Free The Road to Reckoning by Robert Lautner Page A

anyone could stand, and then went off as told.
    An hour gone and we were moving. I ached and was sore in the worst places but mentioning would get no favor and would probably go bad for me. I went on as carefully as I could. Mister Stands must have sensed my discomfort for he was positively human and sang to himself sometimes and called back to me with much conversation, which was a great distraction.
    ‘My wind-rifle is from the empire of Austria,’ he said without provocation. ‘You see this pack?’ He slapped a leather satchel on the flank of his horse. ‘That is its accoutrements. They are its only problems, but no less fuss than powder once you gets used to it. The man I took it from was unable to have it worded to me how to operate—being dead—but I was lucky to have a forester in the Seventh who had been with Lewis’s party. I take it that your schooling covers them boys? Anyways, Merry Lewis had him the selfsame gun. He demonstrated it to every Indian tribe they met. That man wrote a million words but he mentions that gun on page one. It was maybe twenty or thirty years old even then. Gunpowder ruins a gun. It is doomed the moment it is fired. You should tell your mister Colt about it.’
    ‘How is it that it can fire so many shots?’
    ‘You do not understand about air?’
    ‘I do not.’
    ‘I imagine your britches know better. The gun has a reservoir in the stock that I must pump. It is good for seventy shots, I have found. The first forty will kill anything. After that I am just winging and wearing down. Say now.’ He pulled up and looked about. We were on open road at about ten in the morning. ‘This looks like a spot. I will show you and let you show me. A boy should know how to fire a rifle.’
    I now understood mister Chet Baker’s words. Henry Stands liked to shoot. I suppose this habit had come from the war and his ranger life. What men make of themselves after violence leaves is up to them. I could only imagine what Henry Stands pictured when he shot at trees and rocks.
    He unsheathed and drew out the gun. It was brass, wood, and steel and was clean with it. The leather stock was rounded and he explained that this was the reservoir for the air.
    ‘Once empty it can take me an hour to fill it. She carries a load of twenty-two. Forty-six bore.’ He pointed out a tube along the barrel. ‘I can fire forty shots in about a minute.’
    I knew that to be impossible. This was an old-man brag. He led me off the road into a meadow and scanned for a target.
    ‘What you have to consider is that Lewis and Clark went across the land and did not get attacked once. Hundreds of tribes. And you gotta ask yourself why that was.’ He scowled at me as if I was holding out the answer on him.
    ‘Why?’
    ‘Say you’re an Indian. Say you’ve fought white men before. Seen armies of ’em. And what do you do before you attack?’
    ‘I do not know.’
    ‘You let them fire their single shot at you and then you swarm at ’em. But old Lewis there brings out his gun and right in front of them can rattle off a dozen shots without a break. That is the diplomacy of firepower. But he made sure they never saw him empty the gun or load it up. To them it was without limit. Now, to them Indian minds, for all they know the whole party has these guns. There is no smoke, no reload, no powder, and there could be a million white men marching over the hills with this new medicine. They were afraid. And if you make a man afraid, you don’t have to kill him. Remember that.’ He put the gun in my hands.
    ‘If you can put fear in a man you can beat him. It is not what you can do. It is what you might do that is the thing. No-one ever sees a man standing on his pile of the dead. He does not carry his destruction with him. Now take a set.’
    I knelt and pushed the fat stock into my shoulder. It was not as heavy as I had thought. He bid me to find my mark and I set on a boulder the size of a bull.
    ‘It has a ball in the