Revolver Read Free Page B

months, he’d be standing on this beach when the first boats returned. He would nurse Maria to one ending or another, but whatever else, he would stand on that beach next May, as if he’d never moved from the spot.
    Suddenly he realized the boat was no longer there to be seen.
    So. He turned his back on the sea and looked at the Cape Nome Mining Camp. A few dozen tents. A handful
of clapboard shacks formed what was optimistically being called Front Street, as if this place was a town.
    Their home for the next seven months. At least one of the shacks was theirs. They might just make it. As for Maria, only God knew, but then with a surge of fear tightening his throat, he thought of the children.
    Little Anna, only ten, and—heaven!—his boy, Sigfried, half that.
    He put his head down and walked back up the beach, hearing a last toll of the ship’s bell as he went.
    Greed had brought him; only Faith would save them.

    Mobs and murderers appear to rule the hour. The revolver rules, the revolver is triumphant.
    WALT WHITMAN. 1857

6
    Sun Day, morning
    â€œS on?”
    It was a strange first word to utter, and it wasn’t meant as any name or manner of introduction. It was an interrogation, a question, and it meant, Are you the son of Einar Andersson?
    Sig looked up into the face of the man who’d knocked on the door. This in itself was odd, since no one ever knocked on their door. Only once in their three years in Giron had anyone come calling—Per Bergman, the chattering owner of the mine, and he’d come by special arrangement to share lunch one Sun Day.
    No one else came by, and otherwise Einar, Nadya, Anna, and Sig would announce their arrival by the stamp of their boots on the porch.
    â€œThe Andersson boy?”
    Mute as a tomb, Sig stared at the man. He made to push past Sig, who for some reason found he’d wedged
his foot against the inside of the door. The door shoved against it, but it resisted.
    The man was a giant. Behind him in the yard between the cabin, the outhouse, and the dog huts, stood a giant horse, breathing great clouds of steam into the morning air. The frost crackled in the trees, and a crow cawed a harsh call across the frozen lake. The first crow of the year.
    The man’s face was like nothing Sig had ever seen, even in their years of travels around the rim of the world. He’d seen the Esquimaux and the Athabaskans; he’d seen Samoyedes and Sami, but he’d never seen anyone look like the man at the door. His features were coarse, his eyes far apart, his nose broad, his mouth hidden by a rough beard of ginger and white. His head, when he removed his fur hat, was shaven to his scalp. His skull was a disturbing shape, flat at the back, his ears too small. It was not a face stroked into creation by God’s loving hand, but battered into shape by the Devil’s hammer.
    He pulled off a glove and put a fist of meat against the edge of the door, and Sig knew he could pull it off its hinges if he wanted to. With a twitch of his lip, Sig noticed that the man was missing the thumb of his left hand.
    â€œWho are you?” Sig said, dragging his eyes away from the deformity, breaking the silence. “Have you come to help?”

    He looked past the man, hoping to see Anna and Nadya there, putting the dogs away, having brought help. But his sister and stepmother were nowhere in sight.
    The man leaned forward, looking past Sig into the cabin. His heavy black-skin greatcoat swung aside like a theater curtain, ushering on stage a new character.
    There, in the inky shadow at the man’s hip, sat the butt and grip of a revolver.
    â€œEinar?” said the man. It was all he needed to say.
    â€œNo. No,” said Sig hurriedly, panic rising inside him. “No, he’s not here. He’ll be back.”
    The man kept staring over his shoulder.
    â€œWhen?”
    Sig tried to place his accent but with so little to go on, it was hard to tell. He