Fair Blows the Wind (Louis L'Amour's Lost Treasures)

by Louis L'Amour

  We held our fire, waiting.

  CHAPTER 33

  THE HOUSE OF gray granite sits in the hollow of a green hill with all the bay and the rocks below it. A strong walker may climb to where the old fort lies, its black stones made blacker still by the blood of those who died there, and the burning of the fires that ate away its heart more times than one, yet each time by a son rebuilt.

  Ours is a quiet place with the gray sea before us, rarely still, and the black rocks and islets rising from it. Here and there lies a patch of green where the grass grows or a tree.

  To this place have I come after my wandering years. My father died somewhere near but where his body lies no man knows. It matters not, for his spirit haunts these gray rocks, resting or moving among them as he forever did. By now he knows that I have come again, bought back the old place and some of the land around. And if my name is another’s the hearth at least is mine, and my sons will grow tall from the same deep roots.

  You have not failed me, Father, for you gave much, asking only this in return: that I come again and rebuild the old fires that the name and the blood shall live.

  Guadalupe is here, and my firstborn, and a fine lad he is, named for you, my father.

  The chests I brought back from America were fatly filled, and the Irish folk know me for who I am and say nothing, but greet me gently as they pass. The English whom I also love, although it seems traitorous to some, think of me as a sailor from the days of the Armada, a sometime prisoner in Spain, and a wanderer come home.

  My fine Irish horses graze on the salt green grass, and there are cattle here, and sheep. The chests are not empty although I have bought lands here and some in France. And we live quietly but well, going only now and again to Dublintown or Belfast, and mayhap to Cork or London.

  Long ago there was a lady left money with me. She has never returned and when I tried the name she gave me and the place, nothing was known, but someday needing it, she will seek me out. She will find lands she owns and a house here and there, and each year I study the money and judge what must be done with it, for she was a woman who trusted at least one man and shall not regret it.

  Yet when the gray geese fly west for Iceland, bound on to Greenland and then to Labrador, there is sometimes in the heart of me a longing for distant shores and the beat of waves upon the long golden sands, and the distant view of mountains, far and blue against the horizon, and always the winds that whisper of enchantments beyond the purple ridges.

  I shall not go. Guadalupe is here, and my son. My destiny lies here. Like my father before me I shall walk these old paths with my son and show him where the Skelligs lie and old Staigue Fort and the ruins of Derryquin Castle. I shall speak to him of Achilles, Hector, and Conn of the Hundred Battles, of the old kings who lived at Tara and mayhap of a bloody man who went over the rail into the waters behind the cape at Lookout.

  Of Jacob Binns I have seen no more, but my door stands open always for him, or for Fergus MacAskill or even for Tosti Padget.

  Kory comes sometimes, with Porter Bob and Porter Bill, and we trade a little and lie a little and talk of the old days that are better gone.

  Of Emma Delahay I have no word. Gone she was and gone she is, and some small money with her, although most was accounted for by Captain Dabney of the Good Catherine. Was she murdered? Fled? I know not, although sometimes I wonder.

  Last year in London a lovely girl crossed the floor, holding out both hands to me. “You are Tatton,” she said, “and I am Eve Vypont, and I wish you to know that our horse came back, and you may walk in my forest when you will!”

  Silliman Turley keeps a tavern in Ballydehob and sometimes when the Good Catherine sails into Roaring Water Bay, we meet there to share a bottle and a loaf with Captain Dabney. So all things at last come to an end.

  Guadalupe beside me wears her golden medallion that I took from the deck of a long-lost ship in a far place beyond the sea.

  Now I shall go back from the hills to sit beside my fire in the house my own hands built, and sometimes I shall lift my eyes to see the firelight play upon the silver handle of a sheathed sword that hangs there above the fireplace. And when the fire crackles upon the hearth I shall look down from the window to where the gray ghosts of the rainstorms sweep across the distant sea, like veiled women to their prayers.

  I have come home again, and I go now to where love lies waiting….

  WHAT IS LOUIS L’AMOUR’S LOST TREASURES?

  Louis L’Amour’s Lost Treasures is a project created to release some of the author’s more unconventional manuscripts from the family archives.

  Currently included in the series are Louis L’Amour’s Lost Treasures: Volume 1, published in the fall of 2017, and Volume 2, due out in 2019. These books contain both finished and unfinished short stories, unfinished novels, literary and motion picture treatments, notes, and outlines. They are a wide selection of the many works Louis was never able to publish during his lifetime.

  In 2018 we will release No Traveller Returns, L’Amour’s never-before-seen first novel, which was written between 1938 and 1942. In the future, there may be a selection of even more L’Amour titles.

  Additionally, many notes and alternate drafts to Louis’s well-known and previously published novels and short stories will now be included as “bonus feature” postscripts within the books that they relate to. For example, the Lost Treasures postscript to Last of the Breed will contain early notes on the story, the short story that was discovered to be a missing piece of the novel, the history of the novel’s inspiration and creation, and information about unproduced motion picture and comic book versions.

  An even more complete description of the Lost Treasures project, along with a number of examples of what is in the books, can be found at louislamourslosttreasures.com. The website also contains a good deal of exclusive material, such as even more pieces of unknown stories that were too short or too incomplete to include in the Lost Treasures books, plus personal photos, scans of original documents, and notes on the Sackett, Chantry, and Talon family series.

  All of the works that contain Lost Treasures project materials will display the Louis L’Amour’s Lost Treasures banner and logo.

  POSTSCRIPT

  By Beau L’Amour

  Between 1959 and 1972, my father wrote ten novels and two short stories featuring characters from his fictional Sackett family. Having had some success with reoccurring characters in his magazine writing days, Louis set out to create this new series for the booming paperback market.

  I suspect all he had in mind initially was a number of loosely interconnected traditional Westerns, something a step or two more sophisticated than the Kilkenny series which had helped him make the transition from pulp magazines to paperback originals. But, a few stories in, the plan expanded into using the Sackett family to chronicle the era that started with the fur trade and concluded around the time of the “closing of the frontier” in the 1890s. Occasionally Louis even teased people with the idea of taking the concept further and doing a story about a “Sackett in space.” As you will see, he was definitely interested in keeping his options open!

  At the same time, Dad was hoping to use his newfound success in writing Westerns as a springboard into a number of other genres. He had only tentatively committed to the “Western writer” label in the mid-1950s, and had done so mostly to overcome a severe financial crisis. While he loved writing about the American West, he was definitely concerned with being trapped there forever. Throughout the late 1950s and early 1960s Dad attempted to write a number of other works, including The Walking Drum. To his great regret, he found no publisher willing to take any of them on.

  Eventually, he hit upon a strategy that he hoped would allow him to both expand the audience for his Westerns and train his traditional readers to take some risks and follow him into other genres. The new plan was built on the structure he had already been imagining for the Sackett stories but included two additional families: the Talons
and the Chantrys. It also extended the time frame back to the earliest days of European exploration in North America. The more he could redefine the Western, at least for himself, into a genre of “frontier” stories, the more he would be able to write a wider variety of material.

  Louis began laying the groundwork for this new agenda in 1971 with a very traditional Western, North to the Rails. In it he introduced his first Chantry character, Tom Chantry, but established the foundation for stories about Tom’s father, the down-on-his-luck rancher turned town marshal, Borden Chantry.

  Another conventional Sackett family Western, Ride the Dark Trail, tangentially connected to the Talon family. The character of Em Talon was born Emily Sackett. Though her husband is dead by the story’s beginning, Mr. Talon is presented as an intriguing character with a penchant for architecture and engineering, abilities that would eventually be established as family traits. If you take a look at “The Bastard of Brignogan” in Louis L’Amour’s Lost Treasures: Volume 2, you will find that “Talon” becomes the nom de guerre of the family’s artistic progenitor because, after his hand is severed by an enemy, he designs and constructs a metal device to replace it.

  With the stage set for change, Dad took a step backward in time to the years following the Revolutionary War with his next Chantry novel, 1973’s The Ferguson Rifle. The next year he established Sackett’s Land as the beginning of the Sackett series, and its setting in Elizabethan England was a clean break from anything even resembling a traditional Western. It was also around this time that Dad began planning the first Chantry story, Fair Blows the Wind.

  Below is an early version of the first chapter, a draft in which Louis attempted to tell the story without the flashbacks which figure so prominently in the finished book:

  CHAPTER I

  “All of them!” I had heard the old colonel say it. “Kill them all, for nits make lice, and they are a fearsome lot, the men of this blood.”

  Today I was eleven years old and yonder my father lay dead upon the grass, his blade still wet with the blood of those who killed him.

  Once they searched the ruins of our home, still smoking from the fire that destroyed it, they would find no teeth or bones to show them I was dead. Then they would spread wide over the fens and hollows of the hills, searching every cot and shed until they found me.

  Down upon the Bay of Glandore a vessel lay, a vessel ready to spread its canvas for Italy, and it was in my mind to be aboard at sailing time. The searchers would come to the vessel at the last, I was thinking, for the men of our land were ever loathe to leave it, and although I was but a lad they would not think of an escape by sea…not yet.

  There would be a tide soon, and the vessel would sail upon it.

  She lay alongside the stone wharf, a clumsy craft, her sails furled, and her hull deep in the water with the cargo she had taken on. I’d been thinking the master of the vessel would have no wish to have this vessel searched by British, particularly by the old colonel, who was a greedy man, quick to find excuse for looting.

  Rain fell softly upon the grassy hill, and soft upon the village roofs below, all thatch but the inn where slate tiles shone faintly in the dark. My clothes were soaked through, but the rain had washed away the tears from my face, and left something cold and knotted in my stomach’s pit, for there was fear there, but hatred too. And the fear was mostly that they’d catch and kill me before I grew tall enough to face them with a blade.

  When I was still a few yards back from the tavern they came clattering down the road, their horses’ hoofs splashing mud and water, six big men in breastplates and helmets riding behind the hunched and powerful figure of the old colonel. One of those riders would be his son, who wished himself to kill me.

  “One day I’ll be as tall as him,” I told myself, “and then I shall see if he stands as brave against a man with a blade as against a child without one.”

  Square jawed, his face as if carved from granite, the old colonel went into the tavern. Once his eyes swept past the trees where I crouched I shrank into the darkness, frightened that those small, cruel eyes should find me out, but they left their horses standing in the rain and went within. I went a cable’s length up the muddy track before I crossed and went down to where the vessel lay, its spars dripping with wet, its deck glistening with rain.

  The old vessel, squat and dumpy she looked when alongside, creaked at her moorings. The plank was down but there was no watch that I could see, for probably he had gone ashore to round up the crew.

  Up the plank I went, expecting each moment to be halted, and then after to where a hatch, still unclosed, was shielded by an awning of sail. I went down the ladder into the hold and found a space between two bales of sheepskins where I wedged myself.

  This birthday I would not forget if I lived long to be remembering anything at all. Shivering cold I was, and wet through from the rain, I was tired enough that I fell asleep, and was awakened only by the banging around on deck as the vessel made ready for sea.

  Soon I felt the rise and fall of the vessel as she moved out upon the narrow bay. Lying in the dark I could see the emerald green hills of Glandore sliding on either side, could see them in my mind’s eye only, for all was dark and still around me.

  Sleep came to me once more and when I awakened my head ached from the closeness of the air, and the rat of hunger gnawed at my belly. Dry I was, too, and longing for somewhat to drink.

  No use trying the hatchway. That would be battened down for the sea, so I crawled across the bales, seeking a way out, not to give myself up, for that never entered my mind, but to find the water cask that would stand somewhere amidships, if luck was with me.

  A faint crack of light showed and I crept near, able to see nothing, but to hear.

  “We were away in time,” a voice was saying, “they came riding fast, and I am thinking there would have been grief and to spare had we lay alongside.”

  “Aye…what could they be wanting, to come so lively?”

  “Who knows? An excuse to loot the ship, no doubt. The Old One is hard. He burned the manor house, even the barns and sheds, but first he took the silver and linens from the house. They bundled it up like thieves before they fired the house, and all the while the body of himself a-lyin’ there.”

  “Did they kill the lad? There was a lad, you know.”

  “I saw nothing of him. Donal, and big Jemison, they were tied up, trussed like fowls, and I’d have no liking for what faces them. Good men they were, too, seamen, fishermen, and farmers, like all along this shore.”

  “Fighters? Were they fighters?”

  “Aye. Every last one of the clan were fighting men.”

  Nothing more was said of Glandore nor of the fighting there. The rebellion had begun in 1579, and there had been a landing of soldiers from France and Spain a year later, but that only seemed to arouse the English more. Nor had my father approved. “We must fight our own battles. This is between England and us.” And then he had amended it to speak in that dry way he had. “Rather, between Ireland and Henry, for there are many over there who do not believe as he does.”

  In this year of 1581 it was a wise man that kept a still tongue. Old rivalries and hatreds had been stirred to flame by the rebellion, and many an Irishman had seized upon the chance to even old scores. And many of the English who had been settled in Ireland in the time of Henry II now fought on the Irish side, for Ireland had a way of winning to her all who lived long upon her green hills.

  When I awakened again thirst was choking me, and I must find water or die. Exploring further in the dark hold I came upon a small hatch that opened into a tiny cubbyhole that reeked of tar and rope. Feeling about carefully I discovered old ropes, new ropes, and sails…it was a rope locker I was in, or what passed for it.

  The door was not made fast, and I opened it the merest crack. The smell of damp fresh sea air was a gift of the saints, and for a moment I stood there, emptying my lungs of the stuffy, foul air from below decks. There was a fine
sea running, and a nice bit of wind, the sails bellying full and fine to see.

  The wheel was somewhere behind me, the deck lay before, and somewhere close by must be the water-cask. In a distant flash of lightning I saw the cask and made for it. Opening the bung ever so slightly I filled the cup that hung there. Holding the cup in my two hands I drank, then drank again.

  Three times I drained the cup, then crept back to my place of hiding, seen by no one.

  On the fourth day I was suddenly awakened by a change in the ship’s motion. Lying still, I listened, straining my ears to measure and gauge the sounds. Water rustled by the hull, only inches from my ears, but I heard no waves breaking and the motion of the vessel was slightly…we had entered a harbor or river.

  Where? We had not come to Spain, and Italy was far beyond…Brittany, then? It would not matter, for the Irish were there, too, and I should find friends soon enough, but suppose it was England?

  Frightened, I lay still, my heart thumping heavily. The movement of the ship had slowed, then there was a hail from somewhere not aboard ship. That was followed by the distant thump of a monkey’s-fist, the ball at the ending of a heaving-line some one of our crew had cast to the wharf.

  The heaving line would be tied to a heavier line with which our vessel would be made fast to a bollard on the dock. Soon I heard the heavier line dragging along the deck, and I worked my way to the tiny hatch opening to the rope-locker.

  Those vessels that came to the Bay of Glandore were few and small, but did not every boy know the sight and sounds of them? In our minds we had made voyages upon them, but to far off places, the Indies or the land Columbus and Cabot had discovered, which some now claimed were not the Indies at all.

  My father was one who said the idea was ridiculous, and he had talked with Spanish soldiers who had been with Cortés, Pizarro and Ponce de Leon. Tough men they were, veterans of the Moorish wars, some of them, and of fighting with the peoples across the western waters. Yet such news traveled but slowly except that we in Ireland had long known of the lands across the western seas, for our fishermen had often landed on the shores now called Newfoundland to smoke fish, but found nothing desirable there. Only some Indians to whom we gave a name, who were uncertain friends and often thieves.