15Gérard Le Blanc did not have to go riding in his striped trousers after all. It could hardly have surprised him when Roland Durand turned up driving a fine new hack with padded, black-velvet seats and a jingling, silver-trimmed harness. But what did appear to have caught him off-guard was that the cold-eyed limp-wristed fellow who sat in the back.
The hack bore the signage of a local livery stable operating from the stage stop from Sacramento. Le Blanc grudgingly introduced the passenger to Caleb as a lawyer named Noah Jones. And it was plain that while the transport might have been comfortable, the countryside was not to his liking. He regarded the raw vine plantings from the hack window with a curled upper lip. “I wanted to make sure you understood the utmost urgency with which we reg
