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Mackay-ever the gentleman-immediately switched his choice to pistols. Adding insult to injury, he offered to match his wheel lock against any modern sidearm of Chip's selection. At any range the American chose.

By now, sobriety was beginning to arrive. By now, Alex was in a cold fury. By now, Chip was not. Young Chip, belatedly, was realizing that the braggadocio of a former high-school football team captain was no match for the serious intent of a professional soldier.

Wheel lock against a modern pistol? At any range? Given those two men, the outcome was a foregone conclusion.

"He's trying to kill me!" wailed Chip.

Unkind words were muttered in response, here and there in the huge crowd which was now packing the Gardens. Many of them-again, insult piled onto injury-by the Americans in the crowd. Good riddance was a particular favorite. So were: Pride goeth before a fall and Look before you leap.

By the time Dan Frost arrived, the betting was running in favor of the Scotsman. But Dan put a stop to the whole thing immediately. City ordinances, he explained, expressly forbade dueling.

Mackay, ever the law-abiding man, immediately proposed transferring the locale of the duel to the woods, beyond the city limits. The odds began running heavily in his favor.

But Mike arrived then, and made a general ruling. No dueling, period. Anywhere in American territory.

"As you say, my lord," was Mackay's response. Bowing stiffly, he stalked off, never casting a glance at his erstwhile opponent.

The opponent, for his part, spent the next several days in an attempt to extract honor (if not glory) from his own part in the affair. To no avail. Not even his closest friends on the former football team sided with him.

"Cut the bullshit," said Kenny Washaw, the high school's former tight end. "And grow up, while you're at it. Or you'll wind up flipping hamburgers the rest of your life."

"What there is of it," added the former left tackle. Steve Early, that was. Unkindly: "Which won't be much, you keep picking fights with guys who carry sabers and spend hours in a dentist's chair without anesthetic. I don't care how little they are."

***

Simpson, of course, tried to make an issue out of the "duel." Another example of the lawlessness brought on by the Stearns regime!

But it fell flat. No one had actually gotten hurt, after all, saving Mackay's black eye. And, once again, Simpson misjudged his audience. Hill people have their own sense of justice-humorous, but grim for all that-which runs heavily toward bragging about the shrimp in the family tree who showed the local bully who was who and what was what.

***

Then, the memory of that little fracas was swept aside by the arrival of the Abrabanel representative from exotic and far-off Istanbul. Half the town turned out to greet him. Well, the American residents.

Some of them, of course, were there in an official capacity. But most of the crowd was, for the moment, utterly uninterested in general matters of high finance and foreign policy. One question-and one question only-was uppermost in their minds.

Grantville's supermarkets had run out of coffee weeks ago. To the shock and horror of its American residents, it was discovered that in that day and age coffee was almost unknown. Could only be obtained, in fact, from one source.

Turkey.

So, a somewhat bewildered Don Francisco Nasi found that his first item of business, upon his arrival, was negotiating the establishment of a coffee trade.

***

But he was not that bewildered. Francisco was younger than either of the other representatives of the Abrabanel family who had recently arrived. He had just turned twenty-six. Yet it soon became clear that he possessed in full measure the talents of his grandfather and the illustrious matriarch, Doсa Gracia Mendes, who had created the fortune of their branch of the Abrabanels.

In the week following his arrival, in the course of almost nonstop negotiations with Mike and the committee, Francisco led the Abrabanel representatives with a firm hand. Perhaps because of his upbringing in Moslem Turkey, Francisco was much less taken aback than either Moses or Samuel at the undoubtedly outlandish character of the Americans and their new society.

"Who cares?" he demanded. The slim and handsome young man scanned the faces of the other Jews gathered in the Roths' living room. The Roths themselves were absent. Politely, they had felt it best to let the Abrabanels discuss family matters in private.

Francisco gazed at Rebecca, for a moment. There was, perhaps, a faint shadow in his eyes. Even in far off Istanbul, they had heard of the beauty and intelligence of Dr. Balthazar's daughter. Francisco had been enjoined by his family to seek a bride also, in this journey.