Revolver Read Free Page A

arms to get the blood moving, Sig stumbled into the light.
    His father had moved. He looked as though he were sleeping, turned on one side with his arms and legs now gently folded beside him.
    Sig rushed over to the table, a stupid hope rising to his lips, and then he saw his father’s face, and he knew he hadn’t come back to life. His body had simply thawed and relaxed, the rigor mortis passing too, but there was no life in his eyes, nor breath in his mouth, already starting to pinch into a death mask.
    Sig collapsed back onto the chair behind him and stifled the tears that began to burn in his eyes, because he understood it would not help to cry.
    Then there was a knock at the door.

    It wasn’t God or the Declaration of Independence that made all men equal. It was Samuel Colt.
    ANON

5
    Frontier
    A greed brought them, and now it seemed as if that greed would kill them. Ice-bitten and hunger-eyed, Einar Andersson stood on the beach, very near the creek that had started the whole damn thing, and wept. It had been his greed, his weakness, and it was his guilt that he fought to ignore now.
    Tears froze to his eyelashes and his cheeks, and he rubbed them away with a sealskin-gloved hand before they could frostbite him.
    Away, almost on the horizon now, was the boat.
    He had pleaded with the captain, pleaded, begged, offered bribes he did not have, and all for nothing.
    The captain was not a bad man. Einar knew that. But though the captain was not a bad man, he was a stubborn one, a quality perhaps a ship’s captain needs when sailing northern seas.

    He’d given Einar the chance to speak, at least. Many would not even have bothered with that courtesy in this faith-deserted place, but the captain had stood on the beach beside the very last rowboat to put out to the ship.
    â€œWhat would you have me do, Einar?”
    The captain put a thick-gloved hand on Einar’s shoulder. Einar pushed it away.
    â€œShe’s dying. Don’t you understand? She’s dying.”
    The captain looked at the ice-rimed stones on the beach, shaking his head. He turned and barked orders to his men, then spoke quietly to Einar.
    â€œThen I am sorry, sir, but your wife is already dead. God be with you.”
    He turned to go and Einar grabbed wildly at his arm.
    â€œWait!” he cried. “Please! A day or two and, God willing, she’ll be well enough to move.”
    The captain tugged his arm free, scowling at Einar.
    â€œWhat would you have me do?” he repeated, angrily this time. He jabbed his hand toward the sea horizon.
    â€œThe life of your wife against two hundred and fifty souls on that boat? Is it a gamble you want me to take?”
    Einar opened his mouth but could not think what to say. He closed it again and watched as the captain stepped over the stern of the long rowboat even as his men shoved it into the near-freezing water, its motions already slowing in the plummeting cold. Very soon, the captain knew, and Einar knew, the water would slow to the point where
it froze, froze solid in strange waves and ridges near the shore, smoothing to form an ice sheet that within a few weeks would reach clear across the Norton Sound and far out into the Bering Sea, to the Pribilov Islands, over five hundred miles away.
    Now Einar watched the boat go.
    The last boat. There would not be another for seven months. Not until the ice melted in the late spring.
    The boat dwindled, barely seeming to move yet getting smaller with every second. In the stillness of the late morning, the sounds carried across the sea with ease. He heard the tolling of the ship’s bell, and he remembered it was Sunday. In his mind he saw the pastor calling the faithful to a secluded corner of the deck for prayer, asking the Lord for safe passage to their destination, two thousand miles and more to the south.
    Einar watched the boat go, as some stubbornness of his own told him that whatever might happen in the next seven