The Collected Short Stories of Louis L'Amour, Volume 7 Page 11

  Something stirred in the brush across the way, and the shadow of movement caught his eye. An Indian was peering toward the station. And then wild and clear he heard Kickapoo’s yell. “Yeeow!”

  Dud Ryan felt a fierce surge of joy. He’s made it! By the Lord Harry, he’d—! He tried to squeeze, but his fingers failed him and his hand fell away, fell to the floor.

  He could hear the pound of hooves now, and the rattle of the stage.

  He rolled over, the stabbing pain from his broken spine wrenching a scream from him, but in a last, terrible burst of energy he managed to grasp the rawhide in his teeth and jerk down. The twin barrels of the shotgun thundered, an enormous bellow of sound in the empty room. Instantly there was a crash of sound from the rolling stage, rifles firing, and all hell breaking loose outside.

  KICKAPOO JACKSON WAS rolling the stage down the slight hill to Bluff Creek when he heard the roar of the gun. Brad Delaney came up on his knees, rifle in hand, but it was Wells with the revolving shotgun who saw the first Indian. His shotgun bellowed and Delaney’s rifle beat out a rapid tattoo of sound, and from below pistols and a rifle were firing.

  The attack began and ended in that brief instant of gunfire, for the Indians were no fools and their ambush had failed. Swiftly, they retired, slipping away in the gathering darkness and carrying three dead warriors with them.

  Jackson sawed the team to a halt, and Delaney dropped to the ground and sent three fast shots after the retreating Indians.

  Doc Moody pushed open the door and saw the dying man, the rawhide still gripped in his teeth. With a gentle hand he took it away.

  “You don’t need to tell me, Doc. I’ve had it.” Sweat beaded his forehead. “I’ve known for … hours. Had—had to … warn …”

  Hank Wells dropped to his knees beside Ryan. “Dud, you saved us all, but you saved more than you know. You saved your own son!”

  “Son?”

  “Ruby had a boy, Dud. Your boy. He’s four now, and he’s outside there with Ma Harrigan.”

  “My boy? I saved my boy?”

  “Ruby’s dead, Ryan,” Delaney said. “She was sending the boy to you, but we’ll care for him, all of us.”

  He seemed to hear, tried to speak, and died there on the floor at Bluff Creek Station.

  Doc Moody got to his feet. “By rights,” he said, “that man should have been dead hours ago.”

  “Guts,” Hank Wells said. “Dud never had much but he always had guts.”

  Doc Moody nodded. “I don’t know how you boys feel about it, but I’m adopting a boy.”

  “He’ll have four uncles, then,” Jackson said. “The boy will have to have a family.”

  “Count us in on that,” the newlywed said. “We want to be something to him. Maybe a brother and sister, or something.”

  THEY’VE BUILT a motel where the stage station stood, and not long ago a grandson and a great-grandson of Dud Ryan walked up the hill where some cedar grew, and stood beside Dud Ryan’s grave. They stopped only a few minutes, en route to a family reunion.

  There were fifty-nine descendants of Dud Ryan, although the name was different. One died in the Argonne Forest and two on a beach in Normandy and another died in a hospital in Japan after surviving an ambush in what was then known as the Republic of Vietnam. There were eleven physicians and surgeons at the reunion, one ex-governor, two state senators, a locomotive engineer, and a crossing guard. There were two bus drivers and a schoolteacher, several housewives, and a country storekeeper. They had one thing in common: They all carried the blood of Ryan, who died at Bluff Creek Station on a late-October evening.

  Here Ends the Trail

  Cold was the night and bitter the wind and brutal the trail behind. Hunched in the saddle, I growled at the dark and peered through the blinding rain. The agony of my wound was a white-hot flame from the bullet of Korry Gleason.

  Dead in the corral at Seaton’s he was, and a blessed good thing for the country, too, although had I gone down instead, the gain would have been as great and the loss no greater. Wherever he went, in whatever afterlife there may be for the Korry Gleasons of this world, he’ll carry the knowledge that he paid his score for the killing of old Bags Robison that night in Animas.

  He’d been so sure, Gleason had, that Race Mallin had bucked it out in gun smoke down Big Band way. He’d heard the rumor all right, so he thought it safe to kill old Bags, and he’d nothing on his mind when he walked, sloshing through the mud toward Seaton’s—and then he saw me.

  He knew right off, no doubt about that. He knew before he saw my face. He knew even before I spoke. “Good-bye, Korry,” I said.

  But the lightning flashed as I spoke and he saw me standing there, a big, lean-bodied man wearing no slicker and guns ready to hand. He saw me there with the scar on my jaw, put there by his own spur the night I whipped him in Mobeetie.

  He swore and grabbed for his gun and I shot him through the belly, shot him low down, where they die hard, because he’d never given old Bags a chance, old Bags who had been like a father to me … who had no father and no mother, nor kith nor kin nor anything. I shot him low and he grabbed iron and his gun swung up and I cursed him like I’ve never cursed, then I sank three more shots into him, framing the ugly heart of him with lead and taking his bullet in the process.

  Oh, he was game, all right! He came of a hard clan, did Korry Gleason, big, bloody, brutal men who killed and fought and drank and built ranches and roads and civilization and then died because the country they built was too big for them to hold down.

  So now I’d trail before me and nothing behind me but the other members of the Gleason clan, who, even now, would be after me. The trail dipped down and the wind whipped at my face while the pain of my wound gnawed at my side. My thoughts spun and turned smoky and my brain struggled with the heat haze of delirium.

  Gigantic thunder bottled itself up in the mighty canyons of cloud and then exploded in jagged streaks of lightning that stabbed and shimmered among the rock-sided hills. Night and the iron rain and wet rock for a trail, the roaring streams below and the poised boulders, revealed starkly by some momentary flash, then concealed but waiting to go crashing down when the moment came. And through it I rode, more dead than alive, with a good seat in the saddle but a body that lolled and sagged. Under me there was a bronco that was sure-footed on a trail that was a devil’s nightmare.

  Then there was a light.

  Have you ever seen a lighted window flickering through the rain of a lonely land? Have you ever known that sudden rush of heart-glowing warmth at such a sight? There is no other such feeling, and so when I saw it, the weariness and pain seemed warranted and cheap at the price of that distant, promising window.

  What lay beyond that light? It did not matter, for since time began, man has been drawn to the sight of human habitation, and I was in an unknown land, and far from anywhere so far as I knew. Then in a lightning flash I saw a house, a barn, and a corral, all black and wet in the whipping rain.

  Inside the barn, there was the roar of rain on the roof and the good, friendly smells of horses and hay, of old leather and sacks of grain, and all the smells that make barns what they are. So I slid from my horse and led him into the welcome stillness and closed the door behind us. There I stripped the saddle from him and wiped the rain from his body and shook it from his mane, and then I got fresh hay and stuffed the manger full. “Fill your belly,” I told him. “Come dawn we’ll be out of here.”

  Under my slicker, then, I slipped the riding thong from the hammer of my Colt and slid my rifle from the saddle scabbard. The light in the window was welcoming me, but whether friend or enemy waited there, I did not know. A moment after I knocked on the door, it jerked open under my hand and I looked into the eyes of a woman.

  Her eyes were magnificent and brown, and she was tall and with poise and her head carried like a princess crowned. She looked at me and she said, “Who are you?” Her voice was low, and when she spoke something within me quivered, and then
she said, “What do you want here?”

  “Shelter,” I said, “a meal if you’ve got the food to spare. There’s trouble following me, but I’ll try to be gone before the storm clears. Will you help? Say the word, yes or no.”

  What she thought I’d no idea, for what could she think of me, big, unshaven, and scarred? And what could she think when my slicker was shed and she saw the two tied-down guns and the mark of blood on the side and the spot where my shirt was torn by the bullet.

  “You’ve been shot,” she said.

  And then the room seemed to spin slowly in a most sickening fashion and I fell against the wall and grabbed a hook and clung to it, gripping hard, afraid to go down for fear I’d not again get to my feet.

  She stepped in close and put her arm about my waist and helped me walk toward the chair, as I refused the bed. I sat while she brought hot water and stripped my shirt from me and looked down at the place where the bullet had come through, and a frightening mess it was, with blood caked to my hide and the wound an ugly sight.

  She bathed the wound and she probed for the bullet and somehow she got it out. This was something she had done before, that I could see. She treated my side with something, or maybe it was only her lovely hands and their gentle touch, and as I watched her I knew that here was my woman, if such there was in the world, the woman to walk beside a man, and not behind him. Not one of those who try always to be pushing ahead and who are worth nothing at all as a woman and little as anything else.

  She started coffee then and put broth on the fire to warm, and over her shoulder she looked at me. “Who are you, then? And where is it you come from?”

  Who was I? Nobody. What was I? Less than nothing. “I’m a drifting man,” I said simply enough, “and one too handy with a gun for the good of himself or anyone. I’m riding through. I’ve always been riding through.”

  “There’s been a killing?”

  “Of a man who deserved it. So now I’m running, for though he was a bad lot, there’s good men in his line and they’ll be after me.”

  She looked at me coolly, and she said, “You’ve run out of one fight and into another, unless you move quickly.”

  “Here?”

  “Yes. We have moved in and planted crops and now a cattleman would be driving us out. There are eleven of us—eleven that can fight, and fourteen women, who can help. Some have been killed, my father for one. There are more than thirty tough hands riding with the cattleman, and one of them is Sad Priest.”

  There was no good in Priest. Him I knew well and nothing about him I liked. “Who is the cattleman?”

  “Yanel Webb. It’s a big outfit.”

  “I know them.” By now I was eating the broth and drinking coffee and the chill was leaving my bones, but my lids were heavy and there was a weight of sleep on my eyes. She showed me to the bed where her father had slept and helped me off with my boots and guns, and then what happened I never knew, for sleep folded me away into soft darkness.

  Though I remembered but fragments, there was a fever that took me and I tossed and turned on the bed for hours. A drink of water from a cup in her gentle hand exhausted me and the medicine in the dressings for my wound stained the sheets. At last I faded off into a dreamless sleep that seemed to go on forever. When next my eyes opened to awareness, there was daylight at the window and a clear sky beyond it and the girl was standing in the door. I had a vague memory of someone knocking on the door, voices, and the pound of hooves receding into the distance.

  “You’d best get up. They’re coming.”

  “The Gleasons?”

  “Webb and Priest, and his lot. And we’re not ready for them. We’re all scattered.” She dried her palms on her apron. “You’d best slip out. I’ve saddled your horse.”

  “And run?”

  “It’s no fight of yours.”

  “I’m not a running sort of man. And as to whether it’s a fight of mine or not, time will be saying, for you’ve done me a turn and I pay my debts when I can … have you coffee on?”

  “My father said there must always be hot coffee in a house.”

  “Your father was a knowing man.”

  When I had my boots on and my guns I felt better, favoring my side a bit. When they rode into the yard I was standing in the door with a cup of hot, black coffee in my left hand.

  There were at least twenty of them, and armed for business. Tough men, these. Tough men and hard in the belly and eyes. The first of them was Webb, of whom I’d heard talk, and on his left, that lean rail of poison, Sad Priest.

  “Morning,” I said. “You’re riding early.”

  “We’ve no talk with you, whoever you are. Where’s Maggie Ryan?”

  “This morning I’m speaking for her. Is it trouble you’re after? If it is”—I smiled at them, feeling good inside and liking the look of them—“you’ve called at the right door. However, I’ll be forgivin’.

  “If you turn about now and ride off, I’ll be letting you go without risk.”

  “Let us go?” Yanel Webb stared at me as if I was fair daft, and not a bad guess he’d made, for daft I am and always have been. When there’s a fight in the offing, something starts rolling around in me, something that’s full of gladness and eagerness that will not go down until there’s fists or clubs or guns and somebody’s won or lost or got themselves a broken skull. “You’ll let us go? Get out of here, man! Get out while we see fit to let you!”

  That made me laugh. “Leave a scrap when the Priest is in it? That I’d never do, Webb.” I stepped out onto the porch, moving toward them, knowing there’s something about closeness to a gun that turns men’s insides to water and weakness. “How are you, Sad? Forgotten me?”

  He opened that scar of a mouth and said, “I’ve never seen you before—” His voice broke off and he stopped. “Race Mallin …”

  That made me chuckle. There’d been a change in his eyes then, for he knew me, and I knew myself what was said about me, how I was a gun-crazy fool who had no brains or coolness or reason. A man who wouldn’t scare and wouldn’t bluff and who would walk down the avenues of hell with dynamite in his pockets and tinder in his hair. Now, no man wants to tackle a man like that, for you know when the chips are down and you’ve got to fight, he’ll die hard and not alone.

  Sad Priest was a fast hand with a gun, maybe faster than me, but there’d been other fast men who had died as easily as anyone.

  “Right you are. And it looks like some of these boys here will be able to tell it around the bunkhouses next year, the story of how Sad Priest and Yanel Webb died with Race Mallin in an all-out gun battle! What a story that will make for those who yarn around the fires!

  “Yanel Webb, all his cattle wasted, his ranch in other hands, his wife a widow, and his baby son an orphan, and Sad Priest, the fastest of them all, facedown in the dirt of a nester’s yard with his belly shot full of lead.”

  Beyond them were the others and I grinned at them. “Oh, don’t you lads worry. Some of you favored ones will go along. How many is a guess, but you’d best remember I’ve ten good bullets here, and while I’ve gone down three times in gunfights, it was every time with empty guns!

  “Tell them, Sad! You were on the Neuces that time when the four Chambers boys jumped me. They put me down and filled me full of holes and I was six weeks before I could walk, but they buried three of the Chambers and the other one left the country when I left my bed.”

  “You talk a lot,” Webb said sourly.

  “It’s a weakness of the Irish,” I said.

  They did not like it. None of them liked it. At such a time no man feels secure and each one is sure you’re looking right at him.

  “What are you doin’ here?” Webb demanded. “This is no fight of yours.”

  “Why, any one-sided fight is my fight, Yanel,” I explained. “I’ve a weakness for them. I could not stay out of it, and me with the Gleasons behind me.”

  That I said for the smartness of it. I’m not so crazy as I sound, and wi
ld as I get in a scrap, I knew they’d salt me down if the guns opened here. But my deal was to bluff them, for no man wishes to die, and once the bluff started, to offer them an easy out, a reason for delay.

  The Gleasons made a reason. I knew they would figure that if the Gleasons were after me, all they had to do was sit back and let the Gleasons kill me—and any gain in time was a gain for us.

  Webb hesitated, soaking it up. He didn’t like it, but it was smart, and Priest said something to him under his breath, and probably a warning to let the Gleasons come. Then Webb said, “Why are the Gleasons after you?”

  “Korry,” I explained, “shot down an old friend of mine when I was down Del Rio way. I met him last night and he was a bit slow.”

  “That,” Webb said, “I’d like to see. We’ll camp out and see what happens.”

  Now, that I’d not expected. I’d believed they would ride out and leave us alone, but with them here … Maggie Ryan spoke beside me. “What will we do, Race? The others will be here soon, and they are not fighting men, they are quiet, sincere men with families and homes. If there is a fight here, some of them or all of them will die. Webb won’t stop killing once he starts.”

  “It isn’t Webb,” I said. “It’s that cold image of a buzzard beside him, it’s Priest that worries me.”

  Strange is the world that men are born to, and strange the ways of men when trouble comes. Yanel Webb was not a bad man, only a hard man who thought cattle were the only way of life and would stop all others who came into the country. And those with him—they were hard, reckless men, but cowhands, not killers. Fight they would, if they must, but with a decent way out … and the Gleasons who were coming. Korry had been the only bad apple in that lot. They knew it as well as I, but they were honor bound to hunt me down, but I’d no stomach for killing honest men.

  Across the hard-caked earth of the yard I looked at Sad Priest.

  “Maggie,” I said, “there’s a chance that we can work it out, but only one chance. What stake has Priest in this?”