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tame. Often she had to sit still for hours before her maid had completely subdued it. And for Gwyneira, sitting still was harder than anything.
    Sighing, Gwyneira sat down at her dressing chair and steeled herself for a dull half hour. Then a nondescript paperback lying on the dressing table caught her eye.
In the Hands of the Redskins
read the lurid title.
    “I thought my lady might wish for a little diversion,” commented the young maid and smiled at Gwyneira in the mirror. “But it’s really very scary. Sophie and me couldn’t sleep the whole night after we’d read it to each other!”
    Gwyneira had already reached for the paperback. She wasn’t so easily scared.

    Meanwhile, Gerald Warden was bored in the salon, where the gentlemen were having a drink before dinner. Terence Silkham had introduced Gerald to his son-in-law, Jeffrey Riddleworth. Lord Riddleworth, Terence Silkham explained, had served in the Indian Crown Colony and had returned to England highly decorated for his services there just two years before. Diana Silkham was his second wife, the firsthaving died in India. Gerald did not dare ask what of, but he was nearly certain that the lady had died of neither malaria nor a snakebite—that is, unless she had possessed a great deal more vim and vigor than her spouse. Jeffrey Riddleworth, in any event, seemed never to have left regimental quarters during his entire posting in India. He couldn’t say anything about the country beyond the fact that it was loud and dirty outside of the English sanctuaries. He thought the natives were all beggars, the maharajahs above all, and everything beyond city limits was infested with snakes and tigers.
    “Once we even had a keelback in our quarters,” Jeffrey Riddleworth explained with disgust, twirling his well-groomed mustache. “I shot the beast straightaway, of course, although some coolie said it wasn’t poisonous. But, I ask you, can you trust these people? What’s it like where you are, Warden? Do your servants have these repugnant people under control?”
    Gerald thought with amusement that Jeffrey Riddleworth’s shooting in a building had likely caused more damage than even a tiger could have wrought. Besides, he didn’t actually believe that the small, well-fed colonel could hit a snake’s head on the first shot. Regardless, the man had chosen the wrong country to make a name for himself.
    “Our servants take…ahem, a little getting used to,” Gerald said. “We mostly employ natives to whom the English lifestyle is rather foreign. But we don’t have to worry about snakes and tigers. There aren’t any snakes in all of New Zealand. Originally there were hardly any mammals either. It was the missionaries who first brought work animals, dogs and horses and the like, to the island.”
    “No wild animals?” Jeffrey asked, wrinkling his brow. “Come now, Warden, you don’t mean to tell us that before the settlers came it looked like it did on the fourth day of creation.”
    “There were birds,” Gerald Warden reported. “Big, small, fat, thin, flying, walking…oh yes, and a few bats. Besides that, insects of course, but they’re not very dangerous either. You’d have to work hard if you wanted to be killed on New Zealand, sir. Unless you resort to dealing with bipedal robbers with firearms.”
    “Presumably those with machetes, daggers, and krises too, eh?” Riddleworth asked with a chuckle. “Well, it’s a puzzle to me how one could volunteer to live in such a wilderness. I was happy to leave the colonies.”
    “Our Maori are mostly peaceful,” Warden said calmly. “A strange people…at once fatalistic and easy to please. They sing, dance, carve wood, and don’t know how to make any weapons worthy of mention. No, sir, I’m sure you would have been rather more bored than afraid.”
    Jeffrey Riddleworth wanted to correct him that he hadn’t lost a single drop of sweat to fear during his entire time in India. But the gentlemen were