It is a simple but effective strategem to survey the meeting ground well before the meeting. The Gambler, smililng and nodding at the smiling and laughing folkies sipping beers and picking songs along the boardwalk, strolled quietly, and in an opportune moment slipped off at an angle through a row of lilac trees, and made his way through a deepening woods, keeping his bearings by the sound of the merriment behind him, and the faint glow of the remotes Wizzy Wig Revival tent and its small campfire far ahead. Lowhanging oak branches scraped his fine Stetson, and vines threatened to entangle his calfskin boots, but he moved with a grace and a silence one would not expect in so urbane a figure.

From the edges of the wood around the revival campsite, he moved silently back, paralleling the normal footpath; and as he expected, closer to the boardwalk end of the footpath, he saw the gingerheaded man from the saloon searching the trail. He waited for his moment. When it came, he moved in swiftly behind the man, drew one arm tight under his throat from behind and with the other gently placed the end of a derringer against the footpad's right temple.

"Ah believe, sir, that you and I have a rendezvous to keep over this way a bit. Move wrongly and your head will be split open."

That cold baritone whisper stopped the ginger man in his tracks; the click of the derrinfer's hammer reinforced his desire to cooperate, and Delacroix met little resistance leading him into the deeper woods, where he tied him to a young oak with the man's belt, and muffled his snarls and curses with the torn remnants of the man's shirt.