The Lawless West

by Louis L'Amour

  “Beady, I know your way with women. You can save your breath, for I’ve a hunch you’re goin’ to need it.”

  “Mister Springer,” faltered Jane, getting to her knees, “I…I was foolishly taken with this cowboy…at first. Then…that Sunday after the dance when he called on me at the ranch…I saw through him then. I heartily despised him. To get rid of him I did say I’d meet him. But I never meant to. Then I forgot it. Today I rode for the first time. I saw someone following me and thought it must be Tex or one of the boys. Finally I waited and presently Jones rode up to me…And Mister Springer he…he grabbed me off my horse…and handled me most brutally…shamefully. I fought him with all my might, but what could I do?”

  Springer’s face changed markedly during Jane’s long explanation. Then he threw his gun on the ground in front of Jane.

  “Jones, I’m goin’ to beat you half to death,” he said grimly, and, leaping at the cowboy, he jerked him out of the saddle until he was sprawling on the ground. Next Springer threw aside his sombrero, his vest, his spurs. But he kept on his gloves. The cowboy rose to one knee, and he measured the distance between him and Springer, and then the gun that lay on the ground. Suddenly he sprang toward it. But Springer intercepted him with a powerful kick that tripped Jones and laid him flat.

  “Jones, you’re sure about as low-down as they come,” he said in dark scorn. “I’ve got to be satisfied with beatin’ you when I ought to kill you.”

  “Ahuh! Wal, boss, it ain’t any safe bet thet you can beat me,” returned Jones sullenly while he got up.

  As they rushed together, Jane had wit enough to pick up the gun, and then with it and Jones’s, to get back to a safe distance. She wanted to run away out of sight. But she could neither do that nor keep her fascinated gaze from the combatants. Even in her distraught condition she could see that the cowboy, fierce and active and strong as he was, could not hold his own with Springer. They fought over all the open space, and crashed into the cedars, and out again. The time came when Jones was on the ground about as much as he was erect. Bloody, disheveled, beaten, he kept on trying to stem the onslaught of blows.

  Suddenly he broke off a dead branch of cedar and, brandishing it, rushed at the rancher. Jane uttered a cry, closed her eyes, and sank down. She heard fierce imprecations and sodden blows. When at length she opened her eyes in terror, fearing something dreadful, she saw Springer erect, wiping his face, and Jones lying prone on the ground.

  Then Jane saw him go to his horse, untie a canteen from the saddle, remove his bloody gloves, and wash his face with a wet scarf. Next he poured some water on Jones’s face.

  “Come on, Jane!” he called. “Reckon it’s all over.”

  Then he tied the bridle of Jones’s horse to a cedar and, leading his own animal, turned to meet Jane.

  “I want to compliment you on gettin’ that cowboy’s gun,” he said warmly. “But for that, there’d sure have been somethin’ bad. I’d have had to kill him, Jane. Here, give me the guns…You poor little tenderfoot from Missouri. No, not tenderfoot any longer, you became a Westerner today.”

  His face was bruised and cut, his dress dirty and bloody, but he did not appear the worse for that fight. Jane found her legs scarcely able to support her, and she had apparently lost her voice.

  “Let us put you on my saddle till we find your horse,” he said, and lifted her lightly as a feather to a seat crosswise. Then he walked with a hand on the bridle.

  Jane saw him examining the ground, evidently searching for horse tracks. “Ha! Here we are.” And he led off in another direction through the cedars. Soon Jane espied her horse, calmly nibbling at the bleached grass. In a few moments she was back in her own saddle, beginning to recover somewhat from her distress. But she divined that as fast as she recovered from one set of emotions she was going to be tormented by another.

  “There’s a good cold spring down here in the rocks,” remarked Springer. “I think you need a drink, an’ so do I.”

  They rode down the sunny cedar slopes, into a shady ravine skirted by pines, and up to some mossy cliffs from which a spring gushed forth.

  Jane was now in the throes of thrilling, bewildering conjectures and fears. Why had Springer followed her? Why had he not sent one of the cowboys? Why did she feel so afraid and foolish? He had always been courteous and kind and thoughtful, at least until she had offended so gregariously. And here he was now. He had fought for her. Would she ever forget? Her heart began to pound. And when he dismounted to take her off her horse, she knew it was to see a scarlet and telltale face.

  “Mister Springer, I…I thought you were Tex…or somebody,” she said.

  He laughed as he took off his sombrero. His face was warm, and the cuts were still bleeding a little.

  “You sure can ride,” he replied. “And that’s a good little pony.”

  He loosened the cinches on the horses. Jane managed to hide some of her confusion.

  “Won’t you walk around a little?” he asked. “It’ll rest you. We are fifteen miles from home.”

  “So far?”

  Then presently he lifted her up and stood beside her with a hand on her horse. He looked up frankly into her face. The keen eyes were softer than usual. He seemed so fine and strong and splendid. She was afraid of her eyes and looked away.

  “When the boys found you were gone, they all saddled up to find you,” he said. “But I asked them if they didn’t think the boss ought to have one chance. So they let me come.”

  Something happened to Jane’s heart just then. She was suddenly overwhelmed by a strange happiness that she must hide, but could not. It seemed there was a long silence. She felt Springer there, but she could not look at him.

  “Do you like it out here in the West?” he asked presently.

  “Oh, I love it! I’ll never want to leave it,” she replied impulsively.

  “I reckon I’m glad to hear that.”

  Then there fell another silence. He pressed closer to her and seemed now to be leaning on the horse. She wondered if he heard the weird knocking of her heart against her side.

  “Will you be my wife an’ stay here always?” he asked simply. “I’m in love with you. I’ve been lonely since my mother died…You’ll sure have to marry some one of us. Because, as Tex says, if you don’t, ranchin’ can’t go on much longer. These boys don’t seem to get anywhere with you. Have I any chance…Jane…?”

  He possessed himself of her gloved hand and gave her a gentle pull. Jane knew it was gentle because she scarcely felt it. Yet it had irresistible power. She was swayed by that gentle pull. She was slipping sidewise in her saddle. She was sliding into his arms.

  A little later he smiled up at her and said: “Jane, they call me Bill for short. Same as they call me boss. But my two front names are Frank Owens.”

  “Oh!” cried Jane, startled. “Then you…you…?”

  “Yes, I’m the guilty one,” he replied happily. “It happened this way. My bedroom, you know, is next to my office. I often heard the boys poundin’ the typewriter. I had a hunch they were up to some trick. So I spied upon them…heard about Frank Owens an’ the letters to the little schoolmarm. At Beacon I got the postmistress to give me your address. An’, of course, I intercepted some of your letters. It sure has turned out great.”

  “I…I don’t know about you or those terrible cowboys,” replied Jane dubiously. “How did they happen on the name Frank Owens?”

  “Sure, that’s a stumper. I reckon they put a job up on me.”

  “Frank…tell me…did you write the…the love letters?” she asked appealingly. “There were two kinds of letters. That’s what I could never understand.”

  “Jane, I reckon I did,” he confessed. “Somethin’ about your little notes just won me. Does that make it all right?”

  “Yes, Frank, I reckon it does,” she returned, leaning down to kiss him.

  “Let’s ride back home an’ tell the boys,” said Springer gaily. “The joke’s sure on them. I’ve corralled
the little schoolmarm from Missouri.”

  Over the Northern Border

  MAX BRAND®

  Fredrick Schiller Faust (1892-1944) was born in Seattle, Washington. He wrote over 500 average-length books (300 of them Westerns) under nineteen different pseudonyms, but Max Brand—“the Jewish cowboy,” as he once dubbed it—has become the most familiar and is now his trademark. Faust was convinced very early that to die in battle was the most heroic of deaths, and so, when the Great War began, he tried to get overseas. All of his efforts came to nothing, and in 1917, working at manual labor in New York City, he wrote a letter that was carried in The New York Times protesting this social injustice. Mark Twain’s sister came to his rescue by arranging for Faust to meet Robert H. Davis, an editor at The Frank A. Munsey Company.

  Faust wanted to write—poetry. What happened instead was that Davis provided Faust with a brief plot idea, told him to go down the hall to a room where there was a typewriter, only to have Faust return some six hours later with a story suitable for publication. That was “Convalescence,” a short story that appeared in All-Story Weekly (3/31/17) and that launched Faust’s career as an author of fiction.Zane Grey had recently abandoned the Mun-sey publications, All-Story Weekly and The Argosy, as a market for his Western serials, selling them instead to the slick-paper Country Gentleman. The more fiction Faust wrote for Davis, the more convinced this editor became that Faust could equal Zane Grey in writing a Western story.

  The one element that is the same in Zane Grey’s early Western stories and Faust’s from beginning to end is that they are psycho-dramas. What impact events have on the soul, the inner spiritual changes wrought by ordeal and adversity, the power of love as an emotion and a bond between a man and a woman, and above all the meaning of life and one’s experiences in the world conspire to transfigure these stories and elevate them to a plane that shimmers with nuances both symbolic and mythical. In 1920 Faust expanded the market for his fiction to include Street & Smith’s Western Story Magazine for which throughout the next decade he would contribute regularly a million and a half words a year at a rate of five cents a word. It was not unusual for him to have two serial installments and a short novel in a single issue under three different names or to earn from just this one source $2,500 a week.

  In 1921 Faust made the tragic discovery that he had an incurable heart condition from which he might die at any moment. This condition may have been in part emotional. At any rate, Faust became depressed about his work, and in England in 1925 he consulted H. G. Baynes, a Jungian analyst, and finally even met with C. G. Jung himself who was visiting England at the time on his way to Africa. They had good talks, although Jung did not take Faust as a patient. Jung did advise Faust that his best hope was to live a simple life. This advice Faust rejected. He went to Italy where he rented a villa in Florence, lived extravagantly, and was perpetually in debt. Faust needed his speed at writing merely to remain solvent. Yet what is most amazing about him is not that he wrote so much, but that he wrote so much so well!

  By the early 1930s Faust was spending more and more time in the United States. Carl Brandt, his agent, persuaded him to write for the slick magazines since the pay was better and, toward the end of the decade, Faust moved his family to Hollywood where he found work as a screenwriter. He had missed one war; he refused to miss the Second World War. He pulled strings to become a war correspondent for Harper’s Magazine and sailed to Europe and the Italian front. Faust hoped from this experience to write fiction about men at war, and he lived in foxholes with American soldiers involved in some of the bloodiest fighting on any front. These men, including the machine-gunner beside whom Faust died, had grown up reading his stories with their fabulous heroes and their grand deeds, and that is where on a dark night in 1944, hit by shrapnel, Faust expired, having asked the medics to attend first to the younger men who had been wounded.

  Faust’s Western fiction has nothing intrinsically to do with the American West, although he had voluminous notes and research materials on virtually every aspect of the frontier. The Untamed (Putnam, 1919) was his first Western novel and in Dan Barry, its protagonist, Faust created a man who is beyond morality in a Nietzschean sense, who is closer to the primitive and the wild in Nature than other human beings, who is both frightening and sympathetic. His story continues, and his personality gains added depth, in the two sequels that complete his story, The Night Horseman (Putnam, 1920) and The Seventh Man (Putnam, 1921).

  Those who worked with Faust in Hollywood were amazed at his fecundity, his ability to plot stories. However, for all of his incessant talk about plot and plotting, Faust’s Western fiction is uniformly character-driven. His plots emerge from the characters as they are confronted with conflicts and frustrations. Above all, there is his humor—the hilarity of the opening chapters of The Return of the Rancher (Dodd, Mead, 1933), to give only one instance, is sustained by the humorous contrast between irony and naïveté. So many of Faust’s characters are truly unforgettable, from the most familiar, like Dan Barry and Harry Destry, to such marvelous creations as José Ridal in Blackie and Red (Chelsea House, 1926) or Gaspar Sental in The Return of the Rancher.

  Too often, it may appear, Faust’s plots are pursuit stories and his protagonists in quest of an illustrious father or victims of an Achilles’ heel, but these are premises and conventions that are ultimately of little consequence. His characters are in essence psychic forces. In Faust’s fiction, as Robert Sampson concluded in the first volume of Yesterday’s Faces (Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1983), “every action is motivated. Every character makes decisions and each must endure the consequences of his decisions. Each character is gnawed by the conflict between his wishes and the necessities of his experience. The story advances from the first interactions of the first characters. It continues,a fugue for full orchestra, ever more complex, modified by decisions of increasing desperation, to a climax whose savagery may involve no bloodshed at all. But there will be psychological tension screaming in harmonics almost beyond the ear’s capacity.”

  Faust’s finest fiction can be enjoyed on the level of adventure, or on the deeper level of psychic meaning. He knew in his heart that he had not resolved the psychic conflicts he projected into his fiction, but he held out hope to the last that the resolutions he had failed to find in life and in his stories might somehow, miraculously, be achieved on the higher plane of the poetry that he continued to write. Yet Faust is not the first writer, and will not be the last, who treasured least what others have come to treasure most. It may even be possible that a later generation, having read his many works as he wrote them (and they are now being restored after decades of inept abridgments and rewriting), will find Frederick Faust to have been, truly, one of the most significant American literary artists of the 20th century. Much more about Faust’s life, his work, and critical essays on various aspects of his fiction of all kinds can be found in The Max Brand Companion (Greenwood Press, 1996).

  Chapter 1

  “It ain’t hard at all,” said the sheriff. “Most likely he thinks that nobody seen him because of the dark. And he’s right when he thinks that nobody could make out his face. But the point is that there’s lots of ways of identifying a gent, and one of the ways is by the hoss that he rides. And old Jeffreys is willing to swear that he made out the gray gelding of Bill Vance, the high-headed fool of a hoss that young Vance has been riding around lately. So all I’m going to do, boys, is to wait till the moon comes up and then slip out to the Vance place. The reason that I want you fellows to come along is because I never can tell when the Vance people will put up a fight. They got the spirit of a load of dynamite, and any old spark is lightning enough to set them off and blow the tar out of everything within reach.”

  “Till the moon comes up?” queried one of his men. “Well, that won’t be more’n half an hour, I guess, at the most and…”

  But Jack Trainor, sitting in the next room of the hotel and hearing every syllable that was spoken because t
he wall between was of a thickness hardly rivaling cardboard, waited to hear no more. He had made out, from what passed before in their talk, that the sheriff had gathered the half dozen men in the next room to conduct an inquiry into the stage robbery that had occurred the night before. And now he had been struck rigid with horror by the mention of the name of Bill Vance, his brother-in-law.

  Trainor had left Bill’s house the previous evening after a visit of a fortnight. It seemed impossible that young Vance should have committed the robbery, but on second thought Jack remembered that his host had been absent during the entire first half of the night, pleading a business call across the hills. Moreover, he knew that Vance was desperately hard pressed for money. He had made considerable loans to Bill in the past, but all that he could raise on a cowpuncher’s pay had been little enough, considering the needs of a growing family. However that might be, he had no time to argue about possibilities. The important thing for him to do was to rush back to Bill’s house and learn the truth from him and deliver the warning about the coming of the sheriff.

  That was what he did. Five minutes later he was out of the hotel and on his horse galloping hard along the road. As he swung out of the saddle before the door, he saw the white rim of the moon slide up above the eastern hills. The house was black. The family slept. And yet, at the first rap at the door, there was an answering stir.

  Did a guilty conscience make the sleep of Bill Vance light?

  “It’s me, Bill,” he called softly, and a moment later the door was opened to him by his brother-in-law, the moonlight shining fully on his face and making him seem old and pale.

  “What’s wrong?” gasped out Vance.

  “How d’you know that there’s anything wrong?” demanded Jack Trainor sternly. “Who said that there was anything wrong?”

  “I don’t know…only…”

  “Bill,” commanded Jack, “you got to tell me the whole truth. Did you stick up the Norberry stage?”