"Grant! What are you saying?" Jennifer pleaded. "You cant mean that! Take the gold. We dont want it."
"How far would I get with it? Dont be a fool, Jen. Ive thought it all out. That Indian wont talk, they never do, and Ill make sure the rest of you dont do any talking."
Kimbrough looked at Cates. "Ive waited for this for a long time, and this time there wont be anybody to keep you from having to face the issue. This time nobody else has a gun."
Logan Cates stood very tall and still. He stood with his feet a little apart, waiting, simply waiting. "Kimbrough, in this like everything else, youre a tinhorn."
Kimbrough was very sure of himself. "What are you going to do, Cates, when I go for a gun?"
It was then they heard the horses. They heard a sound of hoofbeats, and someone called out loudly.
Kimbrough went for his gun and Logan Cates shot him.
It was that simple and that quick. Cates was firing before Kimbroughs gun came level, and his bullet smashed the gambler halfway around and the second bullet punctured his lungs from side to side. His gun went off into the sand, and he fell, face down and hard, the pistol flying from his grip. He tried to get up, an almost spasmodic effort, then fell back and rolled over.
"You ... you beat me, Cates. You beat me."
Logan Cates looked down at him. "Sorry, Kimbrough. You should have known better. I was doing this when I was sixteen."
Grant Kimbrough tried to speak, then relaxed slowly, and he was dead ...
The riders came down the trail and drew up before the opening. Logan Cates looked up and knew at once that the big, gray-haired man was Jim Fair.
"Whore you?" Fairs voice rumbled. It was harsh, commanding.
"Im Logan Cates," he replied shortly. "Im the man whos marrying your daughter."
Jim Fair stared at him, his eyes hard. "All right, get on your horses and lets get out of here." Fair glanced around at Jennifer. "You all right, Jennifer?"
"Im fine, Dad, but I want to go home."
Fair jerked his head at Cates. "It this your man?"
"He is."
"Youre a lot smartern you were," Fair said grimly. He glanced at Lonnie Foreman. "You punch cows?"
"Sure."
"You got a job."
After the horses had gone, the wind blew a light sifting of sand over the clearing, and that was all. The sand blew and exposed an arrowhead that lay there, an arrowhead that might have been a thousand years old. The wind blew, the sand sifted, and there was nothing more.
The waterholes at Papago Wells would fill again when the rains came, and others would come and some would live and some would die, but the Wells would always be there in the changing of years.
The sand sifted before the wind and somewhere out in the mesquite a quail called inquiringly into the night.
About the Author
"I think of myself in the oral tradition of a troubadour, a village taleteller, the man in the shadows of the campfire. Thats the way Id like to be remembered as 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 LAmour. 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. LAmour 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. LAmour 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 familys 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. LAmour 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. LAmour "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. LAmour 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 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) 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 LAmour stories are available on cassette tapes from Bantam Audio Publishing.
The recipient of many great honors and awards, in 1983 Mr. LAmour became the first novelist ever to be awarded the Congressional Gold Medal by the United States Congress in honor of his lifes work. In 1984 he was also awarded the Medal of Freedom by President Reagan.
Louis LAmour died on June 10, 1988. His wife, Kathy, and their two children, Beau and Angelique, carry the LAmour tradition forward with new books written by the author during his lifetime to be published by Bantam well into the nineties among them, four Hopalong Cassidy novels: The Rustlers of West Fork, The Trail to Seven Pines, The Riders of High Rock, and Trouble Shooter .
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