“Jimmy stole the horses back!” the girl said proudly. “He’s mighty brave, Jimmy is! He’s my brother!”
Clanahan swallowed. “Reckon he is, little lady. I shore reckon.”
“He got him an Injun out there,” Smith offered. “Dead center.”
“I did?” The boy was excited and proud. “I guess,” he added a little self-consciously, “I get to put a notch on my rifle now!”
* * *
BRONCO STARTED AND stared at Red, and the big man hunkered down, the sunlight glinting on his rust-red hair.
“Son, don’t yuh put no notch on yore rifle, nor ever on yore gun. That there’s a tinhorn trick, and you ain’t no tinhorn. Anyway,” he added thoughtfully, “I guess killin’ a man ain’t nothin’ to be proud of, not even an Injun. Even when it has to be did.”
The Dutchman shifted uneasily, glancing at the back trail. Yaqui Joe, after the manner of his people, was not worried. He squatted on his heels and lighted a cigarette, drowsing in the hot, still afternoon.
“We better be gettin’ on,” Clanahan said, straightening. “Them shots will be callin’ more Injuns. I reckon you two got to get to Kitchen’s all right, and this is no country to be travelin’ with no girl, no matter how good a shot yuh are. That Victorio’s a he-wolf. We better get on.”
“Won’t do no good, Red,” Smith said suddenly. “Here they come!”
“Gleason?”
“No. More ’Paches!”
A shot’s flat sound dropped into the stillness and heat, and the ripples of its widening circle of sound echoed from the rocks. Joe hit the ground with his face twisted.
“Got me!” he grunted, staring at the torn flesh of his calf and the crimson of the blood staining his leg and the torn pants.
Clanahan rolled over on his stomach behind a thick clump of creosote bush and shifted his Winchester. The basin echoed with the flat, absentminded reports of the guns. Silence hung heavy in the heat waves for minutes at a time, and then a gun boomed and the stillness was spread apart by a sound that was almost a physical blow.
Sweat trickled into Red’s eyes and they smarted bitterly. He dug into his belt loops and laid out a neat row of cartridges. Once, glancing around, Red saw that the little girl was bandaging Joe’s leg while the Yaqui stared in puzzled astonishment at her agile, white fingers.
Out on the lip of the basin a brown leg showed briefly against the brown sand. Warned by the movement, Clanahan pointed a finger of lead and the Apache reared up, and the Dutchman’s Henry boomed.
It was very hot. A bullet kicked sand into Red’s eyes and mouth. His worn shirt smelled of the heat and of stale sweat. He scratched his jaw where it itched and peered down across the little knoll.
Across the basin a rifle sounded, and Smith’s body tensed sharply and he gave out a long “Aaahh!” of sound, drawn out and deep. Red turned his head toward his friend and the movement drew three quick shots that showered him with gravel. He rolled over, changing position.
Bronco Smith had taken a bullet through the top of the shoulder as he lay on his stomach in the sand, and it had buried itself deep within him, penetrating a lung, by the look of the froth on his lips.
Smith spat and turned his eyes toward Red. “Anyhow,” he said hoarsely, “we put one over on Gleason.”
“Yeah.”
Red shifted his Winchester, and when an Apache slithered forward, he caught him in the side with a bullet, then shifted his fire again.
Then for a long time nothing seemed to happen. A dust devil danced in from the waste of the desert and beat out its heart in a clump of ironwood. Red turned his head cautiously and looked at the boy. “How’s it, son? Hotter’n blazes, ain’t it?”
Later, the afternoon seemed to catch a hint from the purple horizon and began to lower its sun more rapidly. The nearby rocks took on a pastel pink that faded, and in the fading light the Apaches gambled on a rush.
Guns from the hollow boomed, and two Indians dropped, and then another. The rest vanished as if by a strong wind, but they were out there waiting. Clanahan shifted his position cautiously, fed shells into his gun, and remembered a black-eyed girl in Juarez.
A lizard, crawling from a rock, its tiny body quivering with heat and the excited beat of its little heart as it stared in mute astonishment at the rust-red head of the big man with the rifle.
* * *
SHERIFF BILL GLEASON drew up. When morning found the posse far into the desert, he decided he would ride forward until noon, and then turn back. The men who rode with him were nervous about their families and homes, and to go farther would lead to out-and-out mutiny. It was now mid-morning, and the tracks still held west.
“Clanahan’s crazy!” Eckles, the storekeeper in Cholla, said. He was a talkative man, and had been the last to see and the first to mention that Big Red was on a trail. “What’s he headin’ west for? His only chance is south!”
Ollie Weedin, one of the Cholla townsmen, nudged Gleason. “Buzzards, Bill. Look!”
“Let’s go,” Gleason said, feeling something tighten up within him. The four they trailed were curly wolves who had cut their teeth on hot lead, but in the Apache country it was different.
“Serves ’em right if the Injuns got ’em!” Eckles said irritably. “Cussed thieves!”
Weedin glanced at him in distaste. “Better men than you’ll ever be, Eckles!”
The storekeeper looked at Weedin, shocked. “Why, they are thieves!” he exclaimed indignantly.
“Shore,” someone said, “but sometimes these days the line is hard to draw. They took a wrong turn, somewheres. That Clanahan was a good man with a rope.”
In the hollow band of hills where the trail led, they saw a lone gray gelding, standing drowsily near a clump of mesquite. And then they saw the dark, still forms on the ground as their horses walked forward. No man among them but had seen this before, the payoff where Indian met white man and both trails were washed out in blood and gun smoke.
“They done some shootin’!” Weedin said. “Four Apaches on this side.”
“Five,” Gleason said. “There’s one beyond that clump of greasewood.”
A movement brought their guns up, and then they stopped. A slim boy with a shock of corn-colored hair stood silently awaiting them in sun-faded jeans and checkered shirt. Beside him was a knobby-kneed girl who clutched his sleeve.
“We’re all that’s left, mister,” the boy said.
Gleason glanced around. The eyes of Yaqui Joe stared into the bright sun, still astonished at the white fingers that had bandaged his leg in probably the only kindness he had ever experienced. He had been shot twice in the chest, aside from the leg wound.
Bronco Smith lay where he had taken his bullet, the gravel at his mouth dark with stain.
The Dutchman, placid in death as in life, held a single shell in his stiff fingers and the breech of his rifle was open.
Gleason glanced around, but said nothing. He turned at the excited yell from Eckles. “Here’s the bank’s money! On these dead mules!”
Ollie Weedin stole a glance at the sheriff, but said nothing. Eckles looked around and started to speak, but at Weedin’s hard glare he hesitated, and swallowed.
“It was one buster of a fight,” somebody said.
“There’s seventeen Injuns dead,” the boy offered. “None got away.”
“When did this fight end, boy?” Gleason asked.
“Last night, about dusk. They was six of ’em first. I got me one, and he got two or three with a six-shooter. Then they was more come, and a fight kind of close up. I couldn’t see, as it was purty dark, but it didn’t last long.”
Gleason looked at him and chewed his mustache. “Where’d that last fight take place, son?” he asked.
“Yonder.”
Silently the men trooped over. There was a lot of blood around and the ground badly ripped up. Both Indians there were dead, one killed with his own knife.
Weedin stole a cautious look around, but the other men look
ed uncomfortable and, after a moment of hesitation, began to troop back toward their horses. Gleason noticed the boy’s eyes shoot a quick, frightened glance toward a clump of brush and rocks, but ignored it.
Ollie shifted his feet.
“Reckon we better get started, Bill? Wouldn’t want no running fight with those kids with us.”
He hesitated, briefly. The scarred ground held his eyes and he scowled, as if trying to read some message in the marks of the battle. Then he turned and walked toward his horse.
All of them avoided glancing toward the steeldust, and if anyone saw the sheriff’s canteen slip from his hand and lie on the sand forgotten, they said nothing.
Eckles glanced once at the horse that dozed by the mesquite, but before he could speak his eyes met Ollie Weedin’s and he gulped and looked hastily away. They moved off then, and no man turned to look back. Eckles forced a chuckle.
“Well, kid,” he said to the boy, “yuh’ve killed yuh some Injuns, so I reckon youh’ll be carvin’ a notch or two on your rifle now.”
The boy shook his head stiffly. “Not me,” he said scornfully. “That’s a tinhorn’s trick!”
Gleason looked over at Ollie and smiled. “Yuh got a chaw, Ollie?”
“Shore haven’t, Bill. Reckon I must have lost mine, back yonder.”
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), Valley of the Sun, 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
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
VALLEY OF THE SUN
A Bantam Book / December 2004
PUBLISHING HISTORY
Bantam hardcover edition published May 1995
Bantam paperback edition / April 1996
All rights reserved.
Copyright © 1995 by Louis & Katherine L’Amour Trust
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