aving their arms as they called
companions to view the black-bearded stranger.

Aaron whoaed his horse and took a handful of _anenes_, copper
tenth-penny bits, to rattle between his hands. "_Zonang!_" he shouted:
"Come here! Is there a boy amongst you brave enough to ride with an
off-worlder to the Sarki's house, pointing him the way?"

One of the boys laughed at Aaron's slow, careful Hausa. "Let Black-Hat's
whiskers point him the way!" the boy yelled.

"_Uwaka! Ubaka!_" Damning both parents of the rude one, another
youngster trotted up to Aaron's wagon and raised a skinny brown fist in
greeting. "Sir Off-Worlder, I who am named Waziri, Musa-the-Carpenter's
son, would be honored to direct you to the house of Sarki Kazunzumi."

"The honor, young man, is mine," Stoltzfoos assured the lad, raising his
own fist gravely. "My name is Haruna, son of Levi," he said, reaching
down to hoist the boy up beside him on the wagon's seat. "Your friends
have ill manners." He giddapped the horse.

"Buzzard-heads!" Waziri shouted back at his whilom companions.

"Peace, Waziri!" Aaron protested. "You'll frighten my poor horse into
conniptions. Do you work for your father, the carpenter?"

"_To_, honorable Haruna," the boy said. "Yes." The empty wagon thumped
over the wheel-cut streets like a wooden drum. "By the Mother, sir, I
have great knowledge of planing and joining; of all the various sorts of
wood, and the curing of them; all the tools my father uses are as
familiar to me as my own left hand."

"Carpentry is a skillful trade," Aaron said. "Myself, I am but a
farmer."

"By Mother's light! So am I!" Waziri said, dazzled by this coincidence.
"I can cultivate a field free of all its noxious weeds and touch never a
food-plant. I can steer a plow straight as a snapped chalk-string, grade
seed with a sure eye; I can spread manure--"

"I'm sure you can, Waziri," Aaron said. "I need a man of just those rare
qualifications to work for me. Know you such a paragon?"

"Mother's name! Myself, your Honor!"

Aaron Stoltzfoos shook the hand of his hired man, an alien convention
that much impressed Waziri. The boy was to draw three hundred anenes a
day, some thirty-five cents, well above the local minimum-wage
conventions; and he would get his bed and meals. Aaron's confidence that
the boastful lad would make a farmer was bolstered by Waziri's loud
calculations: "Three hundred coppers a day make, in ten day's work, a
bronze cowrie; ten b