ing on his shirt and his belt, and passed on through to the
front porch, where his father was already eating at the table. The
people of the Toon liked to eat in the open; it was something they'd
always done, just as they'd always liked to eat together in the
evenings.

He sweetened his mug of chicory with a lump of maple sugar and began
to sip it before he sat down, standing with one foot on the bench and
looking down across the parade ground, past the Aitch-Cue House,
toward the river and the wall.

"If you're coming around to Alex's way of thinking--and mine--it won't
hurt you to admit it, son," his father said.

He turned, looking at his father with the beginning of anger, and then
grinned. The elders were constantly keeping the young men alert with
these tests. He checked back over his actions since he had come out
onto the porch.

To the table, sugar in his chicory, one foot on the bench, which had
reminded him again of the absence of the hatchet from his belt and
brought an automatic frown. Then the glance toward the gunsmith's
shop, and across the parade ground, at the houses into which so much
labor had gone; the wall that had been built from rubble and topped
with pointed stakes; the white slabs of marble from the ruined
building that marked the graves of the First Tenant and the men of the
Old Toon. He _had_ thought, in that moment, that maybe his father and
Alex Barrett and Reader Rawson and Tenant Mycroft Jones and the others
were right--there were too many things here that could not be moved
along with them, if they decided to move.

It would be false modesty, refusal to see things as they were, not to
admit that he was the leader of the younger men, and the boys of the
Irregulars. And last winter, the usual theological arguments about the
proper chronological order of the Sacred Books and the true nature of
the Risen One had been replaced by a violent controversy when Sholto
Jiminez and Birdy Edwards had reopened the old question of the
advisability of moving the Toon and settling elsewhere. He'd been in
favor of the idea himself, but, for the last month or so, he had begun
to doubt the wisdom of it. It was probably reluctance to admit this to
himself that had brought on the strained feelings between himself and
his old friend the gunsmith.

"I'll have to drill the Irregulars, today," he said. "Birdy Edwards
has been drilling them, while we've been hunting. But I'll go up and
see Alex about a new