" She shoveled down her breakfast, gave us each a hug and peck and gathered up her things and was gone like a whirlwind.Sis and I ate in silence for a...few minutes, neither of us being morning people. Then a horn honked outside."There's my bus! Shit!" She scrambled for her books."Where's your quarter?" I asked. Mom's real strict about bad language. When one of us says the "s" word or the "f" word we have to drop a quarter in a jar on the counter. I think she'd contributed as much as Dee and I. She empowered him so greatly, they fell before him like chopping wheat.’ ‘The prince sounds like he got lucky,’ I said holding back the humor. ‘Luck and then some,’ the lad nodded, ‘you grow up there and they hand you luck.’ ‘You take care of the sheep yourself?’ I asked, changing the subject. I was a little bothered by the ‘hand you luck’ statement. It sounded too close to the truth when looked at it through a sheepherder’s eyes. ‘Most of the time,’ he answered, ‘I have a cousin, the one. . they were both Riley! Riley and his twin brother, more like. They were almost identical except that the other boy's hair was a little longer, covering his ears and almost his eyes. "Felix, you know the rules. You have to last until they do." Elliot looked at me and winked. "Have fun." He hadn't even reached to the bleachers before he snapped. Riley was the first to move. He came over to me, and put both hands on my shoulders. For a moment, I thought he was going to go for another kiss but. Stupidity wasn’t reliable enough for my purposes, so I needed another way.Greed. Now that’s reliable.And if you wanted greed, everyone knew there was one place to go: TheChinaman.The Chinaman, ironically, wasn’t Chinese at all. Or even Asian. He was probably the whitest old man I’d ever seen. He’d been a missionary in China when he was a very young man, and now, as a very old man, he was still remembered for that. Of course the missionary aspect was long gone. He was a fixer, a fence, and a.