"I want my money back!" he screamed from one knee, fumbling at his belt for his shete. "And my horse!"
A thick-set woman in a sequined dress came to the doors and leaned out. A massively built man loomed behind her, a classic whorehouse bully in a tight crimson shirt and expensive blue jeans, belt with a silver-and-turquoise buckle and tooled boots with fretted steel toe caps, his eyes flatly impassive and an iron rod in one fist. He pointed with it, and the cowboy let the hilt of his blade go. It was the woman who spoke, in a harsh raw voice:
"Kid, at your age if you can't get it going after twenty minutes with the Buffalo Heifer, you need a doctor, not a whore."
There were grins and laughter up and down the street as she went on: "And you didn't have enough money to pay for what you gambled anyway. Be thankful we didn't keep the rest of your gear for kickin' up a fuss. Next time leave the sheep alone for a while before you come into town, rube."
The young cowboy staggered on past, the saddle flung over one shoulder. BD caught his gaze for an instant; it was sick with an unfocused rage that must be eating at his soul like acid, and she winced slightly in unwilling sympathy.
And some of the strangers were looking around them entirely too alertly for soldiers whooping it up before action. The crawling sensation between her shoulder blades didn't go away until they'd swung the wagon train into Murdoch's courtyard.
"Welcome, BD!" Murdoch said.
He was a middle-aged balding man, heavyset in a way rare nowadays, with thick brown muttonchop whiskers whose luxuriant curls compensated for his bald spot. He also wore what Pendleton currently regarded as a respectable businessman's evening dress-a good imitation of pre-Change copper-riveted Levi's tucked into tooled boots with pointed toes, fancy belt with ceremonial bowie knife, ruffled white shirt, floppy string tie, a cutaway tailcoat in good brown homespun, and a waistcoat embroidered in gold thread, with a watch and chain as well. The formal felt Stetson with its band of silver conchos was in his hands, and he looked as if he was not crushing it with an effort of will.
"Good to see you, BD, good to see you," he burbled. "Let's get the cargo into place!"
Grooms had led the teams away. Workers appeared and began unloading the wagons, and a steward led the Plodding Pony employees to a bunkhouse. BD stopped her chief guard with a hand on the arm.
"Tia?" he said.
"Don't get settled in, Chucho," she said quietly. "Just water and feed the horses, load some oats, then hitch up. Tell the gate guards and the people at the barricade out on 84 that you're heading for the Circle D, but don't turn off at Jenson's place. Keep going west; push the horses as hard as you can without killing them."
He nodded, unsurprised. They were working for the Kyklos and the Meeting, and they were getting paid for it… but the family business could do without losing its capital assets, too.
And I like Dobben and Maggie, she thought. I've traveled a lot of miles staring at those equine rumps.
"Hugh" helped with the crates, slobbering and grunting but heaving two at a time up onto his broad stooped shoulders. When the last of them was stacked, Murdoch made a production of giving his day laborers their pay, with a little extra for the ones who worked for him regularly.
"You boys get on home to your families," he said. "And Sim, tell the house staff they can go home early. With my wife and the boys off visiting relatives, I can shift for myself tonight."
One of them grinned at him, a youngish man. " I'm goin' next door, patron," he said.
"It's your money now that I've given it to you, Stan," Murdoch said. "Remember, tomorrow's a holiday-time off for the Bossman's speech. See y'all at the House!"
They left, swinging the big entry doors of the warehouse closed. Murdoch's smile ran away from his face as they did, and he checked the lock on the smaller entry door beside it, moving confidently in the darkness, as a man did when he was intimately familiar with a place.
"This is bad tradecraft, letting two agents know each other's identities," he said in a voice that was much colder and had less of the twanging local accent when he turned to face them. "All these years we've been doing business and I didn't know you worked for the Lady Regent until I got that message-"
" With, not for, Ben," BD said patiently. "I'm a perfectly genuine businesswoman. I just do… things on the side sometimes."
And pull yourself together, Ben. It's hard enough to control my own nerves without having to deal with other people's.
"And maintaining your cover isn't going to be important soon," she went on. "Or do you want to be here when the trebuchets start throwing thousand-pound rocks and bundles of incendiaries over the wall? Even Sandra can't make sure a siege engine doesn't drop a boulder or a jug of napalm on your head."
He was silent for a moment, fiddling with an expensive incandescent-mantle lantern; then it lit with a hiss, and a circle of yellow-white light drove the dense blackness back.
"No," he said quietly. "That's why I got my family out on the train to Walla Walla last week. But I've… been here and in this character for a long time. Since the War of the Eye. I keep slipping mentally and thinking I am my cover. And… I've got friends here. My wife was born here, and so were my children. I don't want to see Pendleton wrecked 'in order to save it.' "
"Going native?"
A sigh. "No, not really. It's not such a bad place…"
"If you don't end up sold to the woolen mills, or the Working Girls' Hotel, or worse," BD said. "Besides, hopefully we can make things a lot easier on the ordinary people. I'm not a great fan of the PPA, but even they don't do that sort of thing."
Anymore, she tactfully left unvoiced, and went on aloud:
"That's what this mission is all about, at least as far as I'm concerned. Plus the strategic stuff about keeping the Prophet and Boise at bay."
Murdoch nodded. Then he started as the big man beside BD straightened, took the soft pieces of rubber out of his cheeks, spat on the concrete floor, and pulled a pillow from under his coat. Suddenly he seemed much bigger… and not simple at all. And when he took off his gloves, the auburn fuzz on the backs of the great spade-shaped paws was a horrible mismatch for the raven thatch on his head.
Murdoch's eyes bulged. "You're-"
"John Hordle, at your service," he said, in the rich accent of rural Hampshire, still strong after a generation here in the Western lands.
"You're Little John Hordle! The one who killed Big Mac!"
"The very same. That disguise works a treat, even if you 'ave to drool an' slobber a bit. A bit undignified, innit? Still, it's worth it. Not so easy to hide, when you're my size."
Murdoch nodded. "Come on, then."
"You know," the big man said as they walked towards the office that was partitioned off from the floor of the two-story warehouse, "back when I was a nipper in 'ampshire growing up around the Pied Merlin-me dad's family's pub-I always fancied the Wild West. Clint Eastwood an' all them old shows on the telly. Shame to have me romantic notions ruined, innit?"
He jerked a thumb over his shoulder at the doors and the courtyard, and the street beyond:
"Or maybe it was different before the Change, the first time?"
"Not much," BD said. "Except they had guns so it was louder, and there wasn't a city wall, so it might have been less crowded. There were forty saloons and sixteen bordellos here back when it was a real cow-town with about two thousand people."