“How do you do?” she said, then smiled at his surprise. “Yes, I speak the English, although not well.” Later, when he was bathed and shaved, he walked into the wide old room where she sat and she told him that when fourteen, she had been adopted by the Spanish woman who had lived here before her. She had been educated at home, then at school, and finally had married a young Mexican. He died when he was fifty, but she had stayed on at the ranch, godmother to her tribe.
Uneasily, Mooney glanced through the wide door at the long table that had been set in an adjoining room. “I ain’t much on society, ma’am,” he said. “I reckon I’ve lived in cow camps too long, among men-folks.”
“It’s nothing,” she said. “There will come someone tonight whom I wish you to meet. Soon he goes north, over the old Smuggler’s Crossing into the Chisos Mountains beyond the Rio Grande, and then to San Antonio. You can go with him, and so to your own country.”
Suddenly, she started to talk to him of cattle and of Wyoming and Montana. Startled, he answered her questions and described the country. She must have been sixty at least, although Tarahumara women, he had noticed, rarely looked anywhere near their true ages, preserving their youth until very old. She seemed sharp and well informed, and he gathered that she owned a ranch in Texas, and was thinking of sending a herd over the trail to Wyoming.
Suddenly, she turned on him. “Señor, you are a kind man. You are also a courageous one. You seem to know much of cattle and of your homeland. We of the Tarahumara do not forget quickly, but that does not matter now. You will take my herd north. You will settle it on land in Wyoming, buying what you need, you will be foreman of my ranch there.”
Mooney was stunned. He started to protest, then relaxed. Why should he protest? He was a cattleman, she was a shrewd and intelligent woman. Behind her questioning there had been a lot of good sense, and certainly, it was a windfall for him. At twenty-seven he had nothing but his saddle, a horse and a burro—and experience.
“I am not a fool, señor,” she said abruptly. “You know cattle, you know men. You have courage and consideration. Also, you know your own country best. There is much riches in cattle, but the grass of the northland fattens them best. This is good for you, I know that. It is also good for me. Who else do I know who knows your land of grass and snow?”
When he gathered his things together, she saw the skin-wrapped package. Taking it in her graceful brown fingers she cut the threads and lifted from the skin an image, not quite six inches high, of solid gold.
Mooney stared at it. Now where did those Indians get anything like that?
“From the caves,” she told him when he spoke his thought. “For years we find them. Sometimes one here, sometimes one there. Perhaps at one time they were all together, somewhere. It is Aztec, I think, or Toltec. One does not know. It is ver’ rich, this thing.”
When dinner was over he stood on the edge of the patio with Juan Cabrizo. He was a slim, wiry young man with a hard, handsome face. “She is shrewd, the Old One,” he said. “She makes money! She makes it like that!” He snapped his fingers. “I work for her as my father worked for old Aguila, who adopted her. She was ver’ beautiful as a young girl.” His eyes slanted toward Mooney. “This Don Pedro? You must be careful, si? Ver’ careful. He is a proud and angry man. I think he knows where you are.”
At daybreak they rode northeast, and Cabrizo led the way, winding through canyons, coming suddenly upon saddles, crossing ranges into long empty valleys. For two days they rode, and on the second night as they sat by a carefully shielded fire, Mooney nodded at it, “Is that necessary? You think this Don Pedro might come this far?”
Cabrizo shrugged. “I think only the Rio Grande will stop him. He is a man who knows how to hate, amigo, and you have faced him down before his vaqueros. For this he must have your heart.”
There were miles of sun and riding, miles when the sweat soaked his shirt and the dust caked his face and rimmed his eyes. And then there was a cantina at Santa Teresa.
Juan lifted a glass to him at the bar of the cantina. “Soon, señor, tomorrow perhaps, you will cross into your own country! To a happy homecoming!”
Tensleep Mooney looked at his glass, then tossed it off. It was taking a chance, going back into Texas, but still, he had crossed the border from Arizona, and they no doubt would not guess he was anywhere around. Moreover, he had crossed as an outlaw, now he returned as a master of three thousand head of cattle.
“Señor!” Cabrizo hissed. “Have a care! It is he!”
Tensleep Mooney turned slowly. Don Pedro had come in the door and with him were four men.
Mooney put down his glass and stepped swiftly around the table. Don Pedro turned to face him, squinting his eyes in the bright light. And then the barrel of Mooney’s gun touched his belt and he froze, instantly aware. “You’re a long ways from home, Don Pedro,” he said. “You chasin’ another Indian?”
“No, señor,” Don Pedro’s eyes flashed. “I chase you! And now I have caught you.”
“Or I’ve caught you. Which does it look like?”
“I have fifty men!”
“An’ if they make one move, you also have, like I warned you before, a bellyful of lead.”
Don Pedro stood still, raging at his helplessness. His men stood around, not daring to move. “Perhaps you are right,” he admitted coldly. “Because I am not so skillful with the gun as you.”
“You have another weapon?”
“I?” Don Pedro laughed. “I like the knife, señor. I wish I could have you here with the knife, alone!”
Tensleep chuckled suddenly, the old lust for battle rising in his throat like a strong wine, stirring in his veins. “Why, sure! Tell your men we will fight here, with the knife. If I win, I am to go free.”
Don Pedro stared at him, incredulous. “You would dare, señor?”
“Will they obey you? Is your word good?”
“My word?” Don Pedro’s nostrils flared. “Will they obey me?” He wheeled on them, and in a torrent of Spanish told them what they would do.
Cabrizo said, “He tells them, amigo. He tells them true, but this you must not. It is a way you would die.”
Coolly, Mooney shucked his gun belts and placed them on the bar beside Cabrizo. Then from a scabbard inside his belt he drew his bowie knife. “The gent that first used this knife,” he said, “killed eight men with it without gettin’ out of bed where he was sick. I reckon I can slit the gullet of one man!”
Don Pedro was tall, he was lean and wiry as a whip, and he moved across the floor like a dancer. Mooney grinned and his slate-gray eyes danced with a hard light.
Pedro stepped in quickly, light glancing off his knife blade, stepped in, then thrust! And Mooney caught the blade with his own bowie and turned it aside. Pedro tried again, and Mooney again caught the blade and they stood chest to chest, their knives crossed at the guard. Mooney laughed suddenly and exerting all the power in his big, work-hardened shoulders, thrust the Mexican away from him. Pedro staggered back, then fell to a sitting position.
Furious, he leaped to his feet and lunged, blind with rage. Mooney side-stepped, slipped, and hit the floor on his shoulder. Pedro sprang at him but Mooney came up on one hand and stabbed up. He felt the knife strike, felt it slide open in the stomach of Don Pedro, and then for one long minute their eyes held. Not a foot apart, Don Pedro’s whole weight on the haft of Mooney’s knife. “Bueno!” Don Pedro said hoarsely. “As God wills!” Slowly, horribly, he turned his eyes toward his men. “Go home!” he said in Spanish. “Go home to my brother. It was my word!”
Carefully, Tensleep Mooney lowered the body to the floor and withdrew the knife. Already the man was dead. “What kind of cussedness is it,” he said, “that gets into a man? He had nerve enough.” But remembering the Indian, he could find no honest regret for Pedro, only that this had happened.
“Come, amigo,” Cabrizo said softly, “it is better we go. It is a long ride to Wyoming, no?”
“A long ride,�
�� Tensleep Mooney agreed, “an’ I’ll be glad to get home.”
About Louis L’Amour
* * *
“I think of myself in the oral tradition—
as a troubadour, a village tale-teller, the man
in the shadows of the campfire. That’s the way
I’d like to be remembered as a storyteller.
A good storyteller.”
IT IS DOUBTFUL that any author could be as at home in the world re-created in his novels as Louis Dearborn L’Amour. Not only could he physically fill the boots of the rugged characters he wrote about, but he literally “walked the land my characters walk.” His personal experiences as well as his lifelong devotion to historical research combined to give Mr. L’Amour the unique knowledge and understanding of people, events, and the challenge of the American frontier that became the hallmarks of his popularity.
Of French-Irish descent, Mr. L’Amour could trace his own family in North America back to the early 1600s and follow their steady progression westward, “always on the frontier.” As a boy growing up in Jamestown, North Dakota, he absorbed all he could about his family’s frontier heritage, including the story of his great-grandfather who was scalped by Sioux warriors.
Spurred by an eager curiosity and desire to broaden his horizons, Mr. L’Amour left home at the age of fifteen and enjoyed a wide variety of jobs including seaman, lumberjack, elephant handler, skinner of dead cattle, miner, and an officer in the transportation corps during World War II. During his “yondering” days he also circled the world on a freighter, sailed a dhow on the Red Sea, was shipwrecked in the West Indies and stranded in the Mojave Desert. He won fifty-one of fifty-nine fights as a professional boxer and worked as a journalist and lecturer. He was a voracious reader and collector of rare books. His personal library contained 17,000 volumes.
Mr. L’Amour “wanted to write almost from the time I could talk.” After developing a widespread following for his many frontier and adventure stories written for fiction magazines, Mr. L’Amour published his first full-length novel, Hondo, in the United States in 1953. Every one of his more than 120 books is in print; there are nearly 270 million copies of his books in print worldwide, making him one of the best-selling authors in modern literary history. His books have been translated into twenty languages, and more than forty-five of his novels and stories have been made into feature films and television movies.
His hardcover bestsellers include The Lonesome Gods, The Walking Drum (his twelfth-century historical novel), Long Ride Home, Last of the Breed, and The Haunted Mesa. His memoir, Education of a Wandering Man, was a leading bestseller in 1989. Audio dramatizations and adaptations of many L’Amour stories are available on cassette tapes from Bantam Audio publishing.
The recipient of many great honors and awards, in 1983 Mr. L’Amour became the first novelist ever to be awarded the Congressional Gold Medal by the United States Congress in honor of his life’s work. In 1984 he was also awarded the Medal of Freedom by President Reagan.
Louis L’Amour died on June 10, 1988. His wife, Kathy, and their two children, Beau and Angelique, carry the L’Amour publishing tradition forward.
Bantam Books by Louis L’Amour
NOVELS
Bendigo Shafter
Borden Chantry
Brionne
The Broken Gun
The Burning Hills
The Californios
Callaghen
Catlow
Chancy
The Cherokee Trail
Comstock Lode
Conagher
Crossfire Trail
Dark Canyon
Down the Long Hills
The Empty Land
Fair Blows the Wind
Fallon
The Ferguson Rifle
The First Fast Draw
Flint
Guns of the Timberlands
Hanging Woman Creek
The Haunted Mesa
Heller with a Gun
The High Graders
High Lonesome
Hondo
How the West Was Won
The Iron Marshal
The Key-Lock Man
Kid Rodelo
Kilkenny
Killoe
Kilrone
Kiowa Trail
Last of the Breed
Last Stand at Papago Wells
The Lonesome Gods
The Man Called Noon
The Man from Skibbereen
The Man from the Broken Hills
Matagorda
Milo Talon
The Mountain Valley War
North to the Rails
Over on the Dry Side
Passin’ Through
The Proving Trail
The Quick and the Dead
Radigan
Reilly’s Luck
The Rider of Lost Creek
Rivers West
The Shadow Riders
Shalako
Showdown at Yellow Butte
Silver Canyon
Sitka
Son of a Wanted Man
Taggart
The Tall Stranger
To Tame a Land
Tucker
Under the Sweetwater Rim
Utah Blaine
The Walking Drum
Westward the Tide
Where the Long Grass Blows
SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS
Beyond the Great Snow Mountains
Bowdrie
Bowdrie’s Law
Buckskin Run
Dutchman’s Flat
End of the Drive
From the Listening Hills
The Hills of Homicide
Law of the Desert Born
Long Ride Home
Lonigan
May There Be a Road
Monument Rock
Night over the Solomons
Off the Mangrove Coast
The Outlaws of Mesquite
The Rider of the Ruby Hills
Riding for the Brand
The Strong Shall Live
The Trail to Crazy Man
Valley of the Sun
War Party
West from Singapore
West of Dodge
With These Hands
Yondering
SACKETT TITLES
Sackett’s Land
To the Far Blue Mountains
The Warrior’s Path
Jubal Sackett
Ride the River
The Daybreakers
Sackett
Lando
Mojave Crossing
Mustang Man
The Lonely Men
Galloway
Treasure Mountain
Lonely on the Mountain
Ride the Dark Trail
The Sackett Brand
The Sky-Liners
THE HOPALONG CASSIDY NOVELS
The Riders of the High Rock
The Rustlers of West Fork
The Trail to Seven Pines
Trouble Shooter
NONFICTION
Education of a Wandering Man
Frontier
The Sackett Companion: A Personal Guide to the Sackett Novels
A Trail of Memories: The Quotations of Louis L’Amour, compiled by Angelique L’Amour
POETRY
Smoke from This Altar
LONG RIDE HOME
A Bantam Book / March 2005
PUBLISHING HISTORY
Bantam edition published October 1989
Bantam reissue / March 1998
All rights reserved
Copyright © by Louis & Katherine L’Amour Trust
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antam Books and the rooster colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
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