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

by Louis L'Amour

  Louis Lamoore in Balikpapan, Netherlands’ East Indies.

  Louis is talking about Balikpapan, a town on the Borneo coast, now part of Kalimantan, Indonesia. He visited there while working on a tramp freighter in the 1920s. Seeing that it was part of the Netherlands’ East Indies at the time, it was literally a club for the local Dutch residents. Louis claimed that, on certain evenings, they ran movies that, back in the States, would have been considered very out-of-date…seeing that this was still in the period before sound, I have always wondered exactly how old these films were!

  * * *

  INVESTMENT IN CHARACTER

  * * *

  A Treatment for a Western Story

  Bill Ryan, carrying ten thousand dollars, is en route west to meet his future bride and her father. The money is to be paid for a partnership in a going business that promises well, and Bill is enthusiastic over his prospects. His girl’s father has never approved of Bill, but has resigned himself to the inevitable—but Bill must produce the ten thousand to prove he is able to care for the girl and to provide a good living for her. The money is Bill’s entire savings, combined with a small inheritance he has had since he was a child.

  On the train he meets a kindly old gentleman who is both interested and sympathetic. He kids Bill about losing his freedom, and quotes frequently, among others the quote from Kipling,

  “Pleasant the snaffle of courtship, improving

  the manners and carriage.

  But the colt who is wise will abstain from

  the terrible thorn-bit of marriage.”

  At the hotel Bill finds his girl and her father will not arrive until the following day and he is restless, with time on his hands. His kindly old friend introduces Bill to a tall, polished man who is “in the mining business” and the three have dinner together and Bill hears much talk of “leads,” “drifts,” and “ore bodies” and is impressed. The mining man picks up the check. Later, with time hanging heavy on their hands, the mining man suggests a poker game to the old man. Both advise Bill to stay out of it, but he decides to play a few hands. He feels that his luck is in—that he can’t lose.

  And he wins, wins again—three straight pots. Then he loses, wins again, loses, and wins twice more. Now well ahead of the game, he is feeling good. He gets an excellent hand, and the betting runs high. Before he realizes it he is out of his winnings and deep into the ten thousand—and he loses. Then he wins and loses again. Soon he is winning only small, occasional pots, but losing the big ones.

  Disgusted, most of his money gone, he suggests they call it off, and the others agree—though they all know he still has well over two thousand dollars.

  They leave the room and he sits there, then gets up and paces around the room. Worried and restless. He drops into the chair where the mining man had been seated, starts to get up, but his fingertips brush something pushed down between the side of the chair and the cushion. He reaches back and draws out—an ace of spades! Then the ace of hearts, and then the other two aces follow!

  He has been cheated!

  Then it all adds up: the old man on the train, his own free talk about what he was going to do, his plans, etc. The arrival in town, introduction, and the game. He is enraged, but suddenly, he has a plan. Most of all, the old man’s continual quotations irritate him. He had believed them an amusing quirk; now that the man has been revealed as a card shark, Bill’s attitude is less tolerant.

  At breakfast he meets the men, comments on the fact that he is down to his last two thousand, and says he might as well go for all or nothing.

  Bill now knows their pattern. They will let him win a couple of small pots, then get into a big one—and they will see that he has what he thinks is a good hand—and then they will take him. He doubts if they will delay long.

  As expected, he rakes in a couple of small pots. He has carefully watched the mining man and noticed that his hands have not been off the table. Bill Ryan is dealt two queens and two kings. He discards the fifth card and draws—another king!

  A full house.

  He acts—shows excitement—digs out another wad of bills (actually, it is a Kansas City bankroll: newspaper wrapped in a few bills), and gambling on their belief in his gullibility, he ups the ante until everything he has is in the pot, and all the money they have won from him. He sees the gambler’s hand drop from the table as if to ease his position a little, and Bill Ryan calls—and spreads his cards on the table: queen and four aces!

  The mining man and his companion stare blankly at the aces and Bill places a pistol on the table. “Brought it along for rattlesnakes,” he comments, and rakes in the pot, stuffing the money into his pockets, and easing from the room.

  The two crooks sit staring at each other, then the old man explodes with anger. “You had those aces!” he shouts. “You had them in the chair!”

  The mining man springs up, and the two lift the cushion. A neat white typewritten card is in the position where they had left the cards, on it the words:

  “Lie to a liar, for lies are his coin; steal from a thief, for that is easy; lay a trap for the trickster and catch him at the first attempt, but beware of an honest man!”

  COMMENTS: This feels like a treatment for a half-hour TV episode, but I have no idea if it was intended for any particular show. From the late forties until the sixties, there were dozens of “anthology series” on the air, shows where every episode was a different story with different characters. Some of these were exclusively Western and many others would accept Western genre materials. In the 1950s, other short stories and treatments of Louis’s were purchased for shows like Rebound, Fireside Theater, Ford Television Theatre, Climax!, Schlitz Playhouse, and Chevron Hall of Stars. Selling quickly sketched out ideas like this one or repurposing old short stories was an additional way for Dad to scrape together some money. He also sold or created episode concepts for reoccurring character series like Tales of Wells Fargo, Maverick, The Texan, Sugarfoot, City Detective, and Cowboy G-Men.

  Dad’s relationship with Hollywood was as much a relationship with the TV industry as it was with feature films. Cowboy G-Men was produced as early as 1952, and he also wrote the pilot for 1956’s Hart of Honolulu, which, if picked up, might have been TV’s first “private detective in Hawaii” crime drama.

  * * *

  THE GOLDEN TAPESTRY

  * * *

  The Beginning of an Adventure Novel, and a Treatment

  CHAPTER I

  He lay upon his face in the wet sand, a tall old man in shabby clothes, and looking down at the body, Ballantyne knew it had begun again, but this time he did not know why.

  It was an austere face, judging by the side of it he could see, with a high-bridged nose and prominent cheekbones, a face worn and old, but strong with lines of character and determination. Poor, he might have been, but this man had been proud also.

  Glancing swiftly to right and left, then along the rim of the cliff above, and seeing no one, Ballantyne lifted the edge of the worn coat and checked the pockets….They were empty. The coat, no doubt purchased secondhand years before, bore no label.

  Gently, Ballantyne lifted the old man’s hands, for the hands of a man are revealing, and often tell more than his face or the few odds and ends his pockets may contain. These were strong hands, calloused but agile. Ballantyne had seen those callouses before. These were the hands of a weaver, a weaver of rugs.

  The dead man was unknown to Ballantyne, but the three stab wounds in the kidney indicated the hand of Mustafa Bem. In Samarkand, Damascus, and Kashgar, Ballantyne had seen similar wounds, and he needed no autopsy to know the blade had been long and thin, the blows hard-driven and slanted sharply upward.

  Yet Bem took no action without orders. Somehow this old man had incurred the displeasure of Leon Decebilus, and soon so might Villette Mallory unless Ballantyne moved with extreme care.

  Villette Mallory was alone, and unaware the man she had so recently met, Leon Decebilus, was one of the most ruthless crimi
nals in the Near East. No matter the mask of refinement and culture he might have assumed, Decebilus was a ruthless and violent man, intolerant of interference and utterly without scruples.

  Ballantyne stood up, and then walked quickly away from the body and mounted the cliff by a rarely used path. The last thing he wished was to become involved in an investigation by provincial authorities.

  When his eyes cleared the edge of the cliff, Ballantyne paused and swept the area with a swift, practiced attention. Assured that he was unobserved, he went up quickly, and proceeded to stroll carelessly along the ancient path that skirted the cliff’s edge.

  The narrow beach where the body lay was on the shore of the Gulf of Izmit, known in classical times as the Gulf of Nicomedia, in Asiatic Turkey. Some fifty miles from Istanbul, the former capital of the once-great Byzantine empire, the Gulf was off the beaten track.

  Whatever the reason for this man’s death, it had to be big, for Leon Decebilus no longer involved himself in petty crimes—the thief, spy, panderer, blackmailer, and murderer had come into wealth and power.

  Even the law moved warily where he was concerned, for he was an international figure with friends in high places, and he had been shrewd enough to implicate or involve them in his own dealings, involve them to such a degree that their fortunes depended upon the success of his.

  The dead man obviously had been unaware of the risks involved in dealing with Decebilus, a fatal disadvantage in such affairs. That certainly could not be said of Ballantyne, but what of Villette Mallory? Did she recognize the manner of man Decebilus was? Could she?

  Ballantyne swore bitterly and impatiently, and he was not an impatient or bitter man. He knew why he was getting involved, but he did not understand what was behind the curious chain of events that had led him to this place.

  He was involved because of Villette. You are, he told himself, a silly romantic fool. No, a guilty fool. And guilt is never a good reason to dig yourself in deeper.

  He was a man who lived by his wits, he told himself. He liked this explanation better. Wherever Decebilus showed his hand there was a profit to be made and where there was a profit he could make it as easily as Decebilus. Well, almost.

  —

  Turning from the track along the cliffs, Ballantyne walked through the short grass and up the slight slope to the ruins. The area was known as Eski Hissar, Turkish for “old castle,” but the Byzantine tower for which it was named was only one among the many ruins along the Gulf of Izmit.

  They were unimpressive ruins, without boldness or beauty: a few crumbling walls, scattered stones, and grass-covered mounds. The walls that remained were often constructed of stones from still older walls; even the most ancient ruins in sight had been built from the stones of others.

  On the crest of the hill not far away, tall cypresses marked the tomb of Hannibal, and from that vantage point one could look over the slope below and see an incredible maze, design interwoven with design, the outlines of walls invisible on the ground itself.

  Seating himself among the ruins where he could observe without being observed, Ballantyne took the camera strap from his shoulder and placed the camera beside him on the grass.

  A camera, he had discovered, automatically marked one as a tourist, and tourists were apt to be regarded as harmless, somewhat blundering and gullible creatures inclined to go almost anywhere. The camera was a visible passport to almost anywhere but a military zone.

  To Ballantyne all ruins were interesting, and from time to time he emerged from such ruins with a stone tablet, an ancient vase, or even a fine stone head. Discreetly removed and even more discreetly disposed of, such odds and ends had solved his financial difficulties on more than one occasion. But today he was not scouting such a midnight dig—there was larger game afoot. The dead man had affirmed that suspicion.

  Ballantyne settled back to wait. Warm and lazy under the sun, the slope from where he waited was freshened by a gentle breeze from off the Sea of Marmara and the Gulf. If life had taught him nothing else, it had taught him patience.

  Yet when the gray car appeared, he felt a premonitory chill. It left the village and came slowly along the goat track, a track rarely used by carts, never by cars. The Renault grumbled cautiously along the crumbling edge of the cliff toward the ruins.

  That they returned at all to where the body had been left was evidence of their concern. The track they followed led only from the nearby village to the pastures beyond. Yet it might be possible, if one were a skillful driver, to follow the track along the shore, over the ridge, and then by a woodcutter’s trail through the dark patch of forest beyond. A dirt road somewhere over there connected with the highway from Ankara to Istanbul. No car had made the trip but in years past it had occasionally been done by carts.

  He watched the gray car coming slowly along the track; his own position concealed him and he had chosen it for that reason. He was known to both Barbaro and Mustafa Bem.

  Across the blue waters of the Gulf he could see the thickly wooded shores that ended in the promontory known as Boz Burun, and at the farthest point on the southern horizon he could just make out the peak of the Bithynian Mount Olympus. The closest town was the fishing village Gebze, but, as with many places in this corner of the world, history complicated the simplest of things. Gebze had once been Libyssa, the spot where Hannibal had spent his last years, hiding from the power of Rome. It was there, in 183 B.C., he had taken poison to avoid capture.

  Yet, he had fooled them at last, in one respect at least, for the vast treasure he was known to have with him disappeared when he died. Vanished also were the hollow bronze statues, gods sacred to Phoenicia and Carthage, which he had brought with him from Crete to Nicomedia.

  More than one adventurer, wandering soldier, goatherd or peasant had entertained himself with the thought of what he could do if he found that treasure, yet the story was but one of many told along this coast. War and trouble lead men to conceal their riches, always with a plan to return and recover them, but slavery, imprisonment, or death have a way of intervening. How many such treasures might lie buried within a hundred miles of Istanbul? Or even within the city itself?

  The gray car had stopped some forty yards off, near the ragged boy who tended a flock of goats that grazed among the ruins. Mustafa Bem got out of the car, looking as lean and savage as ever, and called to the boy.

  “Have you seen a blue Maserati? A blue car driven by a woman?”

  The boy walked toward them, accompanied by his sheepdog. “There may have been a car. I was far up the hillside.”

  “Where does this road go?”

  “It does not go. It is always here. For twelve years I have been coming here and the road is always as it is.”

  “Where does it end, boy?”

  “The road has an end? Each road leads to another, yes? So all the roads of the world begin here at our feet.”

  Mustafa Bem grew impatient. “Do people come here? Strangers, I mean?”

  The boy shrugged. “Why should they come? Here there are only the grass and my goats.”

  “The blue car…did it go on?”

  “There are only pastures and forest beyond. I was with the goats. Perhaps the blue car went back when it discovered this was not a road for cars.” Mustafa Bem returned to the Renault and talked to someone within.

  The air was clear and their voices could be heard, but Ballantyne could no longer distinguish the words. He had not heard the woman’s car or seen it, but neither would have been possible during the time he had spent on the beach. Had he missed his chance…?

  Mustafa Bem got into the Renault and drove on, but no great distance, for where the track ran past the base of the ruined tower the cliff’s edge was of crumbling rock. Only a fool would try to go further unless on foot, and for a minute or two the issue was in doubt and Ballantyne watched them in amusement. At last they backed up, turned around, and started back.

  There was a route through the ruins, a route Ballantyne had hims
elf located when he scouted the area on his first visit. Ballantyne had the tactician’s distaste for a cul-de-sac. Was it not Plautus who said that not even a mouse trusted himself to one hole only?

  The goatherd seemed concerned only with his flock, but Ballantyne was sure the boy also watched the car. He was a thin boy of something around twelve years, with large, expressive eyes and an olive skin. Yet he wore his rags with a savoir faire that went beyond mere assurance. Ballantyne had seen the boy on each of his previous visits and they had nodded to one another in passing but they had not talked.

  When the gray Renault disappeared in the direction of Istanbul, the boy walked to where Ballantyne sat among the ruins. Squatting upon his heels, the boy looked where Ballantyne was looking.

  “You see something?”

  “I look at the sea…sometimes at the ruins.”

  “The sea?”

  “I find it beautiful. The ruins, also.”

  The goatherd scarcely glanced at the time-blackened stones. “The ruins are no good, even for goats. The roofs have fallen in.”

  The boy glanced again at Ballantyne. “Why do you look at the sea and not at the goats? I think the goats are more beautiful than the sea. Look at them!”

  To please the boy, Ballantyne turned to look at the goats. Some two dozen of them browsed or reclined upon the hillside. The boy seemed pleased that Ballantyne appeared to agree.

  “They are not my goats,” he explained, “but someday I shall own goats. Perhaps as many as these. Then you shall see beauty! They shall be as white clouds upon the green sky of the hillside.”

  He glanced at the camera, leaning over it, curiously. “You have a machine. What is it for?”