If you see a man walking down the street with a beautiful girl, don’t accept the fact that she goes willingly. He may have a gun in his pocket. Don’t hesitate to walk right up and accuse him. You’ll have adventure!
Let Me Forget…
Let me forget the dark seas rolling,
The taste of wind, the lure and lift
Of far, blue-shrouded shores;
No longer let the wild wind’s singing
Build high the waves in this
My heart’s own storm;
Now let me quietly work, for I have songs.
Let not my blood beat answer to the sea…
The beaches lie alone, so let them lie.
Let me forget the gray-banked distant hills,
The echoing emptiness of ancient towns;
No longer let the brown leaves falling
Move me to wander…I have songs to sing.
Afterword
* * *
DAD SAID HE felt that he had lived two lives, each one full of success and failure and each almost long enough to satisfy most men. He left home to work partway through the tenth grade and his wanderlust—a very appropriate word in his case—kept him traveling until he was almost forty. At that time he decided that there had been too much water under the bridge and he’d better settle down and make a living as a writer.
The material for the stories in this book came from that twenty-three-year period between leaving his parents’ home and finding one of his own. The short poems at the beginning and end of this collection are a good indication of how he felt at the beginning and later the ending of this period.
Two years ago, only a couple of months before Dad caught pneumonia (an early indication of his cancer), Dad and I were on our way back from Hovenweep, Utah after a photo session for the jacket of The Haunted Mesa. We were racketing along a washboarded dirt road when Dad saw a dim trail cutting off across the top of the mesa. “Let’s see where it goes,” he said. I shifted into four-wheel drive and we spent the next hour fighting the red Utah sand out to a broken windmill in the middle of nowhere. Even at seventy-eight years old, Louis L’Amour could give his heart, freely, to a bend in the road.
BEAU L’AMOUR
Thanksgiving Afternoon 1988
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), Yondering, 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
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
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
YONDERING
A Bantam Book / October 2004
PUBLISHING HISTORY
Bantam edition published June 1980
Revised Bantam edition / November 1989
Bantam reissue / July 1994
All rights reserved.
Copyright © 1980, 1989 by Louis L’Amour Enterprises Inc.
Forward copyright © 1989 by Beau L’Amour
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher, except
where permitted by law. For information address:
Bantam Books New York, New York.
Bantam Books and the rooster colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
eISBN 0-553-90023-4
Please visit our website at www.bantamdell.com
v1.0
Table of Contents
Cover page
Title page
Deadly Voyage
Dedication
Foreword
Introduction
Epigraph
Where There’s Fighting
The Dancing Kate
By The Ruins Of El Walarieh
Glorious! Glorious!
Dead-End Drift
Old Doc Yak
Survival
And Proudly Die
Show Me The Way To Go Home
Thicker Than Blood
The Admiral
Shanghai, Not Without Gestures
The Man Who Stole Shakespeare
A Friend Of The General
Author’s Tea
So You Want Adventure, Do You?
Let Me Forget …
Afterword
About the Author
Bantam Books by Louis L’Amour
Copyright Page