The trip back to Zacatecas was exceptionally dangerous because no fewer than three groups of desperadoes were waiting to waylay them in the passes. But Jimmy and Danny, as the result of their journey halfway around the world, and their exploits with the warrior-caste of Malabar, had become expert in travel through hostile mountains. And Tomba, a man who’d escaped from a sugar-plantation in Jamaica and covered a lot of ground since then, in places that were not friendly to black Vagabonds, had developed a kind of guile and subtility that Jack thought of as Oriental. There was nothing he could tell those three boys except to remind ’em, now and then, that this was not Hindoostan, and so they were only allotted one life apiece. This was cheerfully ignored, or else taken as proof that, at the age of forty-one, Jack had become a fretful old man, and toothless in more than one way.