Rivers West (1975)
Page 15
He slipped on the rolling deck, and I caught his left arm in a hammerlock, pushing it toward his shoulder. He turned, throwing his right across my two arms, locking them behind his back. Then he threw me over his leg to the deck.
This time I was slower getting up, and he caught me in the wind with a vicious kick. I felt a stab of pain and gasped for breath, on my knees. He tried to step back to get distance, but I threw myself forward, grabbing his legs.
They were like iron, and he stood over me, laughing. Then he smashed his knee against the side of my face and knocked me sprawling under a table. He kicked me twice before I could get out, the second kick on the side of the neck and shoulder as I was coming up.
My right caught him on the chin, a short, wicked hook from close in, and it shook him. He stepped off, measured me with a left, missed a right as I came in close, and he tried to rabbit-punch me behind the neck. Strong as he was, I began to realize I was stronger still, and I bulled him back against the bulkhead, where I hit him twice in the body.
Suddenly, there was a terrible concussion from above as a gun was fired, then a second and a third. From Bonhomme Island there were wild yells … another shot.
My face was bloody. There was blood running into my eyes. His own face was smooth and hard as iron, unblemished. Yet, I could see there was no longer the same supreme self-confidence. I had him fighting for his life … as I was.
He sparred a moment. He jabbed at my face, and I went under it. He had half stepped back and was waiting with his right cocked for me to come in. Instead, I feinted, then smashed him on the chin with a right. His eyes blinked, and I hit him again.
Now he circled warily. For the first time, I think, he fully realized he might not win. In the narrow confines of the cabin, we moved toward each other.
Tabitha, who had drawn back into a corner, was watching wide eyed. My pistols lay near her, where they had slipped from my belt as I’d gone to the floor.
There was the pound of rushing feet on the deck outside. A cannon roared again. By the feel of the boat, we were now well into the current. Suddenly, Macklem half crouched, his hand went to his boot and came up with a knife. “Sorry!” he said. “But I’ve business aloft!”
He lunged with the blade, not slashing as he should have, but using his knife like a sword.
Slapping his knife hand with my left to push it away from my body, I grabbed his wrist with my right and, stepping across in front of him, punched him to the deck. Yet a sudden lurch of the vessel threw me, and I fell along side and facing him.
My two pistols were there. He grabbed for one, I for the other. We both fired.
I felt a sudden burn as from a red-hot iron across my shoulder, and he was staring at me, his mouth open and his lower jaw gone. I fired again, and he slumped on the deck. I got slowly to my feet and fell back against the bulkhead.
Somebody loomed in the doorway, and I turned, half blind with blood and sweat.
“Don’t shoot!” It was Jambe-de-Bois. “It’s all right. It’s all over.”
I was gasping for breath as though I’d never get enough in my lungs. I tilted my head back against the bulkhead.
McQuarrie came over and began to wipe the blood from my face. “We found Charlie. Butlin got him loose and brought him to us. Then we opened fire on their camp. We shot into their campfire. It scattered them.”
“Is anybody hurt?”
“A few scratches. We’ve been very lucky.”
“Macklem is dead,” Macaire was saying, and there was a lot of confused talk. LeBrun and Yvette were safe. So were Mrs. Higgs and Edwin Hale.
Tabitha was standing where she’d stood during the fight. She was still staring at me, only now she was trembling.
“You’d better sit down,” I suggested, and she crossed over and sat down beside me.
“Macklem was Torville?” I asked, and she nodded.
“Where to?” asked Jambe-de-Bois.
“Pittsburgh,” I said. “I’ve got a boat to build.” I looked around at Tabitha. “Want to come along?”
“Yes,” she said, “I’ve never built a boat.”
About the Author
“I think of myself in the oral tradition—of a troubadour, a village taleteller, 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 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, assessment miner, and officer on 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 includeThe Lonesome Gods, The Walking Drum (his twelfth-century historical novel)Jubal Sackett, Last of the Breed , andThe 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—among them, four Hopalong Cassidy novels:The Rustlers of West Fork, The Trail to Seven Pines, The Riders of High Rock, andTrouble Shooter .
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