conviction, and he was speaking as I had never heard him speak.
Standing there in the shade of a building I listened and was proud. This was my
brother up there … this was Orrin. This was the boy I’d grown up with, left
the mountains with, herded cattle, and fought Indians beside.
There was a strange power in him now that was born of thought and dream and that
fine Welsh magic in his voice and mind. He was talking to them of what the
country needed, of what had to be done, but he was using their own language, the
language of the mountains, the desert, the cattle drives. And I was proud of
him.
Turning away from the crowd, I walked slowly back to the street and between the
buildings and when I emerged on the sunlit street, Tom Sunday was standing
there.
I stopped where I stood and could not see his eyes but as flecks of light from
the shadow beneath his hat brim. He was big, broad, and powerful. He was
unshaved and duty, but never in my life had I seen such a figure of raw,
physical power in one man.
“Hello, Tom.”
“I’ve come for him, Tyrel. Stay out of the way.”
“He’s building his future,” I said, “you helped him start it, Tom. He’s going to
be a big man and you helped him.”
Maybe he didn’t even hear me. He just looked at me straight on like a man
staring down a narrow hallway.
“I’m going to kill him,” he said, “I should have done it years ago.”
We were talking now, like in a conversation, yet something warned me to be
careful. What had Cap said? He was a killer and he would go on killing until
something or somebody stopped him.
This was the man who had killed the Durango Kid, who had killed Ed Fry and Chico
Cruz … Chico never even got off a shot.
“Get out of the way, Tye,” he said, “I’ve nothing against you, I—”
He was going to kill me. I was going to die … I was sure of it.
Only he must not come out of it alive. Orrin must have his future. Anyway, I was
the mean one … I always had been.
Once before I had stepped in to help Orrin and I would now.
There was nobody there on the street but the two of us, just Tom Sunday, the man
who had been my best friend, and me. He had stood up for me before this and we
had drunk from the same rivers, fought Indians together. …
“Tom,” I said, “remember that dusty afternoon on that hillside up there on the
Purgatoire when we …”
Sweat trickled down my spine and tasted salt on my lips. His shirt was open to
his belt and I could see the hair on his big chest and the wide buckle of his
belt. His hat was pulled low but there was no expression on his face.
This was Tom Sunday, my friend … only now he was a stranger.
“You can get out of the way, Tye,” he said, “I’m going to kill him.”
He spoke easily, quietly. I knew I had it to do, but this man had helped teach
me to read, he had loaned me books, he had ridden the plains with me.
“You can’t do it,” I said. Right then, he went for his gun.
There was an instant before he drew when I knew he was going to draw. It was an
instant only, a flickering instant that triggered my mind. My hand dropped and I
palmed my gun, but his came up and he was looking across it, his eyes like white
fire, and I saw the gun blossom with a rose of flame and felt my own gun buck in
my hand, and then I stepped forward and left—one quick step—and fired again.
He stood there looking across his gun at me and then he fired, but his bullet
made a clean miss. Thumbing back the hammer I said, “Damn it, Tom. …” and I
shot him in the chest.
He still stood there but his gun muzzle was lowering and he was still looking at
me. A strange, puzzled expression came into his eyes and he stepped toward me,
dropping his gun. “Tyrel … Tye, what. …” He reached out a hand toward me,
but when I stepped quickly to take it, he fell.
He went full face to the dust, falling hard, and when he hit the ground he
groaned, then he half-turned and dropping to my knees I grabbed his hand and
gripped it hard.
“Tye … Tye, damn it, I …” He breathed hoarsely, and the front of his shirt
was red with blood.
“The books,” he whispered, “take the … books.”
He died like that, gripping my hand, and when I looked up the street was full of
people, and Orrin was there, and Dru.
And over the heads of some of the nearest, Jonathan Pritts.
Pushing through the crowd I stopped, facing Jonathan. “You get out of town,” I
told him, “you get out of the state. If you aren’t out of town within the hour,
or if you ever come back, for any reason at all, I’ll kill you.”
He just turned and walked away, his back stiff as a ramrod … but it wasn’t
even thirty minutes until he and Laura drove from town in a buckboard.
“That was my fight, Tye,” Orrin said quietly, “it was my fight.”
“No, it was mine. From the beginning it was mine. He knew it would be, I think.
Maybe we both knew it … and Cap. I think Cap Rountree knew it first of all.”
We live on the hill back of Mora, and sometimes in Santa Fe, Dru and me …
we’ve sixty thousand acres of land in two states and a lot of cattle. Orrin,
he’s a state senator now, and pointing for greater things.
Sometimes of an evening I think of that, think when the shadows grow long of two
boys who rode out of the high hill country of Tennessee to make a home in the
western lands.
We found our home, and we graze and work our acres, and since that day in the
street of Mora when I killed Tom Sunday I have never drawn a gun on any man.
Nor will I …
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