Collection 1980 - Yondering (v5.0)
Contents
Shanghai, Not Without Gestures
So You Want Adventure, Do You?
Deadly Voyage
H
E 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
D
URING 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.
B
EAU
L
’
A
MOUR
Introduction
I
N 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.
W
HERE
T
HERE’S
F
IGHTING
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
.
