Free The Road to Reckoning by Robert Lautner Page B

chamber. Cock it one hand. One hand, mind, or I’ll take it from you. Hold your other hand as far along as you can, stiff as feels right, and she will steady.’
    ‘Who made this?’
    ‘An Italian. All Italians are genius. There is a man in Philadelphia who makes them also butonly for sport or fancy. This is a soldier’s gun. Stop your breathing and take your shot. There will be no spark so don’t flinch your eye.’
    I held my lungs and fired. There was the crack and a lesser kick and smoke blew off the boulder across the field, fifty yards away.
    I did something magical!
    Too few times in a person’s life does something wondrous occur but it is the sharing of the experience that elevates it. Henry Stands saw it in my grinning face and there was nothing in the years between us. He had done this once for the first time also. I forgot my troubles for a moment.
    ‘Good,’ he said. ‘See that lever in front of the hammer? You push that to the right and hold the gun up just enough and you’ll feel a new shot roll down.’
    I did so, and other than the roll and set of the ball this was a silent action.
    ‘Now it is ready to be cocked and fired again. Go on. You can kill that rock no more.’
    I shot again and was rewarded with another puff of stone.
    ‘How is it that men do not use these all the time?’ I marveled.
    ‘Well, it is not perfect. And powder is an industry. There is no profit in air. Its worse attribute is that the pump must be used often to shoot again.’
    ‘But you could stop an army before that!’
    He took the rifle and stroked my fingerprints from it.
    ‘I heard said that Napoleon made it death to own one. He was fearful that there might be an army with ’em.’
    I stood up. ‘It is as you said.’
    ‘How is that?’
    ‘Put fear in a man.’
    ‘Now you know how no Indian went for Merry Lewis. Shame he killed himself. Real shame.’
    This was a dark end to our talk and we went back to the horses in silence. We rode on but there was no attempt by mister Stands to distance himself from me. I was alongside him when Bloom Town appeared below us, and I guess that street looked up right curious at two partners riding in with the sun at their backs.
    Henry Stands had a lot of tricks learned from the road. He paid a mother in a log house a pistareen to use her grease and stove and cooked up some belly slices and beans he had bought from mister Baker. She gave us soda bread for free and a plate each and we sat outside on her porch to eat. Mister Stands shared but grumbled about the bill I was gathering.
    ‘There will be a reckoning according on this, deadhead,’ he declared.
    The mother had three children who ran around almost naked.
    ‘Why don’t you play with them awhile,’ he said. ‘I could do with not looking at your face in front of me for a spell.’
    ‘They are babies. I do not like children all that much.’
    ‘You are a baby. And I do not like children, yet here you are.’
    I did not like his proclivity. ‘Do you not have family? No wife?’
    ‘I do not.’ He ate angrily. ‘I am past liking women. I do not like their talk.’
    ‘Why not?’
    ‘You meet a woman and you will strive to fit.
I will do this, I will do that,
you say. And what do they say? I will tell you.
He will do this, he will do that.
To hell with them.
You drink too much, you smoke too much.
All the things they forget that you did when you met them. They do not complain if you work too much, that I note. But you will have twenty years to learn this between grass and hay. It will do no good to you now. You will wake up one morning and be mad like all of ’em.’
    I thought about my mother and father. I am sure they were happy in marriage and a preacher may tell me that they were now happy together. But they seemed very far away to me then. I would change subject.
    ‘What plans do you have for me?’
    His dinner finished, he rubbed his hands together and sifted the crumbs and grease from his whiskers. ‘Fetch my