Once Upon a Time in the North Read Online Free PDF Page A

between the two men had silenced every other conversation, and Poliakov stood uncertain, his eyes flicking from one to the other, as if he were wondering how to reassert the dominance that had suddenly leaked away from him.
    It was Olga who spoke first. She had been eating a small cake, and she hadn't noticed anything. She patted her lips and said as loudly as if everyone else was still talking, "Do they have bears in your country, Mr. Morton?"
    Morton-McConville blinked at last and turned to face her. His daemon kept her head fixed on Hester.
    "Bears?" he said. "Why, I believe they do, miss."
    "Horrid," she said, with that childish shudder. "Papa's going to get rid of all the bears."
    Poliakov shrugged his shoulders one at a time like a boxer loosening his muscles and moved forward a step to confront Lee directly.
    "I think you had better leave, Scoresby," he said.
    "Just on my way, Senator. Happy to leave."
    "Don't call me by that title!"
    "Oh, I beg your pardon. When I see a swaggering blowhard, I naturally assume he's a Senator. Easy mistake to make. Good evening, miss."
    Olga had by now realized that the atmosphere had changed, and her lovely dim face looked from Lee to her father and then to Morton and back to Lee. No one took any notice except Lee, who smiled with a pang of regret and turned away. But hers wasn't the last face he saw in the room, and neither was Morton's. Standing at the edge of the crowd was Oskar Sigurdsson, poet and journalist, and his expression was vivid with excitement and expectation.

    "So we've decided what side we're on?" Hester said, back in the chilly little bedroom at the boardinghouse.
    "Hell, Hester," Lee said, flinging his hat into the corner of the room, "why can't I keep my damn mouth shut?"
    "No choice. That bastard knew exactly where we'd seen him before."
    'You reckon?"
    "No doubt about it."
    Lee pulled off his boots and took the revolver out of the holster at his belt. He flicked the cylinder, found it too stiff to move, and shook his head in irritation: no oil. Since that soaking they'd had in the rainstorm he hadn't had occasion to use the weapon, except as a hammer, and the damn thing had seized tight. And here he was on an island that stank of every conceivable kind of oil, and he didn't have a drop to loosen it with.
    He put the gun beside the bed and lay down to sleep, with Hester crouching restless on the pillow.
    Pierre McConville was a hired killer with at least twenty murders to his name. Lee had come across him in the Dakota country. In the summer before he won his balloon in the poker game, Lee was working for a rancher called Lloyd, and there was a boundary dispute that erupted into a minor war, with half a dozen men killed before it was settled. In the course of it Mr. Lloyd's enemy hired McConville to pick off Lloyd's men one by one. He had killed three men by the time the Rapid City gendarmes caught up with him. He shot two of the ranch hands from a distance, undetected, and then he made a mistake: he provoked a quarrel with young Jimmy Partlett, Lloyd's nephew, over cards and drink, and shot him dead in front of witnesses who could be relied on to testify that the dead man had started it. The mistake was that one of the witnesses changed his testimony, and told the truth.
    McConville allowed himself to be arrested with the air of someone fulfilling a minor bureaucratic formality. He was tried for murder in front of a corrupted and terrified jury, and acquitted; following which he promptly shot the truthful witness dead in the street, with no attempt to hide what he was doing, as the gendarmes were riding out of town pleading urgent business in Rapid City. But that was another mistake. With the utmost reluctance the gendarmes turned round and arrested him again, after a brief exchange of lead projectiles, and this time set out to take him to the capital of the province. They never got there. In fact they were never seen again. It was assumed that McConville had