“And that isn’t all. The sheriff is down at San Ysidro. I don’t mean Flynn, but Flynn’s boss. Name is Enright, or something. He rode in yesterday with three deputies and he has been asking questions around, and one of those deputies has a horse with a Texas brand.”
Angelina Foley walked to the fire and picked up the coffeepot. It was always a woman’s way to turn to food in an emergency. Fix a hot meal, make coffee; it was a sensible way. And that was what she should be doing, making a hot meal for some man rather than trying to prove how smart she was and how she could run a cow outfit as well as any man. She had not even managed to run a home, not anywhere.
So all their fancy dreams of wealth were empty. All Harvey’s confident talk, his striding up and down, his gestures—they were as empty as he was—all those big ideas from men who would rather steal than do an honest day’s work with their fine contempt for men who did work. Fools, Harvey called them, hayshakers, so now where was he?
“Can we get out of here?”
For the first time she saw hope in Wall’s eyes. “I think so. I think they’d be glad to be shut of us. We couldn’t take anything, of course. Just personal stuff. But we could ride out, ma’am…”
“Don’t call me ma’am,” she said irritably. “My name is Gelina.”
*
THEY WERE COMING down Vache Creek now, six of them, one with his skull tied in a bloody bandage, one with a broken arm, now in a sling. Their horses’ hoofs dragged and the men slumped wearily in the saddle.
Harvey Thorpe was numb as well as exhausted. They were all numb.
The ride had been cold and they had been anxious to get on with the holdup. The stage showed up on time and they had ridden out and stopped it, confident of their numbers, confident of their guns.
Only the man on the box had a shotgun and he didn’t drop it, he didn’t hold up his hands. His first charge of buck-shot had torn a man’s face off and the second dropped a man, screaming. Amid plunging horses and wild shots he had coolly picked up a Winchester and opened fire. Other men were shooting from the stage itself and horses were down, men screaming, and Harvey Thorpe had been among the first to break into flight. A few miles away they had come together, and they had kept on going. And nobody had anything at all to say.
The thing none of them wanted to say was that the men they had called hayshakers, the men who worked for their money, had been ready for them.
What happened to the others Harvey never was to know. All he did know was that one man sitting up on the box of that stage had not thrown up his hands: he had simply opened fire. From then on it had been nightmare, pure nightmare.
It was not supposed to happen. Their guns were supposed to frighten the stage driver and express messenger into immobility while they were robbed. That was the way it was supposed to happen.
Harvey knew but one thing, and he knew deep within himself that when he heard that shotgun blast and saw that man’s face vanish in a mask of blood, his own guts had turned to water.
They rode into the ranch yard and somebody said, “Harvey!” And it wasn’t one of his own men.
The exclamation made him look up and he saw Radigan standing there in the middle of the ranch yard.
He was standing there with his hands empty, just waiting. And then Harvey saw Loren Pike in the barn door, and Charlie Cade at the corner of the corral, and lean, round-shouldered Adam Stark leaning against the doorpost of the house. And beside the corral and still farther away was John Child. And even a less wary man than himself would have read the story in their presence here, in their manner.
A man behind him said, “Count me out, Harvey,” and Harvey Thorpe heard a gun drop into the dust. And behind him other guns dropped.
Harvey looked at Radigan and felt the hatred inside himself like something raw and sore. Radigan had been nowhere near that stage, but suddenly it seemed as if Radigan had been the man on the box who lifted that shotgun. Without him everything would have been all right.
Out of the welter of thoughts left in his brain came a slow, cool knowledge that he could not win but he could still defeat Radigan. Alive, Radigan was the victor, but dead he was nothing at all, simply nothing.
“Gelina let you come here?”
“She’s gone,” Radigan said. “She rode out with Wall and a pack horse. Heading for California, I think.”
So that was over, too.
Behind him he heard horses walking away, getting clear of him, and Radigan stood there, waiting. Nobody had asked him to drop his gun, nobody suggested he surrender.
Of course, within a few days they would know all about what happened in Colorado, and he would be a wanted man. It was strange he had not considered that, but all his plans had been predicated on success.
Why, they could hang him! And they might.
And Radigan, standing there with his feet apart, just waiting for him to draw and die.
“I’ll be damned if I will!” Harvey said angrily. “You’re all just waiting for me to make a move so you can kill me! I’ll surrender! You think I’ll hang, but I won’t! I’ll beat it! I can still win! I tell you—!”
He meant every word of it, believed it all. Why, so many things could happen in a trial, and he still had friends, he could still dig up some money, he’d show them, he’d…
Harvey Thorpe had no intention of drawing, but he did. He felt his hand dropping for the gun and something in his brain screamed that it was madness, he could not win, but he could kill Radigan, he could.…
“I didn’t think he was going to, there at the end,” Pike said. “I thought he was throwing in his hand.”
“Even a coyote in a trap,” somebody else said, “he’ll snap at anything, just to hurt, to kill.”
“How’d you guess, Tom?” Cade said. “Because you had to guess, it was that fast.”
“Can we do anything for him?” That was John Child. “I mean, is it too late?”
“Sure,” Pike replied, “the man’s dead.”
And he was.
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-lengt
h 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 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), Radigan, 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
RADIGAN
A Bantam Book / June 2004
PUBLISHING HISTORY
Bantam edition / October 1958
New Bantam edition / July 1971
Bantam reissue / September 1993
Bantam reissue / November 2001
All rights reserved.
Copyright © 1958, 1986 by Louis & Katherine L’Amour Trust
Excerpt from Law of the Desert Born Text copyright © 2013 by Beau L’Amour; Illustrations copyright © 2013 by Louis L’Amour Enterprises, Inc.
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.
Map by William and Alan McKnight
Please visit our website at www.bantamdell.com
eISBN: 978-0-553-89960-3
v3.0_r2
Praise for
Law of the Desert Born
“This actually may be the story’s ideal form… . The result is stunning and richly textured.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Yeates’ artwork is incredible.”
—GraphicNovelReporter.com
“Law of the Desert Born is a fantastic example of how relevant the Western can be.”
—Suvudu.com
“The richer plot and characters from L’Amour’s son Beau and collaborator Kathy Nolan add appeal and value in addition to the finely crafted visuals.”
—Library Journal
“The novel’s illustrations add a new dimension to an already gripping tale.”
—American Cowboy
“An amazing level of detail and ambience that breathes new life into Louis L’Amour’s already stunning story.”
—Cowboys & Indians
A Graphic Novel Masterpiece!
Available NOW from your favorite bookstore or online retailer! Find out more at
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