The Collected Short Stories of Louis L'Amour, Volume 7

by Louis L'Amour

  From our town the country slopes gradually away to the Border. It’s a long valley running deep into Mexico, and from my usual seat at the jail door I could look down that valley. Yesterday, before Feist appeared, I had been sitting there, and Larik Feist had not come up that valley. Nothing bigger than a mouse or rattlesnake had been moving out there.

  Also, just before noon, Luke Fair drove his buckboard in from Tombstone, and he had seen nobody for fifty miles, he said. The fact remained, all things considered, the only way Feist could have come was by train. The railroad was just ten miles away. And I’d spotted soot on his ears, which he’d not washed off.

  The dust on his clothes was not desert dust—no more than he could have picked up coming from the railroad. And there were some cinders in the cuffs of his jeans. All his clothes were old except for the coat. It had a label from an El Paso store.

  Tracking that party into Mexico offered no problem, but I had another idea. Feist, if I was right, and I was betting my shirt on it, would get his hands on the money that had been put up. Then he would light out and leave them stranded. And I had just a hunch where he would go.

  Luke Fair was in front of his shack when I walked up. “You played hob,” he said.

  I spoke fast: “Luke, get a horse and a couple of pack mules. Take grub and plenty of water. Then light out after that bunch. By the time you get to them, they’ll be mighty glad to see you.”

  Luke looked at me. The fact that he was here and not with them showed he had brains. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean,” I said, “that about fifty miles south of the Border you’ll find that bunch. They’ll probably be out of water and afoot.”

  He took his pipe out of his mouth. “I don’t get you.”

  “That Feist,” I said, “was a swindler. He never saw the Sierra Madres. He rigged that story, and that gold never came from Lost Village because there’s no gold there, and never was.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Luke, what was my ma’s name?”

  “Why”—he looked sort of odd—“it was Ibanez.”

  “Sure, and Luke, do you know what the name of that officer was who went with the Franciscan friars?”

  “No.”

  “It was Ibanez. Luke, I’ve had a map to Lost Village ever since I was six. My father went there when he was a boy. I went there, too. There was a village, but folks left it when the springs went dry. There never was any mining close by. The mine they took the gold from was ten miles from the village itself, and it’s being worked right now by the Sonora Mining Company.”

  “Well, I’ll be blasted!” Luke just sat there looking at me. “Why didn’t you tell them?”

  “I started to, but they wouldn’t listen. Most of it I didn’t want to tell until the trial. I didn’t want this gent to know what he was facing. I had no idea they’d go off the way they did.”

  “If I was you,” he said, “I’d let ’em get back the best they can.”

  “They might not get back,” I told him, but he knew that as well as I did. He got up and began gathering his duffel.

  “What about you?” he asked.

  That made me grin. “Luke, that gent will head for El Paso unless I’m clean off my rocker. He’ll ditch them about the second day out and he’ll head through the hills toward El Paso. He’ll take a straight route, and about noon of the second day after he leaves them, he’ll stop for water at a little pozo, a place called Coyote Spring. And, Luke, when he gets there, I’ll be sitting close by.”

  IF YOU LOOK ON a good big map, and if you pick a place about midway between the Animas and The Alamo Huaco Mountains, and then measure off about twenty-eight miles or so south of the border, you’ll find Pozo de Coyote.

  The spring is in a plain, but the country is rough and broken, and the ground slopes off a little into a sort of hollow. The pozo is in the bottom. At noon, on the second day after I figured Larik Feist would have left them, I was sitting back in the brush with my field glasses and a rifle.

  He was more than an hour late getting to the pozo, but I was taking it easy back in a tall clump of cholla and mesquite when I heard his horse. It was hot—a still, blazing noon in the desert—when he drew up at the water hole. Lifting my Winchester, I put a bullet into the sand at his feet. He jerked around and jumped for his rifle, but as he lifted it, I smashed two shots at the stock and he dropped it as if it was hot. The stock was splintered. He stood still, his hands lifted.

  Getting to my feet, I walked down the hill. Once he made a motion as if to go for his gun, but I fired the rifle from the hip and grooved the leather of his holster. When I stepped into the open we were thirty yards apart.

  His face was flushed with heat and fury, and he glared at me, the hatred a living thing in his eyes. “You, is it? I might have guessed.”

  “What kept you so long, Feist?” I said. “I’ve been waiting for you.”

  “How’d you get here? How’d you know I’d be coming this way?”

  “Simple.” I smiled at him, taking my time. Then I let him have it, about the map I had, how the Lost Village was not lost, and how there was no mine at all there, and no gold, and never had been.

  “So you knew all the time?” It made him furious to think that. “Now what are you going to do?”

  “Take you in. I wired Tucson about you. They are checking with other places. You’ll be wanted someplace.” My rifle tilted a little. “Drop your gun belts,” I told him. “Or, if you feel lucky, try to draw.”

  Gingerly, he moved his hands to his belt buckle, and unfastening it, he let the belt drop. Then, stepping carefully, he moved away. I closed in and picked up the belt, then shucked shells from the gun, and stuck the belt and gun in my saddlebag. Then I spoke again to Larik Feist: “Now get ready to travel, fellow.”

  THREE DAYS LATER I rode into town with Larik Feist tied to his saddle. He had made one break to escape, and had taken a bad beating. His eyes were swollen shut and his beard matted with blood and sand. He looked like he had been dragged through a lava bed on his face.

  There was nobody in sight. Soon a few people, mostly women, came to the doors to watch.

  Luke Fair strolled out finally. I handed him the pouch containing the money I’d recovered.

  “Where’s everybody? Did you find ’em?”

  Fair grinned at me. “Found ’em just like you said, afoot and out of water. He’d stolen their horses and canteens, but I rounded up the horses that he’d turned loose, and we started back.”

  “But where are they?”

  He chuckled. “Mining,” he said. “Working one of the richest ledges I ever saw. We started back, but about ten miles below the border, Powers sits down for a rest and crumbles a piece of rotten quartz, and it was fairly alive with gold. So they all staked claims an’ they all figure that they’re going to get rich.”

  He started to walk toward the bank, then stopped. “Marla’s in town,” he said.

  When I’d jailed Feist, I thought about it. Suddenly, I knew what I was doing. The law could have Feist and they could have their marshal’s job.

  MARLA OPENED THE DOOR for me, and she’d never looked prettier. Some of it was last-minute fixin’—I could easily see that.

  My badge was in my hand. “Give that to your dad,” I said. “He and Powers wanted a new marshal—now they can get him.”

  “But they were angry, Lou!” she protested. “They weren’t thinking!”

  “Be the same way next time. Feist is in jail. You can turn him over to the law, or hang him, or let him rot there, or turn him loose, for all of me.”

  Marla looked at me. She didn’t know what to say. She was pretty and she knew it, but suddenly that meant nothing at all to me and she saw it. And believe me, it was the only thing she had, the only weapon and the only asset. I could see that then, which I couldn’t see before.

  “Where are you going?” she asked, hesitantly.

  My horse was standing there and I stepped into the saddle. “Why,”
I said, “I’ve been setting here since I was a kid talking to folks who’d been places. Once I made a trip to tombstone, but this time, I’m really traveling. I’m going clear to Tucson!”

  So I rode out of town, and I never looked back.

  Not once.

  Long Ride Home

  Before him rolled the red and salmon unknown, the vast, heat-waved unreality of the raw desert, broken only by the jagged crests of the broken bones of upthrust ledges. He saw the weird cacti and the tiny puffs of dust from the hooves of his grulla, but Tensleep Mooney saw no more.

  Three days behind him was the Mexican border, what lay ahead he had no idea. Three days behind him lay the Rangers of Texas and Arizona, and a row of graves, some new buried, of men he had killed. But Tensleep Mooney of the fast gun and the cold eye was southbound for peace, away from the fighting, the bitterness, the struggle. He was fleeing not the law alone, but the guns of his enemies and the replies his own must make if he stayed back there.

  Here no peon came, and rarely even the Indians. This was a wild and lonely land, born of fire and tempered with endless sunlight, drifting dust-devils and the bald and brassy sky. Sweat streaked his dust-caked shirt, and there were spots flushed red beneath his squinted eyes, and pinkish desert dust in the dark stubble of his unshaven jaws.

  Grimly, he pointed south, riding toward something he knew not what. In his pocket, ten silver pesos; in his canteen, a pint of brackish water remaining; in the pack on the stolen burro, a little sowbelly, some beans, rice, and enough ammunition to fight.

  Behind him the Carrizal Mountains, behind him the green valleys of the Magdalena, and back along the line, a black horse dead of a rifle bullet, his own horse lying within a half minute’s buzzard flight of the owner of the horse he now rode, a bandit who had been too optimistic for his health. And back at Los Chinos, a puzzled peon who had sold a mule and beans to a hard-faced Yanqui headed south.

  Mooney had no destination before him. He was riding out of time, riding out of his world into any other world. What lay behind him was death wherever he rode, a land where the law sought him, and the feuding family of his enemies wanted vengeance for their horse-thieving relatives he had killed.

  The law, it seemed, would overlook the killing of a horse thief. It would even overlook the killing of a pair of his relatives if they came hunting you, but when it came to the point of either eliminating the males of a big family or being eliminated oneself, they were less happy. Tensleep Mooney had planted seven of them and had been five months ducking bullets before the Rangers closed in; and now, with discretion, Mooney took his valor south of the border.

  TWO DAYS HAD PASSED in which he saw but one lonely rancho; a day since he came across any living thing except buzzards and lizards and an occasional rattler. He swung eastward, toward the higher mountains, hunting a creek or a water hole where he could camp for the night, and with luck, for a couple of days’ rest.

  The country grew rougher, the cacti thicker, the jagged ridges sloped up toward the heights of the mountains. The brush was scattered but head high, and then he saw a patch of greener brush ahead and went riding toward it, sensing water in the quickened pace of his grulla.

  Something darted through the brush, and he shucked his gun with an instinctive draw that would have done credit to Wes Hardin—but he pushed on. He wanted water and he was going to have it if he had to fight for it.

  The something was an Indian girl, ragged, thin and wide-eyed. She crouched beside a man who lay on the sand, a chunk of rock in her hand, waiting at bay with teeth bared like some wild thing.

  Mooney drew his horse to a stop and holstered his gun. She was thin, emaciated. Her cheekbones were startling against the empty cheeks and sunken eyes. She was barefoot, and the rags she wore covered a body that no man would have looked at twice. On the sand at her feet lay an old Indian, breathing hoarsely. One leg was wrapped in gruesomely dirty rags, and showed blood.

  “What’s the matter, kid?” he said in hoarse English. “I won’t hurt you.”

  She did not relent, waiting, hopeless in her courage, ready to go down fighting. It was a feeling that touched a responsive chord in Tensleep, of the Wyoming Mooneys. He grinned and swung to the ground, holding a hand up, palm outward. “Amigo,” he said, hesitantly. His stay in Texas had not been long and he knew little Spanish and had no confidence in that. “Me amigo,” he said, and he walked up to the fallen man.

  The man’s face was gray with pain, but he was conscious. He was Indian, too. Tarahumara, Mooney believed, having heard of them. He dropped beside the old man and gently began to remove the bandage. The girl stared at him, then began to gasp words in some heathen, unbelievable language.

  Mooney winced when he saw the wound. A bullet through the thigh. And it looked as ugly as any wound he had seen in a long time. Turning to the trees, Mooney began to gather dry sticks. When he started to put them together for a fire the girl sprang at him wildly and began to babble shrill protest, pointing off to the west as she did so. “Somebody huntin’ you, is there?” Tensleep considered that, looked at the man, the girl, and considered himself, then he chuckled. “Don’t let it bother you, kid,” he said. “If we don’t fix this old man up fast, he’ll die. Maybe it’s too late now. An’,” here he chuckled again, “if they killed all of us, they wouldn’t accomplish much.”

  The fire was made of dry wood and there was little smoke. He put water on to get hot. Then when the water was boiling he went to a creosote bush and got leaves from it and threw them into the water. The girl squatted on her heels and watched him tensely. When he had allowed the leaves to boil for a while, he bathed the wound in the concoction. He knew that some Indians used it for an antiseptic for burns and wounds. The girl watched him, then darted into the brush and after several minutes came back with some leaves which she dampened and then began to crush into a paste. The old man lay very still, his face more calm, his eyes on Mooney’s face.

  Tensleep looked at the wide face, the large soft eyes that could no doubt be hard on occasion, and the firm mouth. This was a man—he had heard many stories of the endurance of these Tarahumara Indians. They would travel for fabulous miles without food, they possessed an unbelievable resistance to pain in any form. When the wound was thoroughly bathed, the girl moved forward with the paste and signified that it should be bound on the wound. He nodded, and with a tinge of regret he ripped up his last white shirt—the only one he had owned in three years—and bound the wound carefully. He was just finishing it when the girl caught his arm. Her eyes were wide with alarm, but he saw nothing. And then, as he listened, he heard horses drawing nearer and he got to his feet and slid his Winchester from its scabbard. His horse had stopped among the uptilted rocks that surrounded the water hole.

  There were three of them, a well-dressed man with a thin, cruel face and two hard-faced vaqueros. “Ah!” The leader drew up. He looked down at the old Indian and said, “Perro!” Then his hand dropped to his gun and Tensleep Mooney drew.

  The Mexican stopped, his hand on his own gun, looking with amazement into the black and steady muzzle of Tensleep’s Colt. A hard man himself, he had seen many men draw a pistol, but never a draw like this. His eyes studied the man behind the gun and he did not like what he saw. Tensleep Mooney was honed down and hard, a man with wide shoulders, a once broken nose, and eyes like bits of gray slate.

  “You do not understand,” the Mexican said coolly. “This man is an Indio. He is nothing. He is a dog. He is a thief.”

  “Where I come from,” Mooney replied, “we don’t shoot helpless men. An’ we don’t run Injuns to rags when they’re afoot an’ helpless. We,” his mouth twisted wryly, “been hard on our own Injuns, but mostly they had a fightin’ chance. I figure this hombre deserves as much.”

  “You are far from other gringos,” the Mexican suggested, “and I am Don Pedro,” he waved a hand, “of the biggest hacienda in one hundred miles. The police, the soldiers, all of them come when I speak. You stop me now and there wi
ll not be room enough in this country for you to hide, and then we shall see how brave you are.”

  “That’s as may be,” Mooney shrugged, his eyes hard and casual. “You can see how big my feet are right now if you three want to have at it. I’ll holster my gun, an’ then you can try, all three of you. Of course,” Mooney smiled a pleasant, Irish smile, “you get my first shot, right through the belly.”

  Don Pedro was no fool. It was obvious to him that even if they did kill the gringo it would do nothing for Don Pedro, for the scion of an ancient house would be cold clay upon the Sonora desert: It was a most uncomfortable thought, for Don Pedro had a most high opinion of the necessity for Don Pedro’s continued existence.

  “You are a fool,” he said coldly. He spoke to his men and swung his horse.

  “An’ you are not,” Mooney said, “if you keep ridin’.”

  Then they were gone and he turned to look at the Indians. They stared at him as if he were a god, but he merely grinned and shrugged. Then his face darkened and he kicked the fire apart. “We got to move,” he said, waving a hand at the desert, “away.”

  He shifted the pack on the burro and loaded the old man on the burro’s back. “This may kill you, Old One,” he said, “but unless I miss my guess, that hombre will be back with friends.”

  The girl understood at once, but refused to mount with him, striking off at once into the brush. “I hope you know where you’re goin’,” he said, and followed on, trusting to her to take them to a place of safety.

  She headed south until suddenly they struck a long shelf of bare rock, then she looked up at him quickly, and gestured at the rock, then turned east into the deeper canyons. Darkness fell suddenly but the girl kept on weaving her way into a trackless country—and she herself seemed tireless.

  His canteen was full, and when the girl stopped it was at a good place for hiding, but the tinaja was dry. He made coffee and the old man managed to drink some, then drank more, greedily.