Kiowa Trail (1964) (17 page)

The bay gelding was cropping grass on a green patch in the bottom, and I rode up to him and got down to pick up the halter rope. The gelding shied off a little, and I walked after the rope.

As I straightened up with it, I saw a faint hint of dust in the air along the draw to the south.

Suddenly I felt the hair prickle on the back of my neck. I stood very still, thinking quickly, as I should have been thinking before this. How had the gelding escaped? Why- "Hello, Dury. This here's a long way from Burro Mesa."

He had come up from behind the nearest willows, a gun in his hand. He was a tall, raw-boned man that I recalled seeing in town.

"I'm Frank Shalett. Or Hastings, if you like that better. Heard you'd killed Rich and Flange some time back, and I got kind of tired watching out for you. You've worried me some, so I think I'll see how you look when you sweat a little."

He had his gun dead center on me, and he was at pointblank range, not over forty feet away. He had been put up to me as a dead shot, and the chances of him missing at that range were slight. Yet I'd seen some good shots miss, especially when the shooter was being shot at - which he didn't expect to be.

"Nobody will ask any questions when they find you with a gun on," he said. "After all, everybody knows you're supposed to be a fast man."

This was the last of the men who had killed Jim Sotherton. How long ago that seemed! Why, I hadn't thought of hunting for him in years. Not since before the war, for I more than half believed him dead. And now he had caught up with me.

But that dust I'd seen ... this man hadn't made that dust.

"Couldn't have been you," I said aloud. "You must have been waiting here quite a spell."

"What are you talkin' about?"

"Dust I saw in the air," I said. "Somebody else is here."

He looked disgusted. "Why, you damn' fool! You don't think I'd go for anything like that, do -"

It is harder for a man to shoot quickly to his right, so I stepped quickly left as my hand went for my gun. He shot ... missed ... shot again. The bullet struck me; I felt the solid blow of it and was firing myself.

Bracing myself against another bullet, I steadied my hand and put a bullet into his belly, then another. There was a spot of blood on his neck near the collarbone, and he turned around and fell, tried to rise, and slumped back.

A voice spoke. "Now, that's what I call a fancy bit of gun play."

Where had I heard that voice before? A rifle bellowed, and the six-shooter was knocked from my hand. "And there's another bit for you. I been aimin' to even things up, even though it taken me time."

It was the Dutchman. It was that dry-gulching, sure-thing killer, Bill Hoback.

There was blood on the sand at my feet. I'd been hit, and I'd been hurt. The shock was keeping me from feeling it now, but how long would that last?

My gun was gone.

My rifle was on my saddle, and my horse was at least fifty feet away, and it might as well have been as many miles.

When he shot the pistol from my hand - no trick for such a man with a rifle at the distance - it left my arm numb to the elbow. The gun had gone spinning, and it was probably good for nothing now, anyway.

He had me, and he was going to kill me. Only he had to be sure I suffered, for I'd hurt his pride.

The boys had been right, of course. You don't let a man like that live. You kill him as you would a rattler, because he'll always be waiting around for you.

Somehow I'd gone down on one knee, and I was fuzzy about that. Had I dropped before he shot at me, or afterward?

He was back there in the brush, and he had been there when Frank Hastings, or Shalett or whatever his name was, and I shot it out. He had been waiting to see me dead, or to finish me off. He had me cold. Think ... I had to think.

The boys could have heard the shooting, but not many of them, if any, were up and about. This was a morning when they could sleep and there were few such mornings for them.

"Don't figure on help. I can see that road, and if anybody starts this way I'll kill you and skedaddle. Be a while before they find out there was somebody else than you and Shalett - if they ever do."

If he could see the road, there was only one place he could be. The trouble was that he could cover every bit of the hollow where I stood from where he was hidden.

The patch of willows and cottonwood was fairly large, with some blackberry bushes among the undergrowth, which were covered with thorns that would catch and tear at a man's clothing.

My eye caught a glint of sunlight. His rifle barrel was pointed at me from alongside a tree trunk, and well back in the brush.

Frank Shalett's body lay there in front of me. Suddenly I saw a slight movement of the dead man's hand - some tightening of muscles, or relaxing. The hand had fallen across a rock when he went down, and if it moved ever so slightly again, it would fall off into the dry leaves below it.

My head was spinning, and my eyes had trouble coming to focus. Had the hand really moved?

Yes ... it was moving again. "Frank!" I yelled. "Toss me the gun!"

And the hand slipped off into the leaves.

Instantly, the Dutchman shot into the dead man's body, and at the moment the gun muzzle was deflected I threw myself into the brush.

Hitting the ground, I lay absolutely still, not moving a muscle. He would be listening, and at the slightest sound I would be dead.

He might kill me, but now I had a fighting chance, if no more.

I realized that I was bleeding. The bullet must have gone into my side ... somehow I'd had the idea it was my leg.

With infinite care I lifted my right hand and eased it, clear of the ground, back for my bowie knife. It was true I had no gun, but if I could get within reach of the knife ...

The knife was bloody. Wiping the haft very carefully on my shirt front, I gripped it in my right hand. And I waited.

He was stalking me now.

He would be worried, because the longer he had to look for me the greater the risk of somebody coming out from town. John Blake must have heard the shots, and he would not stop at just being curious ... by now he should be coming.

That cowhand who told me of Kate's gelding, he had been an ally of Shalett's, of course. Had he ridden on, or was he waiting in town for Shalett? If he was, he would be almighty puzzled by now.

With a stealth learned from the Apaches, I began to inch forward. I wanted to get into a place the eye would pass over quickly. Not an obvious place for hiding ... that would be spotted too soon, but a place practically in the open. A man lying still, unmoving, can be almost invisible.

The earth beneath me was damp, muddy from the nearby stream. Lying flat, with infinite care to make no noise, I rolled over in the mud. It would discolor my shirt, would help to make me difficult to see.

Easing myself along, I chose my spot. There was a stump and a fallen tree, and straight before them was grass, low-growing plants, and brush, none of it more than a few inches high.

By now my clothing was matted with leaves and mud, my hair was muddy, and bits of grass and leaves were clinging to it. My face was streaked with mud.

I lay down close to the edge of the brush, but almost in the open in the small clearing opposite the stump and the fallen tree, and closest to where I believed he would come.

He might see me, and if he did, I was a dead man. The eyes naturally tend to look across a clearing. He had no experience of me in the woods, and the obvious place was across the clearing where the fallen tree offered a hiding place.

Lying absolutely still, afraid even to breathe, I waited. And, my ear being against the ground, I heard him before he reached me.

He was good at stalking, and he had had plenty of experience at stalking men; he was much more skillful than most men, and therefore he was confident. He was the hunter, I the hunted.

It was a game among Apache boys to scatter out and lie down, then for others to try to see how many they could locate just by looking, and I knew how difficult it was to see someone who lay perfectly still.

He could have no doubt that he was going to kill me. My evasive tactics only prolonged the game. But he had been too successful for too long.

He came out of the brush not a dozen feet from me, his rifle half-lifted for a shot, his eyes ranging the brush on the far side of the clearing. And as he stepped past me I raised up and threw the knife upward into his left kidney.

It was hard thrown, for I am a strong man, with much practice at throwing a knife, and it went clean to the haft.

His body stiffened sharply, and I followed the knife in, catching hold of the hilt just as he started to turn. The knife came free with a hard wrench, and he tried to lift his rifle. We were face to face in that instant, our eyes only inches apart.

He looked at me with astonishment, and he said, "You've killed me!"

I said, "Uh-huh ... it looks like it."

He fell then and lay there on the grass, staring up at me. "Take my rifle," he said, "take good care ... finest shootin' -"

So I picked up his rifle and walked across the clearing. When I got to the far side I looked back at him. He was dead, all right, and it was hard to believe.

When I came out of the woods John Blake was bending over Shalett. Bed Mike was there, too, and Meharry.

"This here's Frank Shalett," Bed Mike said. "Is there somebody else back in there?"

"Uh-huh," I said, "the Dutchman's back there. If you figure to see him you'd better go look. He isn't coining out."

So they got me on a horse and took me back into town and put me in a bed.

There was one more thing I did before we started back to Texas - one more thing, I mean, after Kate and I were married. It was never in me to brag, but there were two people, I thought, who ought to know.

On a piece of note paper I wrote to Sir Richard, in England, at Sotherton Manor. The other letter I sent to Colonel Edwards, of the US Army. The same message was in each letter, and it was simple enough, but I had an idea they would both understand:

First there were three, now there are none.

When we started for Texas I was riding on my back in an ambulance with Kate, but I had an idea that before we crossed the Nation I'd be back in the saddle again, looking at the world from between a horse's ears.

About The Author

"I think of myself in the oral tradition -- of 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 recreated 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, assessment miner, and officer on tank destroyers 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 100 books is in print; there are nearly 230 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 includeThe Lonesome Gods, The Walking Drum (his twelfth-century historical novel)Jubal Sackett, Last of the Breed , andThe 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.