They rode out, and Chantry watched them go. Somehow the money did not seem so important now, although he knew it was. It was Earnshaw’s future, Doris’ future, and his.
But was it? They could start over. Out here that was possible. A setback was only that. Nothing to put a man down. You took such things, accepted them, and went on from there. It was a matter of the mind, that was all. If you weren’t whipped in your mind, nothing could whip you.
“Let’s get on with it,” Tom Chantry said. “Back to the railroad.”
Had there ever been a time when he was not riding toward the railroad?
Chapter 23
*
SARAH MILLIER WAS vastly content. She was safely away with two horses and all the gold. She had a good rifle, a pistol, and a map.
The map showed the location of the Arkansas River, it showed Trinidad to the west, Tascosa to the southeast. It was drawn on a piece of tablet paper, and Tascosa looked reassuringly close.
There was a stage from there to Fort Griffin and points east, and her horses were fresh. She would ride to Tascosa, catch the stage, go east to the railroad, then to New York; and within a matter of a few weeks she would be in Paris with nearly fifty thousand dollars in gold.
Nothing on the map said anything about the Llano Estacado…the Staked Plain.
Nor did it mention distance, nor the factor of time. She had just asked a man in Trinidad to show her how the places lay in respect to each other. She had said nothing to him about the fact that she might want to ride over that country.
She had the gold and she was safely away, and if anyone had survived that shooting back there they would be having trouble enough without following her. She rode blithely south, and a little east.
The day was warm and pleasant, and she made good time. By nightfall, when she camped on Wild Horse Creek, she had put twenty-five miles behind her.
There was a good bit of water in Wild Horse Creek, and she drank and her horses drank. There was food in the saddlebags, so she ate. Another hard day’s ride, she thought, and she would be in Tascosa. That was the way it looked on her map.
Sarah had no canteen, nor did she realize the need for one. She had no idea that Wild Horse Creek was more often dry than otherwise. The next day she started out at daybreak, alternately walking or cantering.
At noon she was far out on a wide plain of sparse grass, with nothing in sight anywhere. Her horse no longer cantered, but was content to walk. A light wind began to blow, the sky was clear, the sun warm. She was thirsty, but unworried. When she saw brush ahead she knew it was a creek. Half an hour later she sat her horse in the dry bed of that creek. There was no water, no sign of any. She pushed on.
The pack horse carrying the gold lagged, and impatiently she tugged on the lead rope.
She rode on, into the sun-lit afternoon. Tascosa could not be far away now. The distance on the map the man had drawn had seemed so small, and she had no idea that she would never see Tascosa, that it was far away beyond the horizon, beyond many horizons, and that in all the land between water was scarce, even for those who knew where to look. Shortly before sundown she came upon the bones of cattle, and after that she saw them frequently.
Finally, unable to go on, she got down, tied her horse to several skulls pulled together, and slept. Before morning she awoke. Her throat was dry, and she was scarcely able to swallow.
She walked until the sun came up, then got into the saddle. She could see that her horses were suffering, the pack horse most, for the gold was heavy and a dead weight.
When the sun was high she looked all around her, and saw nothing but an endless plain, level as a floor, it seemed. She found water holes where the earth was cracked from the heat, but no water.
She came at last to a river bed. Instantly, her heart leaped with excitement. Tascosa was on the Canadian. This must be it! She was going to make it, after all!
The bed was dry.
The Cimarron, still far to the north of the Canadian, was often dry. She turned upstream, and after plodding for some distance she found a small pool behind a natural dam formed of rocks and brush. She drank. The water was bad, but she drank. And the horses drank, and the water was gone. In the shade of some brush she lay down to rest, after tying the horses to the brush.
She slept like something dead, then was awakened by the sun on her face.
The pack horse was gone. The branch to which it had been tied was broken. Her horse, tied more securely, had not gotten free.
There was a myriad of tracks of buffalo or cattle or something. Among them all she could not make out which were those of the horse, for the sand was soft and left no well-defined print.
She rode on upstream, found another miniature pool, drank and let the horse drink, them scrambled him up the bank. Seeing a low knoll, she rode to the top.
She stared, and a dreadful emptiness crept into her, for wherever she looked there was nothing, only the vast plain that swept away to the horizon. Never in all her life had she seen or imagined anything like this. It was a vast brown sea, rolling endlessly away.
There was no movement anywhere, no sign of life.
Something seemed to shrink inside her. She no longer even thought of the gold, only of life. Nothing in all her years had prepared her for this.
Yet she must keep on. It could not be far. Surely, surely, it must be close.
She turned the horse down the slope and headed south.
*
ON THE FIFTH day, Mobile Callahan sighted the pack horse. It was standing alone, head hanging. When they rode up they could see the pack had slipped around until it was under the horse’s belly.
They cut the pack away, gave the horse a drink from water poured into the crown of a hat, then dividing the gold between their horses, and leading the pack horse, they turned back.
Bone McCarthy, standing in his stirrups, looked all around. “Beats all,” he muttered. “Where do you figure she thought she was goin’? Ain’t nothing off that way for miles!”
“Lost, maybe. Only she surely held to her course.”
“What d’you think?”
“Figure it out for yourself. She had no water with her, and besides, water’s too far apart in this country. I’d say she was dead.”
“Come on. Packin’ all this gold we’ll be lucky to make it back ourselves.”
*
THIRTEEN YEARS LATER, two cowboys hunting strays in the lonely lands where the Panhandle of Oklahoma gives way to the Panhandle of Texas, came on some bones.
“Hey, Sam. Looka here!”
Sam rode over, looked into the shallow place behind the clump of bear grass. “What d’ya know? Woman, too.”
“White woman.” The first cowhand indicated the twisted leather of a boot sole and heel. He held up a finger bone. On it was a gold ring with a diamond—or what looked like one.
“What would a white woman be doin’ away off here?”
He looked around. Some of the bones had been pulled away by coyotes. There was no sign of a grave. Somehow she had come to this point, died here, and remained lying there until now.
“Ought to bury her,” Sam said.
“With what? We got no shovel. Come on. We got miles to go an’ we’ll be late for chuck. If we’re late the cook will throw it out.”
“What about the ring?”
“Leave it with her. Maybe she set store by it. And anyway, she’s got nothing else.”
They rode away. The sound of their hoofbeats died away. The wind stirred, and a little dust drifted over the whitened bones, and then lay still.
Actually 26 men are said to have been killed in that room during the wild days.
Return to text.
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.
&nbs
p; 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, 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 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), North to the Rails, 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
NORTH TO THE RAILS
A Bantam Book / June 2004
PUBLISHING HISTORY
Bantam edition published February 1971
Bantam reissue / January 2000
All rights reserved.
Copyright © 1971 by Louis & Katherine L’Amour Trust
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.
Please visit our website at www.bantamdell.com
eISBN: 978-0-553-89953-5
v3.0
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