Authors: Marcus Sedgwick

Revolver (7 page)

BOOK: Revolver

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A moment later, and it was all over again, just as Einar had said it would be.

His ears ringing from the bang, Sig heard Anna say, “He missed too!”

“No, he didn't,” Einar said, a fat note of pride in his voice. “Look, he hit your hole. It's bigger. Is that what you were trying to do, son?”

Sig nodded.

He tried not to smile, for Anna's sake, but inside he felt the best he'd ever felt in his whole life. It had felt amazing, incredible, indescribable. It hadn't been frightening at all.

The only frightening thing was how easy it had been, but it would be years before he understood that.

Sun Day, dusk

I
f Wolff felt any discomfort at sharing a table with a dead man, he didn't show it.

“What food?” he'd said, and Sig had boiled up some palt, the local dish of meatballs in potato, from a pot that had gone cold the day before.

He swung his chair around so it sat at the end of the table, and when Sig brought the palt over, Wolff pushed Einar's feet to one side, making more than enough space for the bowl.

Sig watched and hated himself for not shouting at Wolff, for not telling him to stop being so disrespectful to his father, even though his father could take no more offence.

“You not eating?” Wolff said.

Sig shook his head.

Wolff shrugged and shoved Einar's booted legs farther out of the way.

“Just you stop that!” Sig blurted, before he knew what he was doing.

The spoon hung in the air, halfway to Wolff's mouth. Slowly it went down into the bowl again. Wolff stared ahead of him, his right side toward Sig, his coat back, the gun gleaming in its holster.

Before Sig could move, Wolff sprang from the chair, knocking it flying behind him, and with his hand on Sig's chest backed him against the rough cabin wall. He towered above Sig, breathing foul air over him. More than his breath, he stank of horse and sour sweat.

For a moment it seemed that Wolff would simply kill him, right there, but a moment passed, and then another, and, moving away slowly, Wolff picked up the chair and set it in front of the stew again.

He sat down, grabbed the spoon, and went on eating.

Sig slumped against the wall; he felt warmth trickle down his neck. Wolff had shoved him so hard he'd cut the back of his head.

“I'm hurt,” Sig stated, feeling for the blood with his fingertips.

Wolff blew on his stew and slurped a mouthful.

“Is that my problem?”

It wasn't a question that expected an answer.

Sig said nothing. The cut wasn't too bad, and he had learned something. Terrified of Wolff's anger as he was, at least he had managed to rattle him, at least he had
managed to make him angry, and that was better than facing the cold automaton he'd been up till then.

It made Sig feel less as if he were a fly waiting to be squashed by a boot, and more like a boy facing a giant.

Sun Day, dusk

“Y
ou like games?”

Sig put the empty bowl on the side by the window, wondering what Wolff was going to do next. In his mind he realized he had begun to plan distances and speeds, judging the route to the door, to the outside, to the storeroom. But every time he did, he pushed it away again. The gun was at the man's hip, for God's sake. He'd be dead before the last wisp of hot gas had left the barrel. Sig realized that the newer gun Wolff carried would use the latest smokeless powder Einar had told him about. Super-powerful and leaving barely a trace of evidence of the bullet that had killed Sig, it would throw his body across the cabin's floorboards with frightening ease.

“I said, do you like games?”

“We don't have time,” Sig said, giving a truthful answer.

There had been days when he and Anna swam in the lake or played in the snow, but those days seemed to have
curled up in the distance like a dying dog, never to return, though they'd found an amazing thing on their first winter in Giron. A trick of the snow, that they'd never seen before, despite having spent all their short lives in the far North.

They'd been exploring the short, scrubby trees behind the cabin, on the verge of the forest, and as Sig walked across the snow, it suddenly gave way, sending him crashing up to his waist.

From several paces behind, Anna laughed.

“Sig! I have you now!”

She scooped a snowball that she delivered right into Sig's face, and Sig, held fast by the deep snow, was unable to dodge it.

He cursed her and laughed at the same time, then called, “You try it! There's some kind of crust to the snow. These trees aren't really this short. They're up to their necks, too. Just like me!”

Anna saw what he meant and gingerly began to step across the snow after him. Her feet sank in only a few inches, and she was within a foot or so of Sig when she sped upâand immediately sank to her waist as well.

It was a peculiarity of snow falls, thaws, and refreezes, and it seemed to happen only every once in a while, when the weather was just right.

Later that day, finding a fresh patch to try, they lured Einar to the trees and laughed as his greater weight sent
him floundering up to his chest almost immediately. Still laughing, they pounded him with snowballs.

“Well,” said Wolff. “We have the chance for a little game this evening, don't we? It will pass the time till your sister gets home.”

He moved the chair back from the table, swinging his legs to place his boots beside Einar's, poking out from the blanket, but this time he didn't touch the body.

“Here's how the game works. I will ask you a question. If you tell me the right answer, I will walk out of here, get my horse, and leave. If you don't tell me the right answer, I will stay here. And if you tell me an answer that is wrong â¦”

He smiled, and Sig thought he might finish the sentence, but he didn't bother. Sig didn't want to know, anyway, what awful thing the man would do to him.

“Are you ready to play? Good.”

Sig stood by the window that looked at the lake and prayed that his sister would return, not alone, but with Nadya and some men from the mine. Mr. Bergman perhaps, or some of the younger men.

“So, here's my first question. Where is the gold your father stole from me?”

Sun Day, night

C
an you feel something, see something, smell it, and touch it just by thinking about it?

As Sig wondered what he was going to say that wouldn't get him hurt, he found himself unable to concentrate on anything but the Colt. It was as if the gun were calling to him from the storeroom, and though it was ten feet away in a closed wooden box, Sig could feel the cold weight in his hand, smell the metal and oil and even the delicious waft of the burned powder after it had sent its little parcel of death spinning through the air toward Wolff.

It had sometimes puzzled Sig why a bullet did so much damage, how a small thing like that could kill so easily, even if it didn't hit your heart or your head, until Einar had explained how the enormous force held in the bullet rips open a cavity as large as a fist, maybe bigger, in whatever it hits. If the thing is flesh, then the cavity
collapses again, but the damage has been done, and the loss of blood is great.

Sig stared at Wolff but didn't see him. All he saw were the sights of the Colt; the hammer at the rear, cocked and ready to fall on the cartridge, and the target sight at the tip of the barrel. It had been years since he had held the gun, but it was all still crystal clear in his mind.

Wolff was waiting for an answer to his question. He leaned back in his chair, and there was his own revolver again, lurking in the hip holster. Wolff let his hand drop toward the gun, making an obvious show of it. His hand reached the butt and his fingers tickled the backstrap and hammer, but he left it where it was.

His eyes bored right through Sig. He didn't have long.

“Would you like some more coffee?” Sig stumbled out.

Wolff paused before answering, and when he did, merely nodded.

Sig held his breath, trying to steady himself.

“G-good,” he stuttered. “I mean, I'll get some.”

He turned for the door out to the hallway and the storeroom, and even as he did, he realized his mistake.

“Wait!”

Wolff barked the command, stopping Sig in his tracks. “The coffee's already in here, boy. Over there, on the side.” Then he spoke more quietly, the words curdling in his throat. “Where you left it.”

Sig turned quickly back into the room, trying to hide his guilt.

“Yes, I forgot. Yes.”

He began to fumble some more water into the kettle, slopping it onto the stovetop, sending a hiss of steam into the cabin. He turned to the coffee grinder, and was almost relieved when Wolff spoke.

“Forget the coffee. Answer the question.”

Sig turned back to Wolff.

“I'm sorry. My father has no gold.”

Wolff stood up.

“I'm only going to ask this question three times,” he said. “Second time. Where is the gold your father stole from me?”

Now the words tumbled out of Sig.

“Please,” he said rapidly. “I don't know anything about it. My father doesn't have any gold. I've never seen any. We've never been rich; we've always been moving till we came here. We never had anything, or stopped anywhere for long, until we came here. I don't know anything about anything. We don't have any gold.”

“You had enough money to buy this place.”

“No,” Sig said. “The Company owns it. Bergman's Mining. They own everything.”

“That may be true, or it may not,” Wolff said, “but the fact remains that your father owes me a lot of money. In gold. That he stole from me. We had an arrangement.”

“What arrangement?”

Wolff took a step towards Sig.

“That's between him and me. And he's dead.” Wolff smiled, yellow teeth showing behind the ragged ginger beard, and then said, “Though even the dead tell stories.”

“What did you say?” Sig asked incredulously.

“What?” Wolff grunted.

“That was one of my father's sayings,” Sig stated flatly, as if it had been stolen.

Wolff grinned, remembering.

“Yes. It was. Even the dead tell stories. But it seems to be another mistake your father made. He's saying nothing, I think. So now, you had better do his storytelling for him. I've followed him for ten years, wanting to hear how the story ends.

“I've nearly frozen to death. Twice. I have starved. I have eaten things no man should eat. I've crawled through the snow and the ice and damn near lost my other thumb to frostbite like I lost my first. And a man without thumbs is nothing. I could have laid down and died a thousand times over the last ten years, but I didn't. I kept going, because all the time, I knew my gold was waiting for me.

“And now I am here, and I have asked the question twice, so I will ask it one more time, and you will tell me the answer.”

He took another couple of steps toward Sig, who
backed away, and felt his heels kick the wall. Nowhere else to go.

Wolff thrust his neck out and pushed his head and his mad eyes right into Sig's face.

“Where,” he whispered, with a voice as from a slit throat, “is the gold your father stole from me?”

Sig closed his eyes. It wouldn't be long now. He only had to be brave while it happened.

He took a breath.

He spoke slowly, so slowly, and gently, as if speaking to a young child on a summer's day.

Each word became a sentence.

“I. Don't. Know.”

There was an infinitesimal pause, a tiny gap of space and time in which Sig felt his heart stop beating, and then Wolff shoved Sig's head against the wall, reopening the cut from earlier.

Sig howled and dropped to the floor. His eyes swam from the pain and he crouched on all fours. In the corner of his vision, he could see Wolff's boots, saw one swing back, ready to aim a kick at his head.

Then there was a stamp of footsteps on the porch outside, and moments later, a fumbling at the latch.

The swinging boot stopped midway, and Sig tilted his head to the door, like a dog waiting for his master to come home.

The door opened.

Anna came in.

As Sig pulled himself to sit against the cabin wall, Wolff's eyes ran all over Anna, from her snowy feet to the last strand of her long and wavy brown hair, falling in places from underneath her fur hat, to her rosy cheeks, flushed from the cold, and ended on her round young lips.

“Well.” The words slipped from his mouth and crawled over her. “Haven't you grown?”

Sig strained to see past Anna, then hung his head.

She was alone.

Even God leaves on the last boat from Nome.

ANON

BOOK: Revolver

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