Free The Scarred Man by Basil Heatter

thousands of outlaws who were growing increasingly restless under the hot sun. At last we were waved on.
        The town was set prettily in a fold of green hills. Except for a little trouble with the redcoats during the Revolutionary War, it had been small and white and peaceful for two hundred years. Now it was about to know more trouble than it could ever have imagined. The invasion of the British was nothing compared to that of the outlaws who were descending on Kildare.
        Startled heads popped out of windows as we roared into town. A few of the more cautious merchants had boarded up their store fronts, but most were open for business. The riders might be expected to leave fifty dollars a head in Kildare during the course of the long weekend. Ten thousand times fifty meant half a million dollars of outlaw money for the honest burghers.
        A hard-faced sheriff in a shiny black squad car came down the line with a bullhorn: "This is Sheriff Kranski talking. Now all you men are welcome here in Kildare, but you got to keep order. We got a nice campground set aside for you up at Moon Lake, and that's where you're to go. You stay up there, and we won't have no problem. Nice clean ground and good swimming. We can't have all of you in town at one time so them as wants supplies can appoint one guy from each club to come into town and get your beer and stuff…"
        His voice was drowned in a storm of angry protests.
        "Shit! What is this, a fucking concentration camp? What does he mean one guy from each club? How much fucking beer can one guy carry? What about the independents who don't ride with no club? Are they supposed starve to death or something? Fuck this fucking shit!"
        I sat quietly on my machine. It did not appear to me that the sheriff was on very firm ground. His forces consisted of no more than three deputies and half a dozen forest rangers. If the outlaws were provoked enough to run wild, the sheriff and his deputies would have had it. I wondered if anybody had thought to alert the governor.
        Sheriff Kranski was still trying to be reasonable. He was a big man who had obviously made his way through life with his fists rather than his head. Now he found himself pressed into a situation calling for a delicate combination of control and diplomacy. Here was Rome with the barbarians at the gates. Depending on how he handled the situation, Kildare might be in for something resembling the rape of Nanking.
        "Now let's cut out that racket!" The sheriff bellowed over the shouts of the crowd. "If you got a legitimate beef of some kind, I'll hear it. But I sure as hell can't hear all of you at once. You got to have some kind of a spokesman. Let's have each club send its leader up here to the car where I can talk to them."
        Half a dozen men wearing the colors of the various clubs detached themselves from their units and walked up to the sheriff's car. They talked for ten or fifteen minutes while the rest of us stewed in the sun.
        At last the sheriff picked up his bullhorn again: "Now listen, you men! We've worked it out the best way for everybody. You're all going up to the campground at Moon Lake. There's a fella up there named Moore, runs a general store. He sure as hell can't handle all of you at once so the store will be closed. But what he will do is make a trip into the campground with his pickup truck to bring the supplies you want. Now he ain't gonna make but the one trip; so after you get up there, you figure out what you'll need, and he'll bring it in. Now if we all work together on this we can have a nice quiet weekend with no trouble."
        His announcement was received in sullen silence. It seemed obvious to everybody but the sheriff that the last thing the outlaws wanted was a nice quiet weekend. But. since their leaders had agreed to the scheme, there seemed little choice but to go ahead with it. Machines were kicked into life, and the whole ragtag