Reilly's Luck (1970) (33 page)

Val poised at the door, waiting. Suddenly a rifle's sharp crack cut the stillness of the afternoon. The horse sprang away, and the suddenly exposed rifleman raced for the door. He had taken no more than two steps when a second shot ripped splinters from the boardwalk. He fell, got up, and a second bullet struck his boot heel and knocked him sprawling.

Val left the door running, reached the back of the buildings, raced along them to the saloon, stopped suddenly, and stepped inside.

At the sound of his step Sonnenberg, Kiley, and Tom turned as one man. They were spread out badly, but that could not be helped.

"Well, Henry," Val said quietly, "it's been a long time since that time on the mountain in the snow. I never figured you'd live this long."

Sonnenberg was smiling. He looked huge, invulnerable. His body seemed like the side of a battleship. "You come to get it, kid? We're goin' to kill you, you know."

Val was smiling and easy. All the tenseness seemed gone from him. He heard himself talking as if he were another person.

"Howdy, Tom. You're the one I'm not likely to forget. You knew my grandparents once, Tom."

"They were good people," Tom said, "not like their daughter."

"But she's the one who is paying to have me killed--or did Henry tell you?"

"No, sir, he never told us that. You never told us any of that, Hank."

"Hell, who cares?" Kiley said. "Her money's as good as anybody's."

"But she's his mother! She's blood kin to 'im! Why, I used to deliver milk to that house when I was a boy, I--"

"Shut up, old man!" Kiley said. "We got us a job to do."

"I remember you, Tom," Val said. "I was a mighty lonely, frightened kid then, and when I left in the sleigh with Will Reilly, it was you who tucked the blanket in."

"What is this?" Sonnenberg said. "Old home week?"

"No," Val said, "I just wanted Tom to know I wasn't going to shoot at him," and he drew.

Henry Sonnenberg was fast and sure, but that split second of reaction time cost him his speed. Val's gun slid out as if it was greased.

The speed of it shocked Sonnenberg, and something clicked in his brain.I couldn't have beaten him anyway! it said.

The bullet slammed into him, but he never moved his body, only his gun came up like the arm of a well-oiled machine. The gun muzzle dropped into line and the hammer slid off his thumb just as the second and third bullets jolted him. He took a step back then, his arm swinging wide.

Guns were hammering in the room, but Val Darrant knew the man he had to kill was Henry Sonnenberg. He took a step to one side, so that Sonnenberg would have to swing his gun into line, and he shot the big man again.

Four bullets ... one more.

Sonnenberg turned and shot and the bullet knocked Val around and to his knees. He felt another bullet cut through the hair at the side of his head, a sure hit had he not been knocked down.

He lunged up and dived into Sonnenberg, who took a cut at his skull with his gun barrel, but Val had ducked in close and stabbed the muzzle of his gun into the big man's belly. He held it tight and squeezed the trigger and felt the man's body jolt into his arms. Their faces were only inches apart.

"Hello, Henry," he said, and then, "Goodbye, Henry."

The man sagged against him, his gun going off into the floor, and Val stepped back, letting him fall heavily as Tensleep and Dube came bursting through the door.

Marcus Kiley was down, shot to doll rags by Tom, who was sitting wide-legged, his back against the bar.

"They were good folks," Tom said. "Used to let me warm before their fire on cold mornings. They never deserved a girl like Myra ... even then she was a mean one." Blood was staining his shirt. "You got him, boy. You killed ol' Henry. He never believed the bullet was made that could kill him."

Val dropped to his knee beside him. "Thanks, Tom. Will Reilly always said you were a good man."

"But a little crazy. Just a little crazy in the head, that was what they always said about me--but Myra's folks, Will Reilly, and you ... it never made no difference to you all."

"Tom, I--"

"Val," Tensleep said, "he's dead. He died right there."

Val was feeding shells into his empty gun. "What about the breed?"

"He was dead before we got to him. One of those bullets of mine or Dube's must have ricocheted into him--we were both shootin'."

They started back up the street together, walking side by side. Boston came out of the door to meet him, running into his arms.

"There's a train through here tomorrow," Val said. "Let's go home on the Denver & Rio Grande."

The stage came in just before sundown, and with the crimson and pink of the sunset coloring the sky and the rims of the mountains around, Val closed his deal with Cope, a clear sale for cash and stock.

"Myra's gone east," Cope told him. "She could only make money with the right-of-way if she sold to one of us, and we wouldn't do business with her."

Cope glanced around at Dube, Tensleep, and Gates. "Son," he said, "it looks to me as if you've made some friends, some really good friends."

"I hope I can always be as good a friend to them as they have been to me," Val said, "and I think I can. I had a man who taught me how."

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.

Louis L'Amour died on June 10, 1988. His wife, Kathy, and their two children, Beau and Angelique, carry the L'Amour tradition forward with new books written by the author during his lifetime to be published by Bantam well into the nineties -- among them, four Hopalong Cassidy novels:The Rustlers of West Fork, The Trail to Seven Pines, The Riders of High Rock, andTrouble Shooter .

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