The Collected Short Stories of Louis L'Amour, Volume Five

by Louis L'Amour

  Neil Pratt wiped the blood from his face with the back of his hand; he was swaying on his feet. Somehow, something was wrong. In all his fights his huge fists or his great strength had won quickly. Here was a man who didn’t run away, who was always in there close, cutting, stabbing, slicing him with knifing punches, yet he couldn’t hit him!

  Pratt spread his hands, trying to get close. Suddenly Brady’s shoulder was invitingly close. He lunged to grab it, but somehow Brady caught his wrist, bent suddenly, and Pratt found himself flying through the air to land heavily on the turf a half-dozen feet away.

  Van Brady was breathing easily, and he was smiling now. “Get up, Big Boy!” he said softly. “I want to show you what happens to men who bust into my classes!”

  Pratt heaved himself heavily to his feet. Brady did not wait. He walked up to him, and hooked both hands hard to the head. Pratt started to fall, and Brady caught him by the hair and smashed him in the face with three wicked uppercuts. Then he let go and shoved, and Pratt toppled over on the ground.

  “Take him,” Brady said to the Ritter hands, “take him home. He’ll need a good rest!”

  Sullenly, the Ritter hands helped Pratt to a horse and started off. Van Brady turned, wiping the sweat from his face. His clothes were not mussed, not even his wavy hair. The children stood staring admiringly as he walked to the pump to wash his bloody fists.

  “You did a job,” Magoon said solemnly. “I never seen a man fight like that. He couldn’t hit you.”

  “They call it boxing,” Van said, straightening up. “Fighting is just like punching cows or trapping fur. It has to be learned. It isn’t anything fancy, it is just a lot of tricks learned over many years by a lot of different men, each one a good fighter. When you know a lot of them you become a skillful boxer.”

  He looked up at Stretch. “Thanks,” he said, “for keeping that monkey off my back.”

  “It won’t be enough, though,” Magoon said. “You got t’ get a gun. They’ll be back. That Pratt is mean!”

  The Circle R was standing around staring as Neil Pratt was helped from his horse. Both eyes were swollen tight shut. His face was a scarred and bloody mass.

  “What happened?” Ritter demanded.

  He was a tight-faced, hard-mouthed man with mean eyes. Some said he was a killer. That he had twenty killings behind him. He always wore two guns.

  “That schoolteacher,” Brooks said, “the one that’s livin’ at the schoolhouse.”

  Pete Ritter stepped down from the porch, his face livid. “Livin’ at the schoolhouse?” he snapped. “Don’t you know that’s on the Shanahan place? Jest loaned for a school? You pack o’ flea-brained dolts, that hombre may be a Shanahan!”

  In her own room, Claire Ewing was reading a letter from Spanish John.

  That hombre wot done the clown trik ridin ack was Shanahan Brady. He cum from Montana somewheres, but his pappy cum from Arizony, like us. He was a plumb salty hombre. For moren a year he was a prizefighter in Noo Yawk, an he done trick shootin in the show, too. If ’n he’s out thar, yuh tell the boys to lay off. He ain’t no pilgrum.

  The table was crowded when she walked in with the letter in her hands. Coolly, she read it.

  “Why, that ornery coyote!” Magoon declared. “He done that ridin’ ack afore! I got a good notion t’ beat his…” The memory of Neil Pratt’s face came back to him. “No,” he finished, “I guess I better not.”

  “How’d you guess?” Ewing asked her.

  “That riding. I saw him do it on a circus, back East, when I was in school. He was supposed to be a clown, nearly got bucked off all the time, but always stayed on.”

  “Ritter’ll guess,” Magoon said. “He’ll run him off.”

  Web Fancher shoved back from the table. He got up. “I ain’t hongry,” he said, and disappeared through the door. A moment later there was a clatter of a horse’s hoofs.

  “Goin’ t’ warn Ritter. I wondered what that coyote was up to!” Ward said. He got up. “Well, ain’t speakin’ for nobody but myself, but I’m sidin’ the teacher!”

  IN THE CAMP among the willows, Shan Brady was digging into his war bag. He had little time, he knew. Ritter would hear of this, and from all he had learned the Circle R boss would be smart enough to put two and two together. Besides, he might know that Old Mike had allowed the school to be built on his place.

  They would come for him, and he wanted to be ready. He had never killed a man, and he didn’t want to now. There were four, no, that Mexican in Sonora made five, who had tried to kill him. Each of them had lived through it, but each time they had collected a bullet in the hand or arm.

  Digging deeper in the war bag he drew out twin cartridge belts and two heavy Colt .45s in black, silver-mounted holsters. The belt and holsters were rodeo showman’s gear. The guns were strictly business, and looked it.

  With those guns he had shot cigarettes from men’s mouths, shot buttons from their coats.

  Rolling up a fresh smoke, he studied the situation. His position had not been chosen only for camping facilities, and not only because it was on the Shanahan place. It had been chosen for defense, as well.

  Logs had rolled downstream during flood seasons, and he had found several of them in an excellent position. He had dragged more down close, and under the pretext of gathering wood, he had built several traps at strategic places. Now, working fast, he dragged up more logs and rolled them into place. The stream provided him with water, and he had plenty of grub. He had seen to that.

  They had laughed at him for that, behind his back. “That teacher must think he’s goin’ t’ feed an army!” they had said. But he was planning, laying in a supply of food.

  His position was nicely chosen. From three sides he could see anyone who approached. The willows and the log wall gave him some concealment as well as cover.

  It was an hour after daylight when he saw them coming, Pete Ritter himself in the lead. Behind him were six men, riding in a tight knot. When they were thirty yards away, he lifted his rifle and spoke, “Keep back, Ritter! I don’t want any trouble from you!”

  “You got trouble!” Ritter shouted angrily. “You get off that place, an’ get out of the country!”

  “I’m Shanahan Brady!” Shan yelled, “an’ I’m stayin’! Come any closer, an’ somebody gets hurt!”

  “Let’s go!” Ritter snarled angrily. “We’ll run the durned fool clear over the border!”

  He started forward. Shan threw down on him and fired four fast shots. They were timed, quick and accurate. The first shot dropped a horse, the second picked the hat from Ritter’s head, taking a lock of hair with it, the third burned Lefty Brooks’s gun hand, and he dropped his six-shooter and grabbed the hand to him with a curse of rage. The fourth shot took the lobe from a man’s ear.

  The attack broke and the riders turned and raced for shelter. Shan fired two more shots after them, dusting their heels.

  Calmly, he reloaded. “That was the beginning,” he said. “Now we’ll get the real thing.”

  Chewing on a biscuit, he waited. Suddenly, he glanced at the biscuit. “That Claire girl,” he said, “can cook, too! Who’d a thought it?”

  The morning wore on. Several times, he sized up the rocky slope behind him. That was the danger point. Yet he had built his log wall higher there, and he had a plan.

  Suddenly, rifles began to pop and shots were dusting the logs around him. He waited. Then he glimpsed, four hundred yards away, what seemed to be a man’s leg. He fired, and heard a yell of pain.

  Suddenly, a shot rang out from behind him and a bullet thudded into the log within an inch of his head. Hurriedly, he rolled over into the shelter of the log wall. No sooner there than getting to his knees he crawled into the willows away from camp, then slid into the streambed.

  Rising behind the shelter of the banks, he ran swiftly upstream. Rounding a bend, he crawled up behind some boulders, then drifted along the slope. Panting, he dropped into place behind a granite boulder and peered around
the edge.

  A man he recognized as one of those who had come to the school with Pratt was lying thirty yards away, rifle in hand. Shan fired instantly, burning the sniper’s ribs with a bullet. The man let out a yell of alarm and scrambled to his feet and started to run.

  Lying still, Shan hazed the fellow downhill, cutting his clothes to ribbons, twice knocking him down with shots at his heels.

  “All right!” The voice was cold, triumphant. “The fun’s over! Git up!”

  Turning, he saw Pete Ritter standing behind him, gun in hand. With him were Lefty Brooks and a man Brady recognized as Web Fancher from the Ewing ranch. “I figgered you might use that crickbed!” Pete sneered. “Figgered I might use it my ownself. Now we got you. Fust, you go back t’ the ranch an’ we let Neil get his evens with you. Then you start for the state line…. You never get there!”

  It was now or never. Shan Brady knew that instantly. Once they got their hands on him he was through. Ritter had him covered, but…his hands were a blur as they swept down for the guns.

  Somebody yelled, and he saw Pete’s eyes blazing behind a red-mouthed gun. Something hit him in the shoulder, and he shot, and even as he triggered his first six-gun, he realized that what he had always feared was not happening…he was not losing his head!

  Coolly as though on exhibition, he was shooting. Ritter wavered in front of him, and suddenly he saw other Circle R riders appearing, and there seemed to be a roaring of guns behind him. Gunsmoke filled the air.

  Fancher was down on his hands and knees, a pool of blood forming under him; Ritter was gone; and Lefty Brooks was backing up, his shirt turning dark, his face pale.

  Then, suddenly as it began, it was over. He stepped back, and then a hand dropped on his shoulder. He turned. It was Magoon.

  “Some shootin’!” Magoon said, grinning. Curly Ward and big Frank Ewing were also closing in, all with ready guns. “You took Ritter an’ Brooks out of there! I got Fancher! That yeller belly of a traitor! Eatin’ our grub an’ working for Ritter!”

  Claire rode up the slope, her hair blowing in the wind. She carried a rifle. He looked up at her. “You, too? I didn’t know women ever fought in this man’s country?”

  “They do when their men—!” Her face flushed. “I mean they do when their schools are in danger! After all, you’re our best teacher in years!”

  He turned and started down the slope with her. “Reckon that old Shanahan place could be fixed up?” he asked. “I think it’d be a good place t’ have the teachers live, don’t you? It could be mighty livable.”

  “Why, yes, but…,” she stopped.

  “Oh, we’d get a preacher down from Hurston!” he said, grinning. “That would make it all sort of legal, and everything. Of course,” he added, remembering the biscuits, “you’d have to find time to cook, too!”

  She flushed. Then laughed. “For you, I think I could!”

  Shan Brady looked down at the house Old Mike had built. It was a nice house. It was a very nice house. With some curtains in the window, and the smell of cooking…

  The Sixth Shotgun

  They were hanging Leo Carver on Tuesday afternoon, and the loafers were watching the gallows go up. This was the first official hanging in the history of Canyon Gap, and the first gallows ever built in the Territory. But then, the citizens at the Gap were always the kind to go in for style.

  The boys from the ranches were coming in, and the hard-booted men from the mines, and the nine saloons were closing up, but only for the hour of the hanging. On the street behind the Palace where the cottonwoods lined the creek, Fat Marie had given three hours off to the girls. One for the hanging and one for mourning and the third for drinking their tears away.

  For Leo had been a spending man who would be missed along the street, and Leo had been a singing man with a voice as clear as a mountain echo and fresh as a long wind through the sage. And Leo was a handsome man, with a gun too quick to his hand. So they were hanging Leo Carver on the gallows in Canyon Gap, and the folks were coming in from the forks of every creek.

  From behind the barred window Leo watched them working. “Build it high!” he yelled at them. “And build it strong, for you’re hanging the best man in Canyon Gap when tomorrow comes!”

  Old Pap, who had prospected in the Broken Hills before the first foundation was laid at the Gap, took his pipe from his mouth and spat into the dust. “He’s right, at that,” he said, “and no lie. If the ’Paches were coming over that hill right now, it’s Leo Carver I’d rather have beside me than any man jack in this town.”

  Editor Chafee nodded his head. “Nobody will deny that he’s a fighting man,” he agreed. “Leo was all right until civilization caught up with him.”

  And there it was said, a fit epitaph for him, if epitaph he’d have, and in their hearts not a man who heard it but agreed that what Chafee said was right.

  “There’ll be some,” Old Pap added, “who’ll feel a sigh of relief when they spring that trap. When Leo’s neck is stretched and the sawbones says the dead word over him, many a man will stop sweating, you can bet on that.”

  “Better be careful what you say.” Jase Ford shifted uneasily. “It ain’t healthy to be hintin’.”

  “Not since they put Leo away, it ain’t,” Old Pap agreed, “but truth’s a luxury the old can afford. There’s nothing they can take from me but my life, and that’s no use to me. And to do that they’d have to shoot me down from behind, and that’s the sort of thing they’d do unless they could hang me legal, like Leo Carver’s to be hung.”

  Nobody said anything, but Chafee looked gloomy as he stared at the gallows. There was no living doubt that Leo Carver was an outlaw. No doubt that he had rustled a few head here and there, no doubt that he had offended the nice people of the town by carousing at the Palace and down the street of the cottonwoods. There was no doubt, either, that he’d stuck up the stage that night on Rousensock—but from there on there was doubt a-plenty.

  Mitch Williams was dead, buried out there on Boot Hill with the others gone before him—Mitch Williams, the shotgun messenger who never lost a payload until that night on Rousensock, the night that Leo Carver stuck up the stage.

  IT WAS A STRANGE STORY no matter how you looked at it, but Leo was a strange man, a strange man of dark moods and happy ones, but a man with a queer streak of gallantry in him and something of a manner all his own.

  Mitch had been up on the box that night when Leo Carver stepped from the brush. Oh, he was wearing a mask, all right, wearing a mask that covered his face. But who did not know it was Leo?

  He stepped from the brush with a brace of six-guns in his hands and said, “Hold those horses, Pete! You can—” He broke off sharp there, for he saw Mitch.

  Now Mitch Williams was a hand. He had that shotgun over his knees but the muzzle was away from Leo. Mitch could never have swung that shotgun around under Leo’s gun, and he knew it. So did Doc Spender, who was stage driver. Leo Carver had that stage dead to rights and he had Mitch Williams helpless.

  “Sorry, Mitch!” He said it loud and clear, so they all heard him. “I thought this was your night off. I’d never rob a stage you were on, and I’d never shoot you or force you to shoot me.” He swung his horse. “So long!” And he was gone.

  That was Leo for you. That was why they liked him along the Gila, and why as far away as the Nueces they told stories about him. But what happened after that was different.

  The stage went on south. It went over the range through Six-Shooter Gap and there was another holdup. There was a sudden blast of fire from the rocks and Mitch Williams toppled dead from the box, and then another blast—it was a shotgun—and Doc took a header into the brush and coughed out his life there in the mesquite.

  Inside they were sitting still and frightened. They heard somebody crawl up to the box and throw it down. They heard it hit, and then they heard somebody riding off. One horse, one rider.

  The next morning they arrested Leo.

  He was washing
up at the time, and they’d waited for just that. He had his guns off and they took him without a fight. Not that he tried to make one. He didn’t. He just looked surprised.

  “Aw, fellers,” he protested. “I never done nothing! What’s the matter?”

  “You call that nothing? You robbed the stage last night.”

  “Oh, that?” He just grinned. “Put down those guns, boys. I’ll come along. Sure, you know by this time I didn’t rob it. I just stuck it up for a lark, and when I seen Mitch, I knowed it was no lark. That hombre would have sat still while I robbed it and drilled me when I left. He was a trusty man, that one.”

  “You said ‘was,’ so I guess you know you killed him.”

  Leo’s face changed then. “Killed who? Say, what is this?”

  And then they told him, and his face turned gray and sick. He looked around at their faces and none of them were friendly. Mitch had been a family man, and so had Doc. Both of them well liked.

  “I didn’t do it,” Leo said. “That was somebody else. I left ’em be.”

  “Until you could get a shotgun!” That was Mort Lewand, who shipped the money for the bank. “Like you said, Mitch would shoot. You knew that, and he had the gun on you, so you backed out. Then you came back later with a shotgun and shot him from ambush.”

  “That’s not true.” Leo was dead serious. “And he didn’t have me covered. Mitch had that shotgun pointed the other way. I had the drop and if I’d been planning to kill him, I’d’ve shot him then.”

  OH, THEY HAD A TRIAL! Judge come over from Tucson to hold court. They had a trial and a big one. Folks come from all over, and they made a big thing of it. Not that there was much anybody could say for Leo.

  Funny thing, that is. Most of us, right down inside, we knowed the kind of man Leo Carver was, but most of what we knew wasn’t evidence. Ever stop to think how hard it is to know a man isn’t a murderer and yet know that your feeling he isn’t ain’t evidence?