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eyes to a size approximate to a pair of dinner plates as I gawped at Diana and Colonel Crowe.
    This left it to my brother to provide calming comfort, which he did in his usual gentle, compassionate fashion.
    “Get a move on, ya idjits,” he snapped, grabbing both me and Smythe by the arm and jerking us away. “This is bad enough without you two just standin’ around starin’ like a couple heifers chewin’ cud.”
    As Old Red dragged us toward the clump of ladies and gents huddled at the back of the gazebo, a slick-dressed, fiftyish fellow separated himself from the pack and sidled up to Smythe.
    “It was a shock to me, too,” he said, voice low. “Curtis. Up here. With Pinkerton. I don’t know what they’re up to, Urias, but I can tell you this much: We’ve been stabbed in the back.”
    Smythe was whimpering when the man slithered away again.
    Though Curtis was too far away to have overheard the conversation, it was obvious he knew what it was about—and found it rather amusing. Smythe he flashed his cheek-distending grin. Me and Gustav he offered an apologetic shrug. Then, at a whispered word from Pinkerton, he turned and stepped up to the podium at the front of the bandstand. The brass band by the edge of the lagoon wrapped up “The Thunderer,” and the final, rushed bah-bum-bum! was still echoing out toward the lake as the little man addressed himself to the crowd.
    Just about everything he said after “Good afternoon!” I missed, however, for I was deep in conversation with Diana. Not that either of us was actually saying anything. When I leaned out to stare in wonderment at the lady, though, I found her looking our way, and the following passed between us.
    My slack jaw: What are you doing here?
    Her sorrowful frown: Competing against you, obviously.
    The way I raised my hands, the palms up: Well, how could you let that happen ?
    Her elegantly arched eyebrow, pointed first at me, then at my brother and his shaded cheaters: I’d say you have some explaining to do as well.
    My blush as I remembered what I was wearing: Shit .
    Then Colonel Crowe stepped in to join the conversation. There wasn’t much of him—he was short enough to make even Curtis look like Goliath—yet he could prove a formidable obstacle when he set his mind to it.
    His malicious glare: What are you looking at, you EXPURGATED UNPRINTABLE?
    I busied myself looking elsewhere.
    My gaze fell first upon my brother—who was giving me a dose of “EXPURGATED UNPRINTABLE” himself. For once, I couldn’t begrudge him his truculence. Here we were supposedly winning the colonel’s favor, and instead we end up squared off against him. If the man didn’t hate us already for costing him his job with the Southern Pacific, beating him out of $10,000 prize money would surely do the trick. Yet if we didn’t win the contest, why should he bother hiring us?
    We were damned if we did, damned if we didn’t … and damned if I knew what to do about it.
    So absorbed was I in all this I only barely noticed that Curtis was lulling the crowd to sleep with some sort of fable about Christopher Columbus.
    “—which has been secreted somewhere within the confines of the White City,” he was saying when I actually started paying attention. “Only I, the Puzzlemaster, know where it is. So it will be for the next four days. At noon precisely, our contestants will gather here to be given clues as to the egg’s whereabouts. Every day they’ll have the chance to find it, and every night I will hide it again. Whosoever has located the egg the most times by two o’clock Thursday will be our winner.”
    “Uhhh … did he just say ‘egg’?” I asked Smythe.
    He goggled his eyes at me. “Haven’t you heard a word he said?”
    I shrugged. “Yeah. ‘Egg.’ ”
    “I’m doomed,” Smythe said. At least he was over his palpitations.
    Curtis, meanwhile, was introducing that great American (according to him) William Pinkerton. There was a smattering of