Spacepaw by Gordon R. Dickson

arming men and mending kettles for fifteen years, and what I say is, a regular blade and buckler’s too big for him. And that’s that!”
    “All right!” shouted Bill quickly, before the Hill Bluffer could renew the argument. “I don’t care what size my sword and shield are. It doesn’t make any difference!”
    “There!” boomed the Bluffer turning on the blacksmith. “I guess that shows you what these sissy fighting weapons of you Lowlanders are worth! Even a Shorty doesn’t care what they’re like, when he has to use them! I’d like to see some of you iron-carriers wander up into the mountains bare-handed some of these days and try your luck man-to-man in my district. Why, if I wasn’t on official duty, more or less, with Pick-and-Shovel here—”
    “Ahem!” More Jam interrupted at this point by clearing his throat delicately—delicately, that is, for a Dilbian. However, the sound effectively stopped the Bluffer and brought his eyes around toward the wide-bodied individual.
    “Far be it from me to go sticking my oar into another fellow’s argument,” said More Jam sadly. “Particularly seeing as how I’m old and decrepit and fat, and have a weak stomach and I’ve long forgotten what it was like back in my wrestling days—”
    “Come on now, More Jam,” protested Flat Fingers. “We all know you aren’t all that old and sickly.”
    “Nice of you to say so, Flat Fingers,” quavered More Jam, “but the truth is with this weak stomach of mine, that can’t hardly eat anything but a little jam and bread or something like that—though I do try to force down some regular meat and other things just to keep myself alive—I’m lucky if I can leave the house. But it’s true—” He looked sidelong at the Hill Bluffer, “that once I’d have taken on any mountain man, bare-handed.”
    “No one’s putting you down, More Jam,” rumbled the Hill Bluffer. “You never used to tangle with a lot of sharpened iron about you!”
    “True, true,” sighed More Jam. “And true it is, that our younger generation has kind of gotten away from the old way of doing things. Just like it’s true that I never had anything in the way of a weapon about me—that time I happened to be up in the mountains and ran into One Man.”
    He pronounced this name with a peculiar emphasis, and Bill saw both the blacksmith and the Hill Bluffer stiffen to attention. The Hill Bluffer stared at him.
    “You tangled with One Man?” the Bluffer said, almost in a tone of awe. “Why, nobody ever went up against One Man alone. Nobody!” He glanced aside at Bill. “There never has been anybody like One Man, Pick-and-Shovel,” he explained. “He’s a mountain man like myself, and he’s called One Man because in spite of being an orphan, with no kin to help, he once held feud with a whole clan, just by himself—and won!”
    The Hill Bluffer turned back to More Jam almost accusingly.
    “You never tangled with One Man!” he repeated.
    More Jam sighed regretfully.
    “No, as a matter of fact, I never did, the way things worked out,” he rumbled thoughtfully. “I’d heard of him, up there in the mountains, of course. Just as he’d heard of me, down here in the Lowlands. Then one time we just happened to run into each other in the foothills back a ways from here, and we got a look at each other for the first time.”
    More Jam paused, to sigh again. Flat Fingers and the Hill Bluffer were staring at him.
    “Well, go on More Jam!” boomed Flat Fingers, after a moment of stillness. “You met him you say—and you didn’t tangle?”
    “Well, no, as it happened. We didn’t,” said More Jam; and his eyes swung about to catch and hold the eyes of Bill with a particular intensity. “It’s quite a little story—and as a matter of fact, that’s what brought me up here this morning to talk to Pick-and-Shovel. I got to remembering that story, and it began preying on my mind—the strange things that could happen to keep a couple