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around through the literal swamps at the back of New Orleans, his head wrapped in a length of mosquito-netting against the insects that made the soggy ground nearly uninhabitable in summertime. He listened behind him in the moonless dark, less because he thought Queen Régine might be still on his heels than because slave-stealers sometimes haunted these inky woods, looking to kidnap runaways for resale. For this reason, too, he kept the slide over his lantern, leaving only the barest whisper of light to illuminate the path.
    It was a good thing he did, for its stray gleam caught the round gold eye of an alligator lying in the path—a big one, to judge by the glint of teeth as it opened its mouth and lunged at him—and January got soaked to the thighs in water that smelled like a cesspool, stumbling into a bog as he circled wide to avoid it.
    Queen Régine must be losing her touch,
he thought sourly as he tripped over tangles of elephant-ear, seeking the elusive path again.
There weren't any water-moccasins in that pool.
    A deadfall log seemed to materialize underfoot, and he banged his shins.
    When I find Hannibal Sefton, I'm going to wring his neck for him.
    Ahead on his right he could see lights: the long, ramshackle shed known locally as The Rough and Ready. Lantern-light glowed ruby through the cheap calico that comprised one wall, and like a shadow-play January saw men leap up from the makeshift card-table, cursing like the Devils in Hell. The next moment one man was hurled through the fabric wall, bringing the whole of it down with him.
    Women screamed. A large gentleman in buckskins collided with the bar, which, being only planks laid over barrels, collapsed, and the barkeep rushed into the crowd laying about him right and left with a nail-studded mahogany club. A squad of hairy Kaintuck boatmen charged the barkeep with fragments of the benches, and January silently moved on.
    The Keelboat Saloon lay to his left, on the edge of a vile-smelling bayou. Its customers nearly trampled January as they rushed toward The Rough and Ready to take part in the fight—it was a slow night, and he supposed one had to take one's entertainment where one found it. The Keelboat was even less salubrious-looking than The Rough and Ready, a dirty wooden box with lines of orange light leaking through its sides. A good kick would bring it down. But January kept on his course for the place, for he heard in the blackness of the steamy night what he'd been seeking: the wild skirl of fiddle music, like a drunken Irish angel embroidering golden fantasias on a Mozart ballet.
    January closed the lantern-slide and waited in the trees, knowing that in time someone would come out to whom—if he was careful—he could speak. A black man who walked into a saloon anywhere in town risked being beaten up. Even in the elegant establishments of Rue Royale, he would not dare to be seen to raise a hand against a white man in his own defense; here, such an action would no doubt result in an unpleasant and messy death.
    So all he could do was wait, the mosquitoes whining as they tangled up in the veils around his hat and the occasional cicada or palmetto bug blundering into the lantern on roaring wings. He wondered if the gator was still around.
    Three burly shapes crashed through The Keelboat's door and ran past January in a reeking backwash of chewing tobacco and clothing months unlaundered; one of the local girls was with them, holding up her skirts to her knees and laughing.
    The music stopped mid-bar.
    A moment later Hannibal Sefton appeared silhouetted in the weak orange rectangle of the doorway, violin in one hand and a brown bottle of whiskey in the other.
    “
They flee from me, that sometime did me seek,
” he quoted plaintively, and took a long pull from the bottle.
“But I have seen them, gentle, tame and meek / That now
are wild.
. . .
”
    He looked at the bottle, sighed, and turned back into the building.
    January emerged from behind his