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squeeze any more teeth into that smile of his?” Orozco whispered behind Gonji.
    “I’d like to squeeze a few out,” Buey growled in reply.
    Perigor dropped down from the saddle and faced Gonji.
    “So, monsieur le samurai,” he said. “ Escrimer —to fight with the sword—is the only test of a man’s mettle I can trust. If I am to ally myself with your noble cause, then I must know whether I can trust what I’ve heard of that formidable-looking blade of yours. A touch-duel, then, if it please you.”
    He saluted Gonji with his blade and then brought it to en garde.
    The samurai smiled thinly and bowed, the Sagami rasping out of its sheath as shouts and stamping hooves sounded all about them.
    The clink of armament—the cocking of pistols—
    Gonji blocked aside Buey’s clamping hand at his shoulder. Waving to the French knights to make room, he bowed shallowly to Perigor, brought up his katana in both hands, and came to middle guard.
    They engaged blades for a long, motionless moment, eyes locked, gauging each other’s confidence. Clouds of icy breath issued from the tensely rapt crowd.
    “No—it must be stopped!” a shrill male voice called from the ring of torches at the front edge of the encircling throng of citizens.
    But at that instant Perigor sallied forth with his long, slim blade, and the fray was on. The adventurer shot a series of stinging lunges at the legendary samurai fencer, testing his defense of each quadrant, and each time Gonji batted the rapier aside with a tight circular parry.
    Gonji backed two paces. Three. Then with a sudden burst of panther-quick motion, he turned the duel’s line of motion, assuming the attack with a blurring sequence of slashes and cuts, two-handed lunges too fast for the eyes of many onlookers to follow, abrupt one-handed releases ending in cobra-dart sword-licks issuing from strangely contorted positions.
    Perigor slipped his blows and beat back attacks seemingly in instants of certain defeat. He riposted crisply, deeply, Gonji’s own wrist-twisting parries at the brink of being blooded tearing gasps from the crowd. None save their closest companions had ever seen such a matched pair of fencers as these.
    Sweating faces, gaping with excitement, shone in the firelight as the ring of torches altered its shape like some amorphous night-dwelling thing, to afford the combatants room along the street. The shifting eye of the communal mass twinkled with the glinting blades at its center. As the tense minutes passed, the entire spectacle slowly drifted fifty feet down the lane. The duelists were given ready space, their eyes seeing nothing but each other. Their blades clashed and clacked, sparks showering in the keening din.
    Perigor’s classic European style was economical, tight, severe in its lines of attack. Snakelike. Gonji’s ken-jutsu appeared more flamboyant—now a dervish, now a crane; then, without warning, a sensational series of whirling slashes—the raking fury of an aroused bear—
    But his control—the sudden seizing stops, the impossible upward, backward, and under-arm twisting maneuvers—evinced itself just as surely.
    An eternity of anxious moments. Then—Perigor opened the first cut, grazing Gonji’s left cheek. The match was stopped, the blood stanched, and they came to engagement again.
    A shorter time until the next blood-touch—once more the samurai was cut, this time in the upper left arm. The shallow wound was bound by a growling Buey, who whispered harshly that Gonji have done with this game. Buey urged him to complete his blows with full power, to slice the arrogant Frenchman to ribbons.
    The samurai paid him no heed. En garde…
    Another blinding sequence of clashes, breath hissing out of the stunned spectators to witness the strength that yet remained in arms that should have gone numb.
    Gonji’s splendid beat-attack against a feint-a-disengage —the wrist-snapping riposte making a harrowing pass at the brigand’s chin—a