Marcus Kiley was down, shot to doll rags by Tom, who was sitting wide-legged, his back against the bar.
“They were good folks,” Tom said. “Used to let me warm before their fire on cold mornings. They never deserved a girl like Myra … even then she was a mean one.” Blood was staining his shirt. “You got him, boy. You killed ol’ Henry. He never believed the bullet was made that could kill him.”
Val dropped to his knee beside him. “Thanks, Tom. Will Reilly always said you were a good man.”
“But a little crazy. Just a little crazy in the head, that was what they always said about me—but Myra’s folks, Will Reilly, and you … it never made no difference to you all.”
“Tom, I—”
“Val,” Tensleep said, “he’s dead. He died right there.”
Val was feeding shells into his empty gun. “What about the breed?”
“He was dead before we got to him. One of those bullets of mine or Dube’s must have ricocheted into him—we were both shootin’.”
They started back up the street together, walking side by side. Boston came out of the door to meet him, running into his arms.
“There’s a train through here tomorrow,” Val said. “Let’s go home on the Denver & Rio Grande.”
The stage came in just before sundown, and with the crimson and pink of the sunset coloring the sky and the rims of the mountains around, Val closed his deal with Cope, a clear sale for cash and stock.
“Myra’s gone east,” Cope told him. “She could only make money with the right-of-way if she sold to one of us, and we wouldn’t do business with her.”
Cope glanced around at Dube, Tensleep, and Gates. “Son,” he said, “it looks to me as if you’ve made some friends, some really good friends.”
“I hope I can always be as good a friend to them as they have been to me,” Val said, “and I think I can. I had a man who taught me how.”
About The Author
“I think of myself in the oral tradition — of a troubadour, 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 recreated 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, assessment miner, and officer on tank destroyers 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 100 books is in print; there are nearly 230 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 tradition forward with new books written by the author during his lifetime to be published by Bantam well into the nineties — among them, four Hopalong Cassidy novels: The Rustlers of West Fork, The Trail to Seven Pines, The Riders of High Rock, and Trouble Shooter.
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