Free Every Boy Should Have a Man by Preston L. Allen Page B

her back!”
    The authorities gathered around as the boy told them about the girl with whom he was in love and her brother who had recently been released from incarceration.
     
    * * *
     
    The brother denied it, of course, but they traced the missing instruments of music to the hot shops, and the clerks at several of them identified the brother as the one who had sold to them, earlier that day, this instrument or that.
    But the penalty for theft of a man was more severe than the penalty for theft of any other property, so the little brother of the girl the boy loved continued to deny having stolen the female man.
    “I’m really sorry about what I did—but I didn’t steal any man from your house. Maybe she snuck out and ran away. I remember leaving the door open. Don’t they run away all the time? Well, that’s what I heard anyway.”
    They knew that he was lying, but he refused to admit the crime.
    He shrugged. “In a world without thieves, the wealthy become gods,” he said.
    They checked all of the local public kennels, and no one would admit to having purchased a red-haired female man from the brother of the girl with whom the boy was in love.
    When the boy got permission from the authorities to check the inventory of all the local public kennels, he did so, but his female man was nowhere to be found.
    A sympathetic kennel boss took the boy aside. “You have to understand how it is, son. I see that look on your face and I can only imagine the pain you’re feeling right now, but what I’m going to tell you is as true as the day is long. She is in one of two places. She is in the mines or she is with a circus. These days, most missing mans are never recovered. It’s not like before when there were ample mans to go around. A man would run away and someone would find it and bring it home or bring it here. My shop used to be stocked with as many talking mans as dumb ones. But with all of these new laws protecting the natural habitats of the mans and no laws protecting the natural rights of working people to earn a living in the mines, every talking man is worth its weight in silver. Cheap labor is the law of the land. Whoever stole your talking man got rid of her immediately—and a musical man too! Circus or the mines, and I’m betting the mines. Only the wealthy are still using them as pets. People are too hungry these days. I do not have one single talking man in my shop right now. I take in maybe three a week and they are gone within minutes. Your man would have to be pretty dumb and pretty dull to be a pet, but the smart ones—straight to the mines. Thieves know this. Business is good for thieves these days. A curse on all thieves!”
    The boy went home with the horrible vision in his head of his sweet, sarcastic little red-haired female man working in the mines. He wept all the way home. He wept all night.
    “Oh Red Locks, oh my little Red Locks!” he cried in his room that night.
    In the morning he got up and dressed for school and then he left. After school he went to the mill and he worked his part-time hours. After work he and his father got with their mallets and other tools and they tore down the proper kennel in their backyard.
    It was a very long time before the boy courted a girl again. It was a very long time before he loved a girl again. And he never again owned a man.
    It hurt too much.

5
    Red Man, Red Man, Why Do You Weep?
    War is king of your philosophies. Your harvest of blood fills your belly while infants and orphans wail.
    —Great Scripture
     
     
    On the day the red-haired female man arrived at the mines, the boss took the measure of her and liked what he saw.
    He would have preferred that she not be so pale. On the other hand, two years in the eastern mines had made her lean, strong, and clever. He put her to work on the load-and-pull and found that she could do it better than any other man, and so he put her to lead it.
    They told him she was a vicious fighter, that she had the gift