Activity

It was almost Christmastime, and there were humans hanging in the trees beyond the security fence. Mrs. Billings had put up a cheerful breadfruit sapling in the living room—the refrigerated shipment of Virginia pine had not been able to get through because the bandits had blocked the roads eastward…

She’d wanted to leave for some time now, but her husband resisted. They all did. No job in the States would pay them like the nickel company paid them, they said. Or make them mining executives despite the fact that none of them had Ph.D.’s. Or give them enormous ranch-style homes, enroll their chi…

Although there was the plantation boss, Mrs. LaDue remembered—Hatch Allain. A decent man, really, even if it’s true there was a killing connected to him. It seems he did it, she remembered; that was the connection. But that was in Louisiana and a long time ago. And Mr. Flamm the paymaster was kille…

[...] the rebels’ rural habits were laziness and leisure in place of discipline. None was interested in midnight hiking, as the Germans at Wildflecken had been so fond of doing. None was game for a brisk, predawn swim in a cold mountain stream. They had little taste for discipline in itself and the…

[...] He tried to remind himself that the need for happiness was a mutilation of character, and that comfort and pleasures so quickly turned insipid. [...]