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

by Louis L'Amour

  Suddenly she was close to him. “Mr. Loccard…Jeremy? I’m afraid of her.”

  Instantly she stepped away from him. There was a sound of boot heels clicking, and Andrea Ritter was in the door. “Oh? There you are! I wondered what had become of you.”

  “I am helping Mr. Loccard,” she said primly. “There seemed such a lot to do.”

  “I am sure he can manage.” Andrea’s tone was grim. “Come! You’ll be all smelling of onions.”

  She rinsed her hands in the basin, and dried them carefully while Andrea waited, then turned and left the room without a backward glance.

  “Make’s no sense,” he commented, to himself. “Why would she be with someone who scared her? And why would a woman like that be hunting land up here?”

  He finished fixing their supper and served it. The mining engineer, whose name proved to be Delphin Rickard, came to the kitchen to help Loccard carry the food to the table. He suspected Rickard came more from a desire to look around than from any desire to help. “That man in the black suit? Do you know him?”

  “I never saw any of you before,” Loccard said, “and it is unlikely I will see any of you again. I’ll make some money here, then be gone.”

  “Probably a wise choice,” he agreed. “This Zimmerman now? Did you know him?”

  “No. I don’t believe even the man who followed him knew him. Mr. Weaver, your driver…he knew him to talk to.”

  “You’ve never been out in the mountains?” He took up a platter of sliced beef. “Hunting, or the like of that?”

  “I haven’t been here long enough.”

  “Odd that Zimmerman would come here,” he mused, looking about. “It’s unreasonable.”

  “You should know enough by now that there’s no way of judging people. Just when you think you’ve got them figured, they’ll cross you up. But why Zimmerman? What made him so different?”

  “Zimmerman? Ah? There was a strange one! I did not know him, you understand, only of him. He was a scholar. An authority on the occult, a delver into mysteries.”

  “You must have him mixed up. This Zimmerman was a mean man by all I hear, a big, strong, and mighty difficult man.”

  “Of course. He was all of that. I had friends who knew him, or knew of him. He went his own way, shared what he knew with nobody. But why should he come here? To such a place as this? What was he looking for? What did he expect to find?”

  “Maybe,” Loccard said dryly, “he just needed the job, as I did.”

  “Zimmerman? I doubt it. The man always had access to money. I mean he would seem to be on his uppers, then he would show up with money. And money was a prime requisite with Zimmerman. He liked to live. Champagne and fine wines, the best food, the best women. I think the man loved nothing but his appetites.”

  Rickard took his platter and went into the next room and Loccard followed with biscuits, cheese, and a pot of stewed fruit.

  The puzzle of Zimmerman allied itself to the puzzle of Rickard himself. Why was he here? Where had he come from? What was his connection with Zimmerman?

  Yet, he might have given Loccard a clue. Zimmerman could always come up with money, and that implied a source. Was he a wealthy man? Had he wealthy friends or relatives? Or was there some other source for his wealth?

  A delver into mysteries, Rickard said. Well, he found his mystery here, surely, and disappeared. Or had he? Suppose he was somewhere about?

  Well, suppose he was, thought Loccard. That meant nothing to him. Zimmerman had left his job, gone off on his own. Or been killed.

  Killed? By what?

  The word brought Loccard up short. Why not by “whom”? Was he already imagining something else? Was he filling his world with creatures of the imagination? Was he not creating a mystery where there might be none?

  Once the food was served Loccard sat down with the passengers. The talk about the table seemed so much idle chatter, and only Jen and Duro were silent. That was unusual for Duro, for he was a man who liked people and who talked well, and his long years on the frontier had given him a wealth of stories. Now he merely listened, and if anything, he seemed puzzled.

  The fire blazed cheerfully on the hearth and the coal-oil lamps, backed with reflectors, gave added light to the room. Outside the wind howled and sand rattled against the windows.

  The coffee smelled good, and slowly Loccard began to relax. He glanced once toward the door of his room. His rifle stood just inside the door.

  As though reading his thought, the man in the black suit asked, “Do you always wear a pistol?”

  “This country,” Duro replied for him, “a man better. No tellin’ what a body’d run into on the road.”

  Andrea Ritter smiled. “I am sure there’s noth—” Her voice broke sharply off, for they all heard it: an eerie cry, heard faintly but clearly enough during a momentary lull in the wind.

  It was no human cry, nor like any animal….A bird maybe, but what bird? What strange sound in the night? Andrea’s eyes went wide; her lips parted as if to scream, but no sound came. All were transfixed, all but the man in the black suit.

  “There it is,” he said coolly enough, “all that was needed. It’s out there.”

  They looked at him, staring, nor did any one of them speak. The cry came again…closer.

  “It is coming then,” the man in the black suit said. “It’s coming.”

  COMMENTS: Dad found the Southern California wilderness to be a spooky place. He touched on it in The Lonesome Gods and used that strangeness to a much greater extent in The Californios. I agree with him. We used to talk about the feelings we’d get back in the hills and the hot, chaparral-choked arroyos. It is a haunted landscape, even more so than a Colorado or Utah canyon full of cliff dwellings. I have no idea why that should be the case, but we shared the feeling nonetheless.

  The location of this story seems to be very near to Tehachapi Pass in the area along Highway 58 between Bakersfield and Mojave. The idea of seeing a sandstorm come up from the desert makes complete sense; these days the area is near a giant wind farm. I’m confident in saying this story was written in the early 1970s because Louis mentions a narrow canyon where buckeye trees grow and the Kawaiisu Indians left pa-haz, or grinding holes, in the rocks—a description of a piece of property we owned not too far from the pass.

  My mother and sister sitting in that narrow canyon at the base of the rocks with the grinding holes.

  By the time he gets to Chapter 4, it seems Louis had reached a decisive moment in the writing process. The arrival of the odd group of stage passengers suggests that the mystery of the disappearing station agents, and even the existence of some sort of monster, is just the tip of the interdimensional iceberg. The place where Louis stopped writing is probably the place where he was going to have to commit to what the book was going to be about. Dad usually worked this sort of thing out unconsciously, but whether it was a conscious or unconscious process, it is obvious to me that he wasn’t quite ready to take the next step. No doubt several of the passengers are in on whatever is happening and it would seem that Jeremy Loccard’s amulet will also play a role.

  It is amusing to see a moment of Chick Bowdrie–style forensics when Loccard places the smelly hairs in a folded piece of paper. (Bowdrie was a Texas Ranger character Louis wrote about early in his career.) The monster may be a giant sloth, though even as big as they were, I’m not sure they’d be all that aggressive. Perhaps it was a short-faced bear, an extinct carnivore of colossal size…which would definitely have been something to fear. The bones of both have been found in the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles.

  As I mentioned, Dad was working with ideas here that were very similar to ones he experimented with in his novels The Californios and The Haunted Mesa: strange animals that come from somewhere else, another reality of some sort, and people who know about this other place and, regardless of the danger, wish to exploit it in some way. In his notes on this story Dad mentions checking into Harold Courlander’s The Fourth World of
the Hopis and Frank Waters’ Book of the Hopi. Both were also inspirations for Haunted Mesa. Additionally, Louis considered rereading some of the work of Talbot Mundy, a writer who influenced Dad’s more occult-oriented adventure fiction, and Charles Fort, an early collector of unexplained phenomena.

  In some ways it seems as if Louis was about to expand on, or even write a sort of sequel to, The Californios with this story. His notes mention “a lost city in the desert and the people who lived there.” Juan, the old Indian in The Californios who can travel between worlds, told the tale of such an Atlantis-like city. Louis jotted down the following bit of dialogue for one of the characters to impart:

  “People throw things out of kilter. The Old Ones knew. Young folks lost a lot of knowledge. There was a wall in that town, and on the Wall were inscriptions. This wall could be read by the Old Ones, but when the storm came they were suffocated in the dust, all but a few who had gone through the Portals. When they came back all was gone, their folks, temples, houses everything gone. They live on the Other Side now and just return for pilgrimages, but they don’t want folks in the way….This here is on the route, the temple is in the mountains yonder, and the Portals are there. There were other Openings….”

  This idea of portals to other worlds is a significant element in The Californios and Haunted Mesa. In both there is another plane of existence that invites exploration and offers a sense of possibility that our world has been running low on recently. Louis grew up in a time when the ends of the earth had yet to be completely explored, but by the time he wrote these chapters, the likelihood of discovering King Kong’s Skull Island or Lost Horizon’s Shangri-La had been reduced to nearly zero. A parallel universe was the next step for a writer of the frontier.

  Dad also jotted down one final note, possibly of what was intended to be the last scene in this story:

  A vanishing stagecoach? A Lurch of the stage, a jolt, a cloud of dust, then a trail the driver has never seen before. A shining city in the distance. Stage picks up Loccard, he warns them to turn around and drive fast, before the Opening closes. They escape—“Still, that city now. I’d like to have seen it.”

  * * *

  TRAIL OF TEARS

  * * *

  The First Seven Chapters of a Historical Novel

  CHAPTER 1

  She stood poised and naked upon a point of rock, caught in a beam of light that fell through clouds rifted by some far wind.

  For an instant she stood upon her ledge beyond the trees, and upon the high trail where he rode his horse, Miles Tolan drew up sharply, astonished by the sudden glimpse of beauty…and then he reached for his glass.

  Yet even as the glass found her figure she sprang out into the still air, arms flung wide, and vanished from sight beyond the trees.

  The minutes marched, but he did not ride on. Far from any settlement, riding through a mountain wilderness, what he had just seen was clearly impossible. Yet he had seen her. How far away had she been? Was it four hundred yards or a bit less? The clear mountain air made the distance deceptive.

  The sky was overcast with lowering gray clouds, and the shaft of sunlight where the girl had stood was the last, anywhere. Now it, too, was gone. A few scattered drops fell, and he went to his saddlebags for his slicker. Huge drops spattered and rattled on the leaves of the forest, and from afar he heard the coming of the cold battalions of rain.

  Lieutenant Miles Tolan rode through wild country upon dim trails known only to wild game and the Cherokees themselves. He had chosen this route to Atlanta in making his change of station, for he loved the wild and lonely mountains and now it was late summer with the nights carrying a promise of early autumn. It had been three days since he had seen anyone at all, and to see such a girl in such a place…It was preposterous.

  Slowly, he walked his horse forward. In the last ten miles he could remember no trail that turned off in her direction, but he searched for one as he rode. The trail he followed was a narrow passage between two walls of towering forest, and under the trees there was a thick tangle of undergrowth and brush. Then, when he had traveled more than a mile, he dipped down from the rise into a wide green meadow where a mountain stream tumbled over rocks and beside it ran the thread of a rarely used path. Despite the impending storm, he turned the black horse in that direction and rode swiftly along.

  Almost at once the trail left the meadow and went up into the trees. With mounting excitement he knew he was riding toward the rock on which he had seen the girl.

  The trail seemed unused, yet suddenly he emerged from the brush into a small parklike space, and here at the base of a huge rock was a pool. Deep, clear, shadowed by surrounding trees, it was a place of eerie enchantment, but it was empty.

  Arrested by the strange stillness, he sat his horse in absolute silence, listening. There was another swift patter of rain upon the leaves, and somewhere beyond the pool and cloaked by the trees he could hear a trickle of running water. Turning his horse, he rode around the pool’s edge to the towering mass of rock. The ledge from which the girl dived was at least fifteen feet above the water, but due to a rise in elevation, it was all of a hundred feet above the trail where he had been riding when he had glimpsed her.

  On the far side, near a small stretch of sandy shore, he found natural steps and a path leading upward. In the sand at the base of a rock was a small, smudged print like that of a moccasin.

  Dismounting, he climbed the rock and looked all about him. The land was deserted, empty, still.

  Turning slowly, he surveyed the entire scene, and for the first time saw another trail leading westward. It must have been this path the girl had taken. Reluctantly he turned to go, then wedged between the rocks he saw a book.

  Apparently the book had fallen there and been forgotten, perhaps by the girl who had only just left the ledge, for the book showed no mildew or dampness. Careful not to damage the covers, he extracted it from the crack. It was an almost new copy of Thomas Moore’s Lalla Rookh. There was no name on the flyleaf.

  Glancing around for some sheltered place where the book might be left, he found none. After a moment’s hesitation he thrust it into his pocket.

  The rain came across the forest with a rush of strength that belied the preliminary showers, and Miles Tolan scrambled down from the rocks and into the saddle. Reluctantly, he rode back to the trail he had been following. There would be adventure enough waiting for him in Atlanta; what he wanted now was an inn where he might get a hot meal and a bed.

  —

  Six feet and two inches tall, Miles Tolan was a lean and powerful one hundred and ninety pounds with a dark, Hamlet-like face and green eyes, and he was riding toward an assignment he did not want and had not requested.

  It was beautiful land, this country of the Cherokees. He did not blame them for wanting to stay, yet the government had decreed they must move, and move they would. It was the last job he would have asked for, and was definitely not an assignment he had expected after his service in the field, but an Army officer did not question his orders, he merely obeyed.

  The rain fell steadily. His thoughts returned to the diver….What would a woman, especially one familiar with the writings of Thomas Moore, be doing in such a place? From all indications there was no plantation or house within miles, and yet there she had been.

  The smashing sound of a shot cut across the day like the crack of a teamster’s whip, and then, just ahead of him, Tolan heard a high-pitched scream.

  Leaping the gelding into a run, Tolan raced down the trail to swing around a bend into a small clearing. Beyond the clearing and facing him was a long, low house built of logs.

  A girl was running toward him, a child half-blind with fear. Only a few steps behind and rapidly overtaking her was a lean, rawboned man whose features were filled with a savage exultation that revolted Tolan. Even as his horse pounded toward them, the man overtook the girl and threw her to the ground, grasping her dress at the shoulder to rip it away.

  The black covered th
e ground in a breath and Tolan’s hand dropped to the scruff of the man’s neck and seized him by the collar. The horse had not slowed and the man was jerked from the girl, and Tolan dragged him a dozen feet before he let go.

  Beyond the shed Tolan heard the report of another shot and a crackle of flames.

  The man got shakily to his feet, fell, then got up more slowly. “What right you got, buttin’ in here?” he yelled. His lean jaws were covered with a coarse stubble of mixed-gray beard and he was almost frothing in his fury. “She’s nothin’ but a damn Cherokee! The state says they got no rights, so what’s to stop a man?”

  “I am. I’m stopping you.”

  His eyes ugly with malice, the tall man rubbed hard palms on his coarse jeans. “Are you now? I reckon Hallett will have something to say about that.”

  Tolan reined his horse around. “Walk ahead of me.” He indicated an opening between the shed and a corral. “Walk out there into the open.”

  He turned to speak to the girl, but she had chosen the moment to disappear into the trees. Girl? A child rather; she could have been no more than fourteen.

  There was a pile of loot in the clearing, and nearby an old Indian woman sat on the ground staring dumbly at the flames that consumed her home, her face seamed with age and grief. A man was stretched upon the ground, a patch of blood covering most of his back. Standing nearby superintending the rounding up of horses and cattle was a big man in high boots, carrying a blacksnake whip.

  “Mr. Hallett”—the man Tolan had interrupted in his attempted rape was, Tolan noticed, both respectful and fearful of Hallett—“this here sojer says we got to leave them Cher’kee gals alone.”

  The big man turned sharply around, his face hard-set, ready to command. He had a strong-boned face with the skin drawn taut over the bones. His eyes were intensely black, his mustache was black, and it was obvious he was a man accustomed to command. Yet as he saw Tolan’s uniform and recognized his rank, his manner changed. “How are you, Lieutenant? I am sorry you came up when you did, but we have to let the men have their fun. This is disagreeable duty.”