Read Online Once Upon a Time in the North by Philip Pullman - Free Book Online Page B

better believe it. You shoulda seen them two marshals when I finished with 'em, whoo, man. One of 'em had a serpent-daemon and he took his eyes off me and I picked her up by the tail and cracked her like a goddamn whip. You ain't never seen a man so surprised to be dead. That was by the Cheyenne River. And it left the other man on his own against Pierre McConville. That ain't good odds, Scoresby, you think of that. I can stay awake longer'n anyone. He tried to out-wake me but in the end he fell into the sweet arms of slumber, and the sucker thought he'd tied me safe, but ain't nothing can hold me down. I got a trick for that. I snuck out of my bonds and I lashed that son of a whore's feet and hands together and then I just picked up his daemon and tied her to his horse and unhobbled the horse. Man! That was funny. He woke up and he saw the terrible fix he was in. He kept saying, 'Here, Sunshine, good horse, don't go 'way now, come on, you dumb critter, please please now don't move.' As long as that horse didn't move too far he could just about live, but if something was to startle her so she ran off, well, bang, thassit. Like a hand coming up inside your ribs and feeling your heart still beating and pulling and pulling it till the strings and the veins all pop and it comes away in your hand. Man, you're dead then all right. In the end I took his gun and I fired it in the air and off ol' Sunshine took like a cannonball. You ain't never heard a scream like that marshal screamed.
    "Well, I'm gone do that to you, Scoresby. There's that big hoist outside the doors there with a rope on it. I'm gone play a trick with that, you bet. I'm gone play with you and that scrawny jackrabbit for a long time."
    The pool of fish oil had spread. It was close enough now for Lee to reach out and touch it, and then he saw Hester look that way too, and then at him, and then at his pistol, and he knew at once what she meant.
    McConville was still talking, but Lee blanked out his voice and with infinite care reached for the pistol at his waist. Holding it on his lap, he touched a finger to the pool of oil and brought a drop to the pivot of the hammer, and another to the trigger mechanism, and another to the bearing of the cylinder. With his weakened left hand holding the barrel as firmly as he could, he turned the cylinder with his right, very slowly, and felt it loosen. He pulled back the hammer: it moved stiffly at first, and then freely. He made sure there was a cartridge in the chamber, and sat with the pistol cocked, waiting for McConville's deep grating voice to stop.
    "Well, Scoresby, I'm gone start killing you now. This is your end a-coming. It's gone be a hard one and a long one. I made that other marshal's end last a good half-hour by his pretty watch, which I took. I think I might let you stick around a mite longer'n that. Depends how much you scream."
    Lee heard the sound of a man getting to his feet and coughing slightly as if to cover a grunt of pain. So he had been hit!
    And Hester pricked up her ears, tensing suddenly, as she and Lee heard another sound: the slither of a serpent body along a wooden floor, and the faint dry clicking of a rattle. McConville's daemon, impatient to get the torture started, was moving ahead of him.
    And then, not six feet away at the end of the rack of barrels, the snake head appeared—and Hester sprang, and seized it.
    She gripped the daemon just behind the head, and bit down hard. Lee felt every quiver of her muscles, and clenched his teeth in sympathy with hers.

    McConville uttered a great cry of rage and pain and fell to the floor behind the barrels. Unable to move, Lee watched the furious struggle between the lashing, coiling, whipping snake and the tense little form of Hester, her claws slipping as she scrabbled on the floor. There was nothing for her to get any purchase on— no good turf, no springy twigs of sage—nothing but smooth boards, and the little rabbit had only half the weight of the