Galloway (1970)
Page 15
“No … not me.” He was whimpering like a child. “Not me!” And I had it in me to feel sorry for him. Somehow his kind never figure it will be them. They always kill; they are never killed. That’s the way they see it.
Taking up his rifle I backed off a little, still wary of him because he was packing a six-shooter, but I needn’t have been because he was dead.
The wolf moved out there in the dark and I said to him, “Come on, boy, we’re going home now.”
Picking up his collar because I wished to see it by daylight, I started down the mountain in the first gray of dawn, and the wolf—or dog-wolf which he seemed to be—fell in behind me. Not too close, not too far.
Looked like he’d been lonesome for a man to belong to, and when he saw me and I tossed him that meat back yonder he figured I might be the one to help him out of the trap that was sure to kill him sooner or later.
We started down the mountain, but we stopped down there where Starvation Creek flows out of the rock, and I hunted around for that gold and found it. Taken me only a few minutes and I had to rest, anyway, with my wound and all.
I was in bad shape again, but this time I was going home and I had a friend with me. The gold was heavy so I only taken one sack of the stuff, just to throw on the table in front of Nick Shadow, and say “This what you were lookin’ for?”
The sky was all red, great streaks of it, when I walked across the meadow toward the fire. Soon as I felt better, I was going over to see that Meg girl. She’d want to hear about my wolf.
The boys came out and stood there staring at me. “It’s Flagan,” Galloway said.
“I knew he’d be coming in this morning.”
“Boys,” I said, “you got to meet my wolf. Take good care of him, I—”
Well, I just folded my cards together and fell, laid right down, dead beat and hurt. But it was worth it because when I opened my eyes, Meg was there.
About the Author Louis L’Amour, born Louis Dearborn L’Amour, is of French-Irish descent. Although Mr. L’Amour claims his writing began as a “spur-of-the-moment thing” prompted by friends who relished his verbal tales of the West, he comes by his talent honestly. A frontiersman by heritage (his grandfather was scalped by the Sioux), and a universal man by experience, Louis L’Amour lives the life of his fictional heroes. Since leaving his native Jamestown, North Dakota, at the age of fifteen, he’s been a longshoreman, lumberjack, elephant handler, hay shocker, flume builder, fruit picker, and an officer on tank destroyers during World War II.
And he’s written four hundred short stories and over fifty books (including a volume of poetry).
Mr. L’Amour has lectured widely, traveled the West thoroughly, studied archaeology, compiled biographies of over one thousand Western gunfighters, and read prodigiously (his library holds more than two thousand volumes). And he’s watched thirty-one of his westerns as movies. He’s circled the world on a freighter, mined in the West, sailed a dhow on the Red Sea, been shipwrecked in the West Indies, stranded in the Mojave Desert. He’s won fifty-one of fifty-nine fights as a professional boxer and pinchhit for Dorothy Kilgallen when she was on vacation from her column. Since 1816, thirty-three members of his family have been writers. And, he says, “I could sit in the middle of Sunset Boulevard and write with my typewriter on my knees; temperamental I am not.”
Mr. L’Amour is re-creating an 1865 Western town, christened Shalako, where the borders of Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado meet. Historically authentic from whistle to well, it will be a live, operating town, as well as a movie location and tourist attraction.
Mr. L’Amour now lives in Los Angeles with his wife Kathy, who helps with the enormous amount of research he does for his books. Soon, Mr. L’Amour hopes, the children (Beau and Angelique) will be helping too.
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