The Wanton Troopers Read Free Page B

affairs. To most of the children, these events were less real than the incidents in radio serials and comic books. Often, when asked to provide some news item for this period, the younger children related something that had transpired in Buck Rogers , Superman , or Mandrake the Magician. But, in listening to Miss Roache tell of the horrors taking place in the great world beyond the creek and the cedared hills, the world beyond Larchmont, beyond even Halifax, Kevin decided that this world, for all of its superficial foreignness, was in most ways only an extension of the world of his father and the mill.
    Today, Miss Roache talked about Hitler, about his imminent capture and about the punishment that should be meted out to him. Kevin shuddered when she said it had been proposed that Hitler should be killed slowly with knives, a bit of his flesh being cut away each day. During the Bible reading, Miss Roache’s voice had been a dull monotone; now it became shrill and emphatic. She said that she considered the death with knives too merciful. Hitler should be locked up in a cage and carried all over the world, so that persons everywhere could come and spit on him. He should be fed pig feed, but only enough to keep him alive, because if he were allowed to die, he would be no longer capable of suffering. In the cage, he might survive for years, and, in time, he could be brought to the little hamlets on the back roads, to places like Lockhartville . . . And every night he could be burnt with hot irons and beaten with whips, and the greatest doctors in the world would be on hand to see that he did not die.
    Having heard Miss Roache deliver such monologues every morning for more than a year, Kevin had long ago decided that he sympathized with Hitler. In his pictures and especially in the caricatures that Miss Roache tore out of the Halifax newspapers and showed to the children, the tousle-haired, toothbrush-moustached man looked funny and pitiful. He made Kevin think of Wallie, the half-witted hired man at the Mosher farm. When Kevin saw Wallie he did not know whether to laugh or to cry. He felt the same indecision when he saw Miss Roache’s cartoons of Hitler.
    If they ever bring him to Lockhartville, I’ll help him get away from them, Kevin vowed silently. For a little while each morning, Kevin was a dedicated Nazi. He wished he dare leap into the aisle, throw up his arm in a salute, and shout, Heil Hitler!

Three
    Kevin decided that when he grew up he would be king of Nicaragua. For months, he had been fascinated by the idea of becoming a king. From the little glassed-in bookcase that composed the school library, he had taken a book entitled A Boy’s Life of Napoleon. The book fired his imagination. He decided that when he became a man, he too would make himself a master of men and empires. Searching through an atlas for a likely country, he regretfully abandoned France, Spain, Germany, and Italy as too large and powerful. He doubted his ability to enlist sufficient volunteers to overthrow their governments. Finally, he chose Nicaragua, a tiny, purple blotch on the map. Yes, he would make himself ruler of Nicaragua. In his exercise books, he drew up time schedules and plans of campaign, fording rivers with a movement of his pencil, eliminating frontiers with a swipe of an eraser. In 1953, when he was twenty, he would raise an army of freebooters — perhaps one hundred men. They would seize a ship and sail to the Caribbean. In 1954, he would be crowned king. His Majesty Kevin I, by the Grace of God and the Constitution of the Kingdom, Commander-in-Chief and King of Nicaragua. Then, perhaps in 1955, he would invade Honduras and annex it to his domain. In 1957, he would plant his flag in El Salvador. In 1958, he would lead his troops into the capital city of Guatemala. By 1960, he would be Emperor of Central America.
    With wax crayons, he made designs for flags, settling finally on a golden cross with a golden circle