Novel 1981 - Comstock Lode (v5.0) (54 page)

Trevallion turned to her suddenly. “I can tell Jim when we get there. What I wanted to say is, I struck it today. I’m into bonanza.”

“Bonanza?”

“A while back I started to run a short drift to the outside, just to get a better circulation of air, and to have another way out if it was needed. Well, I cut into a vein of almost solid silver. Not the richest on the Comstock, but rich.

“Tomorrow they will be saying I’m the canniest mining man on the lode, but believe me, it was pure luck. I put in a round and spit the fuses and left it, and when I went in this morning there was silver everywhere. The vein is so wide I can’t see top or bottom of it, and it dips right down toward the richest part of the Comstock. I’m a rich man.”

They stopped at the bakery. “I’ve got to tell them.” He peered within. Jim was there, at Melissa’s table. Christian Tapley was there also. He opened the door for Margrita.

“Trevallion?”

He knew by the sound what the voice meant. He saw passersby stop suddenly, and stare. Margrita’s lips parted and she started to speak.

“Go inside, honey,” he said gently, “it seems there’s always something left undone.”

It was the Ax.

He was standing there, feet apart, flamboyant as always, poised and ready.

“Why, hello, Ax,” Trevallion said gently. “Are you getting lonely, Ax?”

“Lonely?” He was surprised by the unexpected question.

“Why, yes, Ax. They’re all on Boot Hill. Are you wanting to join them, Ax?”

This was not happening as Ax had planned. All the speeches he had ready that were to be repeated afterward no longer fitted. It was his turn to reply and he was on the defensive.

“They’re all gone, Ax, all that cozy little bunch of riverrats and scoundrels who were your friends. A pretty shoddy bunch, Ax, just like you.

“Nothing daring, nothing heroic, just a bunch of murdering scum. Just like you, Ax.”

Ax was furious. The coolness on which he prided himself didn’t seem to be there.

“Come on, Ax. They call you the Clean-Cutter. Now that’s a pretty name. What did you ever do that was clean, Ax? When you killed two women back there on the Missouri? Or when four of you murdered my father and came hunting me, when I was a boy?

“I’m not a boy any longer, Ax. They tell me you’re very good with that gun. That you’re fast with it.”

The Ax was trembling. He was so crazy with anger that he was literally trembling with fury. His hand was poised, ready.

He wanted to kill. Never in his life had he wanted to kill anyone so much.

“You know what I’ve got here, Ax? It’s your gun. The gun you lost when you were running away.
Running,
Ax. All you bold, daring thieves, you were running and you dropped your gun.

“See? It has your name on it. I’ll show you.”

He drew and fired, beating the Ax by a hair.

The Ax took a slow backward step, his gun going off into the dust of the street.

Trevallion took a step closer, ready for a second shot. “Being fast, Ax, is not always enough, is it? I’m sorry, Ax. I didn’t come looking for you. I could have tracked you down, Ax, but you came to me.”

The gun slipped from the Ax’s fingers. He started to speak, turned away, and fell.

There was a faint acrid smell of powder smoke, the lights of buildings shining out on the dark street, and on the darker, sprawled body of the Clean-Cutter, Mr. A.X. Elder.

Somewhere a woman laughed and a piano started a jangling tune. There was the distant pound of stamp-mills and compressors.

Trevallion turned and walked into the bakery. Grita caught his arm. “Val? Are you all right?”

“I’m all right,” he said as he reached to hold her. “I’m all right now.”

A Special Interview with
Louis L’Amour

Los Angeles, California
September, 1981

Q: How did the L’Amour family come to America?

My mother’s family came over about 1638 from England and the ancestry is mostly French, some Irish, little spots of English and Cornish scattered here and there. They came over to Boston but then they helped found the town of North Hampton, New Hampshire, and the Dearborns were located there. Then one of them moved west to Pennsylvania and was located in the area of the Susquehanna River. Then my grandfather, who was born there, came out west to Illinois. He was in the army during the Civil War and then was in the Indian wars following that and then came to settle in North Dakota.

Q: And your father’s family?

My father’s family settled in Canada and we don’t know exactly how long they were in Canada, but apparently for a very long time. The best information we can get is that they settled in the 1600’s. They were there very early and then my father’s father, my grandfather, came down from Canada to fight in the Union Army in the Civil War. It was the only fight going on at the time and he wanted to get some action, so he came down and fought through the war as a sharpshooter; and in those days, in return for their work in the war, instead of getting a bonus like they did in World War I, you know, they gave them land. And so, being a pretty sharp guy, he settled on the corners of four townships. And got control of all the timber in the four townships. So he proceeded to log that off and my dad was born up there. And went to school there and in Canada. And then it was he who came west to North Dakota.

Q: So where did you get your sense of the frontier?

I got it mostly from stories and conversation. See, there was a lot of talk about it in my home in Jamestown, North Dakota, because of my grandfather, who was there living with us for a while, and my dad and mother were very familiar with all the stories. And people would drop in and talk about them. Then I had two uncles who both went West for a while. I should say one of them stayed West all his life. But he managed ranches out in Wyoming and Montana and he traveled all over. He delivered the mail for a while in Wyoming. And Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and that crowd used to ride their horses across his ranch and the ranch he was managing, to get into the Hole-in-the-Wall, and sometimes they’d stop and swap horses at night and he used to come home to visit us every two or three years and usually for days he’d sit around and talk to my dad and tell stories and tell about how conditions were out West.

Q: Did you learn to handle a gun when you were young?

I went down to Oklahoma to visit my brother, Parker, he was secretary to the governor of Oklahoma at the time, he had been a newspaperman, one of his very good friends was Bill Tilghman, the old frontier marshal, and Bill came to the room one time in the Sherman Hotel, where Parker was staying at the time, and I was staying there with him until he got settled otherwise, and there was a knock on the door and I opened the door and here’s this very distinguished-looking man with white hair and very kindly blue eyes and a white hat. He asked me if Parker was there. I told him no, but he’d be there soon, and he said, “Well, I’m Bill Tilghman, can I come in and wait?”

You could have knocked me over with a feather, you know, because I had just been reading a paperback book that he’d published. Not the kind of paperbacks that we have now, but larger size, called
The Passing of the Oklahoma Outlaw
. And Bill had made a film on it also. See, Bill Tilghman and Chris Madsen and Heck Thomas used to…see, in Oklahoma they used to call them the Three Musketeers, and they had led the attacks on the Doolin and Dalton gangs and they were almost responsible for wiping them out. And so Bill came and I listened to him for quite a bit, and then Parker came and we went out to dinner. And during the course of the dinner he found out we were both interested in shooting, so he took us down the following week—he came over the following Sunday and took us down to the North Canadian River bottoms near Oklahoma City and he showed us how it was done.

He was very, very good. He was the first person I ever saw split a card edgewise with a pistol. He could do that and shoot out the spots on one, and did a lot of other stuff. He didn’t do any fancy tricks spinning guns, none of the old-timers did, that’s movie stuff. It looks fancy but it doesn’t mean anything, and it is a good way to get yourself shot. But those old-timers were strictly business with pistols. Bill told my brother and me, he told us, and the same thing was repeated in my hearing by Tom Pickett and Jeff Milton and several others—that you never drew a gun unless you were going to shoot, and you never shot unless to kill. You didn’t fool around. A gun was a dangerous thing and you didn’t play with it.

Q: How old were you when you set out on your own?

I was fifteen at the time and passing as twenty-two, because I found out you could get better jobs if you were twenty-two. And get paid better too. And I had been shaving, so I looked it at the time, but I hitchhiked out to Phoenix, Arizona, and when I got to Phoenix I looked for jobs for a couple of days, couldn’t find one, and then a circus came to town and I joined the Hagenback-Wallace circus and for my first job I had charge of what they called the pad room. All it meant was that after the fancy riding stock called “high school” horses finished their performance, the guys would bring the bridles and saddles to me and I would hang them on a rack and then at night when we got ready to move on to the next place I’d store them in a special box and see that they got loaded on a wagon. But every time I had any spare time, I’d get away and go where the elephants were, because I was always interested in elephants and so finally I was transferred and I worked with them. I’ve been kidded a lot about that. Actually my sole experience with working with the elephants lasted about three weeks and that’s all. Wonderful animals, very bright.

Q: So you really first started traveling with the circus?

Yes, and then I left the circus in El Paso, Texas, and I rode freight trains over to Galveston. I helped them load a banana boat over there, went over to New Orleans and shipped out at New Orleans and went to sea.

Q: Did you ever work with cattle?

Yes. I worked on several ranches and I baled hay on a ranch and I worked around or with several of the old gunfighters like Tom Pickett. Pickett had ridden with Billy the Kid, had been wounded in gun battles Bill was in, and been in prison with Billy—and he was a young fellow, very good family, good background, but he had a wild time out West, like a lot of them did. Later he was a peace officer, very legitimate character. But he was in the Tonto-Basin War in Arizona.

Q: The work with cattle wasn’t always glamorous?

The work with cattle was almost never glamorous. I enjoyed working with cattle, but the first time that I ever had much to do with it was skinning dead cattle in west Texas, and this was a job I took when I was broke and needed it very badly.

I took the job working for an old fellow who had been raised with the Apache Indians and he’d been captured when he was seven years old. The Apaches usually kill kids right off, but they liked fighters and this kid fought ’em. In fact, he was sort of the prototype for the little boy in
Hondo
who did the same thing. He fought them, and the Indians liked that. They liked a gutsy kid. So they decided he’d make a good Indian, so they took him along with them. Although they had killed his family, he liked their ways and he became more Indian than the Indians and he had even ridden on war parties with Geronimo and Nana.

I had three months of working and skinning these dead cattle, which is a messy, dirty job, but for three months we didn’t have any other interruptions, because there was no one else around. And we were out in the plains by ourselves. We’d sit around the fire at night and tell stories after the first couple of days and he’d tell me what it was like living with the Indians. He told me how they would lose the Army patrols and all. How they knew where every cupful of water in the desert was—they knew all the possible places where there was water, and the Army didn’t—and he told me all kinds of basic tactics they used; and a lot of things that later went into books like
Hondo, The Lonely Men,
and
Shalako
were things that he taught me.

Q: There’s so much detail about mining in Comstock Lode. Did you do any mining yourself?

Yes, in many mines and I did assessment work all over the West. Your have to do $100 work on a claim to hold it. And I’m not sure what the regulations are now, but in the old days you could file on several claims at once, and lots of people had mining claims but they just didn’t like to do the work. So I would volunteer to do it and I would go out and spend anywhere from five to fifteen days doing the work there was to do and then come in and get another job. But it got me into all kinds of back corners of the country that I never would have seen otherwise, and sometimes you could do the work in just a couple of days, it all depended on the circumstances.

Q: You were part of the Red Ball Express during the war?

For a time, yes. I was with tank destroyers first, and I transferred out of that because they broke up most of the tank destroyer units I was put in…at first I was an officer in charge of platoon tanks, gas line—you know, gasoline—and we’d travel all over the country. All over France and Germany, Belgium and Holland. I was at every major fight out to the Normandy landing, including that. Except for the Battle of the Bulge.

Q: You also had a professional fighting career?

When I left home and started knocking around, I’d get short of cash. One time I was down in New Mexico and I needed money and there was a rodeo going on in town, they were putting on a boxing show also, so on chance I went around to the promoter to see if there was a spot for me on the card because I needed the money. As it happens, he had nobody to box the main event with a fella named Kid Mortio—he was a bantam-weight, only 118 pounds. At that time I weighed 155, a totally different class, but he had fought 214 fights and I’d had none at that moment but everybody was afraid to box with him and he wanted to put on an exhibition for the home folks to show them what he could do. Most of his fights had been down in Mexico, never fought here in his hometown. So I agreed to go on with him and I boxed six rounds, got thirty-five dollars for it. Never saw so many gloves in my life. Then various places around the country when I was traveling around, I’d fight two, three, four times you know, and then maybe quit and do something else—stop for a while. But altogether I fought fifty-nine professional fights and I fought eight or ten fights for money that weren’t in the ring.

Q: Finally, you decided to still make your living with your hands, but over a typewriter, right?

I always wanted to write. I wanted to write from the time I could walk. I wrote while I was traveling around, several volunteer pieces for newspapers, mostly on boxing, and up in Oregon one time, I had just arrived up there and I met a couple of very pretty girls who worked for a newspaper. That was quite an incentive in itself, and they were going to have to go cover a fight and neither one had ever even seen a fight before, so I offered to do it for them. So I reported the fight for them and gave it to them, and the next day it was in the paper with my byline. So after that I covered several other fights in town and wrote a little column for the newspaper for a while, mostly about boxing, pretty corny stuff. I enjoyed it, it was fun.

Q: When you were growing up, were you very much of a reader?

I read everything. I read all the time. For a time my sister was a librarian, so she and my two brothers were always reading, and going to the library was a regular thing. We’d come home for the weekend with fifteen books in our arms and read them; and then for the first time, when I was twelve or thirteen, I discovered nonfiction. I had been reading fiction up until then. And so after that for quite a long time I read a tremendous variety of books on planes, on submarines, on ships, on all kinds of things. Studied some geology, some mineralogy and botany, and then, when I was traveling around the country, read in ships’ forecastles. Whatever books I could pick up, I was always reading.

Q: And so even though your formal education stopped at fifteen, you never stopped trying to learn?

I dropped out of school, not out of education. And I always wanted to learn…I still do. I’ve got a library here in the house that’s quite large, and I keep working on it all the time and adding to it all the time. When I was eighteen, I had been reading very indiscriminately, and I suddenly decided that if I was ever going to get an education, I’d better start doing it. So I began reading psychology and philosophy and following up different kinds of study to get a complete grasp of it.

Q: When did you first turn to fiction writing?

I’ve forgotten when my first fiction story was published. I started to write poetry first. I published a book of poetry called
Smoke from this Altar,
and before I published the book I had published poetry in about eighty different magazines. Most of the magazines didn’t pay. You just had the honor of being published. But the standards were extremely high in most of the magazines. It wasn’t easy to get in them at all. My first actual short-story sale was to a crime magazine called
True Gang Life
. I wrote a gangster story in it called “Anything for a Pal,” and the next story I published was about a fighter who came out of the East Indies. I wrote a whole series of stories about Indonesia and that area, China, and little sports stories, boxing, football, sea stories, air stories, all different kinds of stories.

Q: Before you made your first sale, had you piled up a lot of rejection slips?

Well, usually when people ask me, I say about two hundred. I wouldn’t be surprised if that was an underestimate. It’s a figure I pulled out of the air; I don’t know how many I had, because I didn’t count them. I had a lot of them.

Q: Obviously you didn’t find it too discouraging.