Yondering: Stories

by Louis L'Amour

  Suddenly the firing stopped, waiting for a killing volley at close quarters.

  Dugan had stopped, too. One man, a tall Moor on a fine-looking horse, had ridden out on a point a good six hundred yards away, watching the attack. He stood in his stirrups, lifting a hand to shout a command, unheard at the distance. For what seemed a long minute Dugan held his aim, then squeezed off the shot, and the man stood tall in his stirrups, then fell from the saddle to the dust and lay there. Then the Biscayan opened fire.

  Dugan looked down at him, aware for the first time that the Biscayan was drunk. The gray line melted before him, and the Biscayan lifted the bottle for another drink.

  The unexpected fire from the stone house, cutting a wide swath in their ranks, paralyzed the attack. Then a bunch of the Riffs broke away from the main attack and started toward the stone house. Jerry was up, firing slowly, methodically. Suddenly the machine gun swung, fired three short bursts, and the bunch of attackers melted away. From behind the parapet came a wavering cheer. Dugan winced at the few voices. So many were gone!

  Dugan squinted his eyes against the sun, remembering the line of silent men beside the parapet and the big Russian with the schoolboy pink in his cheeks.

  The Biscayan lifted his bottle to drink, and it shattered in his hand, spilling wine over him. With a lurid burst of Spanish he dropped the neck of the bottle and reached for another. And he had never been a drinking man.

  Slim sat on the floor, muttering. “I’m goin’ to get damn good an’ drunk an’ go out there and show ’em how we do it down in Texas.”

  He started to rise and sat down hard, a long red furrow along his jaw. He swore in a dull, monotonous voice.

  Dugan saw the line of Moors sweep forward and across the parapet. There was scattered shooting, some rising dust, then silence. He blinked, feeling a lump in his throat. He had known few of them, for they had been together too short a time. Only weeks had passed since he lay in his bunk aboard ship, feeling the gentle roll as it steamed west from Port Said.

  The sunlight was bright and clear. Outside, except for the scattered bodies of the slain, all was quiet and peaceful under the morning sun. Dugan looked across the valley, thinking of what he would do. There was little time. Perhaps time had already run out.

  The afternoon was waning before they attacked again. This time they were careful, taking advantage of the slight roll of the hill to get closer. The last hundred yards was in the open, and they seemed unaware of the ditch, which would be hidden from them until they were almost fallen into it.

  Dugan’s face was swollen and sore from the kick of the rifle. He was hot and tired, and he switched rifles again.

  A single shot sounded, lonely against the hills, and something gasped beside him. He turned to see Jerry fall across the sill. Before he could pull him back, three more bullets chugged into his body.

  “Kid,” Slim said, “you better go. It’s time.”

  He took the bar down from the door and looked down the sunlit hill. A knot of Moors was coming toward him, good men, fighting men, dangerous men. Slim stepped out with a pistol in each hand and started down toward them.

  He was drunk. Magnificently, roaring drunk, and he had a pistol in either hand. “I’m a-goin’ to show them how we do it down in Texas!” He opened fire, then his body jerked, and he went to his knees.

  Dugan snapped a quick shot at a Moor running up with a rifle ready to fire, and then Slim got up. He had lost one gun, but he started to fire from waist level. His whole left side was bloody.

  Dugan turned to yell at the Biscayan, but the man was slumped across his machine gun. He had been shot between the eyes.

  Dugan pushed him away from the gun and swung it toward the front of the house. In the distance, against the pale-blue sky, above the heat waves dancing, a vulture swung in slow circles against the sky. Slim was down, all sprawled out, and the enemy was closing in.

  He pointed the gun toward them and opened up, singing in a hoarse, toneless voice.

  Glorious! Glorious!

  One keg o’ beer for the four of us!

  Glory be to heaven that there isn’t

  Ten or ’leven,

  For the four of us can drink it all alone!

  His belt went empty, and the hill was bare of all but the bodies. He got up and closed the heavy plank door.

  He caught up a bandoleer and another pistol. Then he dropped through the trapdoor.

  All was still. He stepped over the dead Moor and went out into the shadowed stillness of the ditch.

  And then he began to run.

  BY THE RUINS OF EL WALARIEH

  FROM THE HILLSIDE above the ruins of El Walarieh one could watch the surf breaking along the shore, and although the grass was sparse, thin goats grazed among the occasional clumps of brushwood high on the hill behind me. It was a strange and lonely coast, not without its own wild beauty.

  Three times I had been there before the boy approached. He was a thin boy with large, beautiful eyes and smooth brown skin. He squatted beside me, his shins brown and dirty, looking curiously toward the sea, where I was looking.

  “You sit here often?”

  “Yes, very often.”

  “You look at something?”

  “I look at the sea. I look at the sea and the shore, sometimes at the clouds.” I shifted my position a little. “It is very beautiful.”

  “Beautiful?” He was astonished. “The sea is beautiful?” He looked again to be sure that I was not mildly insane.

  “I like the sea, and I like to look at those ruins and to wonder who lived there, and what their lives were like.”

  He glanced at the ancient, time-blackened ruins. “They are no good, even for goats. The roofs have fallen in. Why do you look at the sea and not at the goats? I think the goats are more beautiful than the sea. Look at them!”

  I turned my head to please him. There were at least fifty, and they browsed or slept upon the hillside above me. They were white against the green of the hill. Yes, there was beauty there, too. He seemed pleased that I agreed with him.

  “They are not my goats,” he explained, “but someday I shall own goats. Perhaps as many as these. Then you will see beauty. They shall be like white clouds upon the green sky of the hillside.”

  He studied the camera that lay on the grass near my feet. “You have a machine,” he said. “What is it for?”

  “To make pictures. I want to get pictures of the sea and the ruins.”

  “Of the goats, too?”

  To please him, I agreed. “Yes, also of the goats.”

  The idea seemed to satisfy him, yet he was obviously puzzled, too. There was something he did not understand. He broached the idea to me, as one gentleman to another. “You take pictures of the sea and the ruins…also of the goats. Why do you take these?”

  “To look at them. To catch their beauty.”

  “But why a picture?” He was still puzzled. “They are here! You can see them without a picture. The sea is here, the sky, the ruins…the goats, too. They are always here.”

  “Yes, but I shall not always be here. I shall go away, and I want them to remember, to look at many times.”

  “You need the machine for that? I can remember. I can remember all of the goats. Each one of them.” He paused, thinking about it. “Ah! The machine then is your memory. It is very strange to remember with a machine.”

  Neither of us spoke for a few minutes. “I think you have machines for many things. I would not like that.”

  The following day I was back on the hillside. It had not been my plan to come again, yet somehow the conversation left me unsatisfied. I had the feeling that somehow I’d been bested. I wanted the goatherd to understand.

  When he saw me sitting there, he came down the hillside. He saluted me gravely, then sat down. I handed him a cigarette,
and he accepted it gravely. “You have a woman?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “What, no woman? It is good for a man to have a woman.”

  “No doubt.” He was, I thought, all of thirteen. “You have a woman?” I asked the question gravely.

  He accepted it in the same manner. “No. I am young for a woman. And they are much trouble. I prefer the goats.”

  “They are no trouble?”

  He shrugged. “Goats are goats.”

  The comment seemed to explain much. He smoked in silence, and I waited for him to speak again. “If I had a woman, I would beat her. Women are good when beaten often, but they are not so productive as goats.”

  It was a question I did not wish to debate. He seemed to have all the advantage in the argument. He undoubtedly knew goats, and spoke of women with profound wisdom. I knew neither goats nor women.

  “If you like the hillside,” he said at last, “why do you not stay? The picture will be no good. It will be the sea and the ruins only at one time, and they are not always the same. They change,” he added.

  “My home is elsewhere. I must go back.”

  “Then why do you leave? Is it not good there? I think you are very restless.” He looked at me. “Have you goats at home?”

  “No.” I was ashamed to admit it, feeling that the confession would lower me in his esteem. “I have no goats.”

  “A camel?” He was giving me every chance.

  “No,” I confessed reluctantly, “no camel.” Inspiration hit me suddenly. “I have horses. Two of them.”

  He considered that. “It is good to have a horse, but a horse is like a woman. It is unproductive. If you have a horse or a woman, you must also have goats.”

  “If one has a woman,” I ventured, “one must have many goats.”

  He nodded. I had but stated a fact.

  WHERE THERE’S FIGHTING

  During World War II, at the very beginning of it, I went through Officers Training School and I began training troops down at El Campo, Texas. While I was there I was training a lot of boys from cities and farms and whatnot and I was wondering how these boys would do when they got in face-to-face with gunfire and were actually being shot at. I needn’t have worried. All of them did what they had to do. There is a lot of quality in people and I dislike very much the talk about ordinary people or the common man; there is no such thing.

  All men are uncommon in some respect or another. I saw men under great pressure and in all kinds of circumstances of terror and of fear and of war and of struggle. I’ve seen men you’d call the common man react in very uncommon and unordinary ways and some of them rise to the occasion just beautifully and you never know who that man is going to be. Sometimes many of them will. And nearly always there’s somebody who emerges as sort of a leader too….

  THE FOUR MEN were sprawled in a cuplike depression at the top of the pass. From where the machine gun was planted it had a clear field of fire for over four hundred yards. Beyond that the road was visible only at intervals. By a careful watch of those intervals an enemy could be seen long before he was within range.

  A low parapet of loose rock had been thrown up along the lip of the depression, leaving an aperture for the .30-caliber gun. Two of the men were also armed with rifles.

  It was very still. The slow warmth of the morning sun soaked into their bones and ate the frost away, leaving them lethargic and pleased. The low rumble as of thunder in the far-off hills were the bombs over Serbia, miles away.

  “Think they’ll ever come?” Benton asked curiously.

  “They’ll come,” Ryan said.

  “We can’t stop them.”

  “No.”

  “How about some coffee? Is there any left?”

  Ryan nodded. “It’ll be ready soon. The part that’s coffee is done, the part that’s chicory is almost done, and the part that’s plain bean is doing.”

  Benton looked at the two who were sleeping in the sun. They were mere boys. “Shall we wake them?”

  “Pretty soon. They worry too much. Especially Pommy. He’s afraid of being afraid.”

  “Sackworth doesn’t. He thinks we’re bloody heroes. Do you?”

  “I’d feel heroic as blazes if I had a shave,” Ryan said. “Funny, how you like being shaved. It sets a man up somehow.”

  Pommy turned over and opened his eyes. “I say, Bent? Shall I spell you a bit? You’ve been there hours!”

  Benton looked at him, liking his fresh, clean-cut look.

  “I could use some coffee. I feel like I was growing to this rock.”

  The young Englishman had risen to his feet.

  “There’s something coming down there. A man, I think.”

  “Couldn’t be one of our men. We didn’t have any over there. He’s stopped—looking back.”

  “He’s coming on again now,” Sackworth said after a moment. He had joined them at the first sign of trouble. “Shall I try a shot?”

  “Wait. Might be a Greek.”

  The sun climbed higher, and the moving figure came slowly toward them. He seemed to move at an almost creeping pace. At times, out of sight of the pass, they thought he would never show up again.

  “He’s carrying something,” Pommy said. “Too heavy for a rifle, but I saw the sun flash on it back there a way.”

  The man came into sight around the last bend. He was big, but he walked very slowly, limping a little. He was wearing faded khaki trousers and a torn shirt. Over one shoulder were several belts of ammunition.

  “He hasn’t carried that very far,” Ryan said. “He’s got over a hundred pounds there.”

  Benton picked up one of the rifles and stepped to the parapet, but before he could lift the gun or speak, the man looked up. Benton thought he had never seen a face so haggard with weariness. It was an utter and complete weariness that seemed to come from within. The man’s face was covered with a stubble of black beard. His face was wide at the cheekbones, and the nose was broken. His head was wrapped in a bloody bandage above which coarse black hair was visible.

  “Any room up there?” he asked.

  “Who are you?” Benton demanded.

  Without replying, the big man started up the steep path. Once he slipped, skinning his knee against a sharp rock. Puzzled, they waited. When he stood beside them, they were shocked at his appearance. His face, under the deep brown of sun and wind, was drawn and pale, his nose peeling from sunburn. The rags of what must have once been a uniform were mud-stained and sweat-discolored.

  “What difference does it make?” he asked mildly, humorously. “I’m here now.”

  He lowered the machine gun and slid the belts to the ground. When he straightened, they could see he was a half-inch taller than Benton, who was a tall man, and at least thirty pounds heavier. Through his shirt bulging muscles showed, and there was blood clogging the hair on his chest.

  “My name’s Horne,” he added. “Mike Horne. I’ve been fighting with Koska’s guerrillas in Albania.”

  Benton stared, uncertain. “Albania? That’s a long way from here.”

  “Not so far if you know the mountains.” He looked at the pot on the fire. “How’s for some coffee?”

  Silently Ryan filled a cup. Digging in his haversack, Horne produced some Greek bread and a thick chunk of sausage. He brushed the sand from the sausage gravely. “Want some? I salvaged this from a bombed house back yonder. Might be some shell fragments in it.”

  “You pack that gun over the mountains?” Ryan asked.

  Horne nodded, his mouth full. “Part of the way. It was surrounded by dead Greeks when I found it. Four Italians found it the same time. We had trouble.”

  “Did you—kill them all?” Pommy asked.

  Horne looked at him. “No, kid. I asked them to tea an’ then put sand in their bearings.”

 
Pommy’s face got red; then he grinned.

  “Got any ammo for a .50?” Horne looked up at Benton. “I got mighty little left.”

  “They put down four boxes by mistake,” Benton said.

  Ryan was interested. “Koska’s guerrillas? I heard of them. Are they as tough as you hear?”

  “Tougher. Koska’s an Albanian gypsy. Sneaked into Valona alone a few nights ago an’ got himself three dagos. With a knife.”

  Sackworth studied Horne as if he were some kind of insect. “You call that bravery? That’s like animals. One can at least fight like a gentleman!”

  Horne winked at Ryan. “Sure, kid. But this ain’t a gentleman’s fight. This is war. Nothing sporting about it, just a case of dog eat dog, an’ you better have big teeth.”

  “Why are you here?” Sackworth demanded.

  Horne shrugged. “Why am I anyplace? Think I’m a fifth columnist or something?” He stared regretfully into the empty cup. “Well, I’m not. I ran a gun in the Chaco a few years ago; then they started to fight in China, so I went there. I was in the Spanish scrap with the Loyalists.

  “Hung around in England long enough to learn something about that parachute business. Now that’s a man’s job. When you get down in an enemy country, you’re on your own. I was with the bunch that hopped off from Libya and parachuted down in Southern Italy to cut off that aqueduct and supply line to the Sicily naval base. Flock of spiggoties spotted me, but I got down to the water and hiked out in a fishing boat. Now I’m here.”

  He looked up at Benton, wiping the back of his hand across his mouth. “From Kalgoorlie, I bet. You got the look. I prospected out of there once. I worked for pearls out of Darwin, too. I’m an original swagman, friend.”

  “What’s a swagman?” Pommy asked.

  Horne looked at him, smiling. Two of his front teeth at the side were missing.

  “It’s a bum, sonny. Just a bum. A guy who packs a tucker bag around looking for whatever turns up.”