Collection 1980 - Yondering Read online

  Contents

  Cover page

  Title page

  Deadly Voyage

  Dedication

  Foreword

  Introduction

  Epigraph

  Where There’s Fighting

  The Dancing Kate

  By The Ruins Of El Walarieh

  Glorious! Glorious!

  Dead-End Drift

  Old Doc Yak

  Survival

  And Proudly Die

  Show Me The Way To Go Home

  Thicker Than Blood

  The Admiral

  Shanghai, Not Without Gestures

  The Man Who Stole Shakespeare

  A Friend Of The General

  Author’s Tea

  So You Want Adventure, Do You?

  Let Me Forget …

  Afterword

  About the Author

  Bantam Books by Louis L’Amour

  Copyright Page

  Deadly Voyage

  * * *

  HE WAS HALF asleep when they suddenly closed in on him. At one moment he had been thinking of what he’d heard about them, and he must have dozed off, for they closed in quickly and silently. Some faint sound of bare feet on the deck must have warned him.

  He saw the gleam of starlight on steel, and he ripped up with his own knife. The man pulled back sharply, and his blade sliced open a shirt, and the tip of his knife drew a red line from navel to chin.

  Then he was on his feet. Somebody struck at him with a marlin spike, and he parried the blow with his blade and lunged. The knife went in; he felt his knuckles come up hard against warm flesh, and he withdrew the knife as he dodged another blow at his head.

  One feinted a rush. The man on deck was on his feet, and they were spreading out. The half light was confusing, and as he moved to get closer to one man, he heard another coming in from behind. He tried to make a quick half turn, but a belaying pin caught him alongside the skull. He fell against the rail. Then another blow caught him, and he felt himself falling.

  He hit the water and went down.…

  —From “The Dancing Kate”

  To Marc Jaffe . . .

  A good friend

  and a fine gentleman

  from New York

  whom I met in a saloon

  in Elko, Nevada.

  * * *

  Foreword to the Revised Edition

  * * *

  DURING THE MONTHS following my father’s death I began the job of cleaning up his office and trying to make sense out of all the papers that he had left behind. The room where Dad worked is roughly 25 × 15, and its twelve-foot walls are lined with book cases which, mounted on huge hinges, swing out to reveal even more books. His desk—a handcarved wooden table as big as a double bed, a coffee table, the hearth of the fireplace, and most of the floor were covered with precariously balanced piles of paper, magazines (Dad subscribed to more than twenty), reference books and artifacts (everything from an ancient Arabian dagger to a Minox camera smaller than a cigarette lighter). It was a magnificent mess. When Dad was alive he would tell us that, bad as it looked, he knew where everything in the room was…certainly when he needed to find something he always could. I used to joke with him that the trick to locating anything in this room was not so much knowing where it was, as knowing what it was under.

  It took weeks to do the first sorting of all this material. I separated out boxes of notes, clippings of news items he had been interested in, and piles of fan mail. I remember, back when I used to live with my parents, Dad would get a stack of letters two or three inches thick every week, all of it from readers. I can tell you now, while he only answered a portion of them, he kept every one. I filled twenty-two file boxes with correspondence. I also found some stories…

  The first several manuscripts that I came upon turned out to be novels that have already been published. (It was hard to tell at first because many of the copies that Dad kept didn’t have a title page.) But then, hidden away in a closet behind one of his file cabinets, I found several dusty boxes of unpublished stories.

  After I had cleaned up most of the room, my mother and I sat down at the big table and began to examine those manuscripts. There were outlines and treatments, some articles, two novels, and quite a few short stories. We placed them in piles according to genre: westerns, crime stories, adventures, and sports. Among these stories we found a few that had a different tone than the rest. They were about people and events from my father’s own life rather than fictional adventures. I felt that to include them in an upcoming book of mysteries or westerns would be wrong…they belonged in YONDERING.

  Bantam had plans to reissue the book and so I asked for this new material to be incorporated in it. By the Ruins of El ‘Walarieh’ is now the third story with And Proudly Die and Show Me the Way to Go Home the eighth and ninth. The last story, The Moon of the Trees Broken by Snow, which never really belonged in this book, has been replaced by So You Want Adventure, Do You?, an article that Dad wrote while he was in Europe during World War II.

  I hope you enjoy these new selections.

  BEAU L’AMOUR

  Introduction

  * * *

  IN THE BEGINNING there was a dream, a young boy’s dream, a dream of far lands to see, of oceans to cross, and somewhere at the trail’s end, a girl. The girl.

  More than all else I wanted to tell stories, stories that people could read or hear, stories to love and remember. I had no desire to write to please those who make it their business to comment but for the people who do the work of the world, who live on the land or love the land, people who make and bake and struggle to make ends meet, for the people who invent, who design, who build, for the people who do. And if somewhere down the line a man or woman can put a finger on a line and say, “Yes, that is the way it was. I was there,” then I would be amply repaid.

  I have never scoffed at sentiment. Cynicism is ever the outward face of emptiness.

  What, after all, is romance? It is the music of those who make the world turn, the people who make things happen. Romance is the story of dreams that could come true and so often do.

  Why do men ride the range? Go to sea? Explore the polar icecaps? Why do they ride rockets to unknown worlds? It is because of romance, because of the stories they have read and the stories they have dreamed.

  Some have said this is the age of the nonhero, that the day of the hero is gone. That’s nonsense. When the hero is gone, man himself will be gone, for the hero is our future, our destiny.

  These are some of the stories of a writer trying to find his way, trying to find the truth of what he has seen, to understand the people, to learn a little more about telling a story.

  The people whom I have met and with whom I worked in those earlier years were not always nice people, but each in his own way was strong, or he could not survive. Of course, there were some who did not, some who could not survive. For one reason or another, nature weeded them out and cast them aside, just as happened on our frontier during the westward movement.

  Some of these stories are from my own life; some are from the lives of people I met along the way.

  Somewhere my love lay sleeping

  Behind the lights of a far-off town;

  So I gave my heart to a bend in the road,

  And off I went, a-yondering.

  * * *

  WHERE THERE’S FIGHTING

  * * *

  In the passing of time when greater events occupy the attention of the world, some things are forgotten that should be remembered. The following story is just one tiny tribute to many gallant men, both British and Greek, who attempted to stay, if just for a little while, what was at the time an invincible tide.

>   On about April 6, 1941 Germany invaded Greece as one small fragment of a much larger pattern. Anticipating such a move, Great Britain had landed 57,000 men under Gen. Maitland Wilson. Moving with speed and efficiency, the German armored divisions struck south and between April twelfth and the twentieth German spearheads advanced through the rugged mountain terrain of central Greece.

  Papagos, realizing victory was impossible, suggested he try to stay the advance long enough for the British forces to escape intact so they could fight elsewhere. His efforts were so successful that despite a German parachute drop near Corinth, some 43,000 British soldiers were evacuated. Many of these soldiers were with Alexander when he won his victory in North Africa.

  The story here is an episode in the German advance through the mountains of central Greece.

  * * *

  THE FOUR MEN were sprawled in a cuplike depression at the top of the pass. From where the machine gun was planted it had a clear field of fire for over four hundred yards. Beyond that the road was visible only at intervals. By a careful watch of those intervals an enemy could be seen long before he was within range.

  A low parapet of loose rock had been thrown up along the lip of the depression, leaving an aperture for the .30-caliber gun. Two of the men were also armed with rifles.

  It was very still. The slow warmth of the morning sun soaked into their bones and ate the frost away, leaving them lethargic and pleased. The low rumble as of thunder in the far-off hills were the bombs over Serbia, miles away.

  “Think they’ll ever come?” Benton asked curiously.

  “They’ll come,” Ryan said.

  “We can’t stop them.”

  “No.”

  “How about some coffee? Is there any left?”

  Ryan nodded. “It’ll be ready soon. The part that’s coffee is done, the part that’s chicory is almost done, and the part that’s plain bean is doing.”

  Benton looked at the two who were sleeping in the sun. They were mere boys. “Shall we wake them?”

  “Pretty soon. They worry too much. Especially Pommy. He’s afraid of being afraid.”

  “Sackworth doesn’t. He thinks we’re bloody heroes. Do you?”

  “I’d feel heroic as blazes if I had a shave,” Ryan said. “Funny, how you like being shaved. It sets a man up somehow.”

  Pommy turned over and opened his eyes. “I say, Bent? Shall I spell you a bit? You’ve been there hours!”

  Benton looked at him, liking his fresh, clean-cut look.

  “I could use some coffee. I feel like I was growing to this rock.”

  The young Englishman had risen to his feet.

  “There’s something coming down there. A man, I think.”

  “Couldn’t be one of our men. We didn’t have any over there. He’s stopped—looking back.”

  “He’s coming on again now,” Sackworth said after a moment. He had joined them at the first sign of trouble. “Shall I try a shot?”

  “Wait. Might be a Greek.”

  The sun climbed higher, and the moving figure came slowly toward them. He seemed to move at an almost creeping pace. At times, out of sight of the pass, they thought he would never show up again.

  “He’s carrying something,” Pommy said. “Too heavy for a rifle, but I saw the sun flash on it back there a way.”

  The man came into sight around the last bend. He was big, but he walked very slowly, limping a little. He was wearing faded khaki trousers and a torn shirt. Over one shoulder were several belts of ammunition.

  “He hasn’t carried that very far,” Ryan said. “He’s got over a hundred pounds there.”

  Benton picked up one of the rifles and stepped to the parapet, but before he could lift the gun or speak, the man looked up. Benton thought he had never seen a face so haggard with weariness. It was an utter and complete weariness that seemed to come from within. The man’s face was covered with a stubble of black beard. His face was wide at the cheekbones, and the nose was broken. His head was wrapped in a bloody bandage above which coarse black hair was visible.

  “Any room up there?” he asked.

  “Who are you?” Benton demanded.

  Without replying, the big man started up the steep path. Once he slipped, skinning his knee against a sharp rock. Puzzled, they waited. When he stood beside them, they were shocked at his appearance. His face, under the deep brown of sun and wind, was drawn and pale, his nose peeling from sunburn. The rags of what must have once been a uniform were mud stained and sweat discolored.

  “What difference does it make?” he asked mildly, humorously. “I’m here now.”

  He lowered the machine gun and slid the belts to the ground. When he straightened, they could see he was a half inch taller than Benton, who was a tall man, and at least thirty pounds heavier. Through his shirt bulging muscles showed, and there was blood clogging the hair on his chest.

  “My name’s Horne,” he added. “Mike Horne. I’ve been fighting with Koska’s guerrillas in Albania.”

  Benton stared, uncertain. “Albania? That’s a long way from here.”

  “Not so far if you know the mountains.” He looked at the pot on the fire. “How’s for some coffee?”

  Silently Ryan filled a cup. Digging in his haver-sack, Horne produced some Greek bread and a thick chunk of sausage. He brushed the sand from the sausage gravely. “Want some? I salvaged this from a bombed house back yonder. Might be some shell fragments in it.”

  “You pack that gun over the mountains?” Ryan asked.

  Horne nodded, his mouth full. “Part of the way. It was surrounded by dead Greeks when I found it. Four Italians found it the same time. We had trouble.”

  “Did you—kill them all?” Pommy asked.

  Horne looked at him. “No, kid. I asked them to tea an’ then put sand in their bearings.”

  Pommy’s face got red; then he grinned.

  “Got any ammo for a .50?” Horne looked up at Benton. “I got mighty little left.”

  “They put down four boxes by mistake,” Benton said.

  Ryan was interested. “Koska’s guerrillas? I heard of them. Are they as tough as you hear?”

  “Tougher. Koska’s an Albanian gypsy. Sneaked into Valona alone a few nights ago an’ got himself three dagos. With a knife.”

  Sackworth studied Horne as if he were some kind of insect. “You call that bravery? That’s like animals. One can at least fight like a gentleman!”

  Horne winked at Ryan. “Sure, kid. But this ain’t a gentleman’s fight. This is war. Nothing sporting about it, just a case of dog eat dog, an’ you better have big teeth.”

  “Why are you here?” Sackworth demanded.

  Horne shrugged. “Why am I any place? Think I’m a fifth columnist or something?” He stared regretfully into the empty cup. “Well, I’m not. I ran a gun in the Chaco a few years ago; then they started to fight in China, so I went there. I was in the Spanish scrap with the Loyalists.

  “Hung around in England long enough to learn something about that parachute business. Now that’s a man’s job. When you get down in an enemy country, you’re on your own. I was with the bunch that hopped off from Libya and parachuted down in southern Italy to cut off that aqueduct and supply line to the Sicily naval base. Flock of ‘spiggoties’ spotted me, but I got down to the water and hiked out in a fishing boat. Now I’m here.”

  He looked up at Benton, wiping the back of his hand across his mouth. “From Kalgoorlie, I bet. You got the look. I prospected out of there once. I worked for pearls out of Darwin, too. I’m an original swag man, friend.”

  “What’s a swag man?” Pommy asked.

  Horne looked at him, smiling. Two of his front teeth at the side were missing.

  “It’s a bum, sonny. Just a bum. A guy who packs a tucker bag around looking for whatever turns up.”

  Horne pulled the gun over into his lap, carefully wiping the oil buffer clean. Then he oiled the moving parts of the gun with a little can he took from his hip pocket and slowly ass
embled it. He handled the gun like a lover, fitting the parts together smoothly and testing it carefully for head space when it was ready for firing.

  “That a German shirt you have on?” Sackworth asked. His eyes were level, and he had his rifle across his knees, pointed at Horne.

  “Sure,” Horne said mildly. “I needed a shirt, so I took it out of a dead German’s outfit.”

  “Looting,” Sackworth said with scorn. There was distaste and dislike in his gaze.

  “Why not?” Horne looked up at Sackworth, amused. “You’re a good kid, so don’t start throwing your weight around. This sportsmanship stuff, the old school tie, an’ whatnot—that’s okay where it belongs. You Britishers who play war like a game are living in the past. There’s nothing sporting about this. It’s like waterfronts or jungles. You survive any way you can.”

  Sackworth did not move the rifle. “I don’t like him,” he said to Benton. “I don’t trust him.”

  “Forget it!” Benton snapped. “The man’s all right, and Lord knows we need fighting men!”

  “Sure,” Horne added quietly. “It’s just you an’ me are different kind of animals, kid. You’re probably Eton and then Sandhurst. Me, I came up the hard way. A tough road kid in the States, then an able seaman, took a whirl at the fight game, and wound up in Chaco.

  “I like to fight. I also like to live. I been in a lot of fights, and mostly I fought pretty good, an’ I’m still alive. The Jerries use whatever tactics they need. What you need, kid, in war is not a lot of cut an’ dried rules but a good imagination, the ability to use what you’ve got to the best advantage no matter where you are, and a lot of the old moxie.

  “You’ll make a good fighter. You got the moxie. All you need is a little kicking around.”

  “I wish we knew where the Jerries were,” Ryan said. “This waiting gets me.”