A boot track to a skilled reader of sign is as good as a signature.
Jake Booker was a plotter and a conniver. He was not a courageous man. Will Tharp has said nothing. Chapin had obviously washed his hands of the situation. I was letting Fox do the talking. And Jake Booker was frightened.
The rest of us might bluff, but never Fox. The rest of us might relent, but not Fox. Booker's mouth twitched and his face was wet with sweat.
“Noâ¦no.”
He looked around at us. He looked at me. “You can't let him hang me. Not without a trial.”
“Did Maclaren have a trial?”
Booker shifted his hands on the table. He knew there was a man behind him. And Fox was across from him. And nobody was doing anything.
“Morgan Park killed him,” Booker said. “It wasn't me.”
He was talking. Once started, he might continue. It had not been Park, and we all knew it now.
“Where is Park?”
“Deadâ¦Park killed his horse getting away. He came up to that Apache tracker of Pinder's. The Apache had a good black. Morgan Park knocked him off the horse when the Apache wouldn't tradeâ¦the Indian shot him out of the saddle.”
“You saw it?” D'Acy asked.
“Yesâ¦you'll find his body in a gully west of Bitter Flats. Park had started for the Reef.”
Booker sat very still, waiting for us, but we did not speak. He shifted uneasily. Tharp would say nothing, and Booker knew that if he left here now he would be taken by Fox and the Boxed M riders. After that there was only the short ride to a tree.
“Tell us the truth,” Chapin said finally. “If you get a trial you will have a chance.”
“If I confess?” His voice was bitter. “What chance would I have then?”
“You'll live a few weeks, anyway,” I said brutally. “What chance have you now?”
He sat back in his chair. “I've nothing to confess,” he said. “It was Morgan Park.”
Will Tharp got up from his chair. “You asked me here to conclude a peace meeting. The Boxed M, Two-Bar, and CP agree on peace, is that right?”
We all assented, and he nodded with satisfaction. “Goodâ¦now I've some business in the northern part of the county. I'll be gone for three days.”
It took a minute for Booker to grasp the idea that he was being abandoned. He looked up, his eyes shifting quickly. The man behind him eased his weight and a board creaked.
Key Chapin got up. He extended a hand to Canaval. “Be glad to help you across the street, Canaval.” He turned his head to Moira. “Coming?”
She got up. Katie O'Hara had disappeared. Jim Pinder, a wry grin on his face, got up, too.
They started for the door and Jake Booker looked wildly about. Fox was across from him, smiling. Behind him was the other Boxed M hand. Outside the door with an extra horse was still another.
“Wait!”
Booker jumped to his feet. His face was yellow-white and he looked ghastly.
“Tharp! You can't do this! You can't leave me!”
“Why not? I've no business with you!”
“Butâ¦but the trial? What about the trial?”
Tharp shrugged. “What trial? We haven't evidence enough to hold you. You said that yourself.” He turned away. “You're not my business now, Booker.”
Fox had drawn his gun. The Boxed M hand behind Booker grabbed him suddenly. I stepped back, my hands at my sides.
“Wait a minute! Tharpâ
The sheriff was outside, but he was holding the door open. The others were on the walk near him.
“Tharp! I did it. I'll talk.”
There was a tablet on which Katie O'Hara wrote up her menus. I took it down, and put the inkwell beside it, and a pen.
“Write it,” I said.
He hesitated, looking down. His hands trembled and he looked sick.
“All right,” he said.
He sat down when the Boxed M hand released him, and Tharp returned to the room. He looked over at me and we waited, standing around, while the pen scratched steadily.
Jonathan Benaras appeared in the door. “Bodie Miller's gone,” he said. “Left town.”
Moira was still standing on the walk outside. The others had gone. I opened the door and stepped out.
“You're going back to the Two-Bar?” she asked.
“Even a killer has to have a home.”
She looked up quickly. “Matt, don't hold that against me.”
“You said what you thought, didn't you?”
I started to put my foot in the stirrup, but she looked too much like a little girl who had been spanked. “Did you ever start that trousseau?” I asked suddenly.
“Yes, butâ
I dropped the reins of the horse Benaras had led up for me.”
“Then we'll be married without it.”
Suddenly we were both laughing like fools and I was kissing her there on the street where all of Hattan's Point could see us. People had come from saloons and stores and they were standing there grinning at us, so I kissed her again.
Then I let go of her and stepped into the saddle. “Tomorrow noon,” I said, “I'll be back.”
And so I rode again from Hattan's Point.
Chapter 24
D
ID YOU EVER feel so good the world seemed like your big apple? That was how I felt then.
We had our showdown, and we had peace between the three ranches. We could live together now, and we could make our acres fertile and make our cattle fat.
There was grass on the range, water in the creeks, and the house I had built would have the woman it needed to make it home. From the smoke of battle I had built a home and won a wife. The world was mine.
Morgan Park was deadâ¦he had died in violence as he had lived, died from striking the wrong man, heedless of others, believing that his strength would pull him through. Only an Apache had fired from the ground and the bullet had torn through his skull.
I would go home now. I would make ready the house for the wife I was to have, I would care for my horses in the corral, and I would change my clothes and ride back to town to become a bridegroom.
The trail to the Two-Bar swung around a mesa and opened out on a wide desert flat, and far beyond I could see the pinnacles of the badlands beyond Dry Mesa.
A rabbit burst from the bush and sprinted off across the sage, and then the trail dipped down into a hollow, with junipers growing in and around it. And there in the middle of the road was Bodie Miller.
He was standing with his hands on his hips laughing, and there was a devil in his eyes. Off to one side of the road was Red, holding their horses.
Miller's hair was uncut and hung over the collar of his shirt. The hairs at the corners of his upper lip seemed longer and darker. But the two guns tied down to his thighs were nothing to smile about.
“Too bad to cut down the big man just when he's ridin' highest.”
The horse I rode was skittish and unacquainted with me. I'd no idea how he'd stand for shooting, and I wanted to be on the ground. But there was little time. Bodie was confident, but he did not know but what I might have company further back along the road.
Suddenly I slapped spurs to the gelding and when he sprang at Bodie, I went off the other side. Hitting the ground, I ran two steps and drew as I saw Bodie's hands blur.
His guns came up and I felt mine buck in my fist. Our bullets crossed each other, although mine got off a shade the faster despite that instant of hesitation to make sure my bullet would shoot true.
His slug ripped a furrow across the top of my shoulder that stung like a million needles, but my own bullet struck him in the chest and he staggered, his eye wide and shocked.
Suddenly the devil of eagerness was in me. I was mad, mad as I had never been before. Guns up and blasting, I started for him.
“What's the matter ? Don't you like it?”
I was yelling as I walked, my guns blasting and the lead ripping into and through him.
“Now you know how the others felt, Bodie. It's an ugly thing to die because some punk wants to prove he's tough. And you aren't tough, Bodie, just a mean, nasty kid.”
He swayed on his feet, bloody and finished. He was a slighter man than I, the blood staining his shirt crimson, his mouth ripped wider by a bullet. His face was gray and slashed across by the streak left by the bullet.
He stared at me, but he did not speak. Something kept him upright, but he was gone and I could see it. He stood there in the white hot sunlight and stared into my face, the last face he would ever see.
“I'm sorry, Bodie. Why didn't you stick to punching cows?”
He backed up a slow step and the gun slid from his fingers. He tried once to speak, but his lips were unable to shape the words, and then his knees buckled and he went down.
Standing over his body I looked at Red. The cowhand seemed unable to believe his eyes. He stared at Bodie Miller's used-up body, and then he lifted his eyes to me.
“I'll rideâ¦just give me a chance.”
“You've got it.”
He swung into the saddle, then looked back at Bodie. He studied him, as if awakening from a dream.
“He wasn't so tough, was he?”
“Nobody is,” I said, “especially with a slug in his belly.”
He rode away then and I stood there in the lonely afternoon and saw Bodie Miller dead at my feet.
It wasn't in me to leave him there, and I did not want to find him there when I returned. There was a gully off the trail, a little hollow where water had washed before finding a new way. So I rolled him in and shoved the banks in on top of him and then piled on some stones.
Sitting in the shade of a juniper I put together a cross, and on an old wagon tail-gate that had laid beside the road for a long time, I carved out the words:
HE PLAYED OUT HIS HAND
1881
It was not much of an end for a man, but Bodie was not much of a man.
Beside some campfire Red might talk, someday, somewhere. Sooner or later the story might travel, but it would take time, and I wanted no more reputation as a gunfighter. There had been too much of that.
There was a stinging in my shoulder, but only from cut skin. At the ranch I could care for that. And it was time I was getting on.
Ahead of me the serrated ridges of the wild lands were stark and lonely against the late afternoon sky. The sun setting behind me was picking out the peak points to touch them with gold. The afternoon was gone and now I was riding home to my own ranch, riding home with the coolness of evening coming onâ¦and tomorrow was my wedding day.
About Louis L'Amour
“I think of myself in the oral traditionâ
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),
Silver Canyon, 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