Novel 1973 - The Man From Skibbereen (v5.0)

by Louis L'Amour

  He felt the shock of the blow clear to his spine, and at the same moment a gun went off almost in his ear and the ravine opened before him. He cut the black sharply away along the rim, glancing back. Two men were down but one of them was getting up, having either been upset by the horse or tripped in his haste to get out of its way. One of them was lifting a rifle, but at that instant the land dipped and Cris went into a low place and swung in and out among scattered juniper.

  He heard whining bullets … or thought he did. At least he heard the reports, and then he was down even lower and making time away from them. When he finally topped out on the far side of the shallow place he was a quarter of a mile away and the men had disappeared. All but the one he had hit with the gun butt, who still lay, a dark spot on the brown-gray grass.

  Turning his horse, he saw that the creek was before him. Somewhere among those trees were the rest of Parley’s men. He pulled up among some rocks and deadfalls and tying his horse in a sheltered place, walked quickly forward.

  He did not know what to do, but they were somewhere in the brush down there and he wanted to smoke them out. He checked his ammunition … plenty. He looked down into the trees below and could see nothing, and much as it went against the grain to waste ammunition by throwing lead at an invisible target, he knew he must do something more to warn the generals, at least to move them away from the ambush.

  He heard a voice raised down there in some kind of command. He knelt behind a fallen tree and resting his rifle barrel across it he began a searching fire into the woods. He had no target, only the necessity of stirring them up and creating a warning racket, so he fired, elevated the muzzle an inch or so, fired again. With deliberation he put ten shots into the area, searching along the patch of trees, hoping to get some action.

  At the sound of the firing he saw from the tail of his eye the hunting party. They seemed to stop … he could imagine them swearing at the “damned fool” who was frightening the game, though as a matter of fact it only moved the buffalo toward them.

  JUSTIN PARLEY HAD held his file of men ready for a charge. Talk about Stuart, would they? Or Forrest? Or this upstart Yankee Custer? He would show them what a cavalry charge was like, and wipe them out in the process.

  The frustration of his original plans had been gnawing at him. It had seemed a simple, dramatic gesture to grab Sherman, torture and kill him, and notify the world that he had avenged Atlanta. Then the added chance to kill all three, Grant, Sherman and Sheridan, had come. He would be a hero … a hero!

  “Major,” it was Watkins, a tough Arkansas rebel, “that damn Irishman is movin’ the buffalo!”

  “What?” Parley’s daydreams of heroism, of the day when he would be the toast of all unreconstructed Southerners, were interrupted. “What was that?”

  “The Irishman … the fighter. He’s movin’ the buffalo.”

  “Kill him!” Parley snapped. “You, Watkins, and Murray and Hardt. Get out there and stop him. Kill him!”

  They had gone on foot for better shooting, but in the meantime Cris Mayo had ridden nearer, and their sudden emergence had put him right on top of them; and then, instead of running, the idiot had charged them.

  Hardt was down out there, probably dead. Watkins and Murray, bitter with anger at themselves, their luck and Cris Mayo, dropped into the ravine. Watkins had been knocked down by a glancing blow from the horse’s shoulder. Shaken, he had stumbled into the brush, following Murray.

  Murray had scrambled back for the rifle he had dropped, then run to the sheltering brush. “Where’d he go?” he demanded of Watkins.

  “Disappeared,” Watkins growled irritably. “He was there, then he was gone. What’s the matter with him, anyway? Is he crazy?”

  “He ain’t crazy,” Murray replied shortly. “He’s just got more nerve than any one man should have. That damn mick would charge Hell with a bucket o’ water!”

  Parley was ready. The hunting party would come no closer with the buffalo moving as they were, but they were less than half a mile off and partially screened by scattered juniper and brush. He would walk his horses the first couple of hundred yards, trot for a hundred, then charge.

  “Ready!” His voice rang out. He lifted a sword. “Ready,” he repeated, wishing he could remember the proper commands. In the irregular outfit he had served with, such commands were rarely used, but he would have liked to know them now. “Rea—!”

  A bullet kicked dust thirty yards off and the hard crack of the rifle sounded close. A second bullet struck a tree and spat bark, another thunked into the dirt almost at his horse’s feet.

  “Charge!” Parley shouted. It was the first word that came to him, and not at all the one he wanted. The whole line of horsemen surged forward, up the bank of the coulee and into the scattered juniper and sagebrush beyond.

  Mayo heard the wild shout, and the next instant the riders came boiling out of the coulee, faced in the opposite direction. There must have been twenty-five of them. Whirling around, Mayo got off one quick shot, saw a rider fall, and then his gun clicked on an empty chamber.

  Desperately, he began to reload. They were pulling away! He whipped up the rifle and pumped five shots after them, five that had no effect, and his gun was empty again. With quick fingers he again slid in cartridges, kneeling, determined this time to load the gun completely.

  It was reloaded and he started to stand when he heard a footfall. He sprang up, turned, heard the bellow of a gun and a wild, angry, triumphant yell. “Got him!” And then the gun roared again.

  He felt himself falling, threw out a hand to stay his fall but it caught nothing; tripped by the log, he fell over it and struck the side of his head hard on the ground beyond. He heard running feet and yelling, and he threw himself over into the ravine.

  He was hurt, how badly he did not know, but his mind was confused and filled with panic. He had to get away, get away!

  He hit some brush, pitched through it, struck heavily on something hard and then fell clear. He brought up with a jolt in the soft mud near a stream. He tried to get up, fell, and crawled. Half blind with dirt and mud, he saw a dark hole before him and scrambled toward it.

  It was no hole … no safe place, only a dark hollow in the brush where some animal had crawled. He scrambled along it, his breath coming in great gasps. Above him on the bank over which he had fallen he heard shouting and swearing. “Get him, damn it! Kill him!”

  He heard running feet. He suddenly emerged from the animal crawlway, staggered to his feet and lunged through the trees, bumping first one and then another. He felt a stabbing pain in his side, but whether from a bullet or simply exhaustion he could not say. His head was opening and shutting with fierce spasms of torment.

  He fell down, got up. He had lost his rifle back there when he fell over the log. His horse was there, too. In the hands of the renegades by now, surely.

  He ran a few steps, butted into a tree and grabbed wildly at the trunk to keep himself from falling. He turned, looking back. He could see nothing but leaves and brush. He ran on, desperately wanting a hole. Somewhere he heard a yell, then a volley of shots, but none of them came close to him.

  Suddenly, running at full tilt, he saw the ravine narrow before him, a rocky place, solid rock underneath. He ran at the opening, saw the rock vanish almost before his eyes and he was on the lip of a cliff, a dry waterfall!

  He tried to slow down, to stop himself, but his impetus was too great. He felt himself go over, his fingers clawing for the rocks. He caught a corner of stone and for a moment thought he had saved himself, but the rock pulled loose and he fell, struck some brush, crashed through, and the last thing he knew was a faint circle of light above and then darkness closing in.

  A HALF MILE away, Brennan with thirty riders pulled up on the brow of a low hill. They could see nothing. Off toward the mountains he heard the bark of a gun from the hunters.

  “Well,” he said, “they’re still—” At that moment Parley’s men came up the bank in their wild ch
arge, which had started too soon and too far from their objective.

  “Take ’em, men!” Brennan slapped spurs to his horse and started forward. And they opened fire.

  The shock of the unexpected flank attack was too much. Parley’s men, poorly disciplined at least, broke before it. Brennan’s hard riders, most of them cavalry veterans of the Civil and Indian Wars, relishing this sudden call to action, charged into the fleeing renegades with flaming guns.

  In a moment, it was over. Half a dozen men were on the ground. Several fled, barely clinging to their saddles, and Silver Dick, one of the last ones up the bank in the ill-considered charge, had turned sharply at the first shot and gone back into the river bottom, Del Robb beside him.

  There was a crashing in the brush, and Murray ran out on foot, eyes bulging with anger. “Where’d he go?” he yelled. “Did you see that mick?”

  “Forget it, Murray! Get your horse and come on! We’ve been hit … hard!”

  Turning sharply, within fifty yards of the dry waterfall over which Mayo had fallen, they rode back up the ravine under the cover of the trees. On the way they picked up Watkins and two more. Gradually others joined them until there were a dozen or so.

  There was no sign of Justin Parley.

  Chapter 15

  HOLLY BARNES LOOKED nervously toward the sound of the shooting. What had happened to Parley? He had kept the hunting group as close to the river as he dared insist, and then that other bunch of buffalo had drifted nearer, diverting them from the route he planned. And now the shooting … what had gone wrong?

  Suddenly he wanted to be away from here. He wanted to be riding, and riding fast, yet there was no excuse he could give for leaving. He had contracted as a guide, and if there was still an attack, and he had tried to leave—

  It could be a hanging matter. Grant seemed pleasant enough, and Sheridan also, but Sherman was a hard man and one given to asking questions.

  Colonel Seymour rode up, accompanied by McClean. “Barnes, what’s all that shooting about?”

  “I don’t know, Colonel. Maybe some cowboys play-actin’, tryin’ to scare you, more’n likely. You know how it is, that would make a great story after you boys left the country, how they scared you-all.”

  Seymour was irritated, “We are not scared, as you put it, Barnes. We are not at all scared. Ride on!”

  Barnes wet his lips. “Colonel, I think—”

  “Barnes, we came to hunt. So let us hunt.”

  Barnes glanced again over the bland, unassuming prairie, broken with occasional rocks and patches of timber in the lowlands. It told him nothing. Once he thought he glimpsed a dust cloud.

  What was going on over there? What had happened to Parley?

  He led the group on toward the buffalo, then hung back as they moved out to the hunt. He wanted to get away, but for some reason McClean seemed more interested in him than in the hunt. Did McClean know him? How could he? When McClean had been a prisoner, Holly had been in Laramie scouting for information.

  He was nervous, and he was afraid it showed. McClean was no fool, and the colonel was watching him. Somehow, too, McClean always seemed to have that rifle in his hands pointed in Holly’s direction.

  Suddenly Barda McClean came riding up. “Father! Look!”

  McClean turned. A party of horsemen were approaching. Colonel McClean, who had the memory of a cowboy when it came to horses, recognized several that he had seen at the fort or in town. He took up his glass and leveled it. Brennan, that saloonkeeper from town, what was he doing out here? Singleton, Cooney, storekeeper Clyde Dixon … what was this?

  “Let’s ride over, Seymour. There’s something wrong about this.”

  Swinging their mounts, Barda beside them, they rode swiftly toward the approaching band.

  Behind them Holly Barnes took one look. That was none of his outfit. About a hundred yards away there was a shallow draw; he rode at an angle, then suddenly did a vanishing act into the draw.

  It had been a crazy idea anyway, trying to kill all those generals. Why had he ever let himself get into a stupid thing like that?

  Holly Barnes was not an enlightened man, but he had a good bit of practical sense when he settled down to use it, and at this moment it told him that Nevada was a beautiful, extraordinary land uniquely situated to benefit by his talents, a land that was waiting, gasping for his arrival … an arrival too long delayed.

  “If you keep ridin’, Holly,” he told himself, “you can camp thirty miles from here, and the sooner you get to that there camp, the better!”

  CRISPIN MAYO OF County Cork, of Skibbereen, Clonakilty and Rosscarbery, opened his eyes upon a star. It was a single star, straight above him, and there was no other he could see. For several minutes he lay perfectly still, hoping the star would not go away; and when it did not, he moved his head.

  His neck was stiff, and his head felt thick and heavy. He rolled over onto his face and pushed himself up to hands and knees. He was one great lump of pain. Memory came back slowly. He had been shot at from close up, he had been running in blind panic for the first time in his life, and he had taken a bad fall. That must have been hours ago.

  His fingers closed on sand … a creek bed, no doubt. He remembered of a sudden that he had fallen off a dry waterfall, and he thought he’d landed in some brush. He must have crashed through the brush to this sand.

  It was night, and whatever had been about to happen when he’d blacked out had happened long since. That had been around noon. And now it was dark, or all but dark—the sky was a cobalt blue just shading into sapphire.

  He had lost his horse and rifle.

  His side felt stiff; he touched it and found dried blood caked with sand. His shirt was stuck to his side. When he got up, he stood uncertainly, testing himself for what else might be wrong.

  He had been shot before he fell, then. The wound in the side could have come only from a bullet. It didn’t feel too serious, just stiff and aching. He was bruised and sore all over from his fall, and he felt shaky as a leaf in high wind. But his head was the worst.

  He stumbled over to a polished boulder and sat down, touching his skull gently here and there. It hurt badly, but he could not find a wound. Not a gunshot, then. The fall … no, the two falls! He’d gone over that log when he’d been shot, and hit the side of his head hard on ground or rock. Then he’d panicked, a thing so foreign to his nature that he could not understand it.

  He had run like a hare; he, Cris Mayo, who’d have died before he disgraced himself so. He felt his natural pride drain way to leave him hollow, a husk, a coward.

  He’d run till the dry waterfall dropped him into blackness. Maybe he’d hit his head again that time, to sleep so long?

  They did say that a good knock on the skull could send a man crazy for a time, so that he’d do daft things. Cris took a long breath. That must have been it. He surely wasn’t the bravest of men, but by the powers he wasn’t a man who ran from danger, either! It had been the terrible blow. It had addled his wits.

  They seemed to be returning to him now. He got to his feet. His hand went to his holster: his six-gun was there, miraculously. The cool butt in his palm was reassuring.

  His eyes were growing accustomed to the darkness and he saw an opening in the canopy of brush that showed light. Bent over, he went through and stood in the open, under a low-riding moon. He was on the bottom of a dry creek bed with high rock walls. The waterfall over which he had dropped was behind him and no more than fifteen feet in height. Still, if he’d gone down that drop and smacked his thick Irish skull a second time, it was sure little wonder that he’d slept for hours!

  He heard no sound. He sat again, studying the walls. He must get out of here, but he had no desire to pitch over another cliff in the process. There was a lot of broken brush and branches littering the place, and one of the latter he chose for a staff. Limping, he started down the creek.

  It was Murray who had shot him, he was certain of that from his remembrance of the roaring v
oice he’d heard; and Murray was a vengeful man who might still be prowling this neighborhood looking for him.

  Cris had walked only a few yards when he found the walls of the ravine no longer sheer. Yet he was also finding new pains in his battered carcass. He stopped and rested again.

  His eyes were used to the early night now and he could see the dark shapes of rocks, clumps of brush, and along the side of one wall a narrow trail going up … probably made by deer, buffalo or wild horses.

  He started hobbling along. His right leg hurt abominably, not broken, he was sure, but no doubt badly bruised. His maimed left hand throbbed, so did his head. He looked up the narrow, angling path. There was no danger in it, but he dreaded the effort needed. Yet he started on, and after a while came out on top.

  There were many stars. The sky was clear, the lifting moon just past the full. His eyes sought out and recognized the shapes around him. How far was he from Laramie or Fort Sanders? The fort was closer, he believed, but his sense of direction was twisted. He found the North Star easily enough. It seemed to be in the wrong place, yet he knew it must be he himself who was turned around.

  He waited a minute, leaning on his staff and trying to place himself. Was his rifle still on the ground back there? And the black horse? If they had not found that fine stallion he might still be tied there, in that hidden place!

  He hobbled along, swearing a little at his own near helplessness, but the movements gradually came easier as his stiffened muscles loosened up. How long had he been lying back there? He looked at the stars, trying to estimate time by the Big Dipper.

  If he was judging correctly it was about nine. That meant nine hours lost in unconsciousness, indeed, as he’d guessed by the moon’s height. He found his way to the place he had hidden in to send his searching bullets down the ravine. He could see little there, but he felt around in the darkness with his toe.

  Nothing. He moved to the log over which he had fallen. They must have been right on top of him, and then there had been the attack, he thought, recollecting the spate of firing. Had they followed Parley? And what had happened out there on the buffalo range? Were the generals dead? Or Barda McClean?