Revolver Read Online Free Page B

been sent to breed reindeer as an alternative food source for the Esquimaux but had instead found a hunk of gold the size of a man’s head?

    Good or bad?
    Einar and his family had been among the very first to arrive that summer, eager for a quick strike and retreat before the hordes descended. But Einar had found nothing, then winter had closed in just as Maria got ill, stranding them. Einar could do nothing to support them. While some men still tried to prospect for gold through the early winter, even if only by stalking along the beach hoping to repeat the Swedes’ success, Einar had to stay with his family.
    His were the only children in Nome, his was the only white woman. There had already been a death from a fight over a local woman, and aside from that Einar knew he couldn’t leave Anna to look after both her brother and her mother for more than an hour or so.
    Later that week, another man was found behind the dog sheds with his throat slit, all for a pinch of tobacco, someone said.
    So they clung to the inside of the shack, and as the price of coal went to a hundred dollars a ton, and eggs to ten dollars a dozen, Einar spent their last twenty dollars buying a slim but broad box from an old-timer, who went and drank the whole twenty dollars worth in whisky at the half-built building that was to become Dexter’s saloon.
    Anna stared at her father as he stomped back into the cabin with the box.

    â€œWhat’s that, Pappa?” she whispered, her eyes wide.
    Maria woke and propped herself up. Her movement disturbed Sig, who woke too, to witness one of the few scenes from his early childhood that he would remember forever, and clearly.
    He remembered the look on his mother’s face as she saw what Einar had bought. Only many years later would he finally be able to put a word to that look. Despair.
    â€œWhat is it?” Anna repeated. “Is it food? Is it for when the food runs out?”
    â€œNo,” Einar muttered. “It’s something else. For when the faith runs out.”

10
    Cabin Fever
    K now what you will of the world. Know what you can, know what men are and the things they do. Understand what God is to you, understand what you are to your loved ones. Love, sing, cry, and fight, but all the time, seek to know everything you can about the earth upon which you stand, till your time is done.
    Both Einar and Maria had tried to teach Sig this same message. It was simply that they went about it in very different ways, and sometimes, like all parents, they both failed to teach their children anything at all.
    At the darkest point that winter, when the sun barely rose in the sky, and then only for a couple of hours each day, the stores of food under the bed ran out.
    Maria slept fitfully, her Bible by her side, its gold edging gleaming from between the battered black leather covers.

    At about five o’clock one afternoon, in pitch darkness, Einar Andersson strode across Front Street, heading for the saloon. His hand opened and closed on something tucked into the waistband of his trousers, hidden under his sealskin coat.
    Anna watched him go through a spy hole she’d scraped in the ice on the inside of the window. Sig stood by the table, just tall enough to peer into the box that Pappa had left there, its lid open. The inside of the box was organized into special shapes and compartments, all lined with short, dusty velvet. Whatever had been in there was gone, leaving behind a long triangular hole, a few unfamiliar metal objects, a little brush, a tiny tin of oil.
    Sig reached toward the box, fascinated.
    â€œSig,” Anna called from the window. “Don’t touch that. Come here and watch with me.”
    Sig’s hand hovered in midair above the box, but then he did as he was told and silently trotted over to join his sister at the window.
    â€œWhere’s Pappa?” he said, after a while.
    â€œGone out.”
    â€œWhat’s he doing?”
    â€œI