This latter she recognized. From time to time, during the long barge-ride up the Elbe, she’d glimpsed such a figure striding along the riverbank, or betimes wading like a three-hundred-pound stork, darting at the water with a fish-spear. Here, he almost blended in. For Leipzig was the crossroads of the Venice-Lübeck and the Cologne-Kiev highways, and served as a catch-pot for all sorts of exotic ramblers, human oddities, and people who could not make up their minds which turn to take. She marked him only because she had seen him before. And in other circumstances she would have devoted the remainder of the week to puzzling over what he was doing here; but too much else was on her mind now, and this crowded Flail-arm out of her consciousness. She walked into the court of the House of the Golden Mercury as if she owned the place.