Chapter 8 #4
The room was quiet a moment.
Then Ruger, the old man, made a low sound in his throat, and reached into his long canvas coat, and drew out something small.
"Well now," he said. "If that's the way of it. If you're wantin' a serious little tool for the one bad night, and you're wantin' to go grey, unseen, nothin' showin', then that beautiful Colt of mine's no good to you at all. Seven inches of barrel on your hip, you might as well carry a flag. No."
He held out his hand across the firelight. "You want somethin' like this."
In his weathered palm sat a revolver. Small.
Stubby. Nothing like the long elegant Colt.
It was stainless steel, a snub-nosed thing with a short barrel barely longer than the cylinder, a compact grip, the whole gun no bigger than his hand, riding in a soft black nylon holster made for tucking away out of sight.
"Ruger SP101," the old man said. "Which I carried on account of the name amused me, a Ruger for a fella called Ruger.
Little five-shot snubby. Thirty-eight'll fire in it, but she's chambered for the three fifty-seven Magnum, which is a serious round, son, a real serious round, more than a match for those forties and nines you were shootin' today.
Out of this short barrel it barks like the devil and kicks like a mule, and it's only five shots, and it's slow to reload." He turned it in his palm so the firelight ran along the stainless. "But it's small. Small enough to vanish.
Small enough to ride in a pocket or the small of your back and never print, never show, never once tell a soul you're carryin'.
It's a grey man's gun if ever there was one.
Nothin' about you says armed. Right up until the one bad night, when it surely does."
Francis looked at the little revolver.
"That's a concealment gun," he said, understanding. "You could carry that and nobody'd ever know."
"Nobody'd ever know," Ruger agreed. "Which is the whole point of it, and exactly what you just described needin'. A serious tool that stays invisible. Five rounds of somethin' that hits hard, tucked where no one sees, for the night the grey runs out."
He held it out further. "Take it. I've got the Colt, and I love her more than I ought to love a hunk of steel, and I'm too old and too fond of her to change my ways. This little one's just been ridin' in my coat waitin' for a hand that had a use for it. Yours does."
Francis took the little revolver.
It was heavy for its size, dense, the stainless cool in his palm.
It disappeared in his hand in a way the long Colt never could, in a way even the Glocks couldn't.
He could feel already how it would ride hidden, how a man could carry this and be, to every eye, unarmed.
A nobody. A grey man with a hard secret.
"There's a catch," Ruger said. "Same catch as always, these days. Ammo. I've got maybe a dozen rounds for it. Twelve. That's all. Three fifty-seven's not common and I never found more, so what I've got is what there is, and when it's gone, it's a stainless paperweight."
He looked at Francis steady. "So it's the same lesson the old gal's been teachin' you. Every round is a round you'll never replace. Five in the gun, seven in your pocket, and that's your whole war, out there, if it ever comes to the gun at all. Which, God willin',
bein' as grey as you're plannin' to be, it won't."
Francis closed his hand around the little revolver.
Twelve rounds. Five in the cylinder, seven in reserve. A hard, hidden, last-card tool for the one night the grey failed.
"Thank you," he said, and looked up at the old man who had walked up his road an hour ago a stranger and was already, somehow, one of them. "This is exactly what I needed and I didn't even know how to ask for it. Thank you, Ruger."
"Don't thank me," Ruger said. "Just come back. That's how you thank a man for a gun, out here. You take it, and you use it if you have to, and you come back alive to give it back. That's the only thanks worth anything."
His pale old eyes were steady. "You've got a boy.
I've watched him watch you all evenin'. Whatever you're plannin' out there on that killin' ground, you come back to that boy. Everything else is just details."
And Francis looked across the fire at his son, half asleep against Maya, safe and warm and fed, the reason for all of it, and he closed his hand around the little hidden gun that would go out onto Combine ground with him, and he made the old man a promise he intended with everything in him to keep.
"I'll come back," Francis said. "I always come back to him. Always."
But even as he said it, out beyond the firelight, out past the fence and the fields and the long dark road, the plain stretched away toward the east, toward the warehouse where a soft man in wire glasses was counting his fuel and his trucks and his guns,
and building his patient wolf's kingdom farm by frightened farm, and Francis knew that somewhere out in that dark, the war for the harvest was already turning, slow and cold and certain, toward the two of them.
And that soon, very soon, he would have to walk out into it alone.