Collection 1988 - Lonigan (v5.0) (22 page)

A shot splattered glass and punched a hole in the bottom of the washbasin. Another thudded into the log sill below the window. Kneeling beside it, Carey put two quick shots into the brush beyond the corral, and drew back to reload.

Suddenly, from outside, there was a startled yell. Peering out through the window he could see a long stream of horsemen pouring out of the woods and coming down the hill.

Startled, Janie glanced at him.

“The posse!” he said grimly.

Her father was up on one elbow, cursing feebly at his helplessness. A man started from the brush, and Janie's rifle spoke. The fellow stumbled, then scrambled back into the mesquite.

Outside everything was a bedlam of roaring guns now. Somewhere a horse screamed in pain, and shots thudded into the cabin wall.

Jerking out his six-guns, Bill Carey sprang for the door. He threw it open and snapped a quick shot at a man peering around the corral. The fellow let go and dropped flat on his face, arms outspread.

The fight was moving away. Both outlaws and posse were mounted, and it was turning into a running fight.

Bill Carey crouched near the house, his face twisted in a scowl. Tabat Ryerson had come back to kill him. It wasn't like Tabat to run, not at this stage of the game. He would never leave now without killing Carey, or being killed.

Where was he?

Carey slid along the cabin wall, pressed close to the logs. The space between the house and corral was empty, except for a dead horse, lying with its back toward him. There was no movement in the corral. The dead man lay by the corner; another lay across the water trough.

The barn! Carey lunged from shelter and made the corral in a quick sprint. He went around the corral, still running, and dived for the side wall of the barn. When he reached it, he lifted himself slowly, trying to get a look into the window.

Carey could see nothing. Sunlight fell through the open door and across the shafts of an old buckboard. Wisps of hay hung down from the small loft overhead. There was nothing. No movement. No sign of anything human.

The firing had faded into the distance now, and was growing desultory. Somebody was winning and, knowing Buck Walters and the hard-bitten posse behind him, Bill Carey thought he knew who it was.

Bill Carey eased around the corner and glanced at the door of the barn. When he went through that door he was going to be outlined, stark and clear in the sunlight. But he was going through. Suddenly, he was mad clear through. He had never liked sneaking around. He liked to meet trouble face to face and blast it out, and the devil take the unfortunate or the slow of hand!

He lunged around the doorpost and went through that path of sunlight with a lunge that carried him into the shadow even as a gun bellowed. Dust fell from overhead, but he had seen the flash of the gun. Tabat Ryerson was behind the buckboard!

C
AREY STEPPED BACK into the open, firing as he moved. He could see only a vague outline, but he salted that outline down with lead and snapped a few shots around it just for luck. He felt a slug hit him and went to his knees. Then he was up, and standing there swaying, he thumbed shells into a gun and heard Ryerson's gun bellow. Something knocked him back into the corner of the stall; then Tabat came out into the open and Bill drilled him four times over the shirt pocket with four fast-triggered shots, all of them within the outline of the pocket itself.

Tabat folded and went down, and with his heart shot to pieces, he still had life in him. He stared up at Carey, his eyes blazing. “You always had my number, curse you!” he gasped. “I hate the life of you, but you're a mule-tough hombre!”

He sagged, and the light went out of his eyes. Bill Carey automatically thumbed shells into his guns, staring down at the bullet-riddled body. The man was fairly ballasted with lead.

“You're a right tough man, yourself!” he said softly. “A right tough man!”

Carey walked out into the sunlight and saw Sheriff Buck Walters and several of his men riding into the yard. He holstered his guns, and stood there waiting, his mouth tight.

Janie was standing in the doorway, standing as he had seen her so many times, as he knew he could never forget her.

Suddenly Bill Carey felt strange and lonely. Walters looked down.

“Looks like you had a bad time, Bill,” he said drily, “tackling all these bandits. I want to apologize, too.”

“For what?” Carey stared up at the hard riding sheriff.

“Why,” Buck said innocently, “for thinking you was a thief! Old Hankins swore it was you robbed him, but he's so mean he can't see straight. When we found all that gold in Ryerson's saddlebags, we knew it was him was the thief. He being an outlaw, anyway, stands to reason we was wrong. Anyway, when we seen you this morning you was riding a big black, and that bandit didn't have no black horse.”

“Funny, ain't it,” Carey agreed, looking cynically at the old sheriff, “how a man can make mistakes?”

“Sure is,” Walters agreed. “Even a salty hombre like you might make one.” The sheriff patted his horse on the shoulder. “But there'd be no reason for him to make two!”

Bill Carey glanced at Janie Conway, her eyes shining with gladness.

“Why, Buck, I reckon you're right as rain!” Bill said. “I think if I was to leave this here ranch, I'd be making another one! Maybe you all better ride over here sometime and pay us a visit!”

“Us?” Walters looked at him, then at the girl. “Oh! Yeah, I see what you mean.” Buck swung his horse around, then glanced down again. “Can she bake a cherry pie?”

“Can she?” Carey grinned. “Why, man, when we get married, she—”

He looked toward the door, and the girl had disappeared.

“Don't bother me, Sheriff,” he said, grinning. “Can't you see I'm a family man?”

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.”

I
T 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-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 best-selling 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),
Lonigan, 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

LONIGAN

A Bantam Book / January 2005

PUBLISHING HISTORY

Bantam edition published October 1988

Bantam reissue / July 1997

All rights reserved

Copyright © 1988 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:

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Please visit our website at
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eISBN: 978-0-553-89942-9

v3.0