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By Root 1426 0

They'd piled junk in the gaps in the walls downstairs, in the hope of their escape route not being noticed. By the owners of those buildings, if no one else. Only one of the buildings the makeshift tunnel went through was empty. He got up from behind the table he was using as extra cover—between it and the front wall, he figured he was mostly safe from musket balls except where he had to peer over it—and went back. The stairs down were in the back hall, through a kind of low archway under where the stairs up had been. Frank realized he could hear stuff shifting about down there, like—like someone pulling aside that barricade. He had to do something, quick, but not on his own. He looked back into the main bar and tried to pick out one or two guys who—

There was a clatter down below and a stream of curses in what sounded like Spanish. Frank pulled his pistol out and thumbed the hammer, pulling it back until he heard a nice reassuring click. He leaned over to Salvatore and whispered "Get Piero and a couple of his guys over here, quick." He leveled the pistol at the archway, preparing himself to shoot at the first Spaniard to show himself.

How the hell did they find it that fast? He realized that what this probably meant was that they were in surrender-or-die country right about now, and maybe there wasn't going to be much of a chance to surrender.

"Frank? Señor Stone?" The voice came up from the cellar below.

Frank let out a breath, sagging with relief, and very carefully made the revolver safe. "Señor Sanchez? Anyone with you?"

The sound of boots on the steps. "No, I am alone."

Frank waved Piero back. "Don't worry guys. False alarm."

Ruy appeared in the archway, stooped over on the barrel ramp, his hat in his hand and grinning. "How goes it, Frank?"

"'Bout as well as can be expected," Frank replied, grinning ruefully. "Surrounded and outnumbered and we can't get all our people out."

"One of those houses I came through looked to be deserted," Ruy said. "Could you get your women and invalids that far?"

"I wondered, but what good would that do? We'd still be inside the ring the soldiers put around this whole block. They'd see us escaping."

"They will not see those who hide on an upper floor, Frank."

"Yeah, but they'll search if they find this place abandoned."

Ruy shrugged. "Then do not abandon it."

Frank could feel the penny dropping. "Ah, I get it. We get the women and kids—" and Giovanna! and Giovanna!—"out while a few of us stay here and make trouble. We make a real obvious try to escape and hope like hell we can outrun 'em at night in all these alleys, and the soldiers don't think to check for who we left behind?"

Ruy beamed like a high-school teacher about to award a straight A. Then grew serious. "It is not certain of success, I must remind you. It may be that the other buildings will be searched. But those whom you place in the other hiding places can say they were always hiding there."

"It's better than what we got," Frank said, mentally kicking himself for not thinking of that. Of course, Giovanna had chewed him out so badly for suggesting she hide outside the city that he hadn't stopped to think that she might hide close by. Then he realized she probably wouldn't go for that either. Perhaps if he asked her to lead the second site?

Ruy was looking around. "You have no wounded, as yet?"

"No," Frank said, "Yet." And that word was a world of depression all on its own. There were going to be wounded, no question.

"May I be permitted to offer some small suggestions?" Ruy asked, fanning himself with his hat.

"Sure. I'm not what you'd call a military genius. I need all the help I can get, here."

"First, the soldiers had orders to capture you, not kill you."

"That's kind of what I was afraid of." The Inquisition had had their hands on Frank once. Only briefly, true, and it had all worked out okay in the end. But the experience had still been enough to scare him out of a year's growth. And he'd been a prisoner under the eye of a whole lot of powerful and influential