Below me and to the right was Willow Bluff. There was a tumbled-down log cabin lurched half over like a sorry old drunk. There was a well, the remains of a pole corral and some unfinished fence, and not far off was the north bank of the Sulphur. I could hear the water running through the branches of a huge old tree that had fallen off the bank into the stream.
There was some open meadow down there, and from where I squatted on the slope I could see it all without being seen. A fly buzzed in the sunshine, my horse cropped grass, down on the river a fish jumped. Easing my pistols in my belt I knocked out the pipe on the palm of my hand.
Nothing moved anywhere, yet my stomach felt empty and I felt touchy as a boar with a sore snout. There was no sense to feeling this way: Katy would be here soon.
When they came it wasn’t like I expected. Katy was there, but with her was Lacy Petraine and John Tower, and they were leading a pack horse. Tower got down from the horse and helped the two girls down, but I sat right still and didn’t move.
Impatient as I was, I sat right still, just waiting and listening. If they had been followed, I wanted to know it. When ten minutes had passed I could wait no longer, so cinching up the gray, I walked down the slope.
“Cullen!”
Katy ran toward me. “We heard you were dead! Warren said he’d killed you!”
It made no kind of sense. Not at first. Seems when they were well on their way they had spotted a rider coming toward them, and when he pulled up it was Warren and he was wild, and he was yelling,
“I killed him! I killed him!”
“Killed who?” Tower had demanded.
“I killed that outlaw!” Warren was excited and his eyes had a glassy shine.
“I killed Cullen Baker!”
“You killed Cullen Baker?” Tower had asked. “A sneaking little pipsqueak like you?”
“Don’t you dare talk to me like that!” Warren’s voice was shrill. “Don’t you dare!
I
killed Cullen Baker!”
“I don’t believe you,” Tower had said. “You’re out of your mind.”
Warren had laughed, and Katy said she was shocked by his manner. He acted as if he were intoxicated. There was a queerness about him, an almost sadistic excitement that revolted them.
“Oh, I killed him all right! He thought he was so much! He was there in the brush with another fellow. I shot them both. Cullen was lying there in the checkered shirt he always wore and he never knew what happened. That other man, the one called Kirby, he started to get up, and—”
“You shot him when he was
asleep?”
Tower’s face was white with fury, Katy said. “Why you little—”
“He didn’t kill him, Mr. Tower,” Katy said. “I just know he didn’t.”
Warren had turned on her, almost white with anger. “You fool! Can’t you see now? He’s dead! He’s dead now, and nothing but a clod of empty flesh! And
I
killed him!
I!
There’s no sense you mooning around over him. It will be me they talk about now. I’ll be
the man who killed Cullen Baker!”
“I think,” Tower had said, “I think I’ll kill him.”
‘No,” Katy stopped him, “he doesn’t understand. Down here,” she said, looking at Warren, “a man is admired for daring to face another armed man with a pistol and for settling his quarrels bravely. It isn’t a killing that is admired, it is the courage to fight for what you believe. You won’t be admired as the man who killed Cullen Baker, you will be despised as someone who murdered a sleeping man.”
They had turned then and ridden away as he stared after them. And the last thing they heard was a contemptuous laugh, but it was a hollow sound.
“I won’t believe it,” Katy had said, “I’m going on to Willow Bluff.”
And in the end they had all come on along.
S
O THERE WE stood in the warm sunshine of the meadow, with the grass around our feet and a blue sky overhead with a few white puffballs of fleecy cloud drifting. We heard the gurgle of the water around that fallen tree, and I looked at Katy and she looked at me and I knew my home was going to be wherever she was, that I didn’t need the land Pa had owned, that I didn’t need anything, anywhere as long as I had her.
Tower, he turned to Lacy, and he said, “Something I’ve got to say. Lacy, I love you. I’m in Texas because I came hunting you, because I had to find you. I think I’ve loved you ever since you were Terry’s wife, but Lacy, I didn’t want to kill him, I didn’t want to at all.”
Right then Katy was in my arms and I wasn’t thinking about anything else but I heard Lacy say, “John, I think we should go West, too.”
And Katy was saying to me that she’d brought Sandoval for me, and then I looked up and threw Katy away from me.
Chance Thorne and Sam Barlow were there at the edge of the woods, just beyond the old well. And there were two others with them.
Four men standing in a scattered line, and they had us covered.
Fifteen feet away from me John Tower was facing them also.
“John,” I said quietly, “it looks like we’re going to do some shooting.”
We both knew what could happen to the girls if we were killed without killing them.
“I’ll take Barlow and Thorne, John,” I told him, speaking low. “You get those others.”
“All right, but you’re getting all the best of it.”
Sam Barlow was grinning. “Wish we were closer to that grave you dug for me. I figured you to fill it.”
“John”—they were walking nearer—“I’ve been working on something. Getting my gun out fast, shooting from where it is, it worked against Butler in Fort Worth.”
“I saw it.”
“Takes them a moment to think, you know.”
“All right.”
They had come up within thirty feet of us now, and Chance was looking at Katy, and there was nothing nice in the way he looked. “You always despised me,” Chance said, “and whatever happens here, nobody knows. Nobody will ever know.”
“I’d like to take time to set fire to you, Cullen,” Barlow was staying. “but we don’t want to keep them girls awaitin’. They’ll be impatient for some real men, seems like, so we’re goin’ to kill you.”
“Sam.” I was cold inside. I felt like ice. I could feel the sun and hear a mockingbird in the trees and I could see the wasps hovering about the well. “Sam,” I said, “there’s one thing I’ve got to tell you.”
“Yeah? What’s th—”
The brief lightning of my shot coming against men who believed themselves securely in command stabbed across the afternoon.
The months of hard practice, speeded now by the knowledge of waiting death. With complete coolness I fired a second shot into Barlow, then swung the gun muzzle and as a bullet blasted past me, a shot touched off by panic, I shot Chance Thorne through the body. My fourth bullet went through Chance’s neck under his ear and drenched the falling man with his own blood.
I stepped around the well toward Barlow. Tower had to do what he must, these two were mine.
Barlow was trying to get up. He knew he had bought it. He knew what a bullet through the stomach could do and he had two of them right where he lived. He was dying and he wanted only one thing, to hurt me and to take me with him.
“They got Bob Lee,” he gasped at me. “He was ridin’ from his home to Mexico when the Peacocks ambushed him.” He gasped hoarsely, sweat standing out on his forehead. “They got Bickerstaff over in Alvarado. Now I’m gettin’ you.”
He turned the gun muzzle on me and I kicked it from his hand, then I glanced over at Chance.
Thorne was twisting on the bloody grass, dying in the sunlight of a warm afternoon in Texas. “I wish…I wish…” Whatever he wished none of us knew, for he died there on the grass looking up at the empty sky through the leaves of the oak that stood by the well.
“It worked, Cullen,” Tower said. “I’d never have believed it.”
Lacy was ripping his shirt sleeve where a bullet had cut through the deltoid muscle of his shoulder.
“Warren said he had killed you,” Katy said, “and if you don’t appear again, it will be believed, so let Cullen Baker die. Take another name, in another place.”
We switched saddles so I could ride Sandoval and Katy the dappled mare. This much of the dream remained, that we had a stallion and a mare, and it was a beginning for any man, and most of all, I’d come up out of it with Katy Thorne.
So we mounted up and rode away in the sunlight, four of the living who left four of the dead behind.
And that was the way of it, although down along the Sulphur and the bayous around Lake Caddo some will say that Cullen Baker was an unreconstructed rebel who carried on a lone fight, and those who read a book written by Thomas Warren will tell you that Cullen was a drunken murderer and a thief. Only that was not the end.…
A man can breed horses and cattle and still find time to read, even to study law of an evening when he has a wife to help and encourage him, and for a man with an education the world is a wide place and the opportunities are many, but the old habits and ways are not forgotten and on my desk today there lies a Dragoon Colt, polished, cleaned and loaded to remind me of the days along the bayous when I invented the first fast draw.
Tonight John Tower will drive out from town and we will walk down to the corrals together to watch the horses, two tall old men who long ago stood side by side in a green sunlit meadow on the banks of the Sulphur River, but that was long, long ago, and in another world than this, another time.
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.”
I
T 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),
The First Fast Draw, 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