She turned away, laughing, and I cursed her, and my stomach was tight and cold. Bucky said,
"Let's eat if they have a bar in this dump."
We weren't half way across the mud puddle that passed as a landing field when a man came out of a shack on the edge of the settlement. We could see him plainly, because he was off to one side of the crowd.
He fell on his knees in the mud, making noises. It took him three or four tries to get our names out clear enough to understand.
Bucky said, "Jig—it's Sam Kapper."
We started to run. The crowd, mostly big unshaken miners, wheeled around to see what was happening. People began to close in on the man who crawled and whimpered in the mud.
Sam Kapper was a hunter, supplying animals to zoos and circuses and carnivals. He'd given us good deals a couple
