Every Boy Should Have a Man by Preston L. Allen

of landing the first blow. The winding scar on her arm, they told him, was proof. He checked the scar and decided he may have been deceived. It may have been got from the lash. She was a talking man, and so he asked her.
    “I have been defeated,” she said. “But never by the same man twice.”
    Feisty, he thought, and he patted her head, his lips curling upward in delight. “I shall call you Red Man , for you have red hair.”
    She winced and he took notice. Fearing a man bite, he withdrew his hand.
     
    * * *
     
    The boss was first among poets.
    How serious are her eyes, he thought. They are alert and at the same time so weary.
    He peered into her emerald eyes and was afforded a hint of what two years of working in the eastern mines could do to a man—two regular years (six man years) of breaking rock and stone with hammer and club, of hauling the overloaded wheeled carts, of hefting granite, coal, slate, and silver, in the dark bowels of the earth.
    “But,” he said to himself, feeling a sudden surge of compassion, “here in the western mines, it shall not be so.”
    As soon as he said it, he took it back: “On the other hand, there is much silver to be made.” He rationalized, “She is but a man, after all.”
     
    * * *
     
    The boss was first among gamblers. He made her his favorite so that in lean times she would not be eaten as others had been. He made her his companion in the planning of strategy against the man who would be sent to meet her in the fight yard behind the food wagon.
    He would point to the opponent. “Gold Braid does not weigh so very much, but she is tall with sharp teeth.”
    His female man would nod. “I will run against her and knock her to the ground. Then I will pounce quickly and pin her arms. I will twist like so to avoid her teeth, and I will bite with mine. Mine are sharp too, you know?”
    “Good plan, my little red top,” he would say, and then he would clap his hands. “See to it then!”
    That is the way it went in the western mines.
    She lived for the day’s labor.
    She lived for the day’s opponent.
     
    * * *
     
    He was called Yellow Fellow , for his hair and his flesh were yellow-hued, and he was the champion.
    Like her, he was a talking man. Like her, he was a man of talent, and his talent was word singing. The boss would watch the mans as they gathered by the fires to listen to the word songs of Yellow Fellow, and he would send Red Man to join him as companion in music. She played on a kind of tinny drum she fashioned out of whispering stones and coal rocks of differing size.
    The word songs of Yellow Fellow were very beautiful, and every man listened with attention unflagging.
    Even the oafs would gather behind them and hum the parts they knew. But when the food wagon was delayed, the hungry ones entered the tents of mans with their long knives and pick-sticks drawn. The chant of Pick one, pick one, pick a nice fat one rang out through the death-still air of the black night, and every man cried out to the great creator for deliverance.
    “Let it not be me! Let it not be me!”
    The red-haired female man cried out for all mans: “Surely, you cannot eat us! We are your mans! We work by your side in the mines!”
    The oafs would have eaten her to silence her cries, which troubled their sleep as well as their minds, but she was spared, for she was a favorite of the boss of the mines.
    When they complained to him, he sucked his teeth. “Leave her be. It is but the cry of a man. Sleep through it.”
    When she entered his tent and blasted her complaints loudly against his ear, he came to understand what the others meant when they said it was a disturbance to their sleep.
    He put the muzzle on her and rolled over with his back to her. It helped but a little. She was his favorite, but as he lay there, a common working oaf, his precious sleep disturbed by the yapping of a man, he hatched a plan to punish her that brought a smile to his lips, if not relief to his