d; "if I'd lived near him always as you have.
If I just had."

"We're both living near him now," said Marco. "And here's something to
think of," leaning more forward on his elbow. "The kings who were being
made ready for Samavia have waited all these years; WE can make
ourselves ready and wait so that, if just two boys are wanted to do
something--just two boys--we can step out of the ranks when the call
comes and say 'Here!' Now let's lie down and think of it until we go
to sleep."

XIII

LORISTAN ATTENDS A DRILL OF THE SQUAD, AND MARCO MEETS A SAMAVIAN

The Squad was not forgotten. It found that Loristan himself would have
regarded neglect as a breach of military duty.

"You must remember your men," he said, two or three days after The Rat
became a member of his household. "You must keep up their drill.
Marco tells me it was very smart. Don't let them get slack."

"His men!" The Rat felt what he could not have put into words.

He knew he had worked, and that the Squad had worked, in their hidden
holes and corners. Only hidden holes and corners had been possible for
them because they had existed in spite of the protest of their world
and the vigilance of its policemen. They had tried many refuges
before they found the Barracks. No one but resented the existence of a
troop of noisy vagabonds. But somehow this man knew that there had
evolved from it something more than mere noisy play, that he, The Rat,
had MEANT order and discipline.

"His men!" It made him feel as if he had had the Victoria Cross
fastened on his coat. He had brain enough to see many things, and he
knew that it was in this way that Loristan was finding him his "place."
He knew how.

When they went to the Barracks, the Squad greeted them with a
tumultuous welcome which expressed a great sense of relief. Privately
the members had been filled with fears which they had talked over
together in deep gloom. Marco's father, they decided, was too big a
swell to let the two come back after he had seen the sort the Squad was
made up of. He might be poor just now, toffs sometimes lost their
money for a bit, but you could see what he was, and fathers like him
weren't going to let their sons make friends with "such as us." He'd
stop the drill and the "Secret Society" game. That's what he'd do!

But The Rat came swinging in on his secondhand crutches looking as if
he had been made a general, and Marco came with him; and the drill the
S