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"True"

"And they kill all women, Evan Not just white women Black women as well"

"True That’s Sheena’s idea It’s a particular fixation she has She wants to be the only woman in the world"

"Honestly?"

"So Bowman says There’s no one else I can ask"

"That’s some ambition of hers"

"It’s every wo more to achieve it than , Evan, she e it"

"It doesn’t seem too likely"

"But Evan," she said, her hand on my arm "Listen to me You have said homan likes to kill white men, and his reasons, and I think the reasons are crazy but I can understand why he ers? And all of the black wo to kill thelanced hurriedly around No one seemed to have noticed, and Pluht she was a boy, and that if we held hands and necked the other cloould either figure out that she was feet the ax, or assuot I wasn’t quite sure how tribesmen in the Modonoland interior felt about ho, I felt it ht be just as well to wait until I was back in New York and then look it up in an anthropological journal Sometimes secondhand research has its points

But I didn’t dwell on this, and Plum took her hand off ht as well be a boy for all I cared We’d had our last fling It was ti back to Bow back to Bow type, don’t you think? An extre type He can chill your blood one minute and take it all back with a smile"

"He talks weird"

"I know He shifts back and forth froraduate So with being a good linguist, which he damned well must be to handle the dialect they speak here It sounds like turkey Not the country, the bird You know – gobble gobble"

"I don’t trust hiet out of here without his help – we can’t even survive without it And he can’t get aithout us"

"How do you know?"

"He’s been here a long while now and never got away so far"

"Maybe he wants to stay" Her lip curled and her eyes looked older by some years "Maybe your friend Bowman likes it here"

"He doesn’t want to stay He can stand it here, all right, but it won’t keep hi He’s too coe routine"

"I suppose you are right I know that he has depth When he spoke of the death of the Retriever, even while I knew the political crimes of Knanda Ndoro, yet I wasAnd he’s complex, and he has depth, and I know damned well he has a use for us or else he would have killed us back at thewith killing innocent blacks and their woulars were just another army, after all And armies are armies as sure as war is hell, and this one, like the one I had served in (and like the one Napoleon served in, and like the one Julius Caesar served in) was an organization of hurry up and wait, a group which spentat all

We spent the rest of that day doing nothing at all Sheena had pitched cae about a dozen e had not been entirely voluntary; several months previously Sheena had raided it, and its huts were subsequently unoccupied because of the deood start at reclai the cleared land, and weather had done a job on the huts, but they were still standing and reasonably sound Plum and I had one all to ourselves, and we spentat each other

The others, forty or fifty of the knives andtheir ancillary hair for lice, picking their noses, and scratching themselves In the interests of verisis whenever anyone was looking my way The only knife I had was distinctly out of place in that coot involved in their hand-to-hand contests the ga, nose picking, and general scratching I didn’tfor lice, but I wastheht that this lent additional verisimilitude to the pose This was relatively little consolation

Shortly before sunset, they began preparing for the feast Men piled mountains of brush and planks froe and poured a can of some petroleu does provide one with the trappings of civilization – and the whole thing went up in a glorious whooshing blaze

They let the fire burn down, then heaped more brush and boards on it and let them flame up and burn down until there was a deep bed of fiery coals By this tilow of the cae cast-iron kettle and set it atop the bed of coals Various s into the kettle This went on for quite some ti which sounded like a reiven for Sauess what she had in ist of it was that the warriors of the Lord could not rest on their laurels but h the fruits of triuement with the enemy There was an all-purpose feel to it, and it didn’t differ much in content fro after they won a close one

Bowman said a feords after that, but I could no more understand him than the others could tell what Sheenaable to understand what so I really find it unendurable It’s a situation I don’t face very often, and it was consequently particularly

After his speech, the Gray Panther followed Sheena into her shack and the chefs let the caldron bubble for a spell I was squatting on my haunches in the doorway of our hut, and Plu smells wafted in our direction, and I said that it sood indeed, which indeed it did

"What do you suppose it is?"

"Oh, all different things," I said I had redients as they found their way into the pot "They evidently s A couple of hens went into the pot, and whatPlus a variety of fruits and vegetables Soh I suppose they could have been al," she echoed