Revolver Read Online Free PDF Page B

time. She held up her black Bible, brandishing it as if it could speak for her. “God teaches us many virtues. Above all, he teaches us faith, hope, and love. It was our faith that kept God with us through the darkest times. It was our hope that brought Mr. Salisbury to your father and gave him the job, but both of these would not have been possible without God’s love. The Bible teaches us that faith, hope, and love abide. These three, and the greatest of these is love.”
    It had seemed as if the spring would never come, but for weeks now there had been the first signs of its approach. The frozen sea began to send loud and mysterious noises across the ice, breaking the unnatural stillness. Creaks and groans of ice starting to break shattered the air every now and again. There were more birds in the sky, and the
Esquimaux began to gather in their own camp farther along the shore, cautiously content to trade with the miners, offering fresh meat and seal oil in return for drink and gold and trinkets.
    The little community had survived, and though more than a few had died from alcohol or a bullet or starvation, Maria had got better.
    Far out to sea, the ships were gathering.
    For now, news of the Swedes’ gold strike had spread not only to the Yukon and the Klondike, but right across America. Ships had sailed from Seattle, even from distant San Francisco, having waited all winter until it was time to set out.
    Even though they had waited, they arrived too soon, and four miles of ice kept the newcomers from the beaches they believed to be strewn with gold. Fifty ships, maybe sixty, lay moored, waiting for the ice to break, to melt.
    Every day, Einar would spend an hour or so on the shore, watching as the boats edged a little closer.
    One day, there was the sound of shouting and dogs barking from way out on the ice. After two months on board ship, someone had clearly lost his patience at having to wait a few more days at the ice barrier.
    Shouts rose and fell, the barking of a dog team hauling on the ice reached Einar, and then suddenly the barking was gone, and the speck that had been the dog team and the rash prospector was gone too.

    The shouting from the watching ships grew louder for a while, but all too soon it faded away.
    Einar shook his head. How foolish to attempt to cross ice that is starting to break. There would be no more impatience of that sort, Einar thought, but what a way to go. What a way to go.
    Finally, the last of the ice was no more than a thin, glasslike crust, with a heaving green sea eager to get out from beneath it, and the ships weighed anchor and headed as close to land as they could get.
    Just as he’d promised himself the day the last ship left, Einar went down to the shore, joined by Mr. Salisbury and a few of the others who’d survived the winter, to wait for the rowboats to pull their way in the final half mile to the beach.
    They came fast, hordes of them like swarming flies, and as keel after keel crunched onto the stones, none of them noticed the desperation in the survivors’ eyes, or their faces, haunted and drawn.
    They ran like rabid dogs up and down the beach, pushing each other out of the way, scrabbling through the stones, some heaving picks at the ground, hunting for the gold they’d been promised was there for the taking, just lying on the beach.
    As the panic subsided, as the rabble began to realize the terrible mistake they’d made, one, an old miner by the look of him, came up to Einar and Mr. Salisbury.

    He shook his head and dropped to his hands and knees in front of them.
    â€œIt’s all a lie!” he cried.
    Mr. Salisbury put out a hand, but he was not fast enough to stop the old-timer from pulling his pistol.
    He shot himself in the head.
    It was on that day that Einar saw him for the first time.
    A giant of a man, a bear in human form, haggard and hairy, with fists like hams. He walked through the rowdy rabble, stepping over the body