"Don't look at the dam!" shouted Alvin. "Nobody look at the dam!"

Which made everybody look, of course. Look once, and then look away, because there was La Tia and Moose and Squirrel and Dead Mary and Rien, urging them on, hurrying them, hundreds and hundreds of them crossing the river bottom on Arthur's road.

Arthur took off at a jog downriver, not running too fast because he had to dry a path before him or he'd sink. All it took was rounding one bend in the river, and there were the two big riverboats, looking pretty forlorn as they rested right on the bottom.

Already dozens of men were out of the boats, slogging along in thick mud.

"Get back in the boats!" Arthur Stuart shouted.

The men heard him, and some of them stopped and looked around to try to find which bank the voice was coming from.

"Vuelvan-se en los navios!" he shouted again, jogging nearer.

Arthur Stuart wasn't careless. He was just starting to scan the boat for weaponry when he heard a shout of "Atiren!" and saw the flashes of a half dozen muskets on board the first boat. Wasn't he out of range?

Well, he was and he wasn't. The musket balls went far enough, but they had slowed considerably, and the one that hit him didn't go into him all that terribly far. But the spot did happen to be right in the belly, just above his navel, and it hurt worse than the worst stomach ache of his life.

He doubled over and fell to the ground. Careless, foolish ... he cursed himself even as he cried from the pain of it.

But pain or not, he had a mission to perform. Trouble was, with his stomach muscles torn like that, he couldn't work up the strength to shout. Well, he had known persuasion wasn't going to do it, and he already had a plan. When they'd been running with the greensong toward the river, Arthur Stuart had heard and felt and finally seen the heartfires of hundreds and hundreds of gators that lived in the river and its tributaries in this region.

It wasn't hard to call to them. Come to the boats, he told them. Plenty to eat in the boats.

And they came. Whatever they might have thought in their tiny gator brains about the river suddenly disappearing like it did, they understood a supper call.

Trouble was, they had no idea what a "boat" was. They just knew they were getting called and had a vague notion of where the call was coming from and pretty soon they were all headed right for Arthur Stuart. And since he was giving off the smell of blood and looking for all the world like a wounded animal- not unnatural, considering he was wounded-he couldn't blame the gators for thinking he was the meal they'd been promised.

This is about as dumb a way to die as I ever heard of, thought Arthur Stuart. I called the gators down on my own self. Good thing I died before I ever fathered children, because this much stupidity should not survive into the next generation.

And then the gators suddenly turned, all of them at once, and headed downstream toward the boats. They walked right past Arthur Stuart, ignoring him like he was a stump. And while they padded by on their vicious-looking gator feet, he felt something going on inside his stomach. He opened his shirt and looked down at his wound, just in time to see the lead ball nose out like a gopher and plop onto the dirt at his feet.

And as he watched, the blood stopped flowing out of his wound and the skin closed up and it didn't hurt anymore and he thought, Good thing Alvin's still watching out for me, because he gives me one dumb little assignment and I find a way to get myself killed twice over.

The gators were rushing toward the boat, but in the darkness it was plain some of the men hadn't realized what was headed their way. "Gators!" he shouted. "Get back in the boats!"

His alarm made them look again, and some of the men nearest to him got a look at what was coming. Now, a man can outrun a gator on dry land, but not in thick mud, so Arthur Stuart figured his contribution would be to dry the river bottom around the boats. But it was awfully far away from him and he couldn't be too precise. Still, it seemed to help, and he was relieved that all the men got back to the boats in time. The men onboard the boats reached down and helped haul them up, and the last few had gator jaws gaping wide right under them as they rose into the air, but not so much as a foot was lost, and only a few empty boots.

The gators remained in place, snapping and climbing over each other, trying to get up on deck. Arthur Stuart didn't think it was fair that the gators should get killed just because he told them there was food to be had. Besides, he had something against the muskets on board those boats. So he sauntered closer to the boats and used his doodlebug to find the guns and bend their barrels as fast as he could. They were bound to try the cannons next, but they were so thick-barreled that he found it was easier to melt the fronts just enough to narrow the bore, keeping the gunners from ramming the shot down.

So the men were fighting off the gators using their muskets as clubs. Which struck Arthur Stuart as more of an even match.

With that, he headed back upriver toward the dam, following his own trail of dry ground.

By the time he got back, most of the people were already across. Running twenty or thirty abreast, with the greensong still lingering in their ears, they all ran or jogged across, and kept moving on the other side to clear the way for the ones following after. Arthur went around the flow of people and up onto the bank and in no time he was standing beside Alvin.

"Thanks for taking that ball out of my gut," he said.

"Next time try something more subtle than standing out in the open and yelling," said Alvin. "I'm not trying to boss you around, I just think that's good advice."

"And thanks for getting the gators to turn away from me."

"I figgered you didn't really want them coming to you," said Alvin. "And that was nice of you to keep the men from shooting the gators. Not that there's any particular improvement in the world because of having gators in it, but I've never thought it was fair to get animals killed just because they believed a lie I told them."

"It wasn't a lie," said Arthur Stuart. "Plenty of meat on that boat."

"Only a couple of gators have got over the side since you started running back," said Alvin, "and the soldiers managed to throw them back. But I reckon they'll be glad enough when the water starts to flow again."

"Which is when?" said Arthur Stuart.

"Well, I don't see any heartfires up here on the bank aside from yours and mine," said Alvin. "And Dead Mary, seeing as how she just can't seem to stay away from wherever you are."

"Wherever I am!" said Arthur Stuart. But when he turned, he saw Dead Mary was indeed clambering back up onto the bank. "Everybody's gone," she said.

"Well, I'll just sit tight here till they all get up on the other bank," said Alvin. "Including, I must suggest, the two of you."

"But I can't leave you here alone!" said Arthur Stuart.

"And I can't worry about you when it's time to take down this dam," said Alvin. "Now for once in your life, will you just do it my way and git? It's wearing me down holding this river back and you're making it take longer the longer you take trying to argue with me."

"I guess I might as well obey the fellow just saved my life," said Arthur Stuart.

"Double-saved it," said Alvin, "so you owe me another obedience later."

Arthur Stuart took Dead Mary by the hand and they skittered clown the bank and ran across in front of the dam. They moved fast enough that they weren't far behind the last of the people, and all the way as they ran Arthur Stuart looked for the heartfires of any that might have strayed. But the captains and majors and colonels had all done their job, and not one soul had been left behind.