and levered a shot into him. I saw the bullet dust him at the belt line, and
worked the lever again and fired. He threw his gun hand high in a queer,
dance-like gesture, and then he tried to bring it down on me. I stepped forward
and shot again and my bullet went high, striking at the collarbone and tearing
away part of his throat as it glanced off.
The sound of shooting was loud in the street, and then there was stillness, the
acrid smell of gunpowder mixed with dust, and we three stood there, facing them
as they lay. The last one alive was Eli, tugging at one of Tinker’s knives sunk
deep into his chest.
“If that’s the only way,” I commented, “to get one of those knives, I’ll wait.”
Looking down at them, I thought it was a strange trail they had followed, those
three, and how in the end it had only come to this, to death in a dusty street,
nobody caring; and by and by nobody even remembering, except by gossip over a
bar in a saloon.
Seemed it was just as well a man did not know where he was headed when he was to
come only to this—a packet of empty flesh and clothes to end it all. In the end
their hatred had bought them only this … only this, and the bitter years
between.
It always seemed that for me something waited in those western lands, something
of riches in the way of land and living, and maybe a woman. And when I found
her, I wanted her to be like Gin.
Younger, of course, as would be fitting, but like her. Somebody likely to have
no more sense than to fall in love with a Tennessee boy with nothing but his two
hands and a racing mule.
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 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 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, and Trouble Shooter.