She watched LeBlanc as he put his finger in his collar and eased the fabric away from his neck for the eighth time in as many minutes. It was an odd habit, in her opinion, and had already left a grubby mark on the expensive white cotton. She knew damned well that it fitted the boy perfectly.

“Stop fidgeting,” she scolded, sotto voce.

“Yes’m.”

Outside the train’s window, square fields of tilled brown earth, slid endlessly by. The monotony was broken occasionally by a skeletal tree, devoid of leaves, dirty piles of melting snow and the grand brick houses of the estate owners.

The landscape was so different from the ramshackle wooden hut she’d found him in, an untutored polymath from the bayou. He’d shown her around his processing factory, built from the jetsam of the city, and driven her back to town in his pick up, modified to use fuel distilled from the waste products. Only a faintly fishy smell to the exhaust indicated the change.

Unconsciously, the boy raised his hand to loosen his collar, once more.