Wind whipped around corners and sprayed McLeod's face with snowflakes. He heard a voice calling far off in the fuzzy white dimness, but soon it was gone. Finally, he reached the mayor's house--a red-brick, white-columned Georgian structure massive and secure on a large corner lot. He crouched behind a leafless privet hedgerow in the driveway and waited, peering up occasionally at the cheery yellow squares of light that were the second story windows. His ear-crono whispered the time to him: twenty-two hundred hours. The tell-tale footsteps he had left in the snow were fast disappearing as the flakes fell thicker. He slid his parabeam out through the jumper's trick sleeve and felt the cold knife momentarily into his bare arm. The feeling of warm security, so paradoxical under the circumstances, left him. If he foiled Lantrel's gunmen, Overman would learn of it. If he didn't foil them but tried--which seemed more likely--Overman would also hear. Just what was he doing here, anyway? He flexed his stiff muscles and was on the point of standing up when he saw three figures approaching down the street, vague as ghosts in the snow. There was still time. He could intercept them and say he had come to cover the story, something which was expected of him. He wondered what sort of accident they had planned. He jogged toward them through the snow, met them still half a block from Spurgess' house. Two were young, possibly still in training. They were tall and looked like soldiers in their slick jumpers. They stared at him arrogantly. The third was shorter, heavier, of calculating eye. The expression of the first two faces said: _we're gunmen--whatever you are, we're better_. The third face said: _we'd as soon kill you as spit, but we don't kill except for hire or when provoked in the line of duty_. "I'm from the paper," McLeod told them, whispering. "Here to cover the story." The three faces stared back at him through the snow, crystalizing what he had felt all day but had not been able to explain. Those faces. They had nothing against Mayor Spurgess. Perhaps they had never even seen him. If they didn't like him and had a reason and wanted to kill him, that wouldn't be so bad. That would be fine. But they were here to kill him because McLeod had signed the application along with Lantrel. They wanted to do the job and get back to warmer places and hot buttered rum or whatever they liked. "He come out yet?" the older gunman asked. "I don't think he will, not in this weather. What other plans have you got?" "We'll just wait and see. We don't have to make the plans." Had they been able to read McLeod's face as readily as he had read theirs? "I don't understand," he said. "You'll have to think of something else if he doesn't take his walk, won't you?" "You say you were from the paper, guy?" "Of course." "Well, you're not making sense." * * * * *