The Bishop was standing by listening, but I paid him no mind. There had been a time when he seemed awesome and dangerous, but that was a while back.
"You remember what I said, Deckrow," I told him, "because wherever it is this is settled, San Antonio or Austin or wherever, I'll be there."
When I came up to the house pa was there, and Gin beside him. He looked fine ... they were a handsome couple if I ever saw one--but I was sure I'd never get around to calling her ma.
I stepped down from the saddle and slid my Winchester from the boot, and pa looked at me.
"Somebody gave you a beating," he said.
"He didn't give it to me," I replied, "I fought for it."
"You'll be coming with us now? I've held your share of the gold ... it's been waiting your return."
"Buy something with it in my name. I'll come for it one day ... or send a son of mine for it."
"You're going back for the rest?"
"When I left Tennessee for the western lands it was in my mind to become rich with the goods of this world, but by planning and trade, not by diving for dead men's gold. I shall go on to the West."
"You still want me along?" the Tinker asked.
"We left Tennessee together. I left with you and a mule. It's fitting we hold to our course.
However, we never did make a dicker for one of your knives. Now, I'd give--"
"Stand aside, Gin," Pa interrupted, "there's trouble."
When I turned around it put me alongside of pa, although there was a space between us. And the Tinker stood off to one side of me.
And there facing us were the three Kurbishaws, three tall men in dusty black, Elam, Gideon, and Eli.
Pa was first to speak. "You've come a long way from Charleston, Elam ... a long way."
"We came for you."
"You will find most of the gold still there ... if you can get it," pa said coolly. "We've had ours."
"It isn't for gold any more," Gideon said.
"There's more to it."
"I suppose there is," pa replied, his voice still cold. "You hounded your sister to death; you hunted my son."
"And now we got him," Elam replied, his--and you."
Pa didn't want it, I could see that. He was talking to get out of it, to get it stopped, but they would not listen. Strange men they were, but I'd see their like again, in lynch mobs and elsewhere. They were men who knew what I did not--they knew how to hate.
"You wouldn't try me alone," pa said. "Now there's two of us."
"Three," said the Tinker.
"We've come a far piece since then,"
Elam said, "and we've lived as we might, by the gun."
"Why, then," pa said, "if you'll have it no other way--"
Gideon was looking at me, so when pa drew I swung up the muzzle of my Winchester and levered a shot into him. I saw the bullet dust him at the belt line, and worked the lever again and fired. He threw his gun hand high in a queer, dance-like gesture, and then he tried to bring it down on me. I stepped forward and shot again and my bullet went high, striking at the collarbone and tearing away part of his throat as it glanced off.
The sound of shooting was loud in the street, and then there was stillness, the acrid smell of gunpowder mixed with dust, and we three stood there, facing them as they lay. The last one alive was Eli, tugging at one of Tinker's knives sunk deep into his chest.
"If that's the only way," I commented, "to get one of those knives, I'll wait."
Looking down at them, I thought it was a strange trail they had followed, those three, and how in the end it had only come to this, to death in a dusty street, nobody caring; and by and by nobody even remembering, except by gossip over a bar in a saloon.
Seemed it was just as well a man did not know where he was headed when he was to come only to this--a packet of empty flesh and clothes to end it all.
In the end their hatred had bought them only this ... only this, and the bitter years between.
It always seemed that for me something waited in those western lands, something of riches in the way of land and living, and maybe a woman. And when I found her, I wanted her to be like Gin.
Younger, of course, as would be fitting, but like her.
Somebody likely to have no more sense than to fall in love with a Tennessee boy with nothing but his two hands and a racing mule.
About Louis L'Amour "I think of myself in the oral tradition--z a troubadour, a village taleteller, the man in the shadows of the campfire. That's the way I'd like to be remembered--z 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 1600's 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 include The Lonesome Gods, The Walking Drum (his twelfth-century historical novel) Jubal Sackett, 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 tradition forward with new books written by the author during his lifetime to be published by Bantam well into the nineties--among them, an additional Hopalong Cassidy novel, Trouble Shooter.