Yondering: Stories

by Louis L'Amour

  He looked at her. “What was it they took?”

  “They took seventy thousand dollars,” she said quietly, “and half of it belonged to me. Half was to go to the other stockholders. We had sold our equity in some property, and were settling my father’s estate.”

  There was little time. Comber after comber was thundering on the outer reef, and the storm was not far off. With the seas mounting, there would be little time to plan.

  Swiftly, he searched the ship, gathering food, clothing, and oilskins against the coming storm. No boats were left, and no rafts. The after hatches were stove in, and several hatch covers were adrift. Working with a boat hook, he snared

  As I say so often regarding the unfinished material included in Louis L’Amour’s Lost Treasures: “Yes, that’s really how it ends.”

  On top of this Tanner Malloy–Pocklington Reef sequel, Dad also wrote up a rough draft for a movie project that was somewhat similar. This likely dates from the mid to late 1950s and seems intended for one of the low– budget productions of the era:

  Characters:

  ’Bastien McTeague, a successful Basque-Irish playwright who began life as a fisherman, sailor and soldier. Handsome, but rugged and tough, a man fitted by physique and disposition for survival, he learned his fighting the hard way along the waterfronts. Self-educated he has not softened in three years away from the sea.

  Lisa Fairman: Beautiful, voluptuous and tricky. She married Fairman for his money and he knows it. He wanted her and she wanted the money and up to now both are satisfied with the deal. Selfish, but a wench. She has her own method of survival: to attach herself to the man who can best provide for her.

  Taylor Fairman: Extremely rich and always has been, a man of the cities who is helpless when away from places where money is useful. Cynical, he has a perfect understanding of the woman he married, knowing her better than she knows him. He is thirty years older than she is, a slender man, sharp and ironic. Perfectly aware of his abilities and deficiencies.

  Cris Romano: Skipper and owner of the Dancing Lady, a two-mast, auxiliary schooner. Once a gun-runner he is now a trader and poacher of pearls. Big and a scrapper, he could cut your throat without malice if there was money in it. Respects nothing but strength, has a sort of harsh good humor that carries nothing of mercy in it. Survival to him is based on strength and he will stop at nothing to get what he wants.

  Lucas: His saturnine, sadistic mate and companion in trade or crime.

  Pinto: A half-caste who functions as auxiliary engineer, cook and cabin boy.

  Big London: A powerful young native who has been shanghaied aboard the schooner but seems content. He does not talk. Could be either Negro or Kanaka.

  The story opens on an immense expanse of sea and sky with:

  McTeague afloat on some wreckage. A few storm clouds are lingering in the sky but this storm is over. McTeague had been sailing on a chartered yacht from Hawaii to Tahiti when they were struck by a hurricane. McTeague has survived by clinging to the wreckage which consists of the mast, yard and part of a sail.

  He has neither food nor water and knows he is on the edge of one of the loneliest expanses of water in the world. West, there are scattered islands, east there is nothing for two thousand miles. He manages to get water, to catch fish, and to make his wreckage into a crude raft. He knows that clouds gather over islands; the proximity to land can be told by the birds seen and fish seen, and eventually he gets to an island.

  The island is a mere sandbar with a few palms, at no place as much as a dozen feet above the sea. There is wreckage along the reef, and some on the beach of the island itself. There is also a wrecked lifeboat and two other passengers, Taylor and Lisa Fairman. Neither of them has the faintest idea of how to exist in such a place; Fairman has failed after many attempts to open a coconut, to take off the outer husk and then crack the nut itself. McTeague does know how, and the three manage to survive. Their island is far from any steamer lanes and they realize from the start that their chance of being rescued is slight. There is every chance they may be there for the rest of their lives.

  Lisa develops a lively interest in McTeague and has words with Fairman. There is a good bit of biting sarcasm tossed back and forth between them that carries a good deal of humor as well as some underlying viciousness. The situation develops along with their struggle to live, and then the Dancing Lady arrives.

  Cris Romano takes them aboard and then discovers that Fairman has a metal box containing a considerable sum of money that he had managed to lay hands on before the yacht went down. Additionally, of course, there is Lisa—a welcome sight to the eyes of any sailor.

  Romano can see nothing in the way of doing whatever he wishes. A hard character, he will stop at nothing. McTeague has already recognized him and guesses their situation. As nobody knows the three are alive, Romano tells Lucas they can kill the two men and take the money, and they then can keep Lisa around only as long as she can keep them amused.

  McTeague manages a few words with the Kanaka, Big London, but he does not talk, just listens and will not commit himself. Nevertheless, McTeague hopes he will remain neutral, at least. McTeague keeps with him a small waterproof bag that contains a number of other things: some fish hooks, line, etc. It was a sack he always carried fastened to his belt when at sea and contained articles necessary for survival.

  Lucas suggests it would be a simple matter to get the two men into a poker game and trim them but good. They play, and the two are cheating, but after winning at first, they begin to lose. Meanwhile, Fairman wins a good deal and McTeague wins a little; he is a skillful card mechanic and succeeds in trimming Lucas and Romano. However, Romano tells him it makes no difference—they are on his boat, and he wins anyway, and they won’t get off it alive. McTeague replies that he still holds the best hand—it is under the table pointed at Romano’s stomach. He has a .380 Colt taken from the waterproof bag.

  Later, Romano succeeds in surprising McTeague and he loses hold on the gun. There is a battle to end all battles, and McTeague wins.

  During all this time, beginning shortly after his arrival on the island, Lisa has been trying to attach herself to McTeague. From the beginning it looks as if he is listening to her and perhaps falling for her wiles. But she does not know who he is, believes him to be merely a rugged sailor. Her husband does know, and McTeague knows he knows. Now, with land in view and the schooner moving up to the harbor, it suddenly becomes apparent to Lisa that she has been backing the wrong horse.

  Once they get ashore Fairman will be able to spend money….She moves over to him again. Her character by this time has been well established. Beautiful, but a selfish, sexy, wench. She is the kind of woman that nine out of ten women will enjoy seeing get dumped, and she does.

  As the gangway goes down, she remarks to Fairman that they will soon be ashore, and how wonderful it will be to be home again, and he turns and looks past her to McTeague and with an exchange of comments, they go ashore together, Fairman slapping the playwright on the back, and thanking him for saving his life.

  Lisa, her feet apart and her hands on her hips, looks after them thinking you can imagine what.

  Getting back to the more typical Yondering stories, it would seem “Glorious! Glorious!” is not something that my father could have experienced firsthand but may have heard about in Egypt during his ship’s slow transition of the Suez Canal. On the way from there to New York he also sailed the North African coast during the last days of Abd el-Krim and the Republic of the Rif.

  “By the Ruins of El Walarieh” was later updated to form the beginning of the 1960s-era thriller “The Golden Tapestry,” which can be found in Louis L’Amour’s Lost Treasures: Volume 1. Exactly how Dad decided that this minor-key story about the meeting of two young men from vastly different cultures was the appropriate beginning for a novel that feels like
it might have been adapted into a movie by Alfred Hitchcock is a complete mystery, but many drafts were written in an attempt to get the first few chapters just right. The short story takes place in Morocco, while the location of the unfinished novel is Istanbul, Turkey. The following fragment is Louis’s first attempt to fuse “By the Ruins of El Walarieh” into the plot of the more extensive adventure story “The Golden Tapestry”:

  Twice in the first days that I waited near the ruins of El Walarieh, the black car went by, and each time it passed slowly. A man who lives by his wits, by his knowledge of the ways and customs of men, you might say, observes such things. He is careful to observe them if he wishes to prosper…and at times if he wishes to remain alive.

  From the hillside above the ruins one could watch the surf breaking along the shore below the cliffs, and although the grass was at times sparse, thin goats grazed among the occasional clumps of brushwood high on the long slope behind me. It was a lonely coast, south of Casablanca, but possessed of its own wild beauty.

  Three times I had been there before the boy approached. He was a thin boy with large, dark eyes and brown skin. He squatted on his heels behind me, his shins brown and dirty, and he looked curiously toward the sea, where I was looking.

  “You sit here often,” he suggested tentatively.

  “Yes, very often.”

  “You look at something?”

  “I look at the sea, sometimes at the shore and the clouds. They are very beautiful.”

  “Beautiful?” He was astonished. “The sea is beautiful?” He looked again to be sure if I was, as he was now certain, mildly insane.

  “I find the sea beautiful,” I insisted, “and I like the ruins, and sometimes I try to picture the people who lived among them and what their lives were like.”

  He did not even glance toward the time-blackened ruins. “They are no good, not 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!”

  There were at least fifty goats browsing along the hillside, which stretched back a long mile to meet the sky. The goats were white and brown against the green of the young grass. 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. Then you will see beauty. They shall be like small white clouds upon the green sky of the hillside.” He studied the camera at my feet. “You have a machine. What is it for?”

  “To make pictures. I shall make pictures of the ruins.”

  “Of the goats, too?”

  To please him I agreed. “And of the goats, too.”

  The reply did please him yet he seemed restless and puzzled. Something was here that he did not understand. He broached the idea, as one gentleman to another. “You take pictures of the sea and the ruins. Why do you do this?”

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

  “But why a picture? They are here! You can see them without a picture.”

  “They are here for you,” I explained, “because you are here. But I shall go away and it is good to remember beauty. I shall look at them many times.”

  “You need the machine for that?” He was astonished. “I can remember without a machine. I can remember the goats, each of them as they are today, and as they were last year.” He paused, considering. “Ah, then. The machine is your memory. It is very strange to remember with a machine.” Neither of us spoke for several minutes and then he said, “I have heard of this, but I did not believe. It is said that you have machines for everything.”

  The following day I returned to the hillside. It had not been my plan to come but somehow the conversation left me unsatisfied. I’d a feeling somehow that I’d been bested…and there was also the matter of the curious black car.

  When he saw me he joined me where I sat and gravely accepted a cigarette. “You have a woman?” he asked.

  “No.”

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

  “No doubt.” He was very wise for a man of thirteen. “Do you have a woman?” I asked, in all seriousness.

  He accepted the question in the same manner. “No…I am young for a woman. They are much trouble. And I must work with the goats.”

  “They are no trouble?”

  He shrugged his thin shoulders. “Goats are goats.”

  He smoked in silence and then said, “If I had a woman I would beat her. Women are good when beaten…but they are not so productive as goats.”

  It was a question I had no wish to debate for he undoubtedly knew goats, and spoke of women with profound wisdom, while I understood neither women nor goats.

  The black car rolled slowly along the road below the ruins and I watched it with interest. I believed I knew who was in that black car and why they were here.

  “If you like the hillside, why do you not stay? The picture is no good. It will remember the sea and the ruins at only one time and they are never twice the same.”

  When I made no reply, watching the black car, he asked, “Have you goats at home?”

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

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

  “No,” I admitted reluctantly, “I have no camel.” Inspiration came to me. His esteem was more important than the truth. “I have horses.”

  He pondered the matter. “It is good to have horses, 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 was watching the car also. “I think,” he said, “they look for the woman with the rug.”

  Ah ..! “She sits on a rug?”

  “She looks at it. She sits on the grass…or sometimes on the stones of the ruin.” He paused. “She is a very beautiful woman…and not old.” Reluctantly, he added, “She is more beautiful than the goats.”

  It was a compliment of the highest order. “How could a woman be more beautiful than goats?”

  “It is difficult to believe,” he admitted. “She is a woman who looks at a rug….It is very strange.”

  There are rugs and there are rugs…and mine is a nose sensitive to the smell of money…however, I had expected the rug, with or without the woman.

  “She is there now?”

  “I will show you.”

  The ruins of El Walarieh lie something beyond thirty miles south of Cape Blanco, and roughly southwest from Casablanca. Nearer are the smaller port of Mazagan and the town of Safi. The ruins are unimpressive in themselves, but for me all ruins hold a fascination, and a ruin where a beautiful woman looks at a rug…I went down the slope with Rashid after the car was out of sight.

  You wonder why I, a man of many countries and no profession, am interested in a rug? Naturally. In the modern American home a rug has no distinction. It is simply a manufactured substance that covers a floor, and of a nondescript shade. It has no imagination, it has no story, it has no color and no vitality.

  In Persia, in Turkey, in China, a rug is a dream captured in thread, it is a voice speaking beyond the time of the weaver, it can be a masterpiece, like a great painting.

  She was seated on a gray stone with the rug in her lap, and at once I saw this was a rug of great beauty….It was also the rug…a rug of legend.

  Her hair was dark and her eyes were long, almond-shaped and green. Her cheekbones were high, which is a good thing in a woman, yet the bones of her face had delicacy.

  “This is Rashid, a keeper of goats, and he has told me of a beautiful woman who sits among the ruins and looks at a rug. I have come to be of
service.”

  She regarded me with her long green eyes, and she said, “Do you know something of rugs?”

  Rashid squatted on his thin heels and looked at me with cool regard. He looked at me as if to say “You know nothing of goats. Let us see how you do with women.”

  “A rug needs examination. There is much to know of rugs.” I paused. “As much as there is to know of men or jewels.”

  When she lifted her lashes to look at me her eyes were no longer green, but hazel…almost yellow. “Do you know me, then?”

  “My life is to know beauty, Madam, and who can forget such beauty as yours? The first time was at an inn…the Inn of the White Horse, in Honfleur. You had been motoring along the coast, and the food is quite good there.

  “The second time was in the Mosky, that charming market of odds and ends and strange things in Cairo. The first time I sat at an adjoining table listening to your voice and watching your profile….The Marquis was quite annoyed.”

  “And the third time?”

  “You bought from me an antique ring…with a green stone.”

  Her eyes darkened. “I remember the stone. It was false.”

  “Many things are, Madam, but at the time it was all I had to sell, and a man must live. And on you, Madam, who would suspect it of being false? Madam lends all thing beauty.”

  “I believe you are a thief…perhaps worse.”

  “One lives as one can….The falseness or the purity of things are relative, and few things are coincidence. For example, some might believe my presence here an accident, but by now you know it is by intention. You have the rug, Madam, but I have the knowledge.”

  Her hand-bag, a large white one, lay open on the wall beside her, facing away from me so its contents were invisible, but I knew there was a gun.

  “Those others,” I said, “the ones who drive by in the car. It is you they look for.”

  “Who are you?” she asked.