do is make an appeal to the Clan, according to Mighty Grappler’s law, before he gets down to tangling with Iron Bender,” the oldster said. “So, without my bending your ears any further, here’s the Law-Twister himself, with tongue all oiled up and ready to talk you upside down, and roundabout— Go ahead, Law-Twister!”

Mal put his hand on the stone of Mighty Grappler. In fact, he leaned on the stone and it seemed to him it rocked a little bit, under his weight. It did not seem to him that One Punch’s introductory speech had struck quite the serious note Mal himself might have liked. But now, in any case, it was up to him.

“Uh—members of Clan Water Gap,” he said. “I’ve been disturbed by a lot of what I’ve learned here. For example, here you have something very important at stake—the right of a Clan Water Gap maiden to adopt Shorties as orphans. But the whole matter has to be settled by what’s really an emergency measure—that is, my tangling with Iron Bender—just because Clan Water Gap hasn’t elected a new Grandfather lately, and the meeting to elect one is a couple of weeks away—”

“And while it’s not for me to say,” interrupted the basso voice of the Hill Bluffer, “not being a Clan Water Gapper myself, and besides being a government postman who’s strictly not concerned in any local affairs—I’d guess that’s what a lot of folks are going to be asking me as I ply my route between here and Wildwood Peak in the next few weeks. ‘How come they didn’t hold a regular trial to settle the matter, down there in Clan Water Gap?’ they’ll be asking. ‘Because they didn’t have a Grandfather,’ I’ll have to say. ‘How come those Water Gappers are running around without a Grandfather?’ they’ll ask—”

“All right, Postman!” interrupted One Punch, in his turn. “I guess we can all figure what people are going to say. The point is, Law-Twister is still making his appeal. Go ahead, Law-Twister.”

“Well… I asked about the Clan holding their meeting to elect a Grandfather right away,” put in Mal. A small breeze came wandering by, and he felt it surprisingly cool on his forehead. Evidently there was a little perspiration up there. “One Punch here said it could be done all right, but it was a question who’d want to suggest it to the Clan. Naturally, he and the other grandpas who are in the running for Grandfather wouldn’t like to do it. Iron Bender would have his own reasons for refusing; and Gentle Maiden here wouldn’t particularly want to hold a meeting right away—”

“And we certainly shouldn’t” said Gentle Maiden. “Why go to all that trouble when here we’ve got Iron Bender perfectly willing and ready to tear—”

“Why indeed?” interrupted Mal in his turn. He was beginning to get a little weary of hearing of Iron Bender’s readiness to remove heads. “Except that perhaps the whole Clan deserves to be in on this—not just Iron Bender and Maiden and myself. What the Clan really ought to do is sit down and decide whether it’s a good idea for the Clan to have someone like Gentle Maiden keeping three Shorties around. Does the Clan really want those Shorties to stay here? And if not, what’s the best way of getting rid of these Shorties? Not that I’m trying to suggest anything to the Clan, but if the Clan should just decide to elect a Grandfather now, and the Grandfather should decide that Shorties don’t qualify as orphans—”

A roar of protest from Gentle Maiden drowned him out; and a thunder of Dilbian voices arose among the seated Clan members as conversation—argument, rather, Mal told himself—became general. He waited for it to die down; but it did not. After a while, he walked over to One Punch, who was standing beside the Hill Bluffer, observing—as were two other elderly figures, obviously Grandpa Tricky and Forty Winks—but not taking part in the confusion of voices.

“One Punch,” said Mal, and the oldster looked down at him cheerfully, “don’t you think maybe you should quiet them down so they could hear the rest of my appeal?”

“Why, Law-Twister,” said One Punch, “there’s no point you going on appealing any longer, when everybody’s already decided to grant what you want. They’re already discussing it. Hear them?”

Since no one within a mile could have helped hearing them, there was little Mal could do but nod his head and wait. About ten minutes later, the volume of sound began to diminish as voice after voice fell silent. Finally, there was a dead silence. Members of the Clan began to reseat themselves on the grass, and from a gathering in the very center of the crowd, Gentle Maiden emerged and snorted at Mal before turning toward the village.

“I’m going to go get Bender!” she announced. “I’ll get those little Shorties up here, too, so they can see Bender take care of this one and know they might just as well settle down.”

She went off at a fast walk down the slope—the equivalent of about eight miles an hour in human terms.

Mal stared at One Punch, stunned.

“You mean,” he asked him, “they decided not to do anything?”

A roar of explaining voices from the Clan members drowned him out and left him too deafened to understand them. When it was quiet once more, he was aware of One Punch looking severely down at him.

“Now, you shouldn’t go around thinking Clan Water Gap’d talk something over and not come to some decision, Twister,” he said. “Of course, they decided how it’s all to go. We’re going to elect a Grandfather, today.”

“Fine,” said Mal, beginning to revive. Then a thought struck him. “Why did Gentle Maiden go after Iron Bender just now, then? I thought—”

“Wait until you hear,” said One Punch. “Clan Water Gap’s come up with a decision to warm that slippery little Shorty heart of yours. You see, everyone decided, since we were going to elect a Grandfather ahead of time, that it all ought to be done in reverse.”

“In reverse?”

“Why, certainly,” said One Punch. “Instead of having a trial, then having the Grandfather give a decision to let you and Iron Bender hassle it out to see whether the Shorties go with you or stay with Gentle Maiden, the Clan decided to work it exactly backward.”

Mal shook his head dizzily.

“I still don’t understand,” he said.

“I’m surprised—a Shorty like you,” said One Punch, reprovingly. “I’d think backward and upside down’d be second nature to a Law-Twister. Why, what’s going to happen is you and Bender’ll have it out first, then the best decision by a grandpa’ll be picked, then the grandpa whose decision’s been picked will be up for election, and the Clan will elect him Grandfather.”

Mal blinked.

“Decision…” he began feebly.

“Now, my decision,” said a voice behind him, and he turned around to see that the Clan’s other two elderly members had come up, “is that Iron Bender ought to win. But if he doesn’t, it’ll be because of some Shorty trick.”

“Playing it safe, eh, Forty Winks?” said the other grandpa who had just joined them. “Well, my decision is that with all his tricks, and tough as we’ve been hearing Shorties are, that the Law-Twister can’t lose. He’ll chew Iron Bender up.”

The two of them turned and looked expectantly at One Punch.

“Hmm,” said One Punch, closing one eye and squinting thoughtfully with the other at Mal. “My decision is that the Law-Twister’s even more clever and sneaky than we think. My decision says Twister’ll come up with something that’ll fix things his way so that they never will tangle. In short, Twister’s going to win the fight before it starts.”

One Punch had turned toward the seated crowd as he said this, and there was another low mutter of appreciation from the seated Clan members.

“That One Punch,” said Grandpa Tricky to Forty Winks, “never did lay back and play it safe. He just swings right in there twice as hard as anyone else, without winking.”

“Well,” said One Punch himself, turning to Mal, “there’s Gentle Maiden and her orphans coming up from the village now with Iron Bender. You all set, Law-Twister?”

Mal was anything but set. It was good to hear that all three grandpas of Clan Water Gap expected him to come out on top; but he would have felt a lot better if it had been Iron Bender who had been expressing that opinion. He looked over the heads of the seated crowd to see Iron Bender coming, just as One Punch had said, with Gentle Maiden and three, small, human figures in tow.

His thoughts spun furiously. This whole business was crazy. It simply could not be that in a few minutes he would be expected to engage in a hand-to-hand battle with an individual more than one and a half times his height and five times his weight, any more than it could be that the wise men of the local Clan could be betting on him to win. One Punch’s prediction, in particular, was so farfetched…

Understanding suddenly exploded in him. At once, it all fitted together: the Dilbian habit of circumventing any outright lie by pretending to be after just the opposite of what an individual was really after; the odd reaction of the three captured humans who had not been concerned about the Human-Hemnoid Treaty of noninterference on Dilbia when they came into Clan Water Gap territory, but were willing to pass up a chance of escape by letting Mal summon armed human help to rescue them, now that they were here. Just suppose—Mal thought to himself feverishly—just suppose everything is just the opposite of what it seems…

There was only one missing part to this whole jigsaw puzzle, one bit to which he did not have the answer. He turned to One Punch.

“Tell me something,” he said, in a low voice. “Suppose Gentle Maiden and Iron Bender had to marry each other. Do you think they’d be very upset?”

“Upset? Well, no,” said One Punch, thoughtfully. “Come to think of it, now you mention it, Law-Twister—those two are just about made for each other. Particularly seeing there’s no one else made big enough or tough enough for either one of them, if you look around. In fact, if it wasn’t for how they go around saying they can’t stand each other, you might think they really liked each other quite a bit. Why do you ask?”

“I was just wondering,” said Mal, grimly. “Let me ask you another question. Do you think a Shorty like me could carry the stone of Mighty Grappler ten paces?”

One Punch gazed at him.

“Well, you know,” he said, “when it comes right down to it, I wouldn’t put anything past a Shorty like you.”

“Thanks,” said Mal. “I’ll return the compliment. Believe me, from now on, I’ll never put anything past a real person like you, or Gentle Maiden, or Iron Bender, or anyone else. And I’ll tell the other Shorties that when I get back among them!”

“Why thank you, Law-Twister,” said One Punch. “That’s mighty kind of you—but, come to think of it, maybe you better turn around now. Because Iron Bender’s here.”

Mal turned—just in time to see the towering figure of the village harnessmaker striding toward him, accompanied by a rising murmur of excitement from the crowd.

“All right, let’s get this over with!” boomed Iron Bender, opening and closing his massive hands hungrily. “Just take me a few minutes, and then—”

“Stop!” shouted Mal, holding up his hand.

Iron Bender stopped, still some twenty feet from Mal. The crowd fell silent, abruptly.

“I’m sorry!” said Mal, addressing them all. “I tried every way I could to keep it from coming to this. But I see now there’s no other way to do it. Now, I’m nowhere near as sure as your three grandpas that I could handle Iron Bender, here, with one hand tied behind my back. Iron Bender might well handle me, with no trouble. I mean, he just might be the one real man who can tangle with a Shorty like me, and win. But, what if I’m wrong?”

Mal paused, both to see how they were reacting and to get his nerve up for his next statement. If I was trying something like this any place else, he thought, they’d cart me off to a psychiatrist. But the Dilbians in front of him were all quiet and attentive, listening. Even Iron Bender and Gentle Maiden were showing no indications of wanting to interrupt.

“As I say,” went on Mal, a little hoarsely as a result of working to make his voice carry to the whole assemblage, “what if I’m wrong? What if this terrific hassling ability that all we Shorties have gets the best of me when I tangle with Iron Bender? Not that Iron Bender would want me to hold back any, I know that—”

Iron Bender snorted affirmatively and worked his massive hands in the air.

“—But,” said Mal, “think what the results would be. Think of Clan Water Gap without a harnessmaker. Think of Gentle Maiden here without the one real man she can’t push around. I’ve thought about those things, and it seems to me there’s just one way out. The Clan laws have to be changed so that a Shorty like me doesn’t have to tangle with a Clan Gapper over this problem.”

He turned to the stone of Mighty Grappler.

“So—” he wound up, his voice cracking a little on the word in spite of himself, “I’m just going to have to carry this stone ten steps so the laws can be changed.”

He stepped up to the stone. There was a dead silence all around him. He could feel the sweat popping out on his face. What if the conclusions he had come to were all wrong? But he could not afford to think that now. He had to go through with the business, now that he’d spoken.

He curled his hands around the two ends of the iron rod from underneath and squatted down with his knees on either side of the rock. This was going to be different from ordinary weight lifting, where the weight was distributed on the outer two ends of the lifting bar. Here, the weight was between his fists.

He took a deep breath and lifted. For a moment, it seemed that the dead weight of the stone refused to move. Then it gave. It came up and into him until the near face of the rock thudded against his chest; the whole stone now held well off the ground.

So far, so good, for the first step. Now, for the second…

He willed strength into his leg muscles.

Up… he thought to himself… up… He could hear his teeth gritting against each other in his head. Up…

Slowly, grimly, his legs straightened. His body lifted, bringing the stone with it, until he stood, swaying, the weight of it against his chest, and his arms just beginning to tremble with the strain.

Now, quickly—before arms and legs gave out—he had to take the ten steps.

He swayed forward, stuck out a leg quickly, and caught himself. For a second he hung poised, then he brought the other leg forward. The effort almost overbalanced him, but he stayed upright. Now the right foot again… then the left… the right… the left…

In the fierceness of his effort, everything else was blotted out. He was alone with the stone he had to carry, with the straining pull of his muscles, the brightness of the sun in his eyes, and the savage tearing of the rod ends on his fingers, that threatened to rip themselves out of his grip.

Eight steps… nine steps… and… ten!

He tried to let the stone down easily, but it thudded out of his grasp. As he stood half-bent over it, it stuck upright in its new resting place in the grass, then half-rolled away from him, for a moment exposing its bottom surface completely, so that he could see clearly into the hole there. Then it rocked back upright and stood still.

Painfully, stiffly, Mal straightened his back.

“Well,” he panted, to the silent, staring Dilbians of Clan Water Gap, “I guess that takes care of that…”

Less than forty minutes later he was herding the three anthropologists back into their shuttle boat.

“But I don’t understand,” protested Harvey, hesitating in the entry port of the shuttle boat. “I want to know how you got us free without having to fight that big Dilbian—the one with the name that means Iron Bender?”

“I moved their law stone,” said Mal, grimly. “That meant I could change the rules of the Clan.”

“But they went on and elected One Punch as Clan Grandfather, anyway,” said Harvey.

“Naturally,” said Mal. “He’d given the most accurate judgment in advance—he’d foretold I’d win without laying a hand on Iron Bender. And I had. Once I moved the stone, I simply added a law to the ones Mighty Grappler had set up. I said no Clan Water Gapper was allowed to adopt orphan Shorties. So, if that was against the law, Gentle Maiden couldn’t keep you. She had to let you go and then there was no reason for Iron Bender to want to tangle with me.”

“But why did Iron Bender and Gentle decide to get married?”

“Why, she couldn’t go back to being just a single maiden again, after naming someone her protector,” Mal said. “Dilbians are very strict about things like that. Public opinion forced them to get married—which they wanted to do anyhow, but neither of them had wanted to be the one to ask the other to marry.”

Harvey blinked.

“You mean,” he said disbelievingly, “it was all part of a plot by Gentle Maiden, Iron Bender, and One Punch to use us for their own advantage? To get One Punch elected Grandfather, and the other two forced to marry?”

“Now, you’re beginning to understand,” said Mal, grimly. He started to turn away.

“Wait,” said Harvey. “Look, there’s information here that you ought to be sharing with us for the sake of science—”

“Science?” Mal gave him a hard look. “That’s right, it was science, wasn’t it? Just pure science, that made you and your friends decide on the spur of the moment to come down here. Wasn’t it?”

Harvey’s brows drew together.

“What’s that question supposed to mean?” he said.

“Just inquiring,” said Mal. “Didn’t it ever occur to you that the Dilbians are just as bright as you are? And that they’d have a pretty clear idea why three Shorties would show up out of thin air and start asking questions?”

“Why should that seem suspicious to them?” Ora Page stuck her face out of the entry port over Harvey’s shoulder.

“Because the Dilbians take everything with a grain of salt anyway—on principle,” said Mal. “Because they’re experts at figuring out what someone else is really up to, since that’s just the way they operate, themselves. When a Dilbian wants to go after something, his first move is to pretend to head in the opposite direction.”

“They told you that in your hypnotraining?” Ora asked.

Mal shook his head.

“No,” he said. “I wasn’t told anything.” He looked harshly at the two of them and at the face of Rice, which now appeared behind Harvey’s other shoulder. “Nobody told me a thing about the Dilbians except that there are a few rare humans who understand them instinctively and can work with them, only the book-psychiatrists and the book-anthropologists can’t figure out why. Nobody suggested to me that our human authorities might deliberately be trying to arrange a situation where three book-anthropologists would be on hand to observe me—as one of these rare humans—learning how to think and work like a Dilbian, on my own. No, nobody told me anything like that. It’s just a Dilbian sort of suspicion I’ve worked out on my own.”

“Look here—” began Harvey.

“You look here!” said Mal, furiously. “I don’t know of anything in the Outspace Regulations that lets someone be drafted into being some sort of experimental animal without his knowing what’s going on—”

“Easy now. Easy…” said Harvey. “All right. This whole thing was set up so we could observe you. But we had absolute faith that someone with your personality profile would do fine with the Dilbians. And, of course, you realize you’ll be compensated for all this. For one thing, I think you’ll find there’s a full six-year scholarship waiting for you now, once you qualify for college entrance. And a few other things, too. You’ll be hearing more about them when you get back to the human ambassador at Humrog Town, who sent you here.”

“Thanks,” said Mal, still boiling inside. “But next time tell them to ask first whether I want to play games with the rest of you! Now, you better get moving if you want to catch that spaceliner!”

He turned away. But before he had covered half a dozen steps, he heard Harvey’s voice calling after him.

“Wait! There’s something vitally important you didn’t tell us. How did you manage to pick up that rock and carry it the way you did?”

Mal looked sourly back over his shoulder.

“I do a lot of weight lifting,” he said, and kept on going.

He did not look back again; and, a few minutes later, he heard the shuttle boat take off. He headed at an angle up the valley slope behind the houses in the village toward the stone of Mighty Grappler, where the Bluffer would be waiting to take him back to Humrog Town. The sun was close to setting, and with its level rays in his eyes, he could barely make out that there were four big Dilbian figures rather than one, waiting for him by the stone. A wariness awoke in him.

When he came up, however, he discovered that the four figures were the Bluffer with One Punch, Gentle Maiden, and Iron Bender—and all four looked genial.

“There you are,” said the Bluffer, as Mal stopped before him. “Better climb into the saddle. It’s not more than two hours to full dark, and even the way I travel we’re going to have to move some to make it back to Humrog Town in that time.”

Mal obeyed. From the altitude of the saddle, he looked over the Bluffer’s right shoulder down at One Punch and Gentle Maiden and level into the face of Iron Bender.

“Well, good-bye,” he said, not sure of how Dilbians reacted on parting. “It’s been something knowing you all.”

“Been something for Clan Water Gap, too,” replied One Punch. “I can say that now, officially, as the Clan Grandfather. Guess most of us will be telling the tale for years to come, how we got dropped in on here by the Mighty Law-Twister.”

Mal goggled. He had thought he was past the point of surprise where Dilbians were concerned, but this was more than even he had imagined.

“Mighty Law-Twister?” he echoed.

“Why, of course,” rumbled the Hill Bluffer, underneath him. “Somebody’s name had to be changed, after you moved that stone.”

“The postman’s right,” said One Punch. “Naturally, we wouldn’t want to change the name of Mighty Grappler, seeing what all he means to the Clan. Besides, since he’s dead, we can’t very well go around changing his name and getting folks mixed up, so we just changed yours instead. Stands to reason if you could carry Mighty Grappler’s stone ten paces, you had to be pretty mighty, yourself.”

“But—well, now, wait a minute…” Mal protested. He was remembering what he had seen in the moment he had put the stone down and it had rocked enough to let him see clearly into the hole inside it, and his conscience was bothering him. “Uh—One Punch, I wonder if I could speak to you… privately… for just a second? If we could just step over here—”

“No need for that, Mighty,” boomed Iron Bender. “I and the wife are just headed back down to the village, anyway. Aren’t we, Gentle?”

“Well, I’m going. If you want to come too—”

“That’s what I say,” interrupted Iron Bender. “We’re both just leaving. So long, Mighty. Sorry we never had a chance to tangle. If you ever get some spare time and a good reason, come back and I’ll be glad to oblige you.”

“Thanks…” said Mal. With mixed feelings, he watched the harnessmaker and his new wife turn and stride off down the slope toward the buildings below. Then he remembered his conscience and looked again down at One Punch.

“Guess you better climb down again,” the Bluffer was saying, “and I’ll mosey off a few steps myself so’s not to intrude.”

“Now, Postman,” said One Punch. “No need for that. We’re all friends here. I can guess that Mighty, here, could have a few little questions to ask or things to tell—but likely it’s nothing you oughtn’t to hear; and besides, being a government man, we can count on you keeping any secrets.”

“That’s true,” said the Bluffer. “Come to think of it, Mighty, it’d be kind of an insult to the government if you didn’t trust me—”

“Oh, I trust you,” said Mal, hastily. “It’s just that… well…” He looked at One Punch. “What would you say if I told you that the stone there is hollow—that it’d been hollowed out inside?”

“Now, Mighty,” said One Punch, “you mustn’t make fun of an old man, now that he’s become a respectable Grandfather. Anybody knows stones aren’t hollow.”

“But what would you say if I told you that one is?” persisted Mal.

“Why, I don’t supposes it’d make much difference you just telling me it was hollow,” said One Punch. “I don’t suppose I’d say anything. I wouldn’t want folks to think you could twist me that easily, for one thing; and for another thing, maybe it might come in handy some time later, my having heard someone say that stone was hollow. Just like the Mighty Grappler said in some of his own words of wisdom—‘It’s always good to have things set up one way. But it’s extra good to have them set up another way, too. Two ways are always better than one.’”

“And very good wisdom that is,” put in the Bluffer, admiringly. “Up near Wildwood Peak there’s a small bridge people been walking around for years. There is a kind of rumor floating around that it’s washed out in the middle, but I’ve never heard anybody really say so. Never know when it might come in useful to have a bridge like that around for someone who’d never heard the rumor—that is, if there’s any truth to the rumor, which I doubt.”

“I see,” said Mal.

“Of course you do, Mighty,” said One Punch. “You understand things real well for a Shorty. Now, luckily we don’t have to worry about this joke of yours that the stone of Mighty Grappler is hollow, because we’ve got proof otherwise.”

“Proof?” Mal blinked.

“Why, certainly,” said One Punch. “Now, it stand to reason, if that stone were hollow, it wouldn’t be anywhere near as heavy as it looks. In fact, it’d be real light.”

“That’s right,” said Mal, sharply. “And you saw me—a Shorty—pick it up and carry it.”

“Exactly!” said One Punch. “The whole Clan was watching to see you pick that stone up and carry it. And we did.”

“And that proves it isn’t hollow?” Mal stared.

“Why, sure,” said One Punch. “We all saw you sweating and struggling and straining to move that stone just ten paces. Well, what more proof does a man need? If it’d been hollow like you say, a Shorty—let alone a mighty Shorty like you—would’ve been able to pick it up with one paw and just stroll off with it. But we were watching you closely, Mighty, and you didn’t leave a shred of doubt in the mind of any one of us that it was just about all you could carry. So, that stone just had to be solid.”

He stopped. The Bluffer snorted.

“You see there, Mighty?” the Bluffer said. “You may be a real good law-twister—nobody doubts it for a minute—but when you go up against the wisdom of a real elected Grandfather, you find you can’t twist him like you can any ordinary real man.”

“I… guess so,” said Mal. “I suppose there’s no point, then, in my suggesting you just take a look at the stone?”

“It’d be kind of beneath me to do that, Mighty,” said One Punch, severely, “now that I’m a Grandfather and already pointed out how it couldn’t be hollow, anyway. Well, so long.”

Abruptly, as abruptly as Iron Bender and Gentle Maiden had gone, One Punch turned and strode off down the slope.

The Hill Bluffer turned on his heel, himself, and strode away in the opposite direction, into the mountains and the sunset.

“But the thing I don’t understand,” said Mal to the Bluffer, a few minutes later when they were back on the narrow trail, out of sight of Water Gap Territory, “is how… What would have happened if those three Shorties hadn’t dropped in the way they did? And what if I hadn’t been sent for? One Punch might have been elected Grandfather anyway, but how would Iron Bender and Gentle Maiden ever have gotten married?”

“Lot of luck to it all, I suppose you could say, Mighty,” answered the Bluffer, sagely. “Just shows how things turn out. Pure chance—like my mentioning to Little Bite a couple of months ago it was a shame there hadn’t been other Shorties around to watch just how the Half-Pint Posted and Pick-and-Shovel did things, back when they were here.”

“You…” Mal stared, “mentioned…”

“Just offhand, one day,” said the Bluffer. “Of course, as I told Little Bite, there weren’t hardly any real champions around right now to interest a tough little Shorty—except over at Clan Water Gap, where my unmarried cousin Gentle Maiden lived.”

“Your cousin…? I see,” said Mal. There was a long, long pause. “Very interesting.”

“Funny. That’s how Little Bite put it, when I told him,” answered the Bluffer, cat-footing confidently along the very edge of a precipice. “You Shorties sure have a habit of talking alike and saying the same things all the time. Comes of having such little heads with not much space inside for words, I suppose.”