Sackett (1961) (17 page)

"All right," he said, and turned his back on me. I could hear running outside.

For a long minute I stood there with my gun in my hand looking at his back, and then his knees began to sag and he fell slowly, his fingers clinging as long as they could to the bar. Then he let go and rolled over on the floor and he was dead.

He lay there face up in the sawdust, his eyes open to the lights, and there was sawdust in his beard.

There was a wet feeling inside my pants where the blood was running down. I thumbed shells into my gun, holstered it, and Cap came up to me.

"You're hit," he said.

"Seems like," I said, and caught hold of the wall.

The door opened and Tyrel came in, with Orrin right behind him, both of them ready for trouble.

"We'd better get back to the place," I said. "Supper will get cold."

They looked past me at Bigelow.

"Any more of them?" Tyrel asked.

"If there are, they won't have to shoot me. I'll shoot myself."

Cap pulled my shirt open and they could see the blood oozing from a hole in the flesh over my hip. The bullet had gat itself a place without hitting a bone or doing much harm. Tyrel took out a silk handkerchief and plugged it up, and we went outside.

"The doctor's here," Cap protested. "You'd better see him."

"Bring him along. There's a lady waiting dinner."

When I came in the door of the cabin, Ange stood with her back to it. I could see her shoulders hunch a mite as if she expected to be hit, and I said, "This fool ain't married."

She turned around and looked at me. "He will be," she said, and dropped her spoon on the floor and came across the room and right into my arms.

So I taken her in my arms and for the first time in my life I had something that was really mine.

Seems like even a long, tall man who ain't much for looks can find him a woman, too.

ABOUT LOUIS L'AMOUR

"I think of myself in the oral tradition--as a troubador, a village taleteller, 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 writes about, but he literally has "walked the land my characters walk." His personal experiences as well as his lifelong devotion to historical research have combined to give Mr. L'Amour the Unique knowledge and understanding of the people, events, and challenge of the American frontier which have become the hallmarks of his popularity.

Of French-Irish descent, Mr. L'Amour can 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, assessment miner, and officer on tank destroyers during World War Q. During Us "yondering days" he also circled the world on a freighter, sailed a dhow on die Red Sea, was shipwrecked in the West Indies and stranded in the Mojave Desert. He has won fifty-one of fifty-nine fights as a professional boxer and worked as a journalist and lecturer. A voracious reader and collector of rare books, Mr. L'Amour's personal library of some 10,000 volumes covers a broad range of scholarly disciplines including many personal papers, maps, and diaries of the pioneers.

Mr. L'Amour "wanted to write almost from the time I could walk.'* After developing a widespread following for his many adventure stories written for the fiction magazines, Mr. L'Amour published his first full-length novel, Hondo, in 1953. Mr. L'Amour is now one of the four bestselling living novelists in the world. Every one of his more than 85 novels is constantly in print and every one has sold more than one million copies, giving Hfm more million-copy bestsellers than any other living author. His books have been translated into more man a dozen languages, and more than thirty, of his novels and stories have been made into feature films and television movies.

The recipient of many great honors and awards, Mr. L'Amour in 1983 became the first novelist ever to be awarded a Special National 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 Ronald Reagan.

Mr. L'Amour lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Kathy, and their two children, Beau and Angelique.