Volume 1: Unfinished Manuscripts, Mysterious Stories, and Lost Notes from One of the World's Most Popular Novelists

by Louis L'Amour

  The Indian stirred a little, but made no reply. The man seemed lonely, hungry for more than food. Or was that something Loccard was simply reading into him? It was hard to tell with an Indian, for all peoples do not manifest interest or joy or dismay in the same manner.

  Shortly before noon he harnessed six horses and led them out of the corral and tied them to the corral bars to await the stage.

  “That animal?” he said, after a while. “The one that made the track, he is bigger than a bear?”

  The Indian held up two fingers. “Big like two bears. Maybe three. Long hair…yellow. No bullet kill him. No arrow.”

  “He lives in the mountains?”

  “No live here…other place.”

  Loccard went back inside and began making fresh coffee. The stage would be coming along soon and the passengers would want some refreshment. He built up the fire and when he looked outside, the Indians were gone.

  Loccard walked onto the road and looked up and down. The family, if that’s what they were, had vanished. Well…He shrugged and went back inside. In such a short time they could not have gone far, and they might return.

  He heard the stage before he saw it, heard Duro Weaver’s halloo and then saw it coming in the distance. He went out to the roadside and was standing there when the stage came wheeling up and stopped. He caught the horses by their bridles, steadied them a bit, and then he began unhooking the traces as the passengers got stiffly down. There were three men and two women.

  One of the women was scarcely more than a girl, and she looked frightened. The older woman was tall, slender, and very beautiful in a cold, somewhat haughty way. The men moved toward the stage station, and the younger woman made as if to follow, but was stopped by a sharp word. The other woman stood in the road and looked carefully about.

  When the team was taken to the corral and the fresh team harnessed, Loccard walked back to the station with Duro.

  “You all right?” The stage driver spoke softly.

  “Sure. Everything’s fine.”

  “Didn’t know whether to expect you or not,” Weaver said, “the way thing’s been happenin’ up here.”

  “I’ll make it,” Loccard spoke with more assurance than he felt.

  They went inside and he took up the coffeepot and filled cups. He glanced at the girl, smiling when their eyes met. She seemed startled and shot a quick glance at her companion, who seemed not to have noticed.

  She was pretty, Loccard decided, almighty pretty. She was frightened, too, but why he could not guess. All three men were well dressed, and seemed to have no connection with each other or the women.

  The older man, who might have been one of those who invested in mining ventures, or began them, waved a hand at the country around. “It must be lonely here. Do you have many visitors?”

  “I like wild country,” Loccard said, “but visitors? Only some Indians.”

  “Indians?” It was the older woman who spoke. “I thought…I mean, I believed there were no Indians here. It is not true, then?”

  “There was a family,” Loccard said. “They came by just before you did. It is said there are Indians in the higher mountains. Some call them the Kawaiisu, some the Tehachapis.”

  “This is excellent coffee,” a man whom Loccard took to be a gambler commented. “Better than I expected from the tender of a stage station.”

  The third man, who wore a black suit, spoke up. “You have not looked at him, my friend. I detect a certain air, a certain style. It is the style of command.”

  “An Army officer?” The gambler studied Loccard with interest. “I believe not.”

  “Will you have some more coffee?” Loccard suggested.

  Duro Weaver, who sat at the end of the table, knew how Loccard felt. “Better drink up,” he said. “We’ve little time and I want to be out of the pass before dark.”

  The older woman glanced at him, but her expression did not change. She was, Loccard thought, a remarkably beautiful woman who for some reason was trying not to appear so….Was it simply that she did not wish to draw attention to herself? Her eyes were large, her bone structure delicate yet strong.

  The mining man, if such he was, glanced at Weaver. “Any special reason to be out of the mountains before dark? Like the lady here, I didn’t think there were Indians in this part of the country.”

  “Could be outlaws,” the gambler suggested. “There’s one named Vasquez—”

  “I didn’t think that was what he meant,” the man in the black suit commented. “I think our good driver had something else in mind.”

  Nobody spoke for a minute, and Jeremy Loccard went to the door. The sun was sinking behind the mountains. It would soon be dark here, although light upon the desert, only a few miles away. He glanced toward the corral. The grulla had its head up, nostrils flared, looking north toward the darkest mountains.

  He glanced down the pass toward the desert. A weird yellow light showed there. “Weaver?” he spoke in a casual tone. “Got a minute?”

  The stage driver got up and walked to the door, wiping the back of his hand across his handlebar mustache. Loccard indicated the yellow look over the desert. “Is that what I think it is?”

  “Sandstorm,” Weaver said, “a bad one. You’re sheltered here, don’t get much of it.”

  “The wind is picking up, though.”

  Weaver went outside and walked along the road a little, looking down the pass. He walked back. “You got comp’ny, son. No way to get a team to face that. Sometimes the sand’ll take the hide right off a man.”

  Loccard shrugged. “Means you’ll have to spend the night at Twenty Mile,” he commented dryly.

  Duro Weaver swore softly, bitterly. “I’ll tell ’em,” he said, “then we better put up the team.” He paused again. “Put ’em in the barn.”

  They walked back to the station together, and as they stepped in, the older woman started to rise. “Is it not time?” she asked. “It seems to me we have stopped overlong.”

  “We’ll be here longer,” Weaver said. He took out his pipe and began to fill it. “There’s a sandstorm blowin’ out on the flat, blowin’ like the mill-tails of Hell!”

  Loccard was looking at the older woman. Her features had suddenly seemed to harden and for a moment he saw something in her face that seemed wholly evil, something so—

  She turned toward him, and her expression changed swiftly. She smiled, beautifully. Her teeth were very even, very white. “We will be all right here, won’t we? I mean, we don’t have to be afraid of those Indians, do we?”

  “Of course not.” He gestured about. “This place is very strong….Nothing could get in, unless we let it in. And we are well armed.”

  She looked at him, and he thought her eyes were faintly amused, even taunting. “Are your rifles the answer to everything?”

  “Sometimes they have to suffice,” Loccard replied quietly, “although I’ve had no trouble here.”

  He followed Weaver outside and they led the horses to the stable and stripped off the harness, hanging it on pegs inside the stable. They forked hay into the mangers, and then went outside. Loccard caught the grulla then and took him into the stable, too.

  Weaver hesitated in the road. “Loccard, tell me honest. You seen anything out here?”

  “No,” he said. “I’ve seen nothing.” He paused. The wind caught dried leaves and scattered them down the road, moving a little ripple of sand along with them. The wind would get into the pass soon, and they’d be feeling it. And that was the trouble…they would not be able to hear.

  “I’ve seen nothing, Duro, but there was something.”

  Weaver took his pipe from his mouth, looking at him.

  “Something almighty big, something bigger than the biggest grizzly you ever heard of, something that pushed against the door, something that might have weighed a ton or more.”

  Weaver swore, slowly, emphatically, solemnly.

  “I found a smudged track…long claws, and I found some yellow hai
rs. Long hairs, maybe seven or eight inches, mighty coarse. Smelled awful.”

  He listened to the wind, saw the trees bend with it. A tumbleweed went rolling by on the road.

  “The Indians saw the track. They were scared. I fed ’em, tried to get them to stick around. They disappeared.”

  “Don’t do no good to feed Injuns,” Weaver said. “Underfoot all the time.”

  “I wanted to know what they know. They said I’d better go…something would get me, like it got the others, and the Indians.”

  “Indians, too?”

  “That was my impression. There used to be Indians here. Now there are none. Maybe they just went away, but that Indian didn’t think so, he didn’t think so at all. He was scared.”

  “What d’ you think it was?”

  Loccard shrugged. “Look, I’ve been in fifty countries, talked to a hundred kinds of people. The white man thinks he knows it all because right now he’s running ahead of the pack. I came to one conclusion, knocking around in foreign parts, and that was that there was just a whole lot I didn’t know.

  “Maybe there’s animals we’ve never seen, maybe there are things we’ve never seen. I had a dog whistle once that I couldn’t hear, but my dog could hear it.

  “I picked up cargo along the coast of Sumba a couple of times. It’s an island in the East Indies east of Java, but off the mainline of those islands. We picked up sandalwood there, bird’s nests—the Chinese make soup from them—skins, shells, and sometimes horses. There’s a lot of wild horses on the island.

  “I went back inland to see the high plains where the horses ran. They were there, all right, but here and there I saw stone walls surrounded by thickets of brush through which no path seemed to go.

  “These were said to be villages long deserted, although they were not unlike some of the villages in other parts of the island. The people avoided them. Or perhaps they only wanted me to avoid them. In a thicket near one of those villages I saw a piece of what looked like rocks fitted together into some sort of a floor or platform. There were low trees around, a few boulders. I started to go near but they advised against it.

  “Few minutes later I looked back and there was a man standing there beside that flat rock. He was looking at me. Or I thought he was. He hadn’t been there a few minutes before.”

  The wind was blowing harder. Duro Weaver started across the road, then stopped again. “Those tracks you seen? Those claw marks? You ever see anything like them before?”

  Loccard looked at him, leaning closer so Weaver could hear over the rush of wind down the pass. “One time. We were loading tar down at those brea pits out there west of Los Angeles. There were a lot of bones in that tar; made trouble for us, as they were always in the way. I came on a forearm or foreleg of some creature with claws like that. Whatever it was, it was mighty big, and it must have had tremendous crushing power in those forelegs.”

  “I never seen no such animal,” Weaver protested.

  Loccard gestured. “You ever been back in those mountains?”

  “No.”

  “Well, neither have I.”

  CHAPTER IV

  They went inside, closing the door on the wind, which was now blowing a gale. The fire on the hearth was warm, there was a smell of coffee in the air, and the men were gathered about the table, talking.

  At the fireplace the two women sat…not talking.

  The master of a ship, as Jeremy Loccard had occasionally been, or the chief mate, which he had been since he was nineteen, learned to be reticent, sharing his thoughts but rarely. Such a man learned to judge the shades of feeling among a crew, the way the ship creaked in different seas and winds, the way the lines handled and the look of the sails. There was so much in the handling of ships and men that could be found in no book.

  Loccard knew that Duro Weaver was a brave, confident man. In any situation he would be where he needed to be and he would be doing what was necessary.

  He closed the door and put the bar in place. They had fuel enough, for the nights were cold at this time of year, and they had food enough. The sandstorm might blow itself out overnight, but if it followed the way of storms at sea they might be in for two or three days of it.

  The man in the black suit looked around at Loccard. “Any bears in these mountains?”

  “Lots of them,” Weaver spoke up. “When we built the barn, yonder, we killed a grizzly had to weigh eight or nine hundred pounds.”

  “Are they really dangerous?”

  “Mister”—Duro Weaver got out his pipe—“any wild animal is potentially dangerous. I seen a man badly mauled by a buck deer. Up Frisco way I saw a woman half-killed by a cub bear she thought was mighty cute. She just had to ruffle his fur, she said.

  “Wild animals are wild, you got to remember that; also, they’re like folks, and they have their moods. Bears more than most. Bears are notional. A body has to be wary where a bear’s concerned.”

  “You’ve hunted this country?”

  “No.” Weaver stuffed his pipe with tobacco. “I never hunted about here and I don’t know of anybody who has…’less it was Zimmerman.”

  Suddenly Loccard realized Weaver had sharpened their attention. Even the women at the fire were listening.

  “Zimmerman?” The man in the black suit was too casual. “Who was he?”

  “Station man here…a while back.”

  “What became of him?”

  Weaver had not wanted to answer that question but had seen it coming. “Disappeared,” he replied coolly. “He was here one day, and the next day he was gone. Maybe,” he added, “he come onto one o’ them cute bears.”

  “Disappeared? Did anybody look for him?”

  Weaver stooped to the fireplace and took up a burning twig to light his pipe. “Look? Where? Mister, there’s a sight of country out yonder. Take a mighty big army with lots of time to comb it.

  “Nobody,” he added, “knows what’s out there. Maybe nothing. Maybe things no man has ever seen. Maybe things no man wants to see.

  “I’ve heard tell of a canyon back yonder to the northwest…maybe twelve, fifteen mile from here. Maybe not so far. Injuns used to go there. Left holes in the rock where they used to grind acorns. There’s two good springs in that canyon, grass, wood for the burning, shelter from the wind…but no Injuns. Not no more.”

  “Why?”

  “Your guess is as good as mine. They follow the creek up the main canyon, but you’ll never catch an Injun going up the south side of the creek. Least, that’s what I been told.”

  “Superstition,” the mining man suggested.

  “That there,” Weaver said, “is an easy word. It’s a word used to sidestep many an explanation, or a belief or idea a man don’t understand.”

  “Or don’t want to take time to study,” Loccard added.

  Weaver nodded toward the outside. “You ever been out in those mountains alone? Who’s to say what’s there? Maybe what the Injuns believe in is only there because they believe in it. Maybe in places like this there’s things left over, things that ceased to be a long time back…except in places like this.”

  “You’re talking nonsense,” the mining engineer commented. “I only believe in things a man can measure and weigh. Whatever else there is doesn’t matter.”

  Loccard added fuel to the fire. He crouched beside it, staring into the coals. On such a night, in such a wind, they would hear nothing outside. Maybe it was just as well. He thought of the horses. If there was trouble there he must go out.

  The older woman came to him. “I am Andrea Ritter. I must speak with someone who is familiar with all this.” Her gesture took in the country around.

  “I just arrived,” Loccard said. “Duro there, he knows as much as anybody and that’s little enough.”

  Loccard paused a moment, and then in a lower voice he said, “What’s your interest, ma’am? If I knew, maybe I could help.”

  She hesitated, seemed about to speak, then shook her head. “I cannot. It is too muc
h, too, too much!”

  Duro walked over, a cup of coffee in his hand. “Heard what you asked, ma’am,” he said, “but there’s nobody knows much. Some figure there just isn’t nothing to know. It’s empty country. The first white man along here so far’s anybody knows was a Captain Pedro Fages, exploring for the Spanish folks. Jed Smith come through, but we don’t know exactly where. Been a few white men back in yonder huntin’ gold, an’ that’s about it.

  “So far’s anybody knows the Spanish never paid it much mind. Even the Injuns mostly pulled out an’ left.”

  “Why? Why would they do a thing like that?”

  Duro sipped his coffee. He had no answer to that and attempted none. He glanced at Loccard and raised an eyebrow. Neither could understand why a woman such as this was so interested in what was to all obvious view a barren and empty land.

  Loccard’s eyes went to the girl. She was very pretty, but the scared look was there, too, and she seemed scared of Andrea Ritter as much as anything. Or was he imagining things?

  He went back to the kitchen and began putting together a meal. There were supplies enough, and he saw no sense in stinting.

  The girl followed him into the kitchen. “May I help?” she asked. “I can cook.”

  “Sure.” He held out a hand. “I’m Jeremy Loccard.”

  “I am Jennifer Kernaby….Call me Jen.”

  “I’ll do that.” He waved a hand about. “We don’t have much. For now we’ll just make up some cazuela…one name for stewed jerked beef. You can chop up some onions for me, if you’re of a mind to.”

  They worked in silence for a few minutes, and he asked, “Goin’ far?”

  She did not look at him. “Not far. At least, I don’t think so. Maybe we’ll go back to Los Angeles soon. Andrea wanted to come here.”

  “Here? This place?”

  “I…I don’t know. She wanted to come here, and she wanted me along. Maybe she’s going on up to San Francisco. We talked about it. I think…maybe she’s looking for land.”

  Loccard glanced at her. “Ma’am…Jen…this is no place to look for land. There’s land aplenty nigh to the sea, better land than this, I’d say, and it’s closer to market. This here is wild country, and it will be for a good time to come.”