The Chinese Bandit by Stephen; Becker

Author:Stephen; Becker [Becker, Stephen;]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

26

It was a contemptible village of no name; K’uang sat his haughty camel and condemned the elder with one heavy-lidded glance. A barren village of sickly peasants, Qazaq mongrels! In winter they huddled together, half underground, and copulated with their livestock.

While they stood before him, lousy and ragged, he looked beyond them at their hovels of yellow earth. He recognized their trough: oil drums. A foreign trough. If not for the war they would drink from stagnant wells. An oil drum was a fortune to them, a new way of life.

These, my people! He hawked up a weighty gob, and spat. Sometimes he had visions of a new China, its population halved and all of them clean-limbed, bright-eyed, willing workers, patriots.

“The bandits who came this way,” he said. “Describe them.”

The villagers hung their heads and did not speak. A woman not yet past her youth was going bald: her hair struggled in tufts.

“Describe the bandits,” K’uang ordered, louder.

The elder moaned. “No bandits. No strangers these many months.”

K’uang drew his pistol. “Describe them.”

“By the lord of all under heaven. No bandits.” He was wrinkled, white-haired, dull of eye.

K’uang shot him dead, through the heart.

Even Sergeant Shih, who knew this major well, blinked.

The old man sagged like a sack of leeks, and sprawled.

“Who now speaks?”

No one moved. A small child wailed.

“Four,” a woman’s voice said. “With a servant, a foreign devil, yellow-haired. We only want to live.”

“Ah,” K’uang said. “And their goods?” He felt sudden excitement, but kept it from his face.

After a silence the woman said, “Arms, and saddlebags, and packs. Short of feed, they were, and without water.”

“And they watered here.”

“They watered here.”

“Kegs,” K’uang said. “Do you know what a keg is? A small barrel. Four of them.”

“No kegs,” the woman said. “By the lord of all under heaven.”

“You lie,” K’uang said.

“What is there to lie about?” The woman looked him in the eye. “In such kegs what would they carry? There were no kegs.”

The woman was telling the truth. It made no sense. But he could not question further before his men, could not betray what he knew. Any one of them would desert, even kill him. For one of those kegs. Even Sergeant Shih. Even stiff, obedient Sergeant Shih. These are my men! These are the sons of Han!

Suppose he were to say it? Suppose he said, In those kegs is a lifetime of money. They would shoot him in the back, and squabble then, and shoot each other in the back until only one was left, and that one, a brute, would wonder then where he should go and what he should do. Kegs, he would say. Now where does one look for kegs? And he would wander the desert asking about kegs.

“So you fed them, and gave them water.”

“There was no other way,” the woman said. “We only want to live.”

K’uang jerked his head at Sergeant Shih, who sidled his camel closer.

“Guard the men and the children apart,” K’uang said. “The women are yours. Butcher a sheep.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.