Nagant M1895 Officer Carbine Deadeve
NAGANT M1895 OFFICER CARBINE DEADEYE. (See also, NAGANT M1895, NAGANT M1895 OFFICER CARBINE DEADEYE) This modified Nagant adds a telescopic sight to the original Russian-designed double-action Nagant Officer Carbine.
Journal of James Byrne
Handwritten, original
Incomplete, chronology could not be determined
1/?
Death old friend, eternal rival, shadow that plagues my steps. Why can we not meet on friendly terms? I am certain we would have much to discuss. I saw you so many times during the war. When I tried to tell the others, after, they looked at me strangely and told me about the hallucinations, so common among those as badly injured as I, having lost so much blood, longing for death.
But were they really hallucinations? I saw soldiers breath leave their bodies and float toward the night sky like moths. I saw you walk among them, and reach out your hand, allowing injured men to lean upon your shoulder as you walked with them from the field. Their bodies remained, gored and bloody, on the cold ground, and yet at the same time, they walked with you. Hundreds of you, walking. Singing. I saw it, and I will never forget it.
But you did not see me. You did not offer me your hand. I begged for you to take me too. Yet you passed me by, as if you could not see me. Perhaps the living are but ghosts to you, only taking form once they have crossed over your shadowy threshold. And though you would not take me with you, you raced me home and took my Agatha and my Mary instead. You left me here to weep alone over my own unopened letter, on the stoop of an empty house.
The wound festers. I must turn my mind to other things.
Last night a man named Finch approached me. He said he understood my plight and then, cryptically, that he could help me. What plight, I asked him. The song, he said. Not a man of many words, and likely a madman. But if so, he is a well-dressed madman - he carried upon him a fine scoped Centennial and is clearly a man of taste and means! Perhaps, in him, I can seek patronage. If it is indeed my songs that interest him. He would say no more, but we have arranged to meet tomorrow evening, and I admit to feeling the first spark of hope in many months.
