Novel 1965 - The High Graders (v5.0) Read online

  “I did, you damn’ fool! Merriam thought he did. They were arguing, and I saw Clagg was gettin’ nowhere, so when Merriam shot and missed, I killed Eli—from my office window.”

  Mike tugged off one boot, then the other. He was wearing thick woollen socks. He felt sure that Ben was creeping closer, for the sound of those last words had been nearby and close to the ground. Ben had been shooting a pistol, but he still had a shotgun or a rifle … at this distance those shotgun slugs would cut a man in two.

  Suddenly Ben Stowe spoke. “You can still cut out, Mike. You don’t need to die.”

  How far away was he now? Maybe twenty paces. And Ben was without doubt in shelter of some kind, waiting for Mike’s reply, to cut him in two.

  Turning quickly, Mike ran back along the track, his socks making no sound on the wooden cross-ties. He heard the train, closer now, whistling for the station. Leaping to clear the cinders of the roadbed, he landed close against the pens, then with a swift lunge he rounded the corner.

  The headlight of the train was shining off across the flat, for the train had not yet rounded the bend toward the station. When the locomotive rounded the bend, the headlight would throw the whole area into sharp relief.

  The train whistled again, and then the light swung as the engine came around the bend. There was Ben Stowe, standing squarely in the middle of the track, the shotgun in his hands, waiting for that glare of light.

  They saw each other at the same instant—or maybe Mike had a bit the best of it, for he was not where Ben Stowe might have expected him to be. The shotgun came up and Mike fired. Slugs ripped through the air around him, something tugged at his pants. He stepped forward and shot again, and Ben Stowe went down to his hands and knees. The train was thundering down upon him, and Mike rushed forward in a desperate lunge, jerking Stowe free of the tracks with only seconds to spare.

  The train roared by within inches of them, then Ben Stowe came up on his knees, a Colt gripped in his fist. “Thanks, Mike!” he yelled, and fired.

  Shevlin felt the shock of the bullet, and he knew he had dropped his gun. He had reloaded behind the stock pens, and there were still one or two—

  Stowe was resting his gun across a forearm for dead aim, so Mike Shevlin drew Hollister’s gun from his waistband and as he swung it around he fired three shots as fast as he could make them roll.

  Stowe fired once. The bullet missed, struck the steel rail, and ricocheted off into the night with a nasty whine.

  Mike caught hold of the rail and pulled himself around. He was conscious that men had gotten down from the train and others had come up on horseback, but he was concentrating on one thing only: he had to get Ben Stowe.

  He twisted around to look at Stowe. Ben’s face was bloody, and his shirt was dark with blood.

  “You got me,” he gasped. “You always were shot with luck!” Even as he spoke, he brought his gun up with startling speed, and Mike shot into him again.

  Then there was only silence, the hiss of steam from the engine, and, after a moment, a mutter of excited voices and a shuffling of feet.

  Someone was kneeling over Shevlin. It was Doc Clagg. “Babcock,” Mike said, “he’s hurt bad, you—”

  But he was keeping his eyes on Ben Stowe, clutching his empty gun and waiting for him to move. Only Ben did not move, and never would again.

  “He said I was shot with luck,” Mike said slowly. “I wish that was all he had in those guns.”

  “You’ll live,” Doc Clagg assured him grimly. “Your kind are too tough to die.”

  THE CATTLE BUSINESS around Rafter never recovered, and after the mines played out Rafter became a ghost town. Mike and Laine Shevlin never did live there, for they moved to California when he was able to travel. Shevlin ran cattle there for quite a few years.

  Thirty years ago they ripped up the long-unused tracks that had been the only excuse for Tappan Junction. The buildings were destroyed when a tourist dropped a cigarette from his car as it raced along the highway that had been built at the foot of the mountains.

  Laine Shevlin lived to a fine old age until one of her grandsons became an ad man on Madison Avenue; after that there wasn’t much to live for. She just wasted away, and after Mike saw her buried he walked out of the cemetery and disappeared.

  There was quite a lot of talk, and the newspapers dug up the fact that he had been a Texas Ranger and something of a gunfighter, reprinting some of the old stories, with some confusion as to names and dates.

  The only one who could have offered a clue was the last of the old-timers. He had taken to sitting on a bench in the sun alongside a filling station on the new highway, and he was there when the car pulled up and the tall old man called over to him.

  “Wasn’t there a place called Tappan Junction somewhere about here?”

  The old-timer peered toward the driver. “Hey? Did you say Tappan Junction? She used to lie right out there on the flat.”

  The sitter’s pipe had gone out and he fumbled in his pockets for a match. “Young folks, they ain’t never heard of Tappan.”

  “What about Stone Cabin?” the man in the car asked.

  “Stone Cabin?” Through the fog of years the words startled the old man. “Did you say Stone Cabin?”

  WHEN OLD MIKE Shevlin turned up missing he was still a wealthy man, and there was quite a search for him. The highway police made inquiries, and at the filling station the old-timer was pointed out to them.

  “Doubt if he can he’p you much,” the station attendant said. “He’s almost lost his sight, and that one arm, that’s been no good for years. Horse fell on it, I guess, a good many years back. Why, that old feller’s nigh to a hundred years old! Ninety-odd, anyway.”

  They asked their questions after they found Mike Shevlin’s car abandoned in a cove at the foot of the mountains, but the old man did not pay much attention. Only after they had turned away did he mutter to himself as he sat there.

  “Tappan Junction … Stone Cabin … that’s been a while. ‘You tell Doc Clagg,’ he said, ‘you tell Doc Clagg I ain’t as tough as I used to be.’ ”

  “Stone Cabin?” the attendant repeated in answer to their query. “Never heard of it. I’ve lived around here more’n ten years, and I never heard the name.”

  The officer looked at the high green hills, rolling back in somber magnificence, wild and lonely. They told him nothing.

  “What’s back up there?” he asked.

  “Nothin’. There ain’t no road. Ain’t been anybody back in there that I can remember. Folks don’t stop here for more’n gas and the time of day. They just breeze on through. We hereabouts, we got no time for lookin’ in the mountains.”

  It was forty miles back to the highway police office, and they could just make it by quitting time.

  As they were driving back the officer looked at his companion. “Didn’t you tell me your folks came from this part of the country?”

  “My granddaddy did. But he never talked about it, or else I didn’t listen. Anyway, I don’t believe it was rough as they say. His name was the same as mine … Wilson Hoyt.”

  They settled back and listened to the hum of the motor and the sound of the tires, and watched the windshield wiper, for it was beginning to rain.

  It was raining, too, up at Stone Cabin, just as it had long ago.

  About Louis L’Amour

  “I think of myself in the oral tradition—

  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.”

  IT 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, and miner, and was 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 more than 270 million copies of his books in print worldwide, making him one of the bestselling 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 publishing tradition forward.

  Bantam Books by Louis L’Amour

  ASK YOUR BOOKSELLER FOR THE BOOKS YOU HAVE MISSED.

  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

  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

  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 Rustlers of West Fork

  The Trail to Seven Pines

  The Riders of High Rock

  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

  COOL RECEPTION

  YOU WERE LOOKING at Patterson’s grave,” said the man with the badge. “He was killed in a gun battle two years ago.”

  Anger flared up in Mike Shevlin. “Who ever told you that,” he said roughly, “lied.”

  “Then the coroner lied, Mason lied, and Gib Gentry lied.”

  “Who killed him?”

  “Gentry—in self-defense. Mason was a witness. Patterson still had a gun in his hand when the others came up.”

  “No coroner’s jury in the old times would believe that story,” Shevlin said. “They knew Eli too well.”

  “The old-timers are gone, or most of them,” the sheriff said. “Times have changed. Why don’t you ride on?”

  “Why should I?”

  There was irritation in the sheriff’s response to this. “Because you smell of trouble, and trouble is my business. You start anything and I’ll have to come against you.”

  “Thanks,” Shevlin’s tone was dry, harsh. “You’ve warned me, now I’ll return the favor. Don’t make my trouble your business, and don’t come against me.”

  THE HIGH GRADERS

  A Bantam Book

  PUBLISHING HISTORY

  Bantam edition published January 1965

  Bantam reissue / September 1995

  Bantam reissue / October 2003

  Published by

  Bantam Dell

 
A Division of Random House, Inc.

  New York, New York

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 1965 by Louis & Katherine L’Amour Trust.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law. For information adddress:

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  Visit our website at www.bantamdell.com

  Bantam Books and the rooster colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  eISBN: 978-0-553-89921-4

  v3.0