The Lonesome Gods

by Louis L'Amour

  “Then it won’t be today, like I promised,” I said. “We’ll try it at daylight.”

  Owen Hardin studied the trail. “I’ve an idea,” he said, “and I think I’ll scout the country to see where that trail starts. At least, where we can find it.”

  When he was gone, we napped, drank coffee, and loafed the sultry, lazy afternoon through. Each of us knew what was coming tomorrow, each of us was aware that when the shooting starts all men are vulnerable. Bullets are not selective, but we were hard men, reared to a hard school.

  Owen came in just before dark. “Found it!” He stepped down from his horse, smiling. “Those Injuns, they always knew what they were doin’! That trail takes off from a bit of a branch canyon back yonder where there’s trees an’ brush. Doesn’t look like anybody has been there in years! If I hadn’t known about where to look, I’d never have found it, takes off from behind a tree, like.”

  He squatted on his heels by the dying fire and filled a cup from the blackened pot. His shirt was sweat-stained and had a fresh tear from the brush.

  “Thanks, Owen. You’ve saved us a lot of hunting.”

  “You’d never find it in the dark,” he agreed, “but we’ll have to ride easy. Somebody has been comin’ down the canyon tryin’ to throw a loop on what we’re about.”

  He drank his coffee, then stretched out under his tree and was asleep in minutes. Moving over to the fire, I dowsed the coals with dust and the last of the coffee and set the pot in the shade to cool off. Then I backed up to my own tree and checked both pistols and my rifle.

  Brodie was on watch, shaded by a low-growing juniper that had an enormous trunk and a wide spread of branches. It was deep shade and he had a view for a half-mile of the canyon.

  Owen was dozing, but suddenly his eyes opened. “Forgot to tell you. I seen some tracks down yonder.”

  Jacob Finney opened his eyes, listening. I spun the cylinder on my gun and then reloaded it.

  “Tracks?”

  “Well, I can’t be sure. I only seen them a couple of times, and these weren’t complete tracks. I mean, I saw only a piece of them, here and there.”

  “Well?”

  “Looked to me like that black stallion’s tracks. The one that got away.”

  Here.…But why not? This was home to him, this was part of his old range.

  Finney sat up. “I’d of bet on it. Given a chance, a horse will always go back to where he comes from. They are homebodies, horses are.”

  He looked over at me. “I never told you what Ramón said. He said that black was a ghost horse, whatever that means. Kind of a ha’nt, like. He warned me nobody could ride him ’less he wants to be ridden.

  “Sounded like some of the stories I’ve heard of that pacing white stallion from the Plains country. He told me never to try to ride him, that the stallion would kill anybody he didn’t want on his back.”

  “Superstition,” Hardin said. “Injuns got stories about everything. Up where I come from in the Nova Scotia country, their stories are all about somebody or something called Glooscap.”

  “Did Ramón say anything about me riding him?” I asked.

  Finney took up his hat and wiped the sweatband. He put it on his head and tugged it into place.

  “He surely did. He said he thought that horse wanted you to ride him. He said he thought that horse wanted to take you somewhere.”

  Chapter 47

  UNDER A STARLIT sky we rode to find our trail. The air was cool, a hoof clicked on stone, saddles creaked, brush fingered our clothing. It was a steep scramble along a bare slope after we escaped the brush of the river bottom.

  Single file we rode along a vague whitish streak through sparse grass still gray with night. No horse had been here, nor did we see track of any other animal. Haunted by a warning from our senses, we paused to listen, heard nothing, and rode on.

  Scattered oaks were islands of blackness on the rolling gray sea of the hills. At last we topped out on a narrow ridge, and on my left there was a loose pile of stones. Swinging down, I picked a fist-sized stone from the earth nearby and threw it on the pile.

  “What’s that for?” Hardin asked.

  “The Old Ones did it. Offering to the god of the trail.”

  “D’you believe in that stuff?”

  “I like doing it.” For a moment I stood beside my horse, my hands on the saddle. “I have a feeling for them. The old gods, I mean. It must be hard for them, with no worshipers left, their lands invaded by strangers who don’t know their ways, or care.”

  “Throw one on for me,” Hardin suggested. “We’ll need all the help we can get.”

  We would be five against at least twelve, going against them on ground of their own choosing.

  I thought of them then, those four young men who rode with me, four young men carved from the same oak of trouble seasoned by the same winds, yet each as different as could be. They rode forth to battle without a flag except that flown by their own courage, loyal to the last fiber of their being, and strong with the knowledge that if men are to survive upon the earth there must be law, and there must be justice, and all men must stand together against those who would strike at the roots of what men have so carefully built.

  It is all very well to say that man is only a casual whim in a mindless universe, that he, too, will pass. We understand that, but disregard it, as we must. Man to himself is the All, the sum and the total. However much he may seem a fragment, a chance object, a bit of flotsam on the waves of time, he is to himself the beginning and the end. And this is just. This is how it must be for him to survive.

  Man must deal with himself. It is his reality he must face each morning when he rises. It is his world with which he must deal. Perhaps his end is only years away, or even months, yet he cannot more than acknowledge that, for it is the now with which he must deal, unless like a spoiled child he is to fall on his face and beat his fists against the earth. He must be, he must move, he must create.

  If man is to vanish from the earth, let him vanish in the moment of creation, when he is creating something new, opening a path to the tomorrow he may never see. It is man’s nature to reach out, to grasp for the tangible on the way to the intangible.

  We have hedged ourselves round with law, for we know that if man is to survive it must be through cooperative effort.

  We walked our horses down a steep, grassy, rockstrewn hill, across a narrow gully, and were angling along the slope opposite. At times the trail faded or vanished utterly, and once when we lost it, Monte spotted, a hundred yards down a gully, one rock placed atop another. We chose that way and found the trail again. The rocks as we passed were, I saw, coated with the desert varnish of many years. Suddenly my horse pricked his ears and looked to the north, nostrils flaring. I spoke warningly, sharply, and my horse tossed his head, irritated with me.

  It was growing light now. We waited, listening, catching a faint smell of wood smoke, then a clink of metal against metal.

  “Close,” Brodie whispered. “Only a couple of hundred yards or less.”

  The trail we followed branched suddenly, as I had foreseen, and one branch dropped sharply down into a shaded hollow that opened into the wider canyon. Sunlight sparkled on the creek there. Each of us had drawn his rifle; we looked one to the other.

  We looked down into the hollow through the trees and brush, down a steep trail made by men on moccasined feet for other moccasined feet. There was no easy way down, and from the moment we started there would be a trickle of rocks and gravel falling, warning them.

  Dismounting, I walked to the rim and looked down. A horse could make it, but we could not. We’d be shot out of our saddles before we got halfway down. Slowly my eyes searched for a way.

  A man on foot, if he was careful. A faint sound of voices came, a laugh; they were right below us. Yet that one man with a rifle…Maybe he could pin them down, scatter them, leave time for the riders to make it.

  There were oaks along the steep mountainside. A man would hav
e to be careful to start no pebbles rolling. Even one might cause a man to look up, and the descending man would be pinned against the slope, an easy target.

  Studying the ground, I saw my way. Yet if the others did not manage it, I’d be trapped. Yet the horses stolen were my horses, and the trap, if such it was, was set for me. I walked back to my horse, got out my moccasins, and taking off my boots, slung them to the saddle horn. Then I donned the moccasins.

  “What are you thinkin’ of?” Monte asked.

  “One man can make it. I’ll pin them down, then you boys come.”

  Jacob Finney spat. “You let me go, boy. I’m an old hand at this game.”

  My eyes picked out a flash of sorrel from among the leaves. Moving over a bit, I could see the horses, all neatly gathered behind a makeshift gate in a small box canyon. There seemed to be somewhat of an obstruction further along the canyon, an improvised brush-and-timber fence across the upper end of the corral.

  If a man could…

  “Jacob?” I pointed. “If a man could get down there and open that gate—”

  “He could stampede those horses right through their camp and down the canyon,” Brodie interrupted.

  “And we’d have our horses,” Hardin accepted the idea.

  Monte McCalla had ridden off along the ridge. Now he returned. “Yonder,” he pointed, “there looks to be a way down to the upper canyon. I figure we can make it down a-horseback. It’s a steep slope, but away from their camp, and it doesn’t look to be as steep as this.”

  “Take my horse with you,” I suggested. “I’ll take this route down.” Pausing, I added, “We all know what this is going to be like. If anybody gets separated, go back to town. If we shake the horses loose, get away with them.”

  Monte caught up the reins of my horse. “Let’s go,” he suggested, and they rode off along the ridge and I was alone.

  For a moment I stood there in the lemon light of early morning. The sky was slightly overcast. It was still cool, and I looked around, inhaling very deep. The air was fresh, and I filled my lungs with it, then walked to a big old blue oak and stood beside it, looking down the way I must go. Taking my rifle in my right hand, I started down the hill, taking my time, putting each foot down with care, lifting it with equal care.

  If they found a way down, it would take them a while to get to the corral gate, which was out of sight of the camp below but had been a convenient place to hold the stolen horses.

  Twelve or more men, eager to kill me, and for a minute or two I’d be facing them alone. Supposing that route Monte had found proved impossible? It could.…Many a time I’d seen an apparently easy way down end in a fifty-foot drop with no way around. If that happened, I’d have something to sweat about.

  My moccasin came down on gray, dusty earth and pine needles. These were the needles of the Digger pine, eight to ten inches in length. Step by step I worked my way down for fifty feet, then crouched by the trunk of an oak to study the way I should take.

  Three men were loafing about a small fire. A short distance away, two more were playing cards on a blanket. All were armed, all had rifles close by. There was a pot of coffee on the fire. There was no way I was going to get down there without getting my head blown off. What the hell was I doing here, anyway?

  Where were the other men? I had figured on at least another five. There might be a dozen more, or there might be no more.

  The trouble with a situation like this was that a man had to keep going forward until there was no turning back.

  From where I now waited their camp was about a hundred yards away, more than fifty yards of it almost straight down. Lowering one knee to the earth, I studied the route I’d have to take, then moved quickly to another vantage point behind part of a huge old oak that had broken off about five feet above the ground and lay where it had fallen.

  The concealment was better, I was closer, and there was some cover from the thick trunk of the remaining stump as well as the fallen part and its branches.

  A stone trickled past me. Startled, I looked up, half-turning to see a Mexican in a big sombrero and a serape aiming a rifle at me.

  In half-turning I had thrown myself off-balance, and I just let go and fell. The rifle above blasted, and whipping over on my left elbow, I fired my rifle like a pistol. He was looming above me, not more than thirty feet away, and I could scarcely miss.

  My bullet caught him in the brisket and he fell toward me. Twisting to one side, I let him fall, then whipped around to face the camp.

  From the canyon I heard yells and shots, and then I was shooting into the camp. One man near the fire had leaped up, and my bullet spun him around. Twisting position, I fired at one of the card-players. I missed and so did he; then I triggered another shot and he fell back, blood turning his pants leg crimson.

  Leaping up, I plunged down the slope toward the camp. A bullet hit a tree near me and spat bark into my face. I hit level ground and went into the camp firing. These men had, after all, prepared a trap to kill me.

  There was a wild yell from the main canyon, and horses went streaming past. A man leaped up to try to head them off, and I burned him with a shot that spun him around and made him dive for cover. Horsemen went streaking by, there were more shots from down canyon, and I glanced quickly around.

  Two men were on the ground. Another was gripping his leg and trying to stop the flow of blood. I ran down the canyon, looking for a horse.

  Men were coming up the canyon from some post below, and turning, I ran up the canyon, hoping for a horse, any kind of a horse. There were none.

  Rounding the bend, I came on a Mexican down and dead, and a little beyond him, Brodie.

  A glance was all I needed. Brodie was dead, too. I could hear men coming, and I ran up canyon, holding to the soft sand to make no sound. Seeing a crevice in the wall, I darted into it, pausing to catch my breath, and then went scrambling over the rocks, trying to get higher, to escape the canyon.

  Brodie gone! He was a good man, a damned good man.

  I paused again to catch my breath. Did they know I was still around, and afoot? If they did, they could soon round me up. I checked my rifle and my cartridge belt. Then I climbed on, up the canyon, keeping to whatever cover was available. My one desire was to get away, to find a horse.

  Brodie gone…and what of the others? What of my old friend Jacob? He whom I had known since boyhood, who had taught me so much, who had been and still was my friend? The place where I was climbing was, during hard rains, a steep runoff for water. Soon I would top out on the ridge. Would some of them be waiting?

  Under some trees near the crest of the ridge I studied the situation. I had been seen, no doubt recognized. The man with the wounded leg, if he did not bleed to death, would have recognized me. They would know I was here and afoot.

  They would come seeking me. The horses they could afford to lose, but I was the game they had planned to hunt down and kill.

  Turning to the trail, I glanced at it, disappearing among the rocks, appearing on the grass beyond. The canyon would be a trap from which there was small chance of escape. The bald hills where I now was offered no place to hide. There would be several mounted men hunting me, and I was on foot. What I needed was a change of scene. I started to run.

  Often, when living with the Cahuillas, I had run with Francisco or others, run mile upon mile in all sorts of weather, over all kinds of terrain. Automatically I used every device for hiding my trail, leaping from rock to rock, running along occasional fallen logs, but moving swiftly. The ancient trail had once gone somewhere, and now I hoped it would take me away, take me to a place where I could hide.

  Jacob, Monte, and Hardin had the horses and would drive them back to Los Angeles or at least to a rancho where they could be held for us. They might come hunting me, but it would be better for them if they did not.

  Ancient men had run this trail, to trade, to visit, to attend places of worship; in war and in fear they had run where my feet now ran. Once, topping a
razor-backed ridge, I paused to throw a rock on the pile. Only minutes remained to me, only minutes until they would be upon my trail, mounted and hunting.

  Slowing to a walk, I looked back. Nothing yet. Miss Nesselrode, Aunt Elena, Meghan…I thought of them. They were my family. Yes, Meghan, too.

  I had loved her. I still did.

  Turning, I ran on into the bright crystal morning; I ran on into the face of the rising sun.

  Behind me, the pound of hooves.…

  Chapter 48

  WAS THIS TO be the end? Here in this high, rocky country above the desert? Had all my dreams and plans come only to this? To die here, alone, killed by my enemies? Had all the sacrifice of my father and mother brought me only to this?

  Yet I fled not in fear but to find a better place from which to fight. The odds were great against me—how great, I did not know. Many times before, I had run with my friends, the desert Indians. My breath came evenly and strong; the rifle was heavy, but I would need it.

  A mile, another mile. Thicker, taller, rougher rocks, great crags jutting out, trails that dipped between them. Topping out on a great ridge among some rocks, I glanced back and saw them coming, single file, issuing from a narrow place. I counted six, and more followed behind.

  “You want a chase,” I said aloud, “I’ll lead you one.”

  Running with an easy stride, I knew I could go on for miles. I also knew that although a horse was faster, a man could run a horse to death over a distance. Deliberately I turned to a route that would keep me parallel to the old track I’d been following, but one that led into much rougher terrain.

  Barren crags loomed above the way I chose to go, and there were no more oaks, but here and there ancient cedars and patches of cholla cactus. We were nearing the desert now, the harsh Mohave that lay off to the south, mile upon mile of the Mohave, until it merged with the Colorado desert.

  Now the coolness of early morning was gone and the heat was coming. Turning sharply to the right, I went down a steep slope among the cacti, crossed a wash, following it through a natural gate in the rocks, and then found what I sought, a place among the rocks and a gnarled old cedar.