Reverend Sanderson looked stricken, and that morning he talked in a low voice, speaking quietly and sincerely but lacking his usual force. “Perhaps,” he said as we left, “perhaps it is we who are wrong. The Lord gives the power of miracles to but few.”
“There are many kinds of miracles,” Brennen replied, “and one miracle is to find a sane, solid man in a town that’s running after a red wagon.”
As the three of us walked up the street together we heard the great rolling voice of Brother Elisha: “And I say unto you that the gift of life to Brother Colvin was but a sign, for on the morning of the coming Sabbath we shall go hence to the last resting place of your loved ones, and there I shall cause them all to be raised, and they shall live again, and take their places among you as of old!”
You could have dropped a feather. We stood on the street in back of his congregation and we heard what he said, but we didn’t believe it, we couldn’t believe it.
He was going to bring back the dead.
Brother Elisha, who had brought Ed Colvin back to life, was now going to empty the cemetery, returning to life all those who had passed on…and some who had been helped.
“The Great Day has come!” He lifted his long arms and spread them wide, and his sonorous voice rolled against the mountains. “And men shall live again for the Glory of All Highest! Your wives, your mothers, your brothers and fathers, they shall walk beside you again!”
And then he led them into the singing of a hymn and the three of us walked away.
That was the quietest Sunday Red Horse ever knew. Not a whisper, all day long. Folks were scared, they were happy, they were inspired. The townsfolk walked as if under a spell.
Strangely, it was Ed Colvin who said it. Colvin, the man who had gone to the great beyond and returned…although he claimed he had no memory of anything after his fall.
Brace was talking about the joy of seeing his wife again, and Ed said quietly, “You’ll also be seeing your mother-in-law.”
Brace’s mouth opened and closed twice before he could say anything at all, and then he didn’t want to talk. He stood there like somebody had exploded a charge of powder under his nose, and then he turned sharply around and walked off.
“I’ve got more reason than any of you to be thankful,” Ed said, his eyes downcast. “But I’m just not sure this is all for the best.”
We all glanced at each other. “Think about it.” Ed got up, looking kind of embarrassed. “What about you, Ralston? You’ll have to go back to work. Do you think your uncle will stand for you loafing and spending the money he worked so hard to get?”
“That’s right,” I agreed, “you’ll have to give it all back.”
Ralston got mad. He started to shout that he wouldn’t do any such thing, and anyway, if his uncle came back now he would be a changed man, he wouldn’t care for money any longer, he—
“You don’t believe that,” Brennen said. “You know darned well that uncle of yours was the meanest skinflint in this part of the country. Nothing would change him.”
Ralston went away from there. Seemed to me he wanted to do some thinking.
When I turned to leave, Brennen said, “Where are you going?”
“Well,” I said, “seems to me I’d better oil up my six-shooters. There’s three men in that Boot Hill that I put there. Looks like I’ll have it to do over.”
He laughed. “You aren’t falling for this, are you?”
“Colvin sounds mighty lively to me,” I said, “and come Sunday morning Brother Elisha has got to put up or shut up.”
“You don’t believe that their time in the hereafter will have changed those men you killed.”
“Brennen,” I said, “if I know the Hame brothers, they’ll come out of their graves like they went into them. They’ll come a-shootin’.”
There had been no stage for several days as the trail had been washed out by a flash flood, and the town was quiet and it was scared. Completely cut off from the outside, all folks could do was wait and get more and more frightened as the Great Day approached. At first everybody had been filled with happiness at the thought of the dead coming back, and then suddenly, like Brace and Ralston, everybody was taking another thought.
There was the Widow McCann who had buried three husbands out there, all of them fighters and all of them mean. There were a dozen others with reason to give the matter some thought, and I knew at least two who were packed and waiting for the first stage out of town.
Brace dropped in at the saloon for his first drink since Brother Elisha started to preach. He hadn’t shaved and he looked mighty mean. “Why’d he pick on this town?” he burst out. “When folks are dead they should be left alone. Nobody has a right to interfere with nature thataway.”
Brennen mopped his bar, saying nothing at all.
Ed Colvin dropped around. “Wish that stage would start running. I want to leave town. Folks treat me like I was some kind of freak.”
“Stick around,” Brennen said. “Come Sunday the town will be filled with folks like you. A good carpenter will be able to stay busy, so busy he won’t care what folks say about him. Take Streeter there. He’ll need a new house now that his brother will be wanting his house back.”
Streeter slammed his glass on the bar. “All right, damn it!” he shouted angrily. “I’ll build my own house!”
Ralston motioned to me and we walked outside. Brace was there, and Streeter joined us. “Look,” Ralston whispered, “Brace and me, we’ve talked it over. Maybe if we were to talk to Brother Elisha…maybe he’d call the whole thing off.”
“Are you crazy?” I asked.
His eyes grew mean. “You want to try those Hame boys again? Seems to me you came out mighty lucky the last time. How do you know you’ll be so lucky again? Those boys were pure-dee poison.”
That was gospel truth, but I stood there chewing my cigar a minute and then said, “No chance. He wouldn’t listen to us.”
Ed Colvin had come up. “A man doing good works,” he said, “might be able to use a bit of money. Although I suppose it would take quite a lot.”
Brace stood a little straighter but when he turned to Colvin, the carpenter was hurrying off down the street. When I turned around there was Brennen leaning on the doorjamb, and he was smiling.
Friday night when I was making my rounds I saw somebody slipping up the back stairs of the hotel, and for a moment his face was in the light from a window. It was Brace.
Later, I saw Ralston hurrying home from the direction of the hotel, and you’d be surprised at some of the folks I spotted slipping up those back stairs to commune with Brother Elisha. Even Streeter, and even Damon.
Watching Damon come down those back stairs I heard a sound behind me and turned to see Brennen standing there in the dark. “Seems a lot of folks are starting to think this resurrection of the dead isn’t an unmixed blessing.”
“You know something?” I said thoughtfully. “Nobody has been atop that hill since Brother Elisha started his walks. I think I’ll just meander up there and have a look around.”
“You’ve surprised me,” Brennen said. “I wouldn’t have expected you to be a churchgoing man. You’re accustomed to sinful ways.”
“Why, now,” I said, “when I come into a town to live, I go to church. If the preacher is a man who shouts against things, I never go back. I like a man who’s for something.
“Like you know, I’ve been marshal here and there, but never had much trouble with folks. I leave their politics and religion be. Folks can think the way they want, act the way they please, even to acting the fool. All I ask is they don’t make too much noise and don’t interfere with other people.
“They call me a peace officer, and I try to keep the peace. If a growed-up man gets himself into a game with a crooked gambl
er, I don’t bother them…if he hasn’t learned up to then, he may learn, and if he doesn’t learn, nothing I tell him will do him any good.”
“You think Colvin was really dead?”
“Doc said so.”
“Suppose he was hypnotized? Suppose he wasn’t really dead at all?”
After Brennen went to bed I saddled up and rode out of town. Circling around the mountain I rode up to where Brother Elisha used to go to pray. Brennen had left me with a thought, and Doc had been drinking a better brand of whiskey lately.
Brace had drawn money from the bank, and so had Ralston, and old Mrs. Greene had been digging out in her hen coop, and knowing about those tin cans she buried there after her husband died kind of sudden, I had an idea what she was digging up.
I made tracks. I had some communicatin’ to do and not many hours to do it in.
I spent most of those hours in the saddle. Returning to Red Horse the way I did brought me to a place where the trail forked, and one way led over behind that mountain with the burnt-off slope. When I had my horse out of sight I drew up and waited.
It was just growing gray when a rider came down the mountain trail and stopped at the forks. It was Ed Colvin.
We hadn’t anything to talk about right at the moment so I just kept out of sight in the brush and then followed. He seemed like he was going to meet somebody and I had a suspicion it was Brother Elisha. And it was.
“You got it?” Ed Colvin asked.
“Of course. I told you we could fool these yokels. Now let’s—”
When I stepped out of the brush I was holding a shotgun. I said, “The way of the transgressor is hard. Give me those saddlebags, Delbert.”
Brother Elisha stared at me. “I fear there is some mistake,” he said with dignity. “I am Brother Elisha.”
“I found those cans and sacks up top of the hill. The ones where you kept your grub and the grass seed you scattered.” I stepped in closer.
“You are Delbert Johnson,” I added, “and the wires over at Russian Junction say you used to deal a crooked game of faro in Mobeetie. Now give me the saddlebags.”
The reverend has a new church now, and a five-room frame parsonage to replace his tiny cabin. The dead of Red Horse sleep peacefully and there is a new iron fence around the cemetery to keep them securely inside. Brennen still keeps his saloon, but he also passes the collection plate of a Sunday, and the results are far better than they used to be.
There was a lot of curiosity as to where the reverend came by the money to do the building, and the good works that followed. Privately, the reverend told Brennen and me about a pair of saddlebags he found inside the parsonage door that Sunday morning. But when anyone else asked him he had an answer ready.
“The ravens have provided,” he would say, smiling gently, “as they did for Elijah.”
Nobody asked any more questions.
Beau L’Amour
June 2019
To
WINDY SLIM:
Who Knew Every Side-Track West
of the Mississippi
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
The Collected Short Stories of Louis L’Amour (vols. 1–7)
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 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
LOST TREASURES
Louis L’Amour’s Lost Treasures: Volume 1
No Traveller Returns
ABOUT LOUIS L’AMOUR
“I think of myself in the oral tradition— as a troubadour, a village taleteller, 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.
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 a 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 officer in the Transportation Corps during World War II. He was a voracious reader and collector of 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 the many frontier and adventure stories he wrote 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 more than 300 million copies of his books in print worldwide, making him one of the bestselling 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), Jubal Sackett, 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 from Random House Audio.
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.