It had been a great trip.

Four glorious days. No Dr. Snot and the Swami. No spookiness or bitchiness or folks prancing around, keeping count of everything Jayne had ever done wrong.

Just Jayne and his guns and his knives—a beautiful thing.

It would have been nice, he would admit, to have Book along. Spead was great fun, but his high spirits came largely from the bottle, so he wasn’t much one for workouts.

On the other hand, Spead had some great stories about poontang, and you sure couldn’t expect none of those out of Book. Jayne had never known a rich feller before who didn’t have a stick up his pigu. But Spead didn’t act like he was too good to talk to Jayne about all kinds of things.

And he had tales to tell. Stories about companions (“worth every credit”) and bored debutants and the excitingly rivalrous Milton sisters. And he’d listen too, he wasn’t too full of himself not to realize that Jayne was an expert on women. He especially wanted to know if there looked to be any fine tail on Glory of God.

Spead sure loved women. Sometimes a bit too much than was good for him—there was that incident with Zoe, but all it took was a little ice and some rest and he was good was new again. After Zoe, Spead pretty much left her and Kaylee alone, although Kaylee was a little unhappy when her home brew went missing.

Inara was always getting upset with Spead, for just an acre of reasons—the most nonsensical being that his traveling duds were too showy (“You don’t even know what you’ve been aping!”), like she didn’t tromp around in spangle-dangles all the time.

Like Spead said, Inara shouldn’t be so high-and-mighty, because the only reason companions was respectable was that they worked for men like him. Spead was great about putting the uppity into their place—he cut Sisyphus down time and time again. That was fun to watch: Sisyphus was such a sad sack, he just took it and took it and never fought back.

No, Spead was all right by Jayne. He reminded Jayne of his Uncle Bukka—you never actually saw