hanging around the schoolground. Those kids were growing up pretty wild, in some ways. All that saved Kraftsville from a mass outbreak of juvenile delinquency was the amount of necessary work there was for everybody to do and the shortage of opportunities for getting into real mischief. We didn’t have to worry about drugs and peace politics any more, but the young people didn’t have much to hold them down or give them direction—except the ones who had joined the Last Days movement.
What had happened in religion was funny. The regular churches had just faded away without much fuss during Arslan’s first occupation—oh, some of them had shown signs of life longer than others—as if the ban on meetings had been the excuse they were waiting for. Most people had either lost their religion or preferred to exercise it privately. Even when meetings were possible again, the churches hadn’t come back to life, in spite of all the attempted revivals. But the Last Days was different. It started out as just another revival, but people were swept up by it. It had one main doctrine: that Jesus Christ would come to judge the quick and the dead pretty darn soon, while there were still some quick left. Which made as much sense, when you came to think about it, as a lot of other doctrines I’d heard in my life.
“What’s he telling those boys?” I asked Hunt, and he answered dryly, “Whatever they want to hear.” Hunt didn’t like the way the boys had started to flock to Arslan like flies to honey. For a little while Arslan had been all his—profoundly and poignantly his. “Isn’t it obvious?” he added. “He’s collecting a gang.”
No, after all, maybe the strength was on Arslan’s side again. At least he had certain advantages. He offered those restless kids a freedom that amounted to riot and the discipline of the wolf pack. I couldn’t match that.
Sanjar was finding Arslan’s new role a little hard to take, too. He was doggedly adoring—whenever he had a chance to be—but the betrayed look in his eyes told it better. Arslan’s new playmates were a far cry from the troopers who had made Sanjar their mascot. These boys were boys; that was the long and the short of it. They didn’t have enough years on Sanjar (and, God knows, not enough security) to see him as anything but a competitor. The fact that he could do practically anything as well as any of them—anything that didn’t demand weight or sexual development—just made it worse. And Arslan was no help. I’d used to think, when Sanjar was a three-year-old with a talent for finding trouble, that Arslan was trying to toughen him up. Now I was beginning to wonder if he just didn’t give a damn.
By the end of September they were moving in. Arslan had finished his fortifications and fixed up enough of the interior to make a little livable spot. It was like moving into a half-built house, but he knew what he was doing. The boys he was wooing had to have work to do—otherwise the whole setup would have fallen apart in a hurry— and this was the only work he had to offer them. So far, at least.
I wasn’t surprised when Hunt silently packed up his belongings and plodded across the street. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d stayed put, either; but since he’d made up his mind to go, it behooved him to go early and get himself established on Arslan’s right hand.
Once Arslan, Hunt, and Sanjar were well bedded down in what had been the A-V room on the second floor, the boys started moving in, two or three at a time. A few of the parents came to me, either threatening or appealing, to try to get their sons home again, but Arslan was ready for that, too. If the boys were eighteen, they had a legal right to live anyplace they chose; and if they were younger, he didn’t let them actually move in unless they got their parents’ consent in writing. He wasn’t prepared to fight Kraftsville.
“People ask me why the dickens we didn’t shoot him when we had the chance.” Leland Kitchener was too tactful to put his question more directly. “Looks like we could have had a trial to make it legal.”
“We could have.”
“Had to hang him then, I guess,” Leland added thoughtfully. “But I reckon he’d find his way home either way—sniff his way along by the smell of the brimstone.”
“Leland, when I accept a man into my house, he’s entitled to all the protection I can give him.”
He rubbed his jawbone pensively. “We might of had somebody waiting for him when he come out.”
“Well, the thing is this, Leland. Arslan hasn’t committed any crimes as a private citizen, and we don’t have the authority to try him for war crimes. And even if we did, what good would it do? From here on in, he
He thought that over and then grinned his sly, sweet grin. “You mean when he’s got a army we
“That’s about the size of it.”
Of course Arslan would never be exactly a private citizen. But he’d come a long way down since the day he drove me out on the Morrisville road.
“At least you got Hunt Morgan to tell you what goes on in there.”
“I don’t rely too much on what Hunt Morgan tells me, Leland. He’s let me down a few times too many.” Which wasn’t entirely accurate. Hunt was useful enough, but even without him, it would have been pretty clear where Arslan was heading.
He was a politician now. A real politician. It wasn’t hard to make fun of everything the government did, and mockery was one of Arslan’s specialties. People were ready for that—people were always ready for that kind of thing. He didn’t make fun of the KCR, though; in fact, to the extent that he had any public position on the subject, you could say he supported the KCR.
He kept his boys well enough in line not to cut himself off from the rest of the population. (Plenty of hard drinking and hard riding, but no vandalism of private property. Plenty of flirting, and probably seductions, but no rapes.) The next step would be to start offering the same services as the KCR. Already people with a grudge or a gripe—and there were always those—were starting to think of Arslan as a man who might know how to run things better. “Nizam was behind a lot of that business before.” I don’t know how many times I heard it. “Things are different now. Arslan knows he’s got to behave himself. He’s only alive by the good will of the county.” That was as much as they needed—just an excuse for not shooting him on sight. Arslan’s position in Kraftsville was a little like Hunt’s, now; people didn’t have to accept him to do business with him.
“He’s on city property, Mr. Bond. Looks like we got a right to evict him.”
“Maybe we’ve got the right, Leland, but he’s got the arsenal.” As soon as he’d collected enough reliable recruits to garrison his new quarters, he had dispatched Hunt and Sanjar with a couple of boys to some cache farther east, and they had come back loaded with automatic rifles and ammunition.
What Leland was really asking, and a lot of other people, too, was why I’d stood by and
Chapter 27
Leland Kitchener himself brought the alarm, and Leland never wasted much time on introductory remarks.
“There’s a gang riding down this way from somewhere upstate. We’re in trouble, Mr. Bond. Only good thing, the General could be in trouble, too. Looks like his little plan went
“Let’s have it.”
“A girl up there got pregnant.”
My throat and chest tightened. My stomach felt frozen. “How do you know? What happened?”
“Got the word from Colton. Don’t know where they got it from—nor how much you can believe of it. Must not have been a very smart girl. She tried to get rid of it. Killed the baby, and herself, too. Or maybe that’s what she had in mind. Anyway, the thing is, she wasn’t what you’d call a decent girl. And they got a theory up there, somebody got a theory, it was by her having so many
I turned my head in disgust and spat into the dead grass (something I wouldn’t have done, anywhere, while
