RIDERS OF THE DAWN
A Western Duo
LOUIS L’AMOUR
Copyright © 1949 by Popular Publications, Inc. Copyright not renewed. Copyright © 1951 by Best Publications, Inc. Copyright not renewed. Copyright © 2018 by Golden West Literary Agency
E-book published in 2018 by Blackstone Publishing
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Trade e-book ISBN 978-1-5384-7455-6
Library e-book ISBN 978-1-5384-7454-9
Fiction / Westerns
CIP data for this book is available from the Library of Congress
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Introduction
Louis Dearborn LaMoore (1908–1988) was born in Jamestown, North Dakota. He left home at fifteen and subsequently held a wide variety of jobs although he worked mostly as a merchant seaman. From his earliest youth, L’Amour had a love of verse. His first published work was a poem, “The Chap Worth While,” appearing when he was eighteen years old in his former hometown’s newspaper, the Jamestown Sun. It is the only poem from his early years that he left out of Smoke from This Altar which appeared in 1939 from Lusk Publishers in Oklahoma City, a book which L’Amour published himself; however, this poem is reproduced in The Louis L’Amour Colletion (Andrews and McMeel, 1992) edited by Robert Weinberg. L’Amour wrote poems and articles for a number of small circulation arts magazines all through the early 1930s and, after hundreds of rejection slips, finally had his first story accepted, “Anything for a Pal” in True Gang Life (October 1935). He returned in 1938 to live with his family where they had settled in Choctaw, Oklahoma, determined to make writing his career. He wrote a fight story bought by Standard Magazines that year and became acquainted with editor Leo Margulies who was to play an important role later in L’Amour’s life. “The Town No Guns Could Tame” in New Western (March 1940) was his first published Western story.
During the Second World War L’Amour was drafted and ultimately served with the US Army Transportation Corps in Europe. However, in the two years before he was shipped out, he managed to write a great many adventure stories for Standard Magazines. The first story he published in 1946, the year of his discharge, was a Western, “Law of the Desert Born” in Dime Western (April 1946). A call to Leo Margulies resulted in L’Amour’s agreeing to write Western stories for the various Western pulp magazines published by Standard Magazines, a third of which appeared under the byline Jim Mayo, the name of a character in L’Amour’s earlier adventure fiction. The proposal for L’Amour to write new Hopalong Cassidy novels came from Margulies who wanted to launch Hopalong Cassidy’s Western Magazine to take advantage of the popularity William Boyd’s old films and new television series were enjoying with a new generation. Doubleday & Company agreed to publish the pulp novelettes in hardcover books. L’Amour was paid $500 a story, no royalties, and he was assigned the house name Tex Burns. L’Amour read Clarence E. Mulford’s books about the Bar-20 and based his Hopalong Cassidy on Mulford’s original creation. Only two issues of the magazine appeared before it ceased publication. Doubleday felt that the Hopalong character had to appear exactly as William Boyd did in the films and on television and thus even the first two novels had to be revamped to meet with this requirement prior to publication in book form.
L’Amour’s first Western novel under his own byline was Westward the Tide (World’s Work, 1950). It was rejected by every American publisher to which it was submitted. World’s Work paid a flat seventy-five pounds without royalties for British Empire rights in perpetuity. L’Amour sold his first Western short story to a slick magazine a year later, “The Gift of Cochise” in Collier’s (July 1952). Robert Fellows and John Wayne purchased screen rights to this story from L’Amour for $4,000 and James Edward Grant, one of Wayne’s favorite screenwriters, developed a script from it, changing L’Amour’s Ches Lane to Hondo Lane. L’Amour retained the right to novelize Grant’s screenplay, which differs substantially from his short story, and he was able to get an endorsement from Wayne to be used as a blurb, stating that Hondo was the finest Western Wayne had ever read. Hondo (Fawcett Gold Medal, 1953) by Louis L’Amour was released on the same day as the film, Hondo (Warner, 1953), with a first printing of 320,000 copies.
With Showdown at Yellow Butte (Ace, 1953) by Jim Mayo, L’Amour began a series of short Western novels for Don Wollheim that could be doubled with other short novels by other authors in Ace Publishing’s paperback twofers. Advances on these were $800 and usually the author never earned any royalties. Heller with a Gun (Fawcett Gold Medal, 1955) was the first of a series of original Westerns L’Amour had agreed to write under his own name following the success for Fawcett of Hondo. Already this early L’Amour wanted to have his Western novels published in hardcover editions. He expanded “Guns of the Timberland” by Jim Mayo in West (September 1950) for Guns of the Timberlands (Jason Press, 1955), a hardcover Western for which he was paid an advance of $250. Another novel for Jason Press followed and then Silver Canõn (Avalon Books, 1956) for Thomas Bouregy & Company. These were basically lending library publishers and the books seldom earned much money above the small advances paid.
The great turn in L’Amour’s fortunes came about because of problems Saul David was having with his original paperback Westerns program at Bantam Books. Fred Glidden had been signed to a contract to produce two original paperback Western novels a year under the pseudonym Luke Short for an advance of $15,000 each. It was a long-term contract but, in the first ten years of it, Fred only wrote six novels. Literary agent Marguerite Harper then persuaded Bantam that Fred’s brother, Jon, could help fulfill the contract and Jon was signed for eight Western novels under the pseudonym Peter Dawson. When Jon died suddenly before completing even one book for Bantam, Harper managed to engage a ghost writer at the Disney studios to write these eight “Peter Dawson” novels, beginning with The Savages (Bantam, 1959). They proved inferior to anything Jon had ever written and what sales they had seemed to be due only to the Peter Dawson name.
Saul David wanted to know from L’Amour if he could deliver two Western novels a year. L’Amour said he could, and he did. In fact, by 1962 this number was increased to three original paperback novels a year. The first L’Amour novel to appear under the Bantam contract was Radigan (Bantam, 1958).
The marketing strategy used to promote L’Amour was to keep all of his Western titles in print. Independent distributors were required to buy titles in lots of 10,000 copies if they wanted access to other Bantam titles at significantly discounted prices. In time L’Amour’s paperbacks forced almost everyone else off the racks in the Western sections. L’Amour himself comprised the other half of this successful strategy. Dressed in Western attire, he traveled about the country in a motor home visiting with independent distributors, taking them to dinner and charming them, making them personal friends. He promoted himself at every available opportunity. L’Amour insisted that he was telling the stories of the people who had made America a great nation and he appealed to patriotism as much as to commercialism in his rhetoric. His fiction suffered, of course; stories written hurriedly and submitted in their first draft and published as he wrote them. A character would have a rifle in his hand, a model not yet invented in the period in which the story was set, and when he crossed a street the rifle would vanish without explanation. A scene would begin in a saloon and suddenly the setting would be a hotel dining room. Characters would die once and, a few pages later, die again. An old man for most of a story
would turn out to be in his twenties.
All of this notwithstanding, there are many fine, and some spectacular, moments in Louis L’Amour’s Western fiction. Much of his early fiction possesses several of the characteristics in purest form which, no matter how diluted they ultimately would become, account in largest measure for the loyal following Louis L’Amour won from his readers: the young male narrator who is in the process of growing into manhood and who is evaluating other human beings and his own experiences; a resourceful frontier woman who has beauty as well as fortitude; a strong male character who is single and hence marriageable; and the powerful, romantic, strangely compelling vision of the American West which invests L’Amour’s Western fiction and makes it such a delightful escape from the cares of a later time—in the author’s own words from one of his stories, that “big country needing big men and women to live in it” and where there was no place for “the frightened or the mean.”
Ride, You Tonto Riders
I
The rain, which had been falling steadily for three days, had turned the trail into a sloppy river of mud. Peering through the slanting downpour, Mathurin Sabre cursed himself for the quixotic notion that impelled him to take this special trail to the home of the man that he had gunned down.
Nothing good could come of it, he reflected, yet the thought that the young widow and child might need the money he was carrying had started him upon the long ride from El Paso to the Mogollons. Certainly neither the bartender nor the hangers-on in the saloon could have been entrusted with that money, and nobody was taking that dangerous ride to the Tonto Basin for fun.
Matt Sabre was no trouble hunter. At various times, he had been many things, most of them associated with violence. By birth and inclination, he was a Western man, although much of his adult life had been lived far from his native country. He had been a buffalo hunter, a prospector, and for a short time a two-gun marshal of a tough cattle town. It was his stubborn refusal either to back up or back down that kept him in constant hot water.
Yet some of his trouble derived from something more than that. It stemmed from a dark and bitter drive toward violence—a drive that lay deeply within him. He was aware of this drive and held it in restraint, but at times it welled up, and he went smashing into trouble—a big, rugged, and dangerous man who fought like a Viking gone berserk, except that he fought coldly and shrewdly.
He was a tall man, heavier than he appeared, and his lean, dark face had a slightly patrician look with high cheekbones and green eyes. His eyes were usually quiet and reserved. He had a natural affinity for horses and weapons. He understood them, and they understood him. It had been love of a good horse that brought him to his first act of violence.
He had been buffalo hunting with his uncle and had interfered with another hunter who was beating his horse. At sixteen, a buffalo hunter was a man and expected to stand as one. Matt Sabre stood his ground and shot it out, killing his first man. Had it rested there, all would have been well, but two of the dead man’s friends had come hunting Sabre. Failing to find him, they had beaten his ailing uncle and stolen the horses. Matt Sabre trailed them to Mobeetie and killed them both in the street, taking his horses home.
Then he left the country, to prospect in Mexico, fight a revolution in Central America, and join the Foreign Legion in Morocco, from which he deserted after two years. Returning to Texas, he drove a trail herd up to Dodge, then took a job as marshal of a town. Six months later, in El Paso, he had become engaged in an altercation with Billy Curtin, and Curtin had called him a liar and gone for his gun.
With that incredible speed that was so much a part of him, Matt drew his gun and fired. Curtin hit the floor. An hour later, he was summoned to the dying man’s hotel room.
Billy Curtin, his dark, tumbled hair against a folded blanket, his face drawn and deathly white, was dying. They told him outside the door that Curtin might live an hour or even two. He could not live longer.
Tall, straight, and quiet, Sabre walked into the room and stood by the dying man’s bed. Curtin held a packet wrapped in oilskin. “Five thousand dollars,” he whispered. “Take it to my wife … to Jenny, on the Pivotrock, in the Mogollons. She’s in … in … trouble.”
It was a curious thing that this dying man should place a trust in the hands of the man who had killed him. Sabre stared down at him, frowning a little.
“Why me?” he asked. “You trust me with this? And why should I do it?”
“You … you’re a gentleman. I trust you to help her. Will you? I … I was a hot-headed fool. Worried … impatient. It wasn’t your fault.”
The reckless light was gone from the blue eyes, and the light that remained was fading.
“I’ll do it, Curtin. You’ve my word … you’ve got the word of Matt Sabre.”
For an instant, then, the blue eyes blazed widely and sharply with knowledge. “You’re … Sabre?”
Matt nodded, but the light had faded, and Billy Curtin had bunched his herd.
It had been a rough and bitter trip, but there was a little farther to go. West of El Paso there had been a brush with marauding Apaches. In Silver City, two strangely familiar riders had followed him into a saloon and started a brawl. Yet Matt was too wise in the ways of thieves to be caught by so obvious a trick, and he had slipped away in the darkness after shooting out the light.
The roan slipped now on the muddy trail, scrambled up, and moved on through the trees. Suddenly, in the rain-darkened dusk, there was one light, then another.
“Yellow Jacket,” Matt said with a sigh of relief. “That means a good bed for us, boy. A good bed and a good feed.”
Yellow Jacket was a jumping-off place. It was a stage station and a saloon, a livery stable and a ramshackle hotel. It was a cluster of adobe residences and some false-fronted stores. It bunched its buildings in a corner of Copper Creek.
It was Galusha Reed’s town, and Reed owned the Yellow Jacket Saloon and the Rincon Mine. Sid Trumbull was town marshal, and he ran the place for Reed. Wherever Reed rode, Tony Sikes was close by, and there were some who said that Reed in turn was owned by Prince McCarran, who owned the big PM brand in the Tonto Basin country.
Matt Sabre stabled his horse and turned to the slope-shouldered liveryman. “Give him a bait of corn. Another in the morning.”
“Corn?” Simpson shook his head. “We’ve no corn.”
“You have corn for the freighters’ stock and corn for the stage horses. Give my horse corn.”
Sabre had a sharp ring of authority in his voice, and, before he realized it, Simpson was giving the big roan his corn. He thought about it and stared after Sabre. The tall rider was walking away, a light, long step, easy and free, on the balls of his feet. And he carried two guns, low-hung and tied-down.
Simpson stared, then shrugged. “A bad one,” he muttered. “Wish he’d kill Sid Trumbull.”
Matt Sabre pushed into the door of the Yellow Jacket and dropped his saddlebags to the floor. Then he strode to the bar. “What have you got, man? Anything but rye?”
“What’s the matter? Ain’t rye good enough for you?” The bartender, a man named Hobbs, was sore himself. No man should work so many hours on feet like his.
“Have you brandy? Or some Irish whiskey?”
Hobbs stared. “Mister, where do you think you are? New York?”
“That’s all right, Hobbs. I like a man who knows what he likes. Give him some of my cognac.”
Matt Sabre turned and glanced at the speaker. He was a tall man, immaculate in black broadcloth, with blond hair slightly wavy and a rosy complexion. He might have been thirty or older. He wore a pistol on his left side, high up.
“Thanks,” Sabre said briefly. “There’s nothing better than cognac on a wet night.”
“My name is McCarran. I run the PM outfit, east of here. Northeast, to be exact.”
Sabre nodded. “My name is Sabre. I run no outfit, but I’m looking for one. Where’s the Pivotrock?”
He was a good poker
player, men said. His eyes were fast from using guns, and so he saw the sudden glint and the quick caution in Prince McCarran’s eyes.
“The Pivotrock? Why, that’s a stream over in the Mogollons. There’s an outfit over there, all right. A one-horse affair. Why do you ask?”
Sabre cut him off short. “Business with them.”
“I see. Well, you’ll find it a lonely ride. There’s trouble up that way now, some sort of a cattle war.”
Matt Sabre tasted his drink. It was good cognac. In fact, it was the best, and he had found none west of New Orleans.
McCarran, his name was. He knew something, too. Curtin had asked him to help his widow. Was the Pivotrock outfit in the war? He decided against asking McCarran, and they talked quietly of the rain and of cattle, then of cognac. “You never acquired a taste for cognac in the West. May I ask where?”
“Paris,” Sabre replied, “Marseilles, Fez, and Marrakesh.”
“You’ve been around, then. Well, that’s not uncommon.” The blond man pointed toward a heavy-shouldered young man who slept with his head on his arms. “See that chap? Calls himself Camp Gordon. He’s a Cambridge man, quotes the classics when he’s drunk … which is over half the time … and is one of the best cowhands in the country when he’s sober. Keys over there, playing the piano, studied in Weimar. He knew Strauss, in Vienna, before he wrote ‘The Blue Danube.’ There’s all sorts of men in the West, from belted earls and remittance men to vagabond scum from all corners of the world. They are here a few weeks, and they talk the lingo like veterans. Some of the biggest ranches in the West are owned by Englishmen.”
Prince McCarran talked to him a few minutes longer, but he learned nothing. Sabre was not evasive, but somehow he gave out no information about himself or his mission. McCarran walked away very thoughtfully. Later, after Matt Sabre was gone, Sid Trumbull came in.
“Sabre?” Trumbull shook his head. “Never heard of him. Keys might know. He knows about ever’body. What’s he want on the Pivotrock?”
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