The Collected Short Stories of Louis L'Amour, Volume Five

by Louis L'Amour

  When the second round had gone four minutes, he took a glancing left to the head and went down, ending the round.

  When the minutes were up, he went out with a rush. The Slasher put up his hands and without even stopping his rush, Barney dropped low and thrust out his left. It caught the Slasher in the midriff and set him back on his heels.

  Instantly Barney was upon him. Hitting fast, he struck the Slasher five times in the face with a volley of blows before the bigger man was brought up by the ropes. Then setting himself, he whipped a hard right to the Slasher’s ribs!

  THE CROWD WAS YELLING wildly, and the Slasher came off the ropes and swung. Barney went under it and whipped a right to the heart. Then the Slasher’s left took him and he rolled over on the ground!

  He was badly shaken. In his corner, “Turkey Tom” Ryan, his second, grinned.

  “Watch it,” he said. “He can hit, the beggar!”

  They had wiped the blood from the Slasher’s face, and the big man looked hard. Near the Slasher’s corner Barney could see George Clyde.

  Barney Shaw went up to scratch and as the Wyoming Slasher rushed he stabbed a left to the mouth, parried a left himself, and hit hard to the body. Inside, he hammered away with both hands. He took a clubbing right to the head that cut his forehead and showered him with blood. But suddenly he knew that his time had come, and instead of backing away, he set himself and began slugging with everything he had.

  The Slasher was caught off balance. He tried to get set, but he was too heavy. He struck several ponderous blows, but Barney was knifing his face with those skintight gloves. Jabbing a left, he turned his fist as it struck and ripped the Slasher’s face. Then he stepped in and threw a wicked uppercut to the body. Then another and still another.

  The Slasher started to fall, but Shaw caught him under the chin with the heel of his glove and shoved him erect against the ropes. Stepping back, he smashed both hands to the chin.

  With the crowd roaring, Shaw leaped away and the Wyoming Slasher rolled off the ropes and fell flat on his face!

  Instantly his seconds were over the ropes and swarming over him. Harrington rushed across the ring and seized one of Barney Shaw’s hands, shouting something about his fists being loaded.

  Turkey Tom shoved him away, and Shaw took off the glove and showed him his bare fist. Harrington snarled something, and Shaw slugged him in the ribs. As the big man started to fall, one of his friends stepped up, and instantly the ring was a bedlam of shouting, fighting men.

  It was ten minutes before the ring was cleared, and then the Slasher was able to get to the scratch. He rushed immediately, and Shaw ducked, but as he ducked he slipped and the Slasher hit him and knocked him to his knees. He started to get up, and the Slasher rushed and struck him another ponderous blow. He went down hard. And the round ended.

  He was barely on his second’s knee when the call of “time” came again and, groggy, he went to scratch. The Wyoming Slasher charged. Shaw ducked, went into a clinch, and threw the Slasher with a rolling hiplock. The Slasher went down with a thud.

  Still groggy, he came to scratch again, but as they came together, he feinted suddenly. As the Slasher swung, Shaw threw his right, high and hard. It caught the Slasher coming in and knocked him to the ropes. As he rebounded Shaw hit him with a one-two, so fast that the two blows landed with almost the same sound.

  The Slasher hit the ground all in one piece and rolled over. After ten minutes he was still unable to stand.

  As he shoved to his feet and held there, Harrington suddenly shouted. As one man, his thugs charged the ring and began tearing down the posts.

  But even as they charged, the four cattlemen leaped into the ring, as did the man with the blue anchors on his hands. In a breath there was a cordon of men with guns drawn around Barney, around the two stake-holders, and around the shouting Turkey Tom.

  Harrington’s thugs broke against the flying wedge formed by the cattlemen and Shaw’s friends, and the wedge moved on to the hotel.

  Tess met them at the door, her eyes wild with anxiety.

  “You’re all right? Oh, I was so afraid! I was sure you’d be hurt!”

  “You should see the Slasher, ma’am,” Turkey Tom said, grinning to show his five gold teeth. “He don’t look so good!”

  “We’ve got the money to pay off now,” Barney told her, smiling. His lips were puffed and there was a blue welt alongside his ear. “We can pay off and start over.”

  “Yes, and that ain’t all!” One of the cattlemen, a big man wearing a black hat, stepped in. “When yuh wired about the water, I was in Zeb’s office. We went to the governor and we got it all fixed up. So I decided it might be a right good idea for me to come up here and get yuh to feed about five hundred whiteface cows for me—on shares!”

  “She can’t,” snarled a voice behind them.

  AS ONE MAN they turned. George Clyde stood in the doorway, his lips thinned and his face white.

  “She can’t, because there’s mineral on that place, and I’ve filed a mining claim that takes in the spring and water source!”

  His eyes were hard and malicious. Harrington, his face still bloody, loomed behind him. The big man with the anchors on his hands stepped forward and stared hard at Clyde.

  “That’s him, Sheriff,” he said. “The man who killed Rex Tilden!”

  George Clyde’s face stiffened.

  “What do you mean?” he shouted. “I was here that night!”

  “You were in Santos that night. You met Rex Tilden on the road outside of town and shot him. I was up on the hill when it happened and I saw you. You shot him with that Krag Jorgenson rifle! I found one of the shells!”

  “He’s got one of them Krags,” the sheriff said abruptly. “I seen it! He won it from some Danish feller last year in a game of faro. I never seen another like it!”

  Barney Shaw had pulled on his trousers over his fighting trunks and slipped on his shirt. He felt the sag of the heavy pistol in his coat pocket and put on the coat. Half turning, he slid the pistol into his waistband.

  “That means,” he said coolly, “that his mineral claim won’t be any use to him. I know he hasn’t done any assessment work, and without that he can’t hold the claim!”

  Clyde’s eyes narrowed.

  “You!” he snarled. “If you’d stayed out of this I’d have made it work. You’ll never see me die! And you will never see me arrested!”

  Suddenly his hand dropped for his gun, but even as his hand swept down, Barney Shaw stepped through the crowd, drew, and fired!

  Clyde staggered, half turned, and pitched over on his face. Harrington had started to reach, but suddenly he jerked his hand away from his gun as though it were afire.

  “I had nothin’ to do with no killin’,” he said, whining. “I never done nothin’!”

  When the sheriff had taken Harrington away, Barney Shaw took Tess by the arm.

  “Tess,” he asked hesitantly, “does the fifty-fifty deal still go?”

  She looked up, her eyes misty and suddenly tender.

  “Yes, Barney, for as long as you want it!”

  “Then,” he said quietly, “it will be for always!”

  Rain on the Halfmoon

  Jim Thorne came down off the Mules at daybreak with a driving rain at his back. But when he rode out of the pines on the bench above Cienaga Creek he could see the bright leap of flames through the gray veil of the rain.

  Too big to be a campfire and too much in the open. The stage bearing Angela should have left twenty minutes ago, but Dry Creek Station was afire.

  Leaving the trail, Thorne put his horse down the slope through the scattered pines, risking his neck on the rain-slick needles. He hit the flat running, and crowded the dun off the trail to the more direct route across the prairie.

  Flames still licked at the charred timbers with hungry tongues when he came down the grade to Dry Creek, but the station was gone. Among the debris, where the front of the building had been, lay the blackened rim
s of the stage wheels and the remains of the hubs, still smoldering.

  His mouth dry with fear, Jim Thorne drew up and looked around, then swung in a swift circle of the fire. There was but one body in the ruins, that of a belted man. The glimpse was all he needed to know, it was the body of Fred Barlow, station tender at Dry Creek.

  Where, then, was Angela? And where was Ed Hunter, who drove the run?

  A splatter of footprints in the mud pointed toward the stable, and at their end he found Hunter.

  The driver had been shot twice, once in the back while running, the second fired by someone who had stood above him and deliberately murdered the wounded man.

  There was, nowhere, any sign of Angela.

  Keeping to the saddle, he swung back. With a rake handle he poked at the ruins of the stage, rescuing a burned valise from which spilled the charred remnants of feminine garments. They were Angela’s.

  She had, then, been here.

  He sat his saddle, oblivious to the pounding rain. Angela had reached the stage station, had obviously seen her valise aboard the stage. She must have been either in the stage or about to get in when it happened.

  Apaches?

  A possibility, but remote. There had been no trouble in almost a year, and the body of Ed Hunter was not mutilated.

  The nearest help was in Whitewater, fifteen miles north. And with every minute they would be taking Angela farther and farther away.

  Wheeling the dun, he rode again to the stable. The horses were gone. He swung down and studied the floor. At least one man had been in here since the rain, for there was mud, not yet dry, on the earth floor.

  Four stage horses habitually occupied the stalls, but there was ample evidence that eight horses had been stabled there the night before. Knowing Barlow shod the stage horses, and his shoes were distinctive, Thorne studied the tracks.

  The four draft horses were easily identified. Three of the other horses were strange, but the fourth had at least one Barlow shoe. The stalls of the four strange horses were not muddy, which meant the riders must have stabled their horses before the rain began.

  It was not unusual for Barlow to stable the horses of travelers, but the horse with the Barlow shoe implied at least one of the riders had passed this way before.

  Jim Thorne walked to the door and built a smoke. Going off half-cocked would not help Angela. He must think.

  Four men had arrived the previous night. Angela must have arrived earlier and probably went to bed at once. Trouble had apparently not begun until after the arrival of the morning stage.

  Fred Barlow and Ed Hunter had both known Angela. Both were old friends of his, and solid men. They would have seen no harm come to her. Therein, he decided, lay the crux of the situation.

  Angela was not merely pretty. She was steady, loyal, sincere. But Angela had a body that drew the eyes of men. Suppose one of the strangers made advances? Barlow would allow no woman to be molested, and Hunter was stubborn as well as courageous.

  Suddenly, Jim Thorne saw it all. And as suddenly as that, there was no remaining doubt. The Ottens and Frazer.

  They were a Tennessee mountain outfit, surly, dangerous men who made no friends. Quarrelsome, cruel, and continually on the prowl after women, they had settled on the Halfmoon six months before.

  “Tough outfit,” Barlow had commented once. “Wherever they come from they was drove out. An’ left some dead behind, I’ll gamble.”

  Jim Thorne had seen them. Lean, rangy men with lantern jaws and swarthy skin. The odd man, who was Frazer, was thickset and sandy. The leader was Ben Otten, a man with thin, cold lips and a scar on his cheekbone.

  They raised no cattle, lived on beef and beans, rode a lot at night, and made a little whiskey, which they peddled.

  A month after they arrived in the country, they had killed a man down at Santa Rita. Three of them had boxed him and shot him down. There had been some trouble over at Round Mountain, too, but since it was known that trouble with one meant trouble with all, they were left strictly alone.

  When Angela left him, she had come here to catch the stage, just as she told him in the note she left on the table. The Ottens and Frazer must have ridden in; they often stayed over at the station when the weather was bad, although they were tolerated rather than welcomed guests. One of them had started some kind of trouble, and Barlow had been killed. They had murdered Hunter, burned the station, then taken Angela and left.

  Tearing a sheet from his tally book, Jim wet his stub of pencil and wrote what he surmised and where he had gone. The stable door opened inward so he left the note fastened to the door out of the rain. Then he walked to the corner of the blacksmith shop, and drawing aside an old slicker that hung there, Jim took down Barlow’s backup gun.

  It was a Roper four-shot revolving shotgun with several inches sawed off the barrel. Checking the loads, he hung it under his slicker and walked back to the dun. It had undoubtedly been this gun Ed Hunter was running for when shot down.

  Hesitating, Jim Thorne then walked back to the stable, sacked up some grain, and tied it behind the saddle under his bedroll. Then he led the dun outside and swung into the leather.

  It was a twenty-mile ride to Halfmoon the way he would go, but almost thirty miles by the route they would be taking. He was quite sure the Ottens had not been in the country long enough to have scouted the route up Rain Creek and over the saddle to West Fork.

  Two of his friends lay dead, a stage station burned, his wife kidnapped. There was in his heart no place for mercy.

  Angela was an eastern girl, lovely, quiet, efficient. She had made him a good wife, only objected to his wearing a gun. She had heard that he had killed a man, a rustler. But that had been in Texas and long ago. There had been no black mark on their marriage until the arrival of Lonnie Mason.

  Jim Thorne had recognized him for what he was at first sight. Deceptively shy, good-looking, and not yet twenty, Lonnie Mason had seemed a quiet, inoffensive boy to Angela. Jim Thorne had seen at once that the man was a killer.

  Several times he had stopped by the ranch, talked with Angela, and in his eyes a veiled taunt for Jim. He had heard of Jim Thorne, for while Thorne had killed but one man, he had been a Ranger in Texas, and he had won a reputation there. And a reputation was bait for Lonnie.

  It had come unexpectedly. Some stage company stock had drifted, and Thorne had gone with Fred Barlow to find it. They had come upon Lonnie and another man with a calf down and an iron hot…a Barlow calf.

  Lonnie had grabbed for his gun, incredibly fast, but Jim Thorne had not forgotten what he had learned on the Nueces. Lonnie went down, shot through the heart, and one of the stranger’s bullets cut Barlow’s belt before Thorne’s guns saved the rheumatic elder man’s life.

  Angela was profoundly shocked. Jim would never forget the horror in her eyes when he rode into the ranch yard with the bodies over their saddles, en route to the sheriff.

  She would listen to his explanations, but they never seemed to get through to her. It was incredible that Lonnie had been a thief, ridiculous that he might be a killer. Jim Thorne had simply been too quick to shoot. She had known this would happen if he continued to wear a gun. Fred Barlow had tried to explain, but all she could remember was that her husband had killed two men, one of them that soft-voiced boy with the girlish face.

  They argued about it several times and Jim had become angry. He said things he should not have said. He declared she was no fit wife for a western man. To go back East if that was how she felt. It was said in anger, and he had been appalled to return one day to find her gone.

  Low clouds, heavy with their weight of rain, hung above Haystack when he skirted the mountain and rode into Rain Canyon. Taking the high trail above the roar of runoff water, he cut back into the hills. The dun was mountain-bred and used to this. Thunder rolled down the canyons, crashing from wall to wall like gigantic boulders rolling down a vast marble corridor. Ponderous echoes tumbled among the stern-walled mountains.

  Th
e pines were no longer green, but black with rain. The dun plodded on, and squinting his eyes against the slanting rain, he stared ahead, watching for the saddle he must cross to West Fork.

  When Jim Thorne reached the saddle, the rain was sweeping across in torrents. On either side loomed the towering peaks of more than ten thousand feet each. The saddle was itself over eight thousand feet, and at this point was almost bare of timber, rain blackening the boulders and falling in an almost solid wall of water.

  Pushing on, Jim watched the lightning leaping from peak to peak, and striking the rocky slopes with thunderous crashes. Rain pounded on his shoulders until they were bruised and sore, and several times the dun tried to turn away from the pelting rain, but Jim forced the horse to move on, and soon the saddle was crossed and they began the descent.

  From an open place in the timber, Jim Thorne looked over toward Halfmoon. The country between was an amazing spiderweb of broken canyons and towering peaks. It was a geological nightmare, the red rocks streaked with rain and the pines standing in somber lines, their slim barrels like racked guns against the dull slate gray of the sky and the surrounding rock. He pushed on, and the dun had an easier trail now, picking its way surefooted down the mountain.

  The Ottens would have slower going of it, for they must go around, and knowing the country less well, they would be picking their way with care. Suddenly he saw a deep crack in the earth on his right. Swinging the dun, he walked the horse down through the pines and found the narrow trail that led to the canyon bottom.

  Below him there was a tumbling mass of roaring white water, along the edge of which the trail skirted like an eyebrow. The dun snorted, edged away, and then, at his gentle but persistent urging, put a tentative hoof on the trail, starting down. A half hour later the trail left the gorge and slanted up across the mountain, and then around through a small park between the hills, and when he drew up again he was in thick pines above Halfmoon.

  Finding several pines close together that offered shelter from the downpour, Jim Thorne slid to the ground, and removing the bit, hung on the nose bag with a bait of grain. Leaving the dun munching the grain, he worked his way along through the trees and looked down on the high mountain park.