COPYRIGHT

The Borough Press

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2014

Copyright © Robert Lautner 2014

Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015

Cover images © Ilona Wellmann / Arcangel Images (boy); Shutterstock.com (bird, paper texture)

Map © David Rumsey Collection

www.davidrumsey.co.uk

Robert Lautner asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it, while at times based on historical figures, are the work of the author’s imagination.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780007511310

Ebook Edition © January 2014 ISBN: 9780007511334

Version: 2015-01-27

For my brother

The Lord made men.

But Sam Colt made them equal.

—Anon.

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Map

Epigraph

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

About the Author

About the Publisher

ONE

When I first met Henry Stands I imagined he was a man of few friends. When I last knew of him I was sure he had even fewer.

But, it could be said, just as true, that he had fewer enemies because of it.

And as I get older I can see the wisdom of that.

I was twelve when my life began, mistaken in the belief that it had ended when the pock claimed my mother. She had survived the great fire of New York in ’35 that we all thought might have quelled the pock.

The pock knew better.

In 1837 my father was a quiet man in a noisy world. At twelve I was not sure if he had been a quiet man before my mother had gone. I can remember all my wooden-wheeled toys, the tiny things for tiny hands that I cherished, but not the temperament of my father before the Lord took Jane Walker. The quietness is more important than that he was a salesman for spectacles, still quite widely known as ‘spectaculars’ by some of the silver-haired ladies we called upon.

Half the time as a salesman he would just be leaving his card with the maid and the other half would be following up on the business that the card had brought.

That was his day and for some of the week it would be mine also.

It was a slow business and an honest one. Slow for a boy. The closest it ever got to an element of shrewdness was when my father would tell me beforehand to sip slow the glass of milk or lemonade that I was always offered. Sip slow in order to postpone the moment when the lady of the house would be confident in her judgment that she could not afford a new pair of spectaculars today and politely asked my father to leave.

I did not mind to drink slow so much when it was milk or, worse, buttermilk, but the lemonade was hard to draw slow when I had been walking all day. And today if a lemonade comes my way when it is offered I still sip it like it is poison when all I want to do is swim in it.

All of that was in the city of New York, where I was born, and I had no notion of what the rest of the country was like. I also had little idea of what other children were like, being homeschooled by my aunt on my mother’s side and mostly staring out our parlor window at other boys pinwheeling down the street.

I was intimidated by their screams and backed away from the panes as people do now from tigers in the zoological. We had no zoological then but no want of beasts.

I now know this sound of children to have been their unfettered laughter, having had boys of my own once. At the time I thought they were savages, as dangerous as the Indians I imagined hid out on the edges of the roads waiting to snatch me if I did not keep an eye out for them and a piece of chalk to mark behind me, which every boy knew they could not cross.

I am pretty sure it was April when my father had his idea. I remember the crisp blue sky and I know I was still only a part of the way through my Christmas books that I was allowed to read for pleasure on Fridays, and so those weeks would pan out to make it April.

One of them books was about a boy on a ship in the wars against Napoleon, for it rubs at my memory, and the other was set hundreds of years in the future, when the world would be better. I liked that one. It was written by a woman, I remember that, and I imagined that my mother would have liked it. It had a utopian view of our country and my mother was always looking for the best in everything.

I am sorry that I can remember little more about them books but my memory of that time is clouded when it comes to the pleasing and too much of it burned black onto me with the other.

My father had gotten word of a new invention, the chance of a new venture that needed no capital, and I had never seen him so animated. I did not know, as a child, that the whole land was in depression and in New York in particular businesses and people’s homes were crumbling under the weight of paper. I had seen protesters in the park, the placards, and heard the cry. The same as it ever is.

When I think back it would seem that in just a few years, what with the pock and the fire, the banks closing and the gangs, that New York had gone to the Devil. But I was a boy and my belly was full and my aunt had reminded me that there had been some insurance on my mother’s life that would see me well but for the fact that I was drawing into it every time I scraped too much butter, which was her curse of me.

I suppose we were also caught in this financial bust, which would cause my father to take to the road, and I also presume that as a businessman my father paid attention to patents and newspapers. But he shared none of this with me. What I have to tell you now is that in April 1837 we traveled to Paterson, New Jersey, in our gig, my father almost jumping all the way and my books and my aunt Mary left behind.

My aunt was not happy about my going on the road, although I regularly traveled with my father around New York, probably more as a sympathy for his sales than for my companionship, which was mute at best, but I gathered from their talk that we would not come home for supper this time.

‘You cannot take him, John!’ She said this as a fact rather than a plea for my safety. ‘You’ll be gone for months! And what for his schooling?’ This was a good reason for me to run. My aunt had wishes to end my homeschooling. She had subscribed to the Common School Assistant, and along with the Christian Spectator and Cobb’s Explanatory Arithmetick this had become her higher learning.

She had become enamored of a new model of teaching from Europe. A studious Swiss named Fellenberg had developed an institutional method that mingled poor and wealthy children. His concept being that the poor in society would be taught the trades and education needed for their place, and the rich would be taught the arts, literature, and politics of their standing. By seeing the poor at their work the rich children would appreciate their contribution to the country, and by observing their betters side by side and seeing them learn how to be leaders and intellectuals the poor would understand the way of things and appreciate that their aspirations were taken care of. I figured I was for the better half of the school and if that mister Fellenberg thought poor children were apt to admire their betters he had never seen the Bowery, and I for one would have none of that.

‘What is a boy to do out in the west?’ she insisted.

This statement was lost on me. Even at twelve I knew that I would have no limit of things to do out beyond the mountains. My own thoughts of danger were less important than having the opportunity to be away from my aunt’s lavender chiffon and her yardstick rule, which I never saw measure anything except how much blame my knuckles could take. Besides, we were talking only as far as Illinois and Indiana in those days. I am sure my father had no intention of entering the wilds of Missouri.

‘Tom is coming,’ my father said. ‘I cannot leave him here. I will need him.’

Against tradition I was not named for my father. We were a book-reading family and he had named me after the Tom in a Washington Irving tale published the year before I was born. It had the Devil in it.

He looked on me with the same strained face that I had awoken to on that winter morning when my mother passed.

He had sat at the end of my bed that dawn, wringing his hands, rocking like a just and sober man down to his last coin with the landlord at the door and plucking at his fingers to count where he had gone wrong.

‘I cannot.’ He gave the look to me but spoke to my aunt. ‘I will not leave him.’

He packed us on that little four-seat Brewster bought from Broad street the year before the fire, in the months when my mother began to look better.

No room for books or toys. And I never noticed that I left these things. My heart was already on the road.

TWO

Our house was near the river in Manhattan and we took a ferry from Pier 18 to Jersey. Jude Brown stomped and complained on the boat all the way and I had to wrap my arm around his neck to comfort him. There in Paterson, New Jersey, my father met with a young man in a black ulster coat and striped trousers and with a fine mustache that he must have been working on hard to remove his youth. He looked and spoke like a sailor and by that I mean he was short but strong and cussed casually when it seemed unnatural to do so in company you hardly knew.

My father was impressed with him instantly. This young man had convinced some New York investors who still had capital to part with their money to fund a firearms company set up in a corner of a silk-works, and there was no doubt in the man that the military would take up his design. It was an absolute certainty. His assurance to us.

My father shook his hand like he was pumping water.

I am sure that this smiling young man had no trouble extracting money from those cigar smokers with their handlebar mustaches and silk coats that they had trouble buttoning up. At twenty-two years or thereabouts he had certainly beguiled my father, a man twice his senior. I would later find that just a few years before he was taking laughing gas around county fairs from a wagon colored like a circus tent and for a half-dime turning the hayseeds into even bigger fools. I suspect he may have had this gas pumped into the factory, so deliriously enthused was my father, and even I myself, who was most suspicious of any person who did not have a key to my house, followed him around the factory like a puppy.

My father willingly signed on for a job for which he would not be paid. Another five minutes and my father would have been paying him. We were being let in on the ground floor of a great enterprise. I noted when we left that there was another gentleman who was also waiting to be let in on this secret ground floor.

It was commission work and I will accept that that is still work, for my father earned the same for the spectacles he sold, but he still had a stipend for his day-to-day living. But people needed spectacles as they were. They did not require reinventing. At the time, beyond his charming of us both, I saw no prospect in this mister Colt reinventing the pistol.

He called it the ‘Improved Revolving Gun,’ improved being normal devious bluffen brag for a stolen idea and snake oil sold from a buckboard.

This young man, Samuel Colt, now famous throughout the world for ‘improving’ the act of murder, was aware as any that Collier’s revolving flintlock was a fine gentleman’s gun and that the percussion cap had led to the development of the new Allen pepperbox pistol, which put several shots in a man’s fist, mostly the shaky hands of gamblers and barkeeps and others of ill repute whose reputations mister Colt wished to expand by his own invention.

His ambition was to bring unto the world a gun that could be machine made by a labor-line rather than a craftsman. A factory gun. A cheaper gun. The parts could be interchangeable, fixed on the fly (which, in my opinion, was admitting to its faults), and, with a good-sized factory, his arms could be mass-produced for the military.

He had made several hundred revolving carbines and pistols and had provisionally sold some of these down in Texas to the independents (they were fighting with the Seminoles again and always with the Mexicans) and mister Colt claimed that he had won the U.S. patent for his revolving gun the day after the battle for the Alamo began, although he had applied a year before, and, as he declared, if only providence had come sooner the outcome may have been different. He assured my father that he was to be one of the few who would change the course of the history of warfare.

I, to this day, hold to only one truth: if a man chooses to carry a gun he will get shot.

My father agreed to carry twelve.

Mister Colt held his faith in an army and navy contract, be it American, French, or British, for he had traveled and patented the gun to them all, but like any good salesman who is confident in his product, rather than one that sells and runs, he believed that if he put the guns in enough American hands that would do just as well. He kept back in his history that the army had already rejected his weapon as too flimsy for any good field let alone a bad one. It could be disassembled; it could break just as well because of that. Besides, the country was at peace. Even war-makers draw a line at spending sometimes.

So my father was to become a salesman—more, a spokesperson as mister Colt put it—for the Patent Arms Manufacturing Company. We would travel west and promote the gun, the pistol not the carbine, my father well aware that this was not a new thing. Even in New York revolving rifles were sold, although mister Colt was adamant to point out that those were hand-turned and not mechanical and thus just inferior sporting guns. My father took four models each of the machined pistol, all blued steel.

There were four of the belt models with straight, plain grips. Belt model being as imagined: a gun for a man’s belt for short duty, for street-work; not noble like a horse-pistol fired from a saddle holster in defense of Indian attack.

Four others were the scabbard type, with longer barrels and larger bore for carrying in leather. These had straight or flared walnut grips like the handle of a plow. The remainder were boxed models of both with tools and fancy linings. Mister Colt declined to offer us to sell the smaller pocket model. He would do that himself from his office in the city. Country-folk, he said, would not need such a small gun.

These were all ‘small’ guns to my mind when most used musket-bores. And why would someone hinder and confuse himself by carrying two loads of shot, one for his rifle and another for a pistol? That still does not make sense to me. However, mister Colt, a natural carpenter, and by that I mean one of those who can look at trees and envision chairs, had made a wooden model of the gun, which he gave up to me and until that point in my life was the nicest thing I had ever seen made.

This wooden gun replicated the others. That is to say the pulling back of the wooden hammer ‘revolved’ the wooden chambers of the pistol, and the cylinder locked as on a ship’s capstan as it cranked and ratcheted the hawser-chain by the sweat of men. It was on a ship, as he evoked to us both, where mister Colt fancifully dreamed up his design by watching the capstan’s ratchets. He had carved this very gun from an old ship’s block in the same manner as he had his first. I did not swallow that either.

As the hammer locked, the trigger would drop out from the wooden frame cute as a wooden toy-horse nods as you roll it across the floor, and I, as a boy, thought that he would do a far better trade selling these masterpieces as playthings.

He smiled and put it into my hand and my fist wrapped around the bell-like walnut grip, flared like some of the others, and my body took to it as naturally and as comfortable as shaking a hand. It was a stained dark wood the color of leather. I can see it still, now as I write, and in my mind I become small again, my hand shrunk by the gun. I can smell the oil on my fingers.

Mister Colt patted my head; I was small for my age and men tended to do this. I did not know if they did it to their own. I have never done it.

‘Well, Thomas,’ he asked, ‘what do you think of my gun?’

‘It has real beauty about it, sir.’ I declared this about the wooden one that I now thought was gifted to me. I would come to despise the iron ones.

If all wars were fought with wooden guns I would not have read a telegram (and mister Colt also had some invention in that bearer of bad news) that told me to dig two graves for my sons when America stopped being his brother’s keeper and mowed him down.

I have no doubt that the repeating weapon shortened wars, but only because it multiplied man’s ability to shorten the number of his enemies, and not because it would belay the horror of his work.

I was not to have the wooden gun. Its purpose was to enable my father to enter a general store without terror to the owner and demonstrate the practicality of the Paterson, as the gun was named, before securing a sale.

And that was our journey.

My father would gather only orders, take no money, and upon returning to New Jersey, Colt would pay him commission on those orders, mister Colt having informed him that we would be rich in a month. The working samples were to be demonstrated and sold to fund our passage as need may arise; deducted from the commission, naturally.

He never once asked my father, who sold spectacles to old ladies, if he could load and fire a gun. Hands were shook.

We bought half a wheel of cheese and dodgers and crackers and with only my mother’s Dutch oven, jerky, a brick of bohea tea, and a bag of sofkee, for which we would just need to add water to feed an army, it being but little more than cornstarch and rice with some added pease, we set off on what we thought was the best road.

My father told me we had a little over twenty-nine dollars. This was more money than I had ever known in my life and I estimated my father to be a rich man. And this was coin; none of this trust in paper that we have now. I was sure that if I lodged carefully and lived on eggs and candy I could subsist on twenty-nine dollars for the rest of my life.

I was twelve and about to spend more time alone with my father than I had ever done even if you added together all the months of my life.

I will say with excitement even now that the prospect of the road held no adventure greater than the thought of being arm to arm with my father on the seat of our Brewster wagon. Every word he spoke would be to me.

It is a fault of nature that fathers do not realize that when the son is young the father is like Jesus to him, and like with Our Lord, the time of his ministry when they crave his word is short and fleeting.

But for now I had him and we went together and alone. I talked like a bird waking and my father listened all the ways out of New Jersey.

We did not make the west.

THREE

Our gelding, Jude Brown, named on account of his brown eyes and not his fawn-and-roan coat, was a hay horse. This made him slow to the road and, once he got a flavor of the grain we had brought with us, became slower still and fair plodded along as if he carried a whole town behind.

Towns were not those so incorporated that we know now. Boroughs for the most. Some of their names have changed, either through disease or shame, and only their counties remain as their forebears.

We were to travel through Pennsylvania using the lakes, rivers, and canals as our guide, which are the most populous routes, aided with only a compass. This was not such a daunting prospect as it sounds. The method was to visit one settlement and, if successful or not, get directions to the next. A man who does not want to buy your goods is most willing to direct you well to elsewhere. These directions were west anyhow and the road straight.

We camped for the most to save money and I woke almost every day smelling of smoke but glad for it, for April is not a bad month.

Sleeping on the Brewster for fear of snakes and such, I even found comfort in my father’s snoring. That was the first time I had ever slept with anybody, having no siblings, and I still do not know why people complain so. I could barely sleep for grinning.

We had flint, striker, and char cloth for the fire and it was my role to gather the wood and stones, which takes longer than you think. The small animals have no fear of you but rather chatter and chide with the birds that you are disturbing their house. We had some anthracite to fire the oven with kindling added and we made our tea first, with water from the rivers, which tasted of iron. We poured out and kept the tea in a kettle and fetched more water for the sofkee and put in the jerky to soften so it became like bacon. With the corn bread on the side, that was our dinner, and we kept to the hours of between noon and three if we were able and ate supper when we felt we had done enough. Supper would be the cheese and crackers and any sofkee meal we had left. At breakfast we would mash the dodgers with water and the scrapings of the sofkee and rewarm our tea, which would make me giddy with its strength overnight.

I did not complain, but I missed eggs and pork and I did not think it would have weighed Jude Brown too much to have carried eggs at least. I think my father had expected more farms or the towns to be larger but he never said a word on this.

Five days in, over the Delaware by ferry, and we had gained a hundred miles and made Berwick before noon. The place was busy with engineers and carpenters, the town having lost its bridge two years before due to an ice flood and keen to have it rebuilt. This progress of the bridge across the Susquehanna had brought great trade, although the men worked for half of what they would have done last year and someone with a big hat and cigar knew that and profited.

A poor businessman will pay his worker as much as he can afford. A rich one, in times disadvantageous, as little as he has to. That is the world. Still is. Your vote will not change it. You know that now. I work my land for somebody else and get on with it beside you. Maybe I am writing this to be a boy again. Maybe you are reading it for the same. A time before writs and accounts. I say a bill is not a bill until they come tapping at your window.

This place, Berwick, at least had hotels, the cheapest being eighty coronet cents and the greatest two dollars. We stayed at the cheapest, which gave us a hammock, but breakfasted farther up the street where we could get ham and eggs for one shilling, our New York term for the Spanish real, but we settled wiser on fried eggs and bread for nine red cents, thinking less of Gould’s saloon, where our hammocks were, who would charge you an extra three cents for toast. Even I knew that was costly. Jude Brown ate at the hostler and probably did the better for it.

We had made good sales so far. My father sold the Patersons for ten coin dollars, fifteen if it was sold with its kit, which included a spare cylinder and combination tool. That breakfast we had paper orders for one hundred and twenty dollars and even I knew that was not bad. It was with high hearts that we left Berwick, and even Jude Brown could sense our lack of troubles for he fair skipped along. But the towns got smaller, the road meaner, and it is along that a bit that I would meet Henry Stands. We still had the twelve Patersons, the wooden one occasionally my plaything, and I pointed it and shot at ghosts of Indians along the road.

It was the last time I played until I met my own children.

FOUR

We now approached the endless green of the Allegheny mountains, the low end of the Appalachians, which got no closer as you went toward, and we came into the skirts of Milton, still following the Susquehanna. This was a tannery place and also a great lumber town and the air was thick with the smell of sawed wood and the dust of it in your nose. They had a proper sawmill fed by the river and also their own steam-powered mill, which we did not see but did hear aplenty.

It was at that time a bustling settlement where anyone could make a house and call it a hotel. There were tents outside the town and these were the abodes of those waiting for better fortune.

With so much wood there were stores nailed up every day. It had a bank, which was still open, and a main street called Front street although I did not see a Back street to accompany it. Lumber and shingles seemed to be in everybody’s hand. This was good to see. Everywhere else the hammers and the pickaxes had gone down. For ten years America had gone through a juncture of construction that had shamed the pyramids. The canals, the roads, and the bridges. Work in one place one day, walk a ways up the road and sign on as a teamster somewhere else. Now the only things building new were prisons. And we were worldwide proud of those.

This is where I will demonstrate how my father worked for Colt and his oddment of a gun, for up until this place we had gone without incident and I am sure that you would find little interest in the ordinary successes and failures of the traveling merchant.

In those days general stores would often have a table or two and double for butchers and feed stores also. Cards and gin probably more their bread and butter than bread and butter.

Let me tell you how my father did his business.

He would never introduce himself as a salesman. We would come in together and I would scuttle myself away to some corner to pick and prod at some barrel or other and my father would be a customer.

He would ask for something small. A finger of butter if they had it or a button for his waistcoat, and he would count out the tin in his palm like it was the last pennies in both their worlds.

Transaction done my father would say, ‘Let me show you something interesting, Mister Baker,’ for he would be mindful to check the name above the door and use it as often as he felt necessary. He did not talk down to people when he was selling. Many salesmen take the road that they should be superior to their customer, that they are doing them a favor by speaking to them, and that the customer will buy from them because the salesman is letting them become as intelligent as they are by purchasing the goods they extol. This is particularly true if it is a luxurious or superfluous item that must be shown to be aspirational, especially if the customer is not wearing shoes.

You may have seen these salesmen in colorful coats and silk hats shouting at bumpkins about their cure-alls. They may wear a lined cape and carry a silver-topped cane. Mister Colt exemplified some of these manners but my father did not. I maintain that you do not trust a man whose shirt and pants are colorful and expensive. This man is out to impress first and does not wish to be measured by his words and actions but by appearance alone. Nature has the same rules. The most colorful and banded creatures are usually the most venomous. My father did not even wear a hat when we went west as he had done for those bustled city ladies with their reading-eye deficiencies. I did wear a hat but I was selling nothing and it was useful to hide my shyness under.

‘Let me show you something interesting, Mister Baker,’ and he would take out the wooden Colt from behind his back but hold it like a hammer rather than a gun so as to not alarm mister Baker.

‘It is a new gun,’ he would say. ‘It is the pistol of the future, to be taken up by the army and navy. I have a note from President Jackson himself approving of the weapon.’ At this juncture mister Baker would find the pistol in his hands, holding it for my father while he pulled out the copy of the note that indeed Colt had acquired from Old Hickory, no longer president but impressive all the same. It did not mean that the military approved of the gun, just that Colt had the sand to go to the capital and ask. As I told you: snake oil.

Mister Baker held the gun in his hand like a dead fish. ‘It is made of wood, sir.’ This was said in sympathy, as if my father was not aware of it and had been duped.

‘It is a model. Now what do you suppose is so different about it?’

‘It has no trigger.’

‘It has a safety trigger. Cock the hammer, Mister Baker.’

He did so. A look of wonder as the cylinder wheeled into place with a click like a key in a lock and the trigger dropped in front of his finger. It would take a move of the digit to pass in front of the trigger, thus preventing unintentional fire. Now this rotating gun may seem an ordinary thing but not then. Collier’s revolving flintlock and Allen’s pepperbox were cranked by hand. This music-box action was as pleasing to the eye as to the ear.

‘That is quite a trick!’

‘What guns do you use yourself, Mister Baker?’

‘I have my rifle, which I use with shot when I need.’

‘It is a double?’

‘It is.’

‘And why would you use a double?’

Mister Baker being reeled in now by his own hand. ‘For two shots, naturally.’

‘Well, this gun will put five pistols in your hand and is rifled to boot.’

‘A rifled pistol?’

‘Accuracy and reliability is Samuel Colt’s aim.’

Mister Baker passed back the gun. ‘I have no want for a hand pistol.’

‘I agree. We all know that the Allen gun with its multiple barrels is a top-heavy arm and is good for shooting a man across a table but is more likely to blow off your own hand. That is why it is only in small caliber and can barely stop a dog. The Colt patent however, if you notice’—the gun now back in mister Baker’s hand—‘separates the chambers at such a distance that a loose spark from the percussion could never cause such a mishap and thus can come in a larger bore. It is not five shots to put a man down. It is one shot for five men or, as our army would have it—as the chambers do not have to be rotated with the other hand—ten shots for ten Comanche. A pistol in each fist.’

‘That is all to the good. But I cannot afford a new gun.’

‘No-one can, Mister Baker, that is true. Not when a gun is a lifetime’s purchase. Samuel Colt is determined that good handguns should not be the luxury only of those who can afford craftsmanship. As you know, when you buy a gun it is made by one man. You must pay the price for that one man’s dedication and ability, which can be a hefty sum. The Colt, however, is a machine-made arm. Its pieces are assembled by a team of men and, further, this means if it should fault through improper use, it can be repaired economically. No need to buy a new gun.’

‘I cannot afford a new gun.’ He cocked and fired the action. ‘How much is it?’

This is also the mark of a good salesman. The price is the last thing on his mind. It is the value he sells, and now mister Baker knew the value of the weapon without seeing the price tag, which he may have judged unfairly.

‘Mister Baker, I am heading west to put these guns into the hands of homesteaders. Colt wishes to bring defense into normal folks’ lives. I am selling orders for these guns for you to make your own profit and I ask no money. Wholesale to yourself, and if you are kind enough to give my boy a twist of candy, I can let you have them for ten dollars each. Sell them at whatever you see right.’

‘Ten dollars? A gun for ten dollars? Well, my!’

‘For a twist of candy. And you can sell them for whatever you see right. I can let you have one right now for yourself for eight, take your order for the rest, and I will be on my way.’

‘Well, that is an attraction!’

My father took out his order book and licked his pencil.

There was a low laugh from the end of the store.

Mister Baker’s store was L-shaped. He had tables at the back so as no ladies would feel intimidated. This was where men drank and gambled cards or bone-sticks. It was dark. I had not noticed it was there.

‘Haw, haw, Chet!’ A chair went back. ‘I can sell you a wooden knife too if you wants it, Chet Baker!’ He came out of the dark. I stepped sideways toward my father.

My father turned to the sound of the boots.

‘It is a model, sir. I promise the real. It is steel.’

The man was brought into the light now as if the darkness had pushed him out of it. He was brown all the way down. From his wool hat to his boots he was dirty and baked. His face bearded and black; only the whites of his eyes, which were wide, defined it. I could smell his drink then. It was not yet one o’clock. He had two closed flapped holsters angled on his black belt.

‘You say ten dollars for one of them guns, mister?’

‘That is wholesale, sir. And a special price for mister Baker.’ My father did not know how to speak to these people. ‘Twenty dollars for a belt model and that will get you a box and spare cylinder and loading-tool, sir.’

The man grinned. ‘Don’t call me sir, you little shit.’

Mister Baker knew how to speak to them.

‘Now, Thomas.’ I blinked that this creature had my name. ‘Get back and I will be right over once I am done. I am trading here. Do not fool with my day or it will be the last you drink here.’

Thomas leaned on his hip, thumbed his belt. The flap on the holster nearest my father was not buttoned.

‘I would like to see one of them guns. I heard everything you said, salesman. I am an interested party.’

There was a childish giggle back in the dark. Another man who had not come up.

Thomas rubbed his nose at the laugh and showed only the top of his dusty hat as he lowered his face so we would not see it smiling. He flashed it up again.

‘Now see, I have me one of them pepperbox pistols that you disparaged so much, salesman. I have it in the back of me. You say it is small and would not stop a dog. What say we try it up against one of these horseshit pistols of yours? See what dog does what.’

I looked at my father but dared not move closer lest this Thomas mistook me in the gloom for a man of intent.

My father did not look to me but held a palm out for me to stay. I wanted to go home. Would run if I had to.

‘I do not have them with me. They are in my hotel.’

‘Well, surely we should test it? Would you not agree? If I am to buy something, I think that that is fair. And my friend Chet there should see it too before he parts with his tin. Is that not right, Chet?’

Mister Chet Baker shook his head. ‘Thomas Heywood, you are making me regret letting you in here. I will buy what I want to buy without your say!’

Thomas stepped forward. ‘You got any gun on you, salesman?’

My father did not hold with guns. He turned to mister Baker. ‘I will come back in the morning, Mister Baker. We can sign up then.’ He picked up the wooden gun, put it slowly back to his belt, and held out his hand to me and said my name, which drew the other Thomas’ eye to me for the first time. I saw that my father’s hand trembled and ran to it.

Thomas threw down. ‘Don’t you turn your back on me, you son of a bitch!’

A single-shot percussion, too small for its holster. A belt gun with a short barrel. The under-hammer type where you just pulled the trigger and it fired. No man who had dollars to buy a gun had one. I doubted he had that pepperbox also. But I did not think that gun so little then. It was a cannon pointed to my father’s back.

There was the giggle again from the black rear. It sounded like it came from a short, fat throat. I still had faith that mister Baker was in charge of this room. He had said that he had a double-shot rifle and I hoped it was as much of his workplace as his apron.

My father gripped my hand and did something that I did not understand then.

I have made my peace with it.

He switched from holding my hand and squeezed both my shoulders and put me in front of his waist, in front of the gun.

‘Please,’ he said. ‘My boy?’

The gun stared at me with its innocent Cyclops eye and swallowed me whole, a chasm before me. My father behind.

‘Please,’ he said again.

I cannot remember how he said it but in my mind it sounded like the ‘Amen’ that people say too loud in church for show to their neighbors rather than in devotion.

Thomas Heywood roared, buckled over with a callous glee. When he came back up his fist was empty, the flap of his holster closed.

‘Run, you son of a bitch!’ He rolled back with laughter, the dust blowing off him like a cloud. I saw that his coat was made out of a blanket and sewn with wide stitches like sharks’ teeth.

My father pulled me away and out the door with that laugh at our backs.

We did not run. We left briskly. Everyone else on the street was just slow.

FIVE

That night we stayed in a room on Front street above a potter’s called Bastian. This was two dollars for a brass bed but no meal. I figured my father was of the opinion that the man named Thomas Heywood would not spend two dollars for a room so would not likely be one of our neighbors. We had moved our belongings from the hotel along with the sack of guns. I carried the three boxed models like books under my chin. I did not complain about the weight.

In the room my father moved the kerosene lamp from the window and put it on the floor and drew the curtain. We ate salt-beef sandwiches and sauerkraut from a newspaper on the bed with the lamp throwing grotesque shadows of us on the ceiling like a Chinese silhouette show. We did not talk.

I had wanted my father to come into the room, lock the door, and laugh and slap his thigh about how lucky we had been and how foolish the whole scene was to civilized folks like us, but he did not. He had hid the lamp and chewed quietly in case the mice heard him. I could hear his watch tick.

In bed that night a piano along the street tickled me awake and I found myself alone under the blankets.

The lamp was down and flickering, the whole room dancing around the walls.

I was just about to lift up when there was a rattle like someone at our door lock and I froze. Then I was fully awake and knew the sound of the knob on our door turning was inside the room. The stranger twisting the lock was the clockwork and snaps of a gun.

I sat up but my father did not notice as he had the chair faced to the wall and his head down. I saw the box of one of the belt models open on the floor. On the green baize lid was a waxed paper image of the factory with smoke billowing from the chimneys. The inserts where the pistol and its accoutrements lay were skeletal empty. Mister Colt had provided us with caps and balls to demonstrate. Powder too. The boxes held cartridge paper, dowel, and block, and these were on the side table. When they were in their box, in their proper neat holes, they looked like a carpenter’s or an artist’s tools. They fooled you that they could create.

I went to speak but the hammer’s double click shushed me. That sound cuts you down to be quiet. It silences giants, and only dumb animals roar at it.

It has committal.

My father whispered from his corner.

‘Forgive me, Jane. My sweetest friend. What I … Oh, Jane, it was … Preserve me. My sweetest friend.’ He took a breath and the piano down the street stopped and people clapped and laughed. He quoted to the wall with that breath.

‘“Long is the way, and hard, that out of Hell leads up to light.”’

I threw back the bedclothes and he turned to me.

‘Thomas?’ he said. ‘I thought you were asleep.’ He uncocked the gun. Pistols do this reluctantly.

I ran from the bed and around the chair. The gun was in his lap and his arms wrapped around me. I felt the pistol’s coldness against my belly through my shirt. He patted me closer and my cheek touched his, which was damp.

‘Oh, my boy … my boy.’ He chuckled and it was the nicest music.

You may have had a father or you may have had a man who lived in your house. If he beat you or left you I will suffer you that and if you carry it with you then you can have some pity. But I saw my father’s shame and he passed it on to me. If he had hit me I could abide, I could overcome. The Lord does these things so we do not do it ourselves. This is how man changes his generations, the way birds move on from barren lands, and we abide.

I told you when I started that my life began when I was twelve. It was there in that room. I did not exist before that night and I am still that boy.

He held me away. ‘I was only loading the gun so I could learn. So I could show Mister Baker in the morning.’ Then, as if to avow to himself rather than settle me, ‘I am sure that man will not be there then. We will do our business and be gone with Jude Brown.’

‘We could go home,’ I said.

‘We could. But there is no need, Tom. We will be on the road tomorrow. Everything will be well. Here, let me show you how fast I can load this thing. It is a marvel, I swear.’

I wiped my eyes and he rubbed his, lamenting his tiredness and concentration. I noticed he had only loaded one chamber.

I watched him play the gun like that piano outside. The gun in its simplicity and pleasing mechanics coaxed confidence from his hands; it forgave the amateur. And there was the V cut into the hammer as a back sight, the blade at the end of the octagonal barrel, and if you lined them up, aimed your eye down that V, down that steel-barreled extension of your arm, you would shoot the thing in front of you. But the gun does not know how to pull the trigger.

I did not ask him why he could not have practiced with the wooden gun. It separated and loaded just the same and even had wooden caps and balls. I never thought of it, or why the loaded gun did not go back to its green baize bed.

SIX

We packed and fetched the Brewster and Jude Brown first thing. Jude Brown was reluctant to leave either the food or the company of horses although as a gelding they should have smelled like dogs to him. We rode to Baker’s in silence. My father did not tip his head to anyone, which was not his custom and a bad habit for a salesman. His little gold glasses kept slipping down his nose with his sweat and he was forever confusing Jude Brown by lifting the reins to set them glasses right.

Baker’s reached, my father jumped down. I had no will to follow but still he said, ‘Wait here.’

He took two naked belt guns, whose barrels were about five inches, made for as they sounded, and he intimated such by tucking one in his belt.

‘I will not be long.’ He slapped the reins into my hand.

I watched the door close and looked at the back of Jude Brown’s head so as not to meet the eye of anyone on the street. There was a black boy in cotton-duck overalls on the porch sweeping but with no intention on cleaning. He was moving the dust around with the strength of a marionette and studied me and Jude Brown. I played the reins through my fingers and looked up at the mountains covered in cloud, the endless trees on them in the early morning still blue-green like the sea. It was not yet ten. I would not think that a man like Thomas Heywood had got out of his filthy bed by now.

I could not help but look at the door once or twice and each time the black boy grinned a gapped mouth. I chiseled my face like a man with fury in him. I did not truck with boys. I had a wagon and a horse. I had a sack full of guns. I dipped my hat to a milkmaid who instead of smiling or blushing looked at me scornfully. I pulled the brim down as if this was originally my intention.

I do not know how long I sat but it seemed as if the whole world passed by, their clothes getting smarter with every minute as the work they traveled to shifted from strong back to desk and pen, for the earlier you have to get up the harder you have to work. My father was taking his time. I thought on the two guns he had taken in and then I could think of nothing else except Thomas Heywood’s white, wide eyes.

The door and its bell exploded like a gunshot and I jumped, which made Jude Brown toss his head and curse me with a snort when nothing happened. My father was there and shaking mister Baker’s hand. He climbed up onto the seat and took the reins, adjusting them tighter where I had been running them through my hands.

He snapped Jude Brown off and the black boy smiled good-bye and waved us away with a wide, pendulous swing as if hailing a raft from the shore to warn of white water ahead.

We left Milton at the west end and there were more tents outside here than coming in and skinny dogs barked at us, danced at Jude Brown, bit at our wheels then wagged their tails back to their masters proud that they had seen us off.

A great weight lifted off me that I did not know was there. Later we were talking again and pointing out jaybirds. My father had taken an order for six pistols and sold one for mister Baker’s own use. At dinner he put back the pistol from his belt to the wagon. He could not unload it, as is the way with guns (they only empty one way), but he said that would not be to any detriment.

‘It will be provident if we see us a rabbit.’ He smiled but it had no weight to it and my smile back was even lighter.

We had a new plan for our journey. We would head south, follow the mountains, to make the Cumberland road. This was the national road, as you may recall, a redbrick toll road that would carry us safely through the mountains and west into Illinois. It closed in ’38, I believe, when the money ran out or the road ran out, whichever is truer. Over six hundred miles long, and the trail to get down there would add three or four days onto our month, Cumberland being near two hundred miles. But the thought of a good and busy road with civilized turnpikes was comforting. It was the sensible thing to do. Getting there, however, in the shadow of the mountains would be rough country.

We crossed the Susquehanna at Lewis, where we took a cooked supper but did no business, keen as my father was to get on and leave Milton far behind. This was a pity as Lewis seemed like a bustling, money-heavy borough.

With mister Baker’s eight dollars for a pistol and even with our expenses we now had us thirty-two dollars. My father was a good accountant. Already the trip had turned profit.

We camped under the mountains and as it grew dark I looked up into the trees and saw the friendly glow of other travelers’ fires like the tips of cigars, a thousand feet above, separated by miles of forest. The mountains were alive and I did not feel lonely. And I was with my father and he was happier now.

‘If we are up with the sun I reckon we could make Huntingdon by tomorrow evening,’ he said. ‘I will do some business and get us a bed there. We shall need a good sleep. It will be another two days before we can get to Cumberland.’

We spoke like we were mountain men, as if we followed the stars and that two hundred miles were just stepping-stones across a creek. If we were real foresters we would have followed the creeks and the mills and seen towns we did not know existed. But our Brewster would have been no good along a creek. These trails as they were did not do too much to improve its wooden springs.

‘Could we not sell the wagon?’ I inquired. ‘Get another horse? We might travel quicker.’

He looked at me harshly and I blushed. This had been my mother’s wagon. ‘You are too young to ride. And I would be worried about bears if we did not have the cart to sleep on.’

I had not thought about bears and I looked about into the trees and made sure that I did not rattle the pot or my spoon as I ate the Indian meal.

Night, and the sparrows and tanagers had ceased nagging us to get out. We had only a middling fire left with white coals and chars of wood. I could see nothing except my father and the shape of Jude Brown standing like a statue in the dark. I was not tired and my father insisted on one more enamel mug of tea and he drove a stick through the coals and put our mugs directly on them.

The coals sparked and I watched them sparks drift up like angry wasps. My neck went back to follow them to the stars and I missed the men step out of the trees. When I came back to earth they were there like they had always been with us, as if they were the trees we had thought our walls.

Four of them. In surtout coats like old soldiers and wide wool hats. Each had a rifle in his hand and belt tied outside his coat with flap holsters or pistols tied by lanyards. They had made a circle around us. They were bearded and dark below their hats although I could see that one had shaved silver hair close about his ears and a fat mustache. I saw this because he was at my side like a giant. I was sat cross-legged, tailor-wise, and I looked down from his face to his boots. They did not match or one had been fished out of a river.

My father had rolled up and stood with his hands raised. No-one had asked him to do this.

‘What do you want?’ he asked.

It was too dark to see clearly, as the voice that answered was in front of the dying fire to me, but I knew it at once.

‘All that you have, salesman.’ It was Thomas Heywood.

‘You can have it,’ my father said. ‘I do not want trouble.’

‘You give me trouble, salesman? Is that what you said?’ Thomas threw down again, only with a proper pistol this time, a good Ketland percussion. He punctuated his words with its terrible click.

There was the fat giggle again from near Thomas and I could just make out that this would be the man from Chet Baker’s store. He had an old face that should have known better, with a grizzled, rough shave like he plucked his beard with tweezers. He was short and threw down also. He had a hat with a beaded band like something of an Indian decoration. He grinned with teeth the whole time as if he were showing them to a surgeon. I could not see the fourth man at all other than his raised rifle. He was all in black with a high collar to hide him.

‘No. I will give no trouble,’ my father said, and took off his spectacles and folded them into his waistcoat. I do not know why he did this. It would blur them all. At my mother’s funeral he had also taken them off but I thought that for vanity.

‘I hear the word trouble again, salesman.’ Heywood came closer. ‘You keep saying that word, salesman. Do you like that word?’

I hold that my father did not know how to speak to these men.

‘What do you want?’ he asked.

‘Am I repeating myself again?’ Heywood came yet closer, he and my father like bride and groom. ‘All you have, I said, didn’t I?’ He lowered his gun, looked at his trash around us. ‘But first I want you to show me how much you love that horseshit pistol of yours. I want you to get that pistol, salesman.’

I suppose now that they had followed us from Milton. Our Brewster would have left marks. They had probably drunk in a saloon in Lewis while we ate and maybe they had kept an eye on Jude Brown and our Brewster on the street. Their wickedness planned with laughter and rum. The banality of evil is in the joviality of the simpleminded.

‘Get yourself a pistol, salesman.’

My father looked over to me.

Heywood laughed. ‘Oh, see him, boys!’ He waved the pistol to my direction. ‘Go on, salesman. Go on! Grab your boy in front again! Bet yourself that I won’t shoot through him!’

The others laughed as cowards laugh around a bully. These men had no wives or children or work that paid. Nothing but themselves. They were children more than I. Their violence and reasoning the same as children, only with lead now instead of sticks, and if there had been no lead or steel it would be sticks still. Everything my father said would be wrong. I had seen boys like this when I backed away from our windows at home. My father could not win. He was me backing away from the laughter in the street.

‘Get your pistol, salesman.’ Thomas lifted his cocked gun and the giggle from Indian-hatband came again.

My father straightened up. ‘If I take it, you will shoot me, or your men will shoot me. If I leave it you will shoot me and take everything anyway. So why not just rob me and be done. And me and my boy will leave these mountains. We will go home, I assure you. We will go home. I am done now.’

‘Rob you? Rob you? Am I a thief now, is it? Are you saying I would shoot you and rob you without a chance? Is that what I am? Am I that low in your eyes?’ He was mad now. It was done.

‘No,’ my father said. ‘It is whatever you want. I will tell no-one. Just let me and my boy go. Take the wagon and the horse and we will walk out of here now and you gentlemen can have it all.’ He moved toward me with his head down, his back to Heywood.

‘You turn your back on me again, you son of a bitch?’

And that was it.

Thomas Heywood fired into my father’s back with a snap of his wrist like throwing a stone. Like nothing. It flashed and sparked like the fire just minutes before and the trees quaked. I think I cried out. My father fell to his knees and disturbed our mugs in the fire, which sputtered with the tea and coals and startled the others to unload into him, their guns lighting the trunks of the trees four more times, Heywood emptying another pistol, and Jude Brown raised his hooves and tried to jump from his tether.

He still whinnied and snorted as my father lay still and the dark came back like a lamp snuffed. Indian-hatband giggled again.

I had never seen the top of my father’s head before. He was going bald. It is foolish how you notice these things.

You may have heard that the dead twitch and jerk as they go on and they may, but I had been saved from that sight. My father simply fell and lay like a cut log, only the dust from his fall showing that he had weight. He had no more movement. His neck was angled and his arms were underneath him, his shoes pointed together.

‘You want the horse?’ asked the man who had left my side as if I was not there.

‘Why would I want a horse with no dick?’ Heywood said. ‘Leave the wagon. Get the guns and the money. Take it all. Leave the boy and the ground.’

The hatband giggler stopped his mirth. ‘Leave the boy?’

‘He’s a boy. Get moving.’

I do not think this was mercy.

I had not stirred past looking at the top of my father’s head. I watched the silver-haired man take Father’s watch and purse and kick him back over again. Someone rubbed Jude Brown’s nose and he settled down while they robbed the wagon. There was laughter at the discovery of the wooden gun and they threw it on my father’s back.

I did not notice them leaving. They said nothing to me and just melted away.

I sat in the dark for a half hour, I guess. Jude Brown tried to talk to me. He just wanted to know that everything was all right, so at some time I stood up and rubbed his neck. I sat up on the Brewster and played his reins through my fingers.

I sat there for hours listening to the owls and the forest creaking, watching shooting stars and hearing things snuffling just outside our camp. Branches fall at night, did you know that? You can be sitting in silence and suddenly something falls and you jump.

Eventually false dawn came and I got down and went to our tin of char cloth and striker. I made a fire. There were flying insects everywhere, even on my hands as I sparked and they did not care. I pulled out the cups from the ash and drank what was in them. They had taken the oven pot.

My father’s body gurgled but I knew he was not alive. After an hour I rolled him over. I recognized nothing about him, and in a way this was easier to me. His mouth was open and bloodied wet and his eyes stared up. I tried to close them but they would not. I tried to close his mouth but his teeth just ground and it flopped back open. It felt like rubbing a brick against another and the feeling of it through my arm made me throw up my belly.

I went through his pockets and got just his compass and spectacles. I picked up the wooden Paterson and stuffed it in my belt. They had tossed away my father’s order book and I stooped and plucked each one of the white paper chits like picking cotton and placed them back.

Dawn now and the birds tried to get rid of me again with their cries. I knew I could not pick up his body. I was not strong enough. I have had to live with that.

I covered him with our blankets, not thinking of the next night, and me and Jude Brown went back the way we came.

I did not cry. Not once. It is very important for you to know that. I would not get anywhere with crying. I wooed Jude Brown and clucked when I wanted him to get along. I do not think he cared anything about what had happened and he stopped when we cleared into wide ground until I fed him. He took an age with his bag, and I chewed corn dodgers for breakfast and waited for him. There was no satisfaction in my eating. I could taste nothing.

When I got back up onto the seat my feet touched the loaded Paterson that my father had practiced with. He had left it underneath and it had moved as I rode. Heywood had not seen it. I took out the wooden one and put it at my feet and put this steel one in its place. Jude Brown took us to a creek and I had to untie him to let him drink. I washed for I had the smell of gunpowder and smoke all over.

I would go back to Milton, back to mister Baker. He knew me and my father. That would do for now.

SEVEN

I had done back through Lewis and on to Milton. It had taken the best part of the day and the town had gone quiet for suppertime when I reached Baker’s store. Mercifully he was still open. I put the guns in the sofkee bag and hid it under the seat.

I hesitated before my hand reached the door. I realized I had not spoken to anyone since last night and that I had not thought of what I was to say or why I was to say it. I was childishly embarrassed. I was used to not piping up when I got the small piece of pie, to be thankful for the warm buttermilk. I sat quietly in corners and let adults talk. But I knew I needed the company and security of good men. I would say it all just as it was. They would know the right thing to do and I would go back to sitting quietly in corners while they made the world right again. I opened the door.

Mister Baker was behind his counter, I doubted if the town recognized him without a bar of wood in front of him. He stopped wiping something and fixed me with a questioning look, then recalled me and looked over my head for my father’s shape. I had frozen in the doorway for I had heard lewd laughter and the chime of glass from the dark area. I had not thought on the possibility that I was coming back into the den where I had first seen beasts.

The change in me had not gone unnoticed and mister Baker came closer to me along his counter.

‘What is it, son?’

I took off my hat and stepped up to the brass rail along the foot of the bar.

‘My father,’ I said. My voice was dry and I swallowed to moisten my throat but I had nothing in me to wet it. ‘He has been shot and killed. I would like to go home now.’

Mister Baker had no wife but he found a neighbor who held me tight to her bosom when she heard and gave me a good stew and dumplings, which I did prefer more. She had no children, which was to the good. I would not know how to address myself to them now, my usual shyness of other children presently deepened by my horrors. She called me ‘dear’ at every word and made me a cot in her parlor. I kept the sofkee bag with the guns beside me.

I was a little fearful when mister Baker left to take care of Jude Brown but I comforted myself that he was only across the street. The neighbor did not leave me a light when she ‘deared’ me good night, which at first worried me, but I realized that no-one would have reason to look in through the window of a darkened room. Before settling I got out from under the four-patch quilt and checked the locks on the windows. I slept a little. I dreamed a lot. I do not want to write about them dreams.

There was no law in Milton. That would come when they got a post office. The bank had men on a payroll of a dollar and a half a day to protect its interests and they could be persuaded to keep order on a Saturday night. Mister Baker informed me in the morning after he had opened and set me down in a chair with my bag by my feet that we would have to apply to a judge in Lewisburg and make Thomas Heywood a matter for the marshals.

I dreaded the concept of repeating my entire story to a man in black who did not know my father from a hole in the ground but I trusted mister Baker as a man who had at least conversed and traded with my father. He was kin to me now. Even today every shopkeeper reminds of him whenever I see a white apron and cuff protectors. I have found most of them to be polite and warm. They are the few of us who often see all walks of life and unlike with a doctor or a lawman it is mostly a happy event when someone purchases something, and they meet us at our best, which must be good for their souls. They become the begrudging kind when they have been taken advantage of or stolen from too often. I have met these also.

The evil men who had done this to me had left me with Jude Brown and our Brewster and our clothes. I had no money in the world and was dependent on strangers. I expressed to mister Baker that I wanted to get back to New York.

‘What about your father’s body, Thomas?’ he asked. ‘Would you not like to give him a Christian burial?’

I thought on the blankets I had left over my father’s body. I thought on the snuffling and howls of unseen things.

‘I would like that, sir, but … it has been some time … and it will be more time to get back to …’

Bless mister Chet Baker. I saw my uncompleted thoughts trawl across his face. I had burdened him with my dilemmas unfairly. I had asked to go home and now this poor man had to spend part of his precious day considering my future, which had walked into his store. A good shopkeeper finds it hard to say no. As I understand it, in China, if one walks into a store and asks for something that the store does not stock, rather than say no and disappoint, that little Chinaman will keep nodding and bringing out things that you may like instead. I guess mister Baker was of this tradition. No was not a word for him.

The bell broke our cabal and I jumped at the door swinging wide. A tall man blew in and hung holding the door as if Odysseus had returned. He had a gray greatcoat that did not suit the warmer weather that April was bringing. He looked at mister Baker and me like furniture and walked to the counter with a grunt.

He wore a weak hat that could have been his grandpa’s for it certainly looked older than him but his beard made him older. He could have been seventy with them whiskers. He had those same black-flapped holsters around his belt that I had come to fear and smaller ones that probably held just as terrifying devices.

‘I have a list, Chet, if you please,’ he said, and occupied the counter with a great familiarity as if he owned the place.

Mister Baker tapped my knee and stood and brushed his hands down his apron. He went to his stage. The man looked back at me with a cocked head and sniffed and turned away.

‘Right with you, Henry.’ Mister Baker’s voice was friendly and I relaxed a bit. He took the list and perused it with a squint. I guessed the man to have bad script. ‘Are you stopping a spell, Henry?’

‘No, I am not,’ the man said. ‘I am on to Cherry Hill. They may have some loose prisoners to fetch. Men like to escape for the summer. Let me try your jerky.’

Mister Baker handed him a strip of the beef that was strung on a cord above and the man leaned on the counter and surveyed the room and me.

I knew of Cherry Hill. This was the Philadelphia state prison shaped like a wagon’s wheel. It was the largest jail in America and freshly built. Pennsylvania was famous throughout the world for its efficiency of handling criminals for reform and punishment, and the Pennsylvania system of separate confinement would become the model for the world. It even had flush toilets in each cell. Even President Buren did not have one of those, although with the state of the country he had gained from Jackson he probably had need of it.

My face must have lit up at the sound of places close to home for this man Henry studied me more.

‘You making opinion on me, boy?’

‘No, sir.’

He snorted and went back to his business. ‘I have tobacco twists to sell, Chet. Virginian. Don’t want to take it with me.’

‘I know, I know, Henry.’ Mister Baker waved him down and went about with his cans and bags to the counter. ‘Store-pay or coin?’

‘What you will. What is with the boy, Chet? You a wet nurse now?’

On this morning I had no opinion on Henry Stands. He was of those rough-and-ready, broad, fat men we tended to elect as presidents and senators when they were too old to do anything else and too ornery to lie down. He had that same military bearing and attitude of patience that they had seen it all and leaned on the seasons like fences and watched the rest of the world cluck and run around.

Mister Baker stopped in his actions and lowered his voice. ‘His father has been killed. Not two days gone.’

‘Killed by who?’ I still think that a strange, direct questioning.

‘Thomas Heywood. He was working on the canal building last I knew. Do you know him?’

‘I do not.’ Henry Stands turned back to me. ‘You are not hurt, boy?’

‘No, sir. It was not just Heywood. There was four of them.’

‘Where is your mother?’

‘The pock took my mother last year.’

Mister Baker seemed to sink. ‘I did not know that. I am sorry, son.’

Henry bit off more jerky and spoke through his chewing. ‘So you are an orphan now, boy?’

This had not occurred to me. But it was true. An orphan.

‘I cannot say,’ I said, and meant it. ‘I have my house with my aunt.’

‘My, Chet, you have inherited a piece. What’s your name, boy?’

‘Thomas Walker, sir.’

‘Henry Stands.’ And that was his introduction. ‘Thomas Walker.’ He said my name as if he were chewing on it to see if it was something he should swallow or spit. ‘You hold the same name as the man that done this? That is unfortunate. Well, boy, there is no shame in being an orphan. I am an orphan myself. That is because I am old and that is what happens. You may become a smarter man than me as it has come to you so young.’ He rubbed his nose. ‘I am sorry for your loss. I’ll take tea, Chet, and rum if you has it in half bottles or I will take gin.’ He turned away.

‘Henry? You are heading east. Could it not be available that you could take the boy with? He is of New York.’

Henry bit off more jerky. ‘I am not to New York. I am to Philadelphia.’

Although I had not yet formed my views on Henry Stands I saw an opportunity to leave this place, and right soon, for this man was set to leaving and that suited me.

I stood up. ‘I am not to New York. I am for Paterson, New Jersey.’

They both looked at me. ‘Mister Samuel Colt is expecting me there.’ I knew how to catch this old goat. ‘He has monies for me. We have business. I can pay.’

‘What’s he jawing about?’

‘His father was selling guns. I bought half a dozen myself on promise and one for my own.’ He reached below. ‘Now see this here.’ The Paterson came out. Henry took it by the barrel and reversed it into his palm quicker than I could see. He weighed it smartly.

‘Should be brassed. It’ll rust like nails.’ He half cocked it and watched the cylinder click round and the trigger drop. ‘That is pretty.’ But he said this with scorn. He took it all the way and the cylinder finished its trick. It was not loaded but he did not fire; such action can damage the placings for the caps. He let the hammer back. This was an experienced man.

‘It does not load down the barrel? How is it to be done?’ He tugged down on the barrel. ‘Does it snap? I fear I will break it and owe you, Chet.’

I stepped across.

‘I will show you, sir.’ I held out my hand for the gun. Henry Stands grunted and passed it over. I half cocked it again and showed him the key wedge on the barrel. ‘This taps out,’ I said, and did it exactly as my father had shown me using the pocket compass as a hammer. ‘You can pull the barrel right off.’ I did and placed it on the counter. ‘This makes it perfect for cleaning or for buying longer barrels for greater accuracy. Now you can take the cylinder off the arbor and load the chambers. The arbor will double as a ram for the shot in a pinch or you can use your own tool or the one supplied, which fits through this slot in the arbor.’ I assembled the gun again with my father’s hands.

‘You can load all five chambers and keep a cap on four. The hammer will rest on an empty nipple for safety if you so choose but the chamber will be loaded ready.’ I eased the hammer down and put it back in his hand. ‘With spare cylinders you can load fast and have five shots in moments.’

‘Spare?’

‘For more dollars it comes with a spare and tool, cutter, cartridge maker, nipple picker, and twenty-two-grain loader.’

‘Does it come with pan and brush to pick up the pieces when it chain-fires? I never seen so many screws. Who made this toy?’

‘Mister Samuel Colt of the Patent Arms Manufacturing Company, sir,’ I declared straight up.

‘You paid for this, Chet?’

‘And ordered six more, Henry.’ He winked at me.

‘You shoot it yet?’

‘I only had it a day, Henry.’

‘Do you want to buy a unicorn as well, Chet?’

‘I seen a letter from Jackson affirming it.’

‘I have an affidavit for my unicorn from the same hand. Ink still wet.’ He put his first finger on the mouth of the barrel. ‘I have nothing under a musket-bore. Make me a load, Chet, twenty-two-grain like the boy says. We’ll go out back and see what this Indian gun can do. I can get by with one hand if she goes grenado on me.’

Mister Baker set up a plank of pine against the back fence. This was maybe thirty yards from Henry Stands, who stood, feet apart, playing the pistol back and forth in his hands. I would admit that the gun looked weak in his fists.

‘You clear out now, Chet. No telling what this thing will do.’

Mister Baker dodged back and came beside me. I watched Henry Stands take a breath, which also appeared to move something unpleasant in his chest, which he spat out. He puffed his chest again and I failed to notice mister Baker cover his ears, and a blink later I was deaf.

The gun-smoke was pure white. A waft of copper and hot iron and a puff of sawdust from the plank. I thought of the five shots into my father. Two from Heywood. I had not heard their noise.

Once down from the frame the trigger stayed until the shooter put it back. This allowed for rapid fire and Henry Stands picked up on this a breath later and blasted twice more successively.

He was now in a cloud and I wondered how he could see or even think as my hands were clapped to my ears and I was dizzy.

He shifted his footing and, as there is only one tidy way to empty any firearm, he cracked it twice more into the suffering wood.

Five shots like the ticking of a watch. He stepped out of his cloud.

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