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someone like Dirty Teeth! It’s just what you’d expect of some scruffy outlaw. Tell him you’ll hit him one for me, too!”
    “Hit him one—I don’t understand—” Bill was beginning, when Sweet Thing exploded.
    “Well, I don’t see what there is not to understand!” she cried angrily. “I’ve been explaining and explaining until even a Shorty like you ought to be able to follow it. I won’t marry that Bone Breaker unless he gives up his outlaw ways and settles down to being a farmer here in Muddy Nose, like you Shorties say everybody in the Lowlands should do. It’s all nonsense about a girl having to go where her husband says. It’s only women like Thing-or-Two that pretend to believe the world’s coming to an end if any of the old customs get changed. Hah! Why she’s really all for the old customs is that if she can get me out of the Inn, she’d have a right as female relative next-of-kin to move into it as inn-keepress in my place. She’d drive my poor old daddy crazy in a week! No, no—Dirty Teeth explained it all to us! We’ve just as much right to say where we’re going to settle down as the men have! Bone Breaker’s as bad as the rest, but he really made a mistake when he decided to make Dirty Teeth a prisoner out in the valley. I wish I could see his face when you do it!”
    “Do what?” demanded Bill, baffled.
    “Challenge him, of course!” snapped Sweet Thing, turning on her heel and opening the street door. “Naturally, he’s not going to give Dirty Teeth back to you unless you fight him for her and win, like the Half-Pint-Posted did with that mountain man who ran off with a Shorty female. So you better get out there to the valley and do it. I’ve waited long enough for Bone Breaker as it is, and it’s a cinch there’s no one else around Muddy Nose with nerve enough to take him on!”
    She went out, slamming the door behind her.
    A second later, it opened again, and she stuck her nose back in.
    “Don’t worry about having to get him all riled up before you challenge him,” Sweet Thing added. “He knows what you’re coming out there for. I sent word for him to expect you a couple of days ago.”

Chapter 4
    Sweet Thing’s nose disappeared. The door slammed shut again. Bill stared at it, with his head swimming. If there was one thing he had absolutely no intention of doing, it was challenging the head man, or whatever, of outlaws like those from whom he had run and hidden in Tin Ear’s farmyard earlier in the day.
    “Well, so you see,” said the Hill Bluffer behind him heavily. Bill turned to look at the postman and the Bluffer nodded at the closed door. “Crazy as a spring storm. And with a father who thinks more of his belly than he does of his daughter, or she wouldn’t be able to get away with these wild, Shorty ideas—”
    He broke off, glancing at Bill apologetically.
    “—No offense to you, of course, Pick-and-Shovel,” he rumbled. “As for Sweet Thing’s ideas—”
    “Wait a minute,” interrupted Bill hastily. “Can’t the village get together and help someone like Tin Ear—”
    “Well, now, that’s an idea for you!” said the Hill Bluffer indignantly. “Sure, if a neighbor yells for help, you might run over and give him a hand—when you hear him yell. But put yourself and all of your family into blood-feud for someone who’s no kin at all? Well, a man’d be crazy to do that. After all, these are pretty honorable outlaws. Bone Breaker sees to that. They take their outlaw-tax out of what the Muddy Nosers can spare—they don’t go taking what the local people have to have to stay alive. If they did that, then I suppose the Muddy Nosers would get together in blood-feud, if they had to declare themselves a clan, temporarily to do that. We’ve got to get going to make that valley before the gates are closed.” He turned his massive, furry shoulders to Bill and squatted down. “Climb on, Pick-and-Shovel.”
    Bill hesitated only a second, and then