Collection 1980 - Yondering (v5.0)

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by Louis L'Amour


  If you see a man walking down the street with a beautiful girl, don’t accept the fact that she goes willingly. He may have a gun in his pocket. Don’t hesitate to walk right up and accuse him. You’ll have adventure!

   

  Let Me Forget…

  Let me forget the dark seas rolling,

  The taste of wind, the lure and lift

  Of far, blue-shrouded shores;

  No longer let the wild wind’s singing

  Build high the waves in this

  My heart’s own storm;

  Now let me quietly work, for I have songs.

  Let not my blood beat answer to the sea…

  The beaches lie alone, so let them lie.

  Let me forget the gray-banked distant hills,

  The echoing emptiness of ancient towns;

  No longer let the brown leaves falling

  Move me to wander…I have songs to sing.

  Afterword

  * * *

  DAD SAID HE felt that he had lived two lives, each one full of success and failure and each almost long enough to satisfy most men. He left home to work partway through the tenth grade and his wanderlust—a very appropriate word in his case—kept him traveling until he was almost forty. At that time he decided that there had been too much water under the bridge and he’d better settle down and make a living as a writer.

  The material for the stories in this book came from that twenty-three-year period between leaving his parents’ home and finding one of his own. The short poems at the beginning and end of this collection are a good indication of how he felt at the beginning and later the ending of this period.

  Two years ago, only a couple of months before Dad caught pneumonia (an early indication of his cancer), Dad and I were on our way back from Hovenweep, Utah after a photo session for the jacket of The Haunted Mesa. We were racketing along a washboarded dirt road when Dad saw a dim trail cutting off across the top of the mesa. “Let’s see where it goes,” he said. I shifted into four-wheel drive and we spent the next hour fighting the red Utah sand out to a broken windmill in the middle of nowhere. Even at seventy-eight years old, Louis L’Amour could give his heart, freely, to a bend in the road.

  BEAU L’AMOUR

  Thanksgiving Afternoon 1988

  About Louis L’Amour

  * * *

  “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 re-created 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 1600s 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, miner, and an officer in the transportation corps 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 120 books is in print; there are nearly 270 million copies of his books in print worldwide, making him one of the best-selling 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), Yondering, 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 publishing tradition forward.

  Bantam Books by Louis L’Amour

  NOVELS

  Bendigo Shafter

  Borden Chantry

  Brionne

  The Broken Gun

  The Burning Hills

  The Californios

  Callaghen

  Catlow

  Chancy

  The Cherokee Trail

  Comstock Lode

  Conagher

  Crossfire Trail

  Dark Canyon

  Down the Long Hills

  The Empty Land

  Fair Blows the Wind

  Fallon

  The Ferguson Rifle

  The First Fast Draw

  Flint

  Guns of the Timberlands

  Hanging Woman Creek

  The Haunted Mesa

  Heller with a Gun

  The High Graders

  High Lonesome

  Hondo

  How the West Was Won

  The Iron Marshal

  The Key-Lock Man

  Kid Rodelo

  Kilkenny

  Killoe

  Kilrone

  Kiowa Trail

  Last of the Breed

  Last Stand at Papago Wells

  The Lonesome Gods

  The Man Called Noon

  The Man from Skibbereen

  The Man from the Broken Hills

  Matagorda

  Milo Talon

  The Mountain Valley War

  North to the Rails

  Over on the Dry Side

  Passin’ Through

  The Proving Trail

  The Quick and the Dead

  Radigan

  Reilly’s Luck

  The Rider of Lost Creek

  Rivers West

  The Shadow Riders

  Shalako

  Showdown at Yellow Butte

  Silver Canyon

  Sitka

  Son of a Wanted Man

  Taggart

  The Tall Stranger

  To Tame a Land

  Tucker

  Under the Sweetwater Rim

  Utah Blaine

  The Walking Drum

  Westward the Tide

  Where the Long Grass Blows

  SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS

  Beyond the Great Snow Mountains

  Bowdrie

  Bowdrie’s Law

  Buckskin Run

  Dutchman’s Flat

  End of the Drive

  From the Listening Hills

  The Hills of Homicide

  Law of the Desert Born

  Long Ride Home

  Lonigan

  May There
Be a Road

  Monument Rock

  Night over the Solomons

  Off the Mangrove Coast

  The Outlaws of Mesquite

  The Rider of the Ruby Hills

  Riding for the Brand

  The Strong Shall Live

  The Trail to Crazy Man

  Valley of the Sun

  War Party

  West from Singapore

  West of Dodge

  With These Hands

  Yondering

  SACKETT TITLES

  Sackett’s Land

  To the Far Blue Mountains

  The Warrior’s Path

  Jubal Sackett

  Ride the River

  The Daybreakers

  Sackett

  Lando

  Mojave Crossing

  Mustang Man

  The Lonely Men

  Galloway

  Treasure Mountain

  Lonely on the Mountain

  Ride the Dark Trail

  The Sackett Brand

  The Sky-Liners

  THE HOPALONG CASSIDY NOVELS

  The Riders of the High Rock

  The Rustlers of West Fork

  The Trail to Seven Pines

  Trouble Shooter

  NONFICTION

  Education of a Wandering Man

  Frontier

  The Sackett Companion: A Personal Guide to the Sackett Novels

  A Trail of Memories: The Quotations of Louis L’Amour, compiled by Angelique L’Amour

  POETRY

  Smoke from This Altar

  YONDERING

  A Bantam Book / October 2004

  PUBLISHING HISTORY

  Bantam edition published June 1980

  Revised Bantam edition / November 1989

  Bantam reissue / July 1994

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 1980, 1989 by Louis L’Amour Enterprises Inc.

  Forward copyright © 1989 by Beau L’Amour

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher, except

  where permitted by law. For information address:

  Bantam Books New York, New York.

  Bantam Books and the rooster colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  eISBN 0-553-90023-4

  Please visit our website at www.bantamdell.com

  v1.0

  Table of Contents

  Cover page

  Title page

  Deadly Voyage

  Dedication

  Foreword

  Introduction

  Epigraph

  Where There’s Fighting

  The Dancing Kate

  By The Ruins Of El Walarieh

  Glorious! Glorious!

  Dead-End Drift

  Old Doc Yak

  Survival

  And Proudly Die

  Show Me The Way To Go Home

  Thicker Than Blood

  The Admiral

  Shanghai, Not Without Gestures

  The Man Who Stole Shakespeare

  A Friend Of The General

  Author’s Tea

  So You Want Adventure, Do You?

  Let Me Forget …

  Afterword

  About the Author

  Bantam Books by Louis L’Amour

  Copyright Page

 

 

 


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