Bill continued to look on, awed. Sweet Thing, no longer able to make effective use of any of her other natural weapons, had fallen back upon her tongue. She was busy telling the Bluffer what she would do to him the moment he turned her loose. It was a question that also interested Bill. It was all very well for the Bluffer to have Sweet Thing immobilized as she was at the moment. But sooner or later he would have to let her up—and what would happen then?
" . . . My father . . . Bone Breaker . . . limb from limb . . ." Sweet Thing was informing the lanky postman. Bill did not see how the Upland Dilbian could possibly get out of his present awkward situation with life and limb intact. But he was about to learn that Dilbian emotional responses were somewhat adaptable in these circumstances. The Bluffer waited patiently until Sweet Thing paused for breath, and then said, apparently, exactly the right thing.
"I've really got to ask you to forgive me for interrupting that beautiful fight of yours," he observed genially. "Where'd a girl like you learn to tangle like that?"
There was a long moment of silence from Sweet Thing. Then she spoke.
"More Jam," she said in a much calmer and obviously pleased voice. "Don't you remember? My father was champion Lowland wrestler."
"Why, of course," said the Bluffer, letting her up, "that explains it."
Sweet Thing bounced hastily to her feet.
"Where is she?" Her face fell. "Oh, she got away."
Bill also looked around the clearing. It was a fact. Perfectly Delightful had disappeared.
"Oh well," said Sweet Thing philosophically. "She'll be around. I can catch her anytime I want to."
She and the Hill Bluffer both turned to look at Bill.
"How about untying me?" demanded Bill.
"Why, sure," said the Bluffer. He walked around behind the tree to which Bill was anchored, and began untying the ropes binding his wrists together.
Bill endured, without really feeling, the rather bruising and painful business that the Hill Bluffer's big fingers made of clumsily jerking loose the knots that tied Bill's hands. His mind was busy, and once he was on his feet, he had a question for both of the two Dilbians facing him.
"How did you happen to find me?" he asked.
"Well, I don't know how
he
did," said Sweet Thing, sniffing slightly, "but Thing-or-Two and Perfectly Delightful had been looking too pleased for words all day long, so I knew something was going on. When they and Grandpa Squeaky ducked off into the woods instead of joining everybody else up at the forge, I just followed them. I lost them in the woods for a few minutes, but I just poked around—and here they were, with you."
"So that's what it was," said the Hill Bluffer, looking down at her admiringly. "Your old dad, More Jam, came rolling up to me when I was waiting at the forge.
" `Word in your ear, Postman,' he said to me, and led me off behind a shed. `Haven't seen that daughter of mine around any place, have you?' he asked me.
" `No,' I said, `Why should I?'
" `Because it's all a little peculiar, that's all,' said More Jam, sort of thoughtful. `I just saw Perfectly Delightful and Thing-or-Two, with Grandpa Squeaky, sliding off into the brush a few minutes ago, and that daughter of mine right behind them. Naturally, I didn't pay much attention, except that it was just about time for me to have a little, hot something to settle this delicate stomach of mine, and Sweet Thing might not be around to fix it for me—' and he patted his stomach, the way he does. `It sure is peculiar, particularly when you figure that Pick-and-Shovel ought to have shown up at the blacksmith's by this time.'
"Well," said the Bluffer, looking meaningfully at Bill, "it'd been on my mind, too, that it was high time you were showing up at the forge. So I asked him where he'd seen all this going on—and in what direction Sweet Thing and the others had taken off. Then I went down to the Residency and looked for you. But you weren't there. So I just took off in the woods the way I'd been told everybody else'd gone, and after a while I figured it wouldn't do any harm to sort of yell your name a bit and see if you answered. Well," wound up the Bluffer, "you did. And here I am."
"I see," said Bill. "I wonder how it was More Jam just happened to be watching, to see what he did?"
Sweet Thing and the Hill Bluffer stared back down at Bill with noses wrinkled in every evidence of puzzlement.
"Guess he just happened to, Pick-and-Shovel," said the Bluffer.
"I see," said Bill again. There were a number of questions that were coming to his mind right now that he would like to have answered by Sweet Thing and the Bluffer—particularly by the Bluffer. But he remembered that he had unfinished business back at the village.
"Better let me get back up in that saddle," he said to the Bluffer now. "I'm a good three hours overdue at the forge."
The Bluffer stared at him in consternation, as did Sweet Thing. There was a moment of silence.
"Why, Pick-and-Shovel," said the Bluffer, finally, "you can't go back there now!"
Bill stared up at him.
"Why not?"
"Why? Well, because you—just can't!" said the Bluffer in a shocked tone of voice. "Why, they'd laugh you out of town if you showed up now, Pick-and-Shovel. Here you went and set up a weight-lifting contest, and then you didn't show up for it when the time came."
"But it wasn't my fault I wasn't there," said Bill. Tersely, he told them about being hit on the head and brought into the woods and tied up by the Hemnoid. However, to his surprise, when he finished, the long looks on the faces of Sweet Thing and the Bluffer did not lift. The Bluffer shook his head slowly.
"I might've figured it was something like that," said the Bluffer heavily. "But it doesn't make any difference, Pick-and-Shovel. No doubt you had a good reason for not being there on time—but the point is you
didn't
show up. How're folks to be sure you didn't just duck out of it and make this whole story up as an excuse? I believe you, because I know something about the kind of guts you Shorties've got. But these Muddy Nosers aren't going to believe you. They'll figure you probably knew you couldn't outlift Flat Fingers, so you just didn't show up."
"Well, I'll outlift him now," said Bill.
But the Bluffer still shook his head.
"You don't understand, Pick-and-Shovel," he said. "Flat Fingers isn't going to stick his neck out by agreeing to lift weights with you again. He did once and you ducked out—all right, I know it wasn't your fault. But he's going to be thinking—suppose he agrees to lift again, and you duck out a second time, or fall down and play sick, or something? If it happens twice in a row that you get out of it, people are going to start laughing at him for letting himself be fooled that way."
The Bluffer shook his head.
"No, I wouldn't go back to the village right now if I were you, Pick-and-Shovel," he said. "What you and I better figure on doing is camping out here in the woods for a few days. I'll go in and get your sword and shield made by the blacksmith—that's business, he won't mind making those. Then, when you've got these weapon things of yours, you can go and have the duel with Bone Breaker, and after you win that maybe they'll let you back in Muddy Nose Village without falling over and rolling way down the street, laughing, every time they see you."
"So," observed Bill grimly. "Barrel Belly managed to get me in bad with the villagers, after all, did he? Your rescuing me didn't help at all, then, did it?"
Both the postman and Sweet Thing looked uncomfortable. Sweet Thing, however, was quick to recover.
"Well, why don't you think of something, then?" she demanded. "You Shorties are all supposed to be so tricky and sneaky! Tricky Teacher was supposed to be so smart at thinking up things and getting around people; but where is he when
She
needs him? Not here, that's where he is! Instead, you're here, Pick-and-Shovel. So why don't you think up something? I know why! It's because you're a male Shorty.
She'd
think of something, if
She
were here. I know
She
would.
She
—"
The continued emphatic repetition of the word "She" was doing little to improve Bill's temper which had already been worn rather threadbare by events. The single thought that was in his mind at the moment was that palm trees would be flourishing on the Weddell pack ice of Antarctica, back on Earth, before he would let any combination of events keep him out of Muddy Nose Village. He interrupted Sweet Thing roughly.
"All right," he retorted. "I've thought of something. Let's head for the village."
The Hill Bluffer still hesitated.
"Are you sure you know what you're doing, Pick-and-Shovel?" he asked. "Like I say, Flat Fingers won't lift weights with you now—"
"That's what he thinks!" said Bill.
The Hill Bluffer lit up suddenly.
"You mean you figured a way to make him?" said the Bluffer, happily. "Why didn't you say so?" He turned on Sweet Thing. "There, how do you like that? You and your female Shorties!"
Sweet Thing sniffed disdainfully.
"Oh, well," she said. "
She
would have thought of it right away."
"Climb up in the saddle, Pick-and-Shovel," said the Hill Bluffer, ignoring this, and turning his back on Bill. "And we'll get going."
Bill scaled the Bluffer's back by means of the straps of the Dilbian's harness, and seated himself. The three of them started back through the woods toward the village.
As they went along, the heads of Dilbians out on the street turned to look at them, and the sounds of comments, ribald and otherwise, began to float to Bill's ears. He held on to the straps of the Bluffer's harness, before him, looking neither to right nor left. He noticed that Sweet Thing and the Hill Bluffer were not particularly pleased, either—even though they themselves were not the target of the jeers and catcalls that pursued them as a group. The Bluffer snorted once and swung half-around, as if ready to turn back and give battle to those who were criticizing. More Jam was not to be seen, Bill noted.
However, in due time they ran the long gauntlet of the street and arrived at the blacksmith's property. Flat Fingers paid no attention to them as they came up. He studiously avoided looking at Bill, and only grunted in response to the greeting of the Hill Bluffer.
"Well," said Bill, as cheerfully as he could manage, in the Bluffer's ear, "I'll get down here."
Flat Fingers was busy at the forge, beating rather savagely upon a piece of red-hot iron. The Bluffer was seated on the bench and Sweet Thing was standing near the Bluffer. Just outside the shed where they all stood, a crowd of villagers was beginning to gather. These stood and watched; silently, but grinning widely, and obviously expecting the worst. Bill felt a return of the coldness inside him he had felt with Mula-
ay
. However, he smiled and turned his back on them with as much an appearance of unconcern as he could muster.
"Well," he said loudly to the Bluffer, ignoring the blacksmith, who had now ceased hammering and thrust the beaten piece of red-hot iron, hissing, into a dark and dirty-looking barrel of water alongside the forge, "so this is Flat Fingers' place, is it?"
"That's right, Pick-and-Shovel," replied the Bluffer curiously.
Bill did not say anything more immediately. Instead he began to wander among the piles of wood and iron that were stacked up under the shed roof, stopping here to finger a broken candlestick—there to run his finger along the edge of a broken sword. Flat Fingers, having laid aside the piece of iron he had been working on before, now had picked up what apparently was a broken barrel hoop and was scowling at it.
"Mighty interesting around here," commented Bill loudly, examining the rafters of the shed overhead. They were very stout rafters indeed, made of logs and a good twelve feet in the air, well out of his reach unless he climbed up on a stack of five- and six-foot lengths of foot-diameter logs—firewood, probably—that were piled up a little distance from him. He drifted over to the logs and began to examine them. Then he turned back to Sweet Thing and pulling her head down to approximately the level of his own mouth, spoke quietly into her ear for a second. Sweet Thing went off through the crowd, followed by the curious stares of those nearby, who watched her disappear in through the front door of the Residency. They might have gone on watching, if Bill had not started talking again and drawn their attention back to him.
"Yes," he said thoughtfully, staring at the logs. "It's a shame I couldn't get here in time to have that weight-lifting contest with the blacksmith."
"Sure was!" spoke up a voice from the crowd, producing a chorus of bass-voiced laughter.
"Yes, a real shame," went on Bill, ignoring the reaction and nodding at the Hill Bluffer. "It would've been something to see."
He looked over at Flat Fingers, who had moodily shoved both the broken ends of the hoop into the bed of coals at his forge and was grimly pumping the bellows attached to it.
"Yes . . ." went on Bill, fingering one of the logs and trying to estimate its weight. It was about five feet long and looked as if it might weigh pretty close to a hundred pounds. The logs underneath it were similar in size, and their weight should be about the same, "An appointment like that's an
appointment
. If you miss it, that's that. I wouldn't insult Flat Fingers by suggesting he lift weights with me now, since I already missed one chance at it."
"That's playing it safe, Shorty!" boomed another voice from the observing crowd, and a new burst of laughter followed.
"No," said Bill thoughtfully. "That'd look like I might be trying to pull the same trick all over again. So I guess there isn't much for me to do—" He broke off as Sweet Thing shouldered her way importantly back through the crowd, the block-and-tackle Bill had made slung over one shoulder. There was a hum of interest at the sight of her, and it; but she ignored the reaction. She came up to Bill and dumped the block-and-tackle into his arms.
"There!" said Sweet Thing. She went over and sat down on the bench beside the Hill Bluffer, as if she had just done something remarkable to put everyone in their place. The crowd stared with interest at Bill and the block-and-tackle. Even Flat Fingers, over by the forge, shot a surreptitious glance in Bill's direction.