Talon & Chantry 07 - North To The Rails (v5.0) (23 page)

It could still work. Williams and Chantry and Sparrow…the Talrims and the Ruffs…when it was all over she might still be alone.

She stood for an instant, knowing that the slightest move might start the shooting. She was hesitating, trying to decide what could be done that would be best for her, when Chantry spoke again.

“There need to be no shooting here,” he said quietly. “As you gentlemen know, I am against violence. Leave the gold, Ruff—just take your horses and ride out of here.”

“What about your pa?”

“My father faced his problems in his time. I shall face mine in my time. What you did to my father was murder, Ruff. I have a feeling you will hang—if not for that, for some other crime. I see no reason for me to kill you, when your end is inevitable.”

“You talk mighty fancy,” Frank Ruff said. “All I hear is that you want to back out.”

“I did not come hunting you. That was your own idea. I came west to buy cattle, as these men can testify. I have bought my cattle.

“You now have two sons. No matter who wins, the odds are that when the shooting is over you will have one less, maybe two less. Is that what you want?”

“He’s right, Frank. It’s a Mexican stand-off,” Sparrow said.

Sarah saw only one thing. Frank Ruff was hesitating. The last argument had reached him. In a moment he might decide to quit, then there would be no shooting, and the gold would go to Chantry.

She knew the Talrims. Their first instinct, always, was to kill. If she moved at this tense moment, her move would draw the eyes of the others, and she knew what the Talrims would do then.

“Hank?” she said softly, and moved suddenly.

Eyes swung toward her, and the Talrims grabbed for their guns.

All eyes had turned but Tom Chantry’s. Even as the Talrims drew, his gun was coming up. His first shot caught Hank Talrim in the stomach and knocked him to the ground; the second hit Bud in the shoulder.

And then a thunder of guns, stabbing flame. A man running, a man falling…a grunt, a scream, and then silence.

How long had it been? Only a few seconds. Tom Chantry still held his gun up, ready. But it was all over. So many lives, so short a time.

He could hardly realize yet what had happened. From the corner of his eye he had seen French Williams…his gun had come out so fast it seemed almost to materialize out of thin air into his hand, spouting flame. Now Williams was down, hunched against a tree, his eyes still bright, his gun still ready, but his shirt was slowly turning crimson.

Sparrow was leaning against another tree, a trickle of blood on his cheek, more blood on his shirt.

Hank Talrim was dead. Bud was crawling toward his horse, but anybody could see he wasn’t going far. Frank Ruff was dead, literally shot to pieces by French Williams. Mort Ruff was seemingly unhurt, and was bending over Charlie, who was down.

Doris came from the ditch where she had been lying. “Tom, are you all right?” she asked.

“I think so. Take care of French.”

He went over to Sparrow. “Better get your coat off, Mr. Sparrow. I’ll want to look at your side.”

“It’s just a crease. Tom, did you hear what Frank said? About me being on the wrong side?”

“So? I think you were on the right side.”

“You don’t understand, Tom. I want you to understand. I was a youngster…only sixteen. I’d been working with Frank Ruff and Harvey. They told me there was a man needed killing, that he’d killed a friend of theirs, and they wanted me to join them. I believed them, and I went along, and I didn’t know what I was shaped up for until it happened. I didn’t figure on an ambush, Tom. I didn’t even know your father, but I helped shoot him down, and it wasn’t until I read it in the papers and heard folks talking that I realized what I’d done.

“They lied to me, Tom, but I went along—maybe because I wanted them to think me a big man. I wanted to show them I had as much nerve as anyone. I didn’t know until afterwards that the man I had helped to kill was a good man, a better man than any one of us.”

“We’ll consider your part past and done with now.” And Chantry uncovered Sparrow’s wound.

It was a crease, but a deep one. He tore the shirt and made a pad, then bound it over the wound. There was nothing much else to be done here.

“I tried to make it up to you, Tom, I tried to help.”

“You did.”

Then Mobile Callahan and Bone McCarthy came riding hard down the slope. And from the south, came Hay Gent, McKay, and Helvie.

Chantry went over to French. “How is he?” he asked Doris.

“He’s been shot three times—low on the left side, through the thigh, and the chest muscle on the left side where it joins the shoulder.”

“They were shooting for his heart.”

French looked up at him. “I’ve got no heart, Tom. That’s why they couldn’t hit it.”

Callahan dropped from his horse and brought his saddlebags with him. “Let me at him. I’ve had something to do with this sort of thing.”

McCarthy and Helvie were looking at the outlaws. Mort Ruff got slowly to his feet. “Charlie’s hurt bad,” he said. “Can you help him?”

“I’ll try,” Helvie said.

Bud Talrim was dead.

“We’d better report this,” Chantry said.

Sparrow looked at him. “To whom? There isn’t any law within a hundred and fifty miles that I know of. You report it if you like. I’m going to forget it.”

McKay and Gent were pulling poles from the roof of the house. “We’ll make some travois, like the Indians use,” McKay said. “Carry the wounded back.”

“I can ride,” Sparrow said. “We’ll need just two, for Williams and Charlie Ruff.”

Suddenly Doris looked up. “Where’s Sarah?”

Chantry looked blank. Nobody had thought of Sarah.

She was gone. Two horses were gone, and the money was gone.

Mobile started for his horse. “We’ll find her. Come on, Bone.”

“All right if I come?” Helvie asked.

They rode out, and Chantry watched them go. Somehow the money did not seem so important now, although he knew it was. It was Earnshaw’s future, Doris’ future, and his.

But was it? They could start over. Out here that was possible. A setback was only that. Nothing to put a man down. You took such things, accepted them, and went on from there. It was a matter of the mind, that was all. If you weren’t whipped in your mind, nothing could whip you.

“Let’s get on with it,” Tom Chantry said. “Back to the railroad.”

Had there ever been a time when he was not riding toward the railroad?

Chapter 23

S
ARAH MILLIER WAS vastly content. She was safely away with two horses and all the gold. She had a good rifle, a pistol, and a map.

The map showed the location of the Arkansas River, it showed Trinidad to the west, Tascosa to the southeast. It was drawn on a piece of tablet paper, and Tascosa looked reassuringly close.

There was a stage from there to Fort Griffin and points east, and her horses were fresh. She would ride to Tascosa, catch the stage, go east to the railroad, then to New York; and within a matter of a few weeks she would be in Paris with nearly fifty thousand dollars in gold.

Nothing on the map said anything about the Llano Estacado…the Staked Plain.

Nor did it mention distance, nor the factor of time. She had just asked a man in Trinidad to show her how the places lay in respect to each other. She had said nothing to him about the fact that she might want to ride over that country.

She had the gold and she was safely away, and if anyone had survived that shooting back there they would be having trouble enough without following her. She rode blithely south, and a little east.

The day was warm and pleasant, and she made good time. By nightfall, when she camped on Wild Horse Creek, she had put twenty-five miles behind her.

There was a good bit of water in Wild Horse Creek, and she drank and her horses drank. There was food in the saddlebags, so she ate. Another hard day’s ride, she thought, and she would be in Tascosa. That was the way it looked on her map.

Sarah had no canteen, nor did she realize the need for one. She had no idea that Wild Horse Creek was more often dry than otherwise. The next day she started out at daybreak, alternately walking or cantering.

At noon she was far out on a wide plain of sparse grass, with nothing in sight anywhere. Her horse no longer cantered, but was content to walk. A light wind began to blow, the sky was clear, the sun warm. She was thirsty, but unworried. When she saw brush ahead she knew it was a creek. Half an hour later she sat her horse in the dry bed of that creek. There was no water, no sign of any. She pushed on.

The pack horse carrying the gold lagged, and impatiently she tugged on the lead rope.

She rode on, into the sun-lit afternoon. Tascosa could not be far away now. The distance on the map the man had drawn had seemed so small, and she had no idea that she would never see Tascosa, that it was far away beyond the horizon, beyond many horizons, and that in all the land between water was scarce, even for those who knew where to look. Shortly before sundown she came upon the bones of cattle, and after that she saw them frequently.

Finally, unable to go on, she got down, tied her horse to several skulls pulled together, and slept. Before morning she awoke. Her throat was dry, and she was scarcely able to swallow.

She walked until the sun came up, then got into the saddle. She could see that her horses were suffering, the pack horse most, for the gold was heavy and a dead weight.

When the sun was high she looked all around her, and saw nothing but an endless plain, level as a floor, it seemed. She found water holes where the earth was cracked from the heat, but no water.

She came at last to a river bed. Instantly, her heart leaped with excitement. Tascosa was on the Canadian. This must be it! She was going to make it, after all!

The bed was dry.

The Cimarron, still far to the north of the Canadian, was often dry. She turned upstream, and after plodding for some distance she found a small pool behind a natural dam formed of rocks and brush. She drank. The water was bad, but she drank. And the horses drank, and the water was gone. In the shade of some brush she lay down to rest, after tying the horses to the brush.

She slept like something dead, then was awakened by the sun on her face.

The pack horse was gone. The branch to which it had been tied was broken. Her horse, tied more securely, had not gotten free.

There was a myriad of tracks of buffalo or cattle or something. Among them all she could not make out which were those of the horse, for the sand was soft and left no well-defined print.

She rode on upstream, found another miniature pool, drank and let the horse drink, them scrambled him up the bank. Seeing a low knoll, she rode to the top.

She stared, and a dreadful emptiness crept into her, for wherever she looked there was nothing, only the vast plain that swept away to the horizon. Never in all her life had she seen or imagined anything like this. It was a vast brown sea, rolling endlessly away.

There was no movement anywhere, no sign of life.

Something seemed to shrink inside her. She no longer even thought of the gold, only of life. Nothing in all her years had prepared her for this.

Yet she must keep on. It could not be far. Surely, surely, it must be close.

She turned the horse down the slope and headed south.

O
N THE FIFTH day, Mobile Callahan sighted the pack horse. It was standing alone, head hanging. When they rode up they could see the pack had slipped around until it was under the horse’s belly.

They cut the pack away, gave the horse a drink from water poured into the crown of a hat, then dividing the gold between their horses, and leading the pack horse, they turned back.

Bone McCarthy, standing in his stirrups, looked all around. “Beats all,” he muttered. “Where do you figure she thought she was goin’? Ain’t nothing off that way for miles!”

“Lost, maybe. Only she surely held to her course.”

“What d’you think?”

“Figure it out for yourself. She had no water with her, and besides, water’s too far apart in this country. I’d say she was dead.”

“Come on. Packin’ all this gold we’ll be lucky to make it back ourselves.”

T
HIRTEEN YEARS LATER, two cowboys hunting strays in the lonely lands where the Panhandle of Oklahoma gives way to the Panhandle of Texas, came on some bones.

“Hey, Sam. Looka here!”

Sam rode over, looked into the shallow place behind the clump of bear grass. “What d’ya know? Woman, too.”

“White woman.” The first cowhand indicated the twisted leather of a boot sole and heel. He held up a finger bone. On it was a gold ring with a diamond—or what looked like one.

“What would a white woman be doin’ away off here?”

He looked around. Some of the bones had been pulled away by coyotes. There was no sign of a grave. Somehow she had come to this point, died here, and remained lying there until now.

“Ought to bury her,” Sam said.

“With what? We got no shovel. Come on. We got miles to go an’ we’ll be late for chuck. If we’re late the cook will throw it out.”

“What about the ring?”

“Leave it with her. Maybe she set store by it. And anyway, she’s got nothing else.”

They rode away. The sound of their hoof-beats died away. The wind stirred, and a little dust drifted over the whitened bones, and then lay still.

Actually 26 men are said to have been killed in that room during the wild days.
Return to text.

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.”

I
T 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, miner, and 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 nearly 270 million copies of his books in print worldwide, making him one of the best-selling 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),
North to the Rails, 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.