"It worry you that Jamie's got such a good education, Dean? That it?"

"Suppose it is, Dad. Am I real stupe?"

"For worrying about it?"

"Yeah."

" 'Course not. Everybody wants to be better than they are. I envy Mildred the way she shoots and all she

knows about medicine. J.B. for his knowledge of weapons. Krysty for her wisdom. Doc for the bedrock

of learning he's gotten himself. Jak for his way with knives and his tracking skills. Everyone has things

they reckon they're good at. As well as things they envy others."

"I suppose so."

"You wish you were better book-learned. Jamie wishes he could do all the things you can do."

"Does he?"

"Sure he does."

"How do you know?"

Ryan shook him gently. "Hey, you doubting me, Dean? I'm telling you it's so."

"But I mean Do you think there'd ever be a chance of me having some sort of real learning, like him?"

"I think it's possible. I know that Krysty once talked about some kind of school where you live for a year

or so. Not that far from Harmony ville, where she came from. Get yourself a real book education."

Dean nodded, eyes screwed up as he considered this totally new option in his life.

"A year?"

"Or two years. I don't know. I know that there's an awful lot of learning that a man could get. Doc sometimes says that knowledge is power, and I believe him."

"Do you, truly, Dad?"

"Yeah. We'd keep in touch. Visit. Then, afterward, it might be that me and Krysty'll have settled down someplace. And you'd come join us."

"Like Jak did?"

"Yeah."

He glanced up at his father. "And have kids?"

Ryan swallowed hard. He hadn't seen that particular question coming. "Mebbe."

"Brothers and sisters for me. I think I'd probably like that, Dad."

"If you got plenty of education, then you could pass it on to them."

Dean grinned, jumping to his feet. "Can we get back to the ville and talk to Krysty?"

"Not yet." Ryan stood and looked behind them, where the fog had thinned down to a veil of white mist,

opalescent in the first light of the new day.

"Nobody's coming after us." Dean was staring intently down the trail, through the trees. "We could cut back down onto the main track and be in the ville in about four or five hours."

"We could, but we aren't. Been thinking about a sort of a plan. Been taking its own shape while we

walked and talked. Now it's time to bring it out and shake it down and hold it up. See if it might work."

THEY CROSSED THE TOP of the hill, looking down the far side into another steep-sided canyon.

The trail seemed to vanish as it reached the highest point of the scarp. The hogback ridge continued

northward, and it was just possible to make out where it curved round eastward in what looked like the box end of the heavily wooded valley.

"Hey," Dean squeaked, pointing with an arrow-straight finger. "Look, pigs."

Ryan looked where his son was indicating, wishing that he had the boy's keen vision. He'd been so long

with only one eye that he automatically accommodated to it, having no problem with spatial concepts.

He still didn't have that same extra sharpness of sight as Dean. But he could make out movement.

Pink-gray shapes lumbered between the trees. Now he could see that there had to have once, way before

the long winters, been a farm in the canyon, and it was the ancient predark orchards that had attracted the large herd of mutie animals. There were rambling apple and pear trees at the bottom of the valley, the ground below them thick with windfalls.

"Looks like it might be where they live," Dean said, dropping his voice, even though the pigs were a good quarter mile away and a thousand feet lower.

"That's what I thought."

"We can probably work our way around the top end of the canyon, then drop down into the next ravine along."

Ryan glanced sideways at his son, seeing how quickly he'd tumbled to why they'd come this difficult way. "Why do that?" he asked.

"Because it'd be triple stupe to go down where all the pigs are" He stopped, grinning. "That's why we came this way, instead of sticking to the bottom road. Part of this special plan, isn't it, Dad?"

"Could be. Let's go slow and careful and see what we can see."

Chapter Thirty-Two.

The brushwooders had taken the horses. All that was found in the abandoned clearing was a scene from a slaughterhouse.

The ten bodies lay where they'd fallen, every one with his throat neatly cut. Bill Rainey went quickly around the circle of corpses, his boots squelching in the blood-sodden grass. Already the blowflies were humming busily around the lakes of congealing crimson, sensing a feast beyond any imagining.

"This one looks like he mebbe tried to fight back a little," J.B. called, pointing down with his good right arm, the left one tucked snugly inside his jacket to ease the pain from the musket ball.

"Magnus. That's his twin brother, Marcus, lying next to him. Sweet couple of boys." The sec boss was weeping openly, holding up his carmined hands to the gray dawn sky. "You must've been sleeping, Jesus, letting this happen. Ten innocent men, butchered like little lambs."

"Best move," Jak said, limping to the far side of the clearing. "Got horses. Could follow us."

BUT THE BRUSHWOODERS didn't pursue them. Ditchdown was all for a vengeful chase, once the corpse of his aunt, Rosie, had been found with its neck snapped.

"Catch them easy," he said.

Straub shook his head. "Time for a serious change of plans," he said calmly. "Now we know the kid we held belonged to that monocular son of a bitch, Cawdor, and not the valuable son of the baron. When I finally get my hands on father and son, I'll take pains to see that they have pain. There's"

"What's 'monocular' mean?" asked the leader of the brushwooders, running his hand through his damp hair.

"One-eyed."

"But why not go after them all?"

"Tracks show only one came in for the boy. Cawdor is my guess. Bet you a peanut to a honey stick the rest are hotfooting it toward the ville."

Ditchdown stamped his foot in frustration. "Then why not get after them?"

"Baron's lost thirteen of his men in the last day. He was always weak. Now we got the edge. In a day or so we can go in slow and easy and the ville's ours."

TRADER WAS FOR WAITING to see if Ryan and Dean turned up safely.

"Can't abandon friends. One of the greatest rules of living in Deathlands. Might be the number one rule."

Krysty pointed at him angrily. "Just keep your nose out of this, Trader. Ryan told you precisely what we

were to do. Things've gone wrong enough as it is."

"Not Trader's fault," Abe said, the first time he'd spoken in the past hour.

"Krysty's not saying it is." Mildred looked at Doc for help. "We've learned that what Ryan says is

generally the best thing to do."

"I could not agree more." Doc wiped his forehead with his swallow's-eye kerchief. "Where rank confusion offers choice, best listen to a single voice."

THE DESCENT from the ridge was more dangerous and difficult than Ryan had hoped.

The trail had vanished, running out on the bare expanse of granite and wind-washed scree that lay just over the far side, before the trees began. The loose mass of tiny stones shifted as they started to move across it, with the risk of it gathering force into a full avalanche that might dash them helplessly into the valley far below.