The High Graders

by Louis L'Amour

  Mike Shevlin, leaning against the corner of the loading pens near the chute, saw Ben Stowe come outside. His right arm was straight down by his side, which meant that he was carrying a weapon close against him where it could not be easily seen. Mike, who knew all the subterfuges, watched thoughtfully.

  Ben was looking around warily. He was like an old grizzly that senses trouble, but has failed to locate it. Suddenly he stepped off the platform and strode across the tracks to the station.

  When Stowe opened the door, Mike could hear his voice. “Where’s Shevlin?”

  The reply was muffled, then Stowe spoke again.

  “All right. I’m payin’ you boys top wages, come on, let’s go get him!”

  Evidently one of the men had come to the door, for the words were plain—it sounded like Billy Daniels.

  “We’d like to see you go get him yourself. There’s only one of him, and he’s right around close.”

  “So it’s like that, is it? Well, you’re fired every last one of you! Now take yourselves out of here!”

  “We like it here,” Also’s voice drawled. “We’re stayin’ on for the show. We got us gallery seats.”

  Ben Stowe turned away without speaking, then he halted. “Look,” he said, “Babcock needs Doc Clagg or he’ll lose an arm. One of you boys ride after him, will you?”

  There was a moment of silence, and then one of the men detached himself from the group. “I’ll go. I’ll see no man lose an arm if I can help it.”

  Ben Stowe walked to the middle of the tracks and stopped there, waiting until the hoof-beats died away in the distance.

  Now, just where would Shevlin be? At the pens? Or at the car where the gold should be? Probably at the car. He took a moment longer to get his eyes accustomed to the darkness, and then he walked along the track.

  Mike Shevlin knew every thought that was going through Stowe’s head. He knew what he was thinking, because he knew what he himself would be thinking at such a time.

  Far away, he heard a distant echoing sound— the train whistle. It was going to be as close as that.

  Mike Shevlin rolled the dead cigar in his teeth and looked toward the dark figure of the big man coming toward him. Well, Ben, it’s been a long time coming. Did you ever figure it would be like this? Just you and me in the black, wet night?

  There had been neither saloon or station here in the early days—only the stock pens and the loading chute. They had loaded Rafter cattle from here ... how many times?

  Ben Stowe stepped aside suddenly and disappeared. Mike held himself very still.

  Now what? Had Stowe just stepped aside and crouched down in the blackness; or was he coming on along beside the track? He was out of range of the lights, and probably was in the shallow ditch alongside the roadbed.

  Suddenly cold steel touched Shevlin lightly behind the ear, and a cool voice said, “I could let him kill you, but it’s easier this way.”

  Clagg Merriam! Mike Shevlin had one boot on the lowest bar of the pen, and as that voice spoke, he threw himself back, shoving hard with his boot.

  He staggered the man behind him, and a shot bellowed right alongside Mike’s ear. They hit the ground together, and instantly Shevlin threw himself clear, rolled into the ditch, and scrambled under the loading chute.

  Ben Stowe, believing he had been shot at, shot quickly; and almost with the sound of the second shot, a rifle bellowed from the top of a cattle car, and a bullet struck sparks from a rail near where Ben lay.

  “What the hell’s goin’ on?” shouted a voice from the station.

  Mike Shevlin held himself tight against the lowest part of the loading chute, partly protected by the posts of its underpinning. Clagg Merriam was out there ... and the other one with the rifle—that must be Burt Parry.

  Why hadn’t Merriam simply fired, instead of opening his mouth? And Parry should have held his fire until he had Ben Stowe outlined. It would have been simple enough, with a little patience.

  A cold drop of water fell on Shevlin’s head behind the ear and trickled slowly down his neck and under his shirt. His leg was cramping but he waited, holding his six-shooter ready.

  Suddenly, from behind the stock pens, Ben Stowe shouted, “Mike! Let’s get ‘em! They butted into a private fight!”

  Just then a gun flashed and a bullet spat slivers into Mike’s face—a gun not a dozen feet away. He lunged from his cover, firing as he went, and he heard the thud of a bullet’s impact on flesh, and a muffled grunt.

  Again a gun flashed, but this time it was not pointed at him, and he shot into the dark figure as he ran by with a bullet whipping past his face.

  He lifted his pistol to fire again, and as he did so two guns barked, almost together. The first was Merriam’s, wounded but not dead; the other was Ben Stowe’s almost instant reply.

  Shevlin heard a gun fall into the cinders, and then he thrust his hand into the cattle car and triggered three fast, spaced shots through the roof of the car where Burt Parry was lying.

  Parry screamed, and at the sound Stowe, who had climbed one of the cars, fired. The body slid from the top of the car and fell to the roadbed near where Shevlin was standing.

  “Ben!” he called.

  “You’re talkin’!”

  “We got ‘em both. Now you get on that train and get out of here.”

  “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” Suddenly Ben’s voice changed. “Like hell I will! I’ll see you dead first!”

  “Ben ... one thing— who killed Eli?”

  “I did, you damn’ fool! Merriam thought he did. They were arguing, and I saw Clagg was gettin’ nowhere, so when Merriam shot and missed, I killed Eli— from my office window.”

  Mike tugged off one boot, then the other. He was wearing thick woollen socks. He felt sure that Ben was creeping closer, for the sound of those last words had been nearby and close to the ground. Ben had been shooting a pistol, but he still had a shotgun or a rifle ... at this distance those shotgun slugs would cut a man in two.

  Suddenly Ben Stowe spoke. “You can still cut out, Mike. You don’t need to die.”

  How far away was he now? Maybe twenty paces. And Ben was without doubt in shelter of some kind, waiting for Mike’s reply, to cut him in two.

  Turning quickly, Mike ran back along the track, his socks making no sound on the wooden cross-ties. He heard the train, closer now, whistling for the station. Leaping to clear the cinders of the roadbed, he landed close against the pens, then with a swift lunge he rounded the corner.

  The headlight of the train was shining off across the flat, for the train had not yet rounded the bend toward the station. When the locomotive rounded the bend, the headlight would throw the whole area into sharp relief.

  The train whistled again, and then the light swung as the engine came around the bend. There was Ben Stowe, standing squarely in the middle of the track, the shotgun in his hands, waiting for that glare of light.

  They saw each other at the same instant— or maybe Mike had a bit the best of it, for he was not where Ben Stowe might have expected him to be. The shotgun came up and Mike fired. Slugs ripped through the air around him, something tugged at his pants. He stepped forward and shot again, and Ben Stowe went down to his hands and knees. The train was thundering down upon him, and Mike rushed forward in a desperate lunge, jerking Stowe free of the tracks with only seconds to spare.

  The train roared by within inches of them, then Ben Stowe came up on his knees, a Colt gripped in his fist. “Thanks, Mike!” he yelled, and fired.

  Shevlin felt the shock of the bullet, and he knew he had dropped his gun. He had reloaded behind the stock pens, and there were still one or two—

  Stowe was resting his gun across a forearm for dead aim, so Mike Shevlin drew Hollister’s gun from his waistband and as he swung it around he fired three shots as fast as he could make them roll.

  Stowe fired once. The bullet missed, struck the steel rail, and ricocheted off into the night with a nasty whine.

&nb
sp; Mike caught hold of the rail and pulled himself around. He was conscious that men had gotten down from the train and others had come up on horseback, but he was concentrating on one thing only: he had to get Ben Stowe.

  He twisted around to look at Stowe. Ben’s face was bloody, and his shirt was dark with blood.

  “You got me,” he gasped. “You always were shot with luck!” Even as he spoke, he brought his gun up with startling speed, and Mike shot into him again.

  Then there was only silence, the hiss of steam from the engine, and, after a moment, a mutter of excited voices and a shuffling of feet.

  Someone was kneeling over Shevlin. It was Doc Clagg.

  “Babcock,” Mike said, “he’s hurt bad, you—” But he was keeping his eyes on Ben Stowe, clutching his empty gun and waiting for him to move. Only Ben did not move, and never would again. “He said I was shot with luck,” Mike said slowly. “I wish that was all he had in those guns.”

  “You’ll live,” Doc Clagg assured him grimly. “Your kind are too tough to die.”

  ****

  THE CATTLE business around Rafter never recovered, and after the mines played out Rafter became a ghost town. Mike and Laine Shevlin never did live there, for they moved to California when he was able to travel. Shevlin ran cattle there for quite a few years.

  Thirty years ago they ripped up the long-unused tracks that had been the only excuse for Tappan Junction. The buildings were destroyed when a tourist dropped a cigarette from his car as it raced along the highway that had been built at the foot of the mountains.

  Laine Shevlin lived to a fine old age until one of her grandsons became an ad man on Madison Avenue; after that there wasn’t much to live for. She just wasted away, and after Mike saw her buried he walked out of the cemetery and disappeared.

  There was quite a lot of talk, and the newspapers dug up the fact that he had been a Texas Ranger and something of a gunfighter, reprinting some of the old stories, with some confusion as to names and dates.

  The only one who could have offered a clue was the last of the old-timers. He had taken to sitting on a bench in the sun alongside a filling station on the new highway, and he was there when the car pulled up and the tall old man called over to him.

  “Wasn’t there a place called Tappan Junction somewhere about here?”

  The old-timer peered toward the driver. “Hey? Did you say Tappan Junction? She used to lie right out there on the flat.”

  The sitter’s pipe had gone out and he fumbled in his pockets for a match. “Young folks, they ain’t never heard of Tappan.”

  “What about Stone Cabin?” the man in the car asked.

  “Stone Cabin?” Through the fog of years the words startled the old man. “Did you say Stone Cabin?”

  When old Mike Shevlin turned up missing he was still a wealthy man, and there was quite a search for him. The highway police made inquiries, and at the filling station the old-timer was pointed out to them.

  “Doubt if he can he’p you much,” the station attendant said. “He’s almost lost his sight, and that one arm, that’s been no good for years. Horse fell on it, I guess, a good many years back. Why, that old feller’s nigh to a hundred years old! Ninety-odd, anyway.”

  They asked their questions after they found Mike Shevlin’s car abandoned in a cove at the foot of the mountains, but the old man did not pay much attention. Only after they had turned away did he mutter to himself as he sat there.

  “Tappan Junction ... Stone Cabin ... that’s been a while. “You tell Doc Clagg,” he said, “you tell Doc Clagg I ain’t as tough as I used to be.””

  “Stone Cabin?” the attendant repeated in answer to their query. “Never heard of it. I’ve lived around here more’n ten years, and I never heard the name.”

  The officer looked at the high green hills, rolling back in somber magnificence, wild and lonely. They told him nothing.

  “What’s back up there?” he asked.

  “Nothin’. There ain’t no road. Ain’t been anybody back in there that I can remember. Folks don’t stop here for more’n gas and the time of day. They just breeze on through. We hereabouts, we got no time for lookin’ in the mountains.”

  It was forty miles back to the highway police office, and they could just make it by quitting time.

  As they were driving back the officer looked at his companion. “Didn’t you tell me your folks came from this part of the country?”

  “My granddaddy did. But he never talked about it, or else I didn’t listen. Anyway, I don’t believe it was rough as they say. His name was the same as mine ... Wilson Hoyt.”

  They settled back and listened to the hum of the motor and the sound of the tires, and watched the windshield wiper, for it was beginning to rain.

  It was raining, too, up at Stone Cabin, just as it had long ago.

  About The Author

  “I think of myself in the oral tradition—as a troubadour, a village tale-teller, the man in the shadows of the campfire. That’s the way I’d like to be remembered—as a storyteller. A good storyteller.”

  IT IS doubtful that any author could be as at home in the world recreated in his novels as Louis Dearborn L’Amour. Not only could he physically fill the boots of the rugged characters he wrote about, but he literally “walked the land my characters walk.” His personal experiences as well as his lifelong devotion to historical research combined to give Mr. L’Amour the unique knowledge and understanding of people, events, and the challenge of the American frontier that became the hallmarks of his popularity.

  Of French-Irish descent, Mr. L’Amour could trace his own family in North America back to the early 1600’s and follow their steady progression westward, “always on the frontier.” As a boy growing up in Jamestown, North Dakota, he absorbed all he could about his family’s frontier heritage, including the story of his great-grandfather who was scalped by Sioux warriors.

  Spurred by an eager curiosity and desire to broaden his horizons, Mr. L’Amour left home at the age of fifteen and enjoyed a wide variety of jobs including seaman, lumberjack, elephant handler, skinner of dead cattle, assessment miner, and an officer in the tank destroyers during World War II. During his “yondering” days he also circled the world on a freighter, sailed a dhow on the Red Sea, was shipwrecked in the West Indies and stranded in the Mojave Desert. He won fifty-one of fifty-nine fights as a professional boxer and worked as a journalist and lecturer. He was a voracious reader and collector of rare books. His personal library contained 17,000 volumes.

  Mr. L’Amour “wanted to write almost from the time I could talk.” After developing a widespread following for his many frontier and adventure stories written for fiction magazines, Mr. L’Amour published his first full-length novel, Hondo, in the United States in 1953. Every one of his more than 100 books is in print; there are nearly 230 million copies of his books in print worldwide, making him one of the bestselling authors in modern literary history. His books have been translated into twenty languages, and more than forty-five of his novels and stories have been made into feature films and television movies.

  His hardcover bestsellers include The Lonesome Gods, The Walking Drum (his twelfth-century historical novel), Jubal Sackett, Last of the Breed, and The Haunted Mesa. His memoir, Education of a Wandering Man, was a leading bestseller in 1989. Audio dramatizations and adaptations of many L’Amour stories are available on cassette tapes from Bantam Audio publishing.

  The recipient of many great honors and awards, in 1983 Mr. L’Amour became the first novelist ever to be awarded the Congressional Gold Medal by the United States Congress in honor of his life’s work. In 1984 he was also awarded the Medal of Freedom by President Reagan.

  Louis L’Amour died on June 10, 1988. His wife, Kathy, and their two children, Beau and Angelique, carry the L’amour tradition forward with new books written by the author during his lifetime to be published by Bantam well into the nineties.

  our, The High Graders