The Lonesome Gods

by Louis L'Amour

  Over and over I said it, and over and over like some weird litany it chanted itself in my brain, and then from somewhere came coolness, and the day was gone. The low, ragged mountains were not that far away.

  In the coolness of the early evening when the stars were just appearing, I came to the springs. There were two of them, only a few yards apart, lying at the edge of some low hills near the Tiefort Mountains.

  Dropping to my knees, I bathed my face and neck. I swallowed a little water, then a little more. I put my head down into the water, then withdrew it, dripping. I turned around and sat down to face the desert from which my enemies would come. I got out a piece of dried beef and worried a piece from the end with my teeth. Slowly, methodically, I chewed.

  My foot moved, and I gasped with sudden agony. I looked again. My moccasins were gone. My feet were raw and bloody, the broken skin cracked and the cracks filled with sand.

  Scooping water with my left hand, as my right held the pistol, I bathed my feet. Slowly, for what must have been an hour, I bathed them.

  Listening into the night, I heard nothing. Peeling off my buckskin shirt, I got out my knife and cut the shape of my moccasins from it. One, then another. It was something I had done before. Sitting there in the darkness beside the Garlic water, I cut and made myself moccasins, and used the laces of the shirt’s neck and lower sleeves to bind them on.

  Again I drank, and drank.

  Moving away from the water, I found a place in the sand. Dared I sleep? I slept.

  And in the night the stars moved, and a night wind stirred the dried leaves on the scarce brush, and sand sifted, and in the night, something stirred, and my eyes opened.

  A man…moving…coming nearer.

  I sat up. There was a pale gray light in the eastern sky. I held the gun in my hand, and out of the desert a scarecrow of a man, staggering, with wild, staring eyes. He saw me and stopped.

  “Water?” he pleaded. “Water?”

  “Drop your gun belt. Your knife.”

  “Gone…back…back there.”

  “Drink, then, and be damned.”

  He drank, drank too much. Taking him by the hair, I dragged him back from the water. “Wait, you fool. You’ll kill yourself.”

  Yellow crept into the sky. He was an Anglo, a man burned red by the sun, a man whose boots were leather rags about his feet, an evil man with a knife-scarred face.

  “Where are the others?”

  “Gone…dead…back there.” He lifted a hand toward the desert. “Gone. All of them.”

  “Was Federico among them?”

  “He went back. For horses and to come again for you.” The man stared at me. “You are dead, too. He will have men waiting for you when you come from the desert. If you do not die here, they will be waiting at each water hole. He has a man who knows where you must come. They will be waiting.”

  Careful not to turn my back on him, I recovered the sleeves of my buckskin coat, and using rawhide threads cut from the remnants of the back after the moccasins were made, I doubled one sleeve over to make a bottom for the other sleeve and threaded it through holes in the sleeve.

  He watched me, staring. “If that’s s’posed to be a water bag, it won’t work. It’ll leak.”

  “Maybe. Some of it.”

  “You’re a fool. They’re goin’ to get you.”

  My hand waved toward the desert. “That’s what they thought.”

  He started toward the water, and I let him drink. “You’re a fool,” he said.

  “A live fool,” I said.

  I dipped my water bag into the water and lifted it out, full. Water ran from it, dripped from it.

  “See?”

  Yet much water remained inside. I lowered it into the water hole again and left it there to soak.

  “You…” I lifted my gun. “Get up.”

  He stared at me. Slowly he got up.

  “There’s another water hole right over there. It’s a part of this spring. You go over there and set. And you stay there. If you stand up again after you get there, I’ll kill you.”

  He stumbled over to the other hole and sat down.

  “You try to walk out of here, and you’ll die,” he shouted at me.

  It was only about thirty or forty feet away, but it gave me breathing room. After a while he stretched out on the sand to sleep. My back against a bank, I did likewise, dozing, sleeping, waking. He never stirred.

  All through the day, I rested, letting my feet heal, saturating myself with water. When the sun went down, I filled my water bag again, and holstering my gun, I turned into the desert.

  The man got up and stared after me. “You’ll die!” he shouted. “You’ll die out there!”

  There was no need to waste time looking back. I had far to go.

  “You’ll die!” he screamed.

  He ran a few steps after me. “You’ll die out there!” he screamed hoarsely. “You’ll die!”

  My crude water bag slung around my neck and hanging against my chest, I walked on.

  “…die!” he screamed.

  Far off there were mountains, and where there were mountains there might be hollows where water had been caught. The water in my bag would not last. Now it was saturated; soon the buckskin would dry and shrink. Would it help? At least there would be a few swallows before it was gone.

  A few swallows…Then?

  I thought of Meghan, and I said aloud what I had never dared say before. “Meghan, I love you.”

  My feet were bleeding again. Each step was agony. I chose a distant star above distant mountains.

  I walked on, into the night, into the desert.

  Chapter 50

  MISS NESSELRODE MADE coffee in the large pot. Soon the stage would come to the Bella Union and the newspapers would be brought to her. Several of her regulars were sure to drop in. A dozen of the town’s most prominent men had made her reading room a place of meeting, away from the noise of the saloons.

  The news of the day was discussed here before it appeared in the columns of the Star. In the beginning she had been merely a young woman who kept a book shop, but more and more she had been accepted into their conversations, although when more than two men were involved she retreated behind her desk.

  English had long been her preferred language, although every young woman of her class in Russia spoke French in common conversation, yet she kept her books and her notes in Russian for the sake of privacy.

  In Russia she would have been making tea in a samovar. How long ago it was! What if she had not been sent to Siberia? What if her brother had not been involved in that rather silly plot? By now she would have married, had children, and would be spending much of her life in France or Germany, perhaps Switzerland.

  She remembered her mother, that slender, beautiful woman with her kind gray eyes and her stately manner. Her father had been terribly proud of his wife, although he affected to disapprove of some of her too-liberal British ideas. They had met when he was on a diplomatic mission to England, and it had been immediate love. He had not even waited to be presented but had crossed the room and introduced himself. It had been shocking, but exciting, too. Her mother had often told her the story, a story that never grew old and which she had delighted in hearing.

  So far, far away, so long, long ago!

  She remembered playing croquet on the lawn, and while waiting for Mikhail to make his play, she would look off down the avenue of firs toward the lake. She loved that view, and how often she had walked to the lake with her father on a Sunday afternoon!

  By now she might have been a great lady, received by the czar and probably living at court. Although she had always preferred their country estates to living in St. Petersburg.

  Nor had Siberia been the cold, dismal place they all expected. In the town to which they had been exiled the winters were less rigorous than in St. Petersburg and she had found the people more open and friendly, and the countryside beautiful in summer. Although exile was considered the worst of thing
s, she had found it not at all bad, but then word had reached them of what was to happen, and they fled.

  So lost in her thoughts was she that when she turned and saw a man standing inside the door she was completely surprised. It was a man she had not seen before but immediately recognized for who he was—Yacub Khan.

  Her first impression was one of power, not muscular power alone, although that was obvious from his massive shoulders and mighty arms, but from something emanating from the man itself.

  He was no taller than she, but wide and thick. He stood facing her, his feet slightly apart, his loose shirt hanging outside his trousers. His face was broad, strongly boned, and his head was either bald or shaved.

  “You are friend to Meghan Laurel?”

  “I am.”

  “She goes to look for Johannes Verne.”

  “What? Meghan? But she cannot! She must not!”

  “She takes four men. One is Tomás Machado, a good man. Three packhorses.”

  If Meghan had gone into the wilderness looking for Johannes, she had not one chance in a thousand of finding him. He was pursuing horse thieves and would follow wherever the trail led. Meghan, having never been into the back country, could not appreciate the immensity of it, nor have the vaguest idea of what she was undertaking. She had ridden the trails in the Los Angeles Valley and into the San Gabriel and San Fernando valleys, but beyond the mountains it was something quite different.

  “She must be found before she reaches the desert.”

  “I go.”

  “You? Only an Indian could find them!”

  A glint of amusement showed itself. “I am born on the desert. My people were of the Taklamakan and mountains bordering it.”

  “I know of the Taklamakan. I crossed the Gobi as a young girl. I know of your people, but this desert is different, although less dangerous than yours.”

  “I shall find them.”

  “Johannes has been gone three weeks. No one has returned, so there will have been trouble.” She looked down at her desk, then looked up at Yacub Khan. “Johannes knew it was a trap. The stealing of horses was deliberate. They wished for him to follow.”

  “He will not be trapped.”

  “Yacub Khan, please bring her back. She is a young girl in love and she is my friend. She is very dear to Johannes, too.”

  When he had gone, she sat very still, remembering not the desert she had crossed with Johannes and his father, but that long-ago crossing of the Gobi. The Taklamakan she knew only by reputation; some said it was the worst desert on earth. In the far west of China it was reached by the Silk Road, which went around its border. That road had been taken by pilgrims from China proceeding to India to study Buddhism at its source. There had been great schools at Khotan, and the Buddha himself had been a Saka, an Indo-European people from Central Asia whose tribe had settled in Nepal.

  Such a man as Yacub Khan might find Meghan.

  But where was Johannes? Actually, now that she thought of it, he had been gone more than three weeks.

  Meghan herself had been worried about Johannes having enemies of whom he was not aware. At least he had been unaware of the true reason for their enmity, and she had herself been partly responsible for her father’s warning to Johannes, but that had been before she met Don Federico.

  After meeting him, her fears seemed ridiculous. Intrigued by his courtly manner and his obvious interest in her, she had accepted a contrary view, unwilling to believe that such a polished gentleman could also be plotting murder.

  Johannes had gone. He had left abruptly. Miss Nesselrode remembered that she herself had implied he might not return.

  Meghan had returned home sick and empty at the thought that she had driven him away, that he might not come back. She was used to the young men of the town, but Johannes was different. He possessed a quality she had not fathomed, a strangeness and a sort of inner quiet. Her father respected him, which was astonishing, as her father was rarely impressed by anyone.

  Yet she was not her father’s daughter for nothing. If Johannes would not come back, she would go after him. She told no one but the maid at her home, but she suspected Tomás had told Elena.

  Miss Nesselrode walked to the window and looked into the street. The idea that Meghan would follow Johannes into the desert had not occurred to her. Nor could Meghan have any idea of what she was getting into. Few Angelenos had knowledge of what lay over the mountains, nor were they interested. Nor was it the kind of conduct one expected from a well-behaved young lady.

  She heard the steps on the boardwalk and recognized them at once. Impulsively she started for the door as Jacob Finney pushed it open and stepped in.

  “Mr. Finney…!”

  “He’s still out there, ma’am. We recovered the horses, but they took out after Johannes. He told us if we got separated to bring the stock back here, that he’d take care of himself.”

  “He’s out there alone?”

  “We weren’t ready for the desert, ma’am. Neither were they. Don Federico and a couple of his men came back for fresh horses and outfits. I think they plan to locate on water holes at the desert’s edge and wait for him to show.”

  “How is it out there?”

  “Upwards of one hundred degrees, ma’am. If I know Johannes, he’ll come out of that desert alive, but nobody else will. I’ve heard him talk about it a time or two. Those Injuns and his pa, they taught that boy aplenty.”

  “Meghan has gone looking for him.”

  “Meghan? What in God’s world…?”

  “She’s a young girl, Mr. Finney, and she’s in love. She knows nothing of what is out there. The man she loves is gone and she is afraid he’ll never come back.”

  Jacob Finney swore softly, bitterly. How far had she gone? He asked quick, pointed questions. His thoughts raced. She would be impatient, and she would push it. Tomás was all right, but what if something happened to him? She’d be out there alone, with three men whom she did not know, and in bandit country. And how could she even dream of finding Johannes?

  Of course, Finney had been planning to go back. He had not wanted to leave Johannes out there, but they had the horses to consider, and Johannes in many ways was better off alone.

  He was dead beat. He’d just come in, and the trip had been a hard one. It was the same with Monte and Owen Hardin, and Hardin was upset because of the loss of his friend Myron Brodie.

  He needed rest. “You’re not as young as you used to be,” he told himself. Still, he was far from an old man, and he knew the desert somewhat.

  “Tomás will slow her down if he can. Maybe by the time she sees some of that country she will begin to understand what she’s up against.” He paused. “I’ll get the boys, but they’re dead beat, Miss Nesselrode. They came in off the trail all wore-out. We’ll do what we can.”

  “Yacub Khan went after her.”

  Finney wiped the sweatband of his hat, thinking. Yacub Khan? Some kind of an Oriental foreigner who had a small place over against the mountain. He had only seen him once that he remembered.

  “He is a friend of Captain Laurel’s.”

  “Some kind of foreigner, ain’t he? What good will he be out there?”

  “He grew up in a desert worse than the Mohave, a good deal worse.”

  “Can he sit a horse? I mean, most of those foreigners don’t know one end from the other, ’less they’re Englishmen.”

  “His people live on horseback. They are nomadic herdsmen, following the grass from the desert’s edge to the high mountain country. Mountains,” she added, “that make these look like prairie-dog mounds.”

  Finney was doubtful. “I been in the Sierras,” he said, “and the Rockies. There’s peaks in the Rockies that top out at fourteen thousand, a lot of them.”

  “Where he comes from they are twice that high,” she said quietly. “In the Kunlun and the Pamirs there are many peaks over twenty thousand feet. He’s used to rough country, Mr. Finney.”

  “Maybe. But can he fight?”
>
  “He can. His people all carry broadswords and rifles. They protect their herds from bandits and other nomads. He grew up fighting. They tell me, too, that he’s a master at several kinds of hand-to-hand fighting.”

  Finney was silent. Finally he dropped into a chair. He did not want to go back out there, but how to explain that? He had been constantly in the saddle for three weeks. There had been a short, hard fight, and above all he knew finding Johannes would be impossible. He would lose himself in that desert. He would go places no man on horseback could go unless he had three packhorses loaded with water.

  He did not know Meghan Laurel, but in his own mind he was sure she would give up and return. No young girl was going to buck the heat, the sweat, the sleeping out…

  She had to be crazy. Almost automatically he accepted the coffee Miss Nesselrode offered.

  Other men were coming in. Matt Keller, De La Guerra, and then Ben Wilson.

  “Captain Laurel’s daughter?” Wilson asked. “What in the world…?”

  “She’s in love,” Miss Nesselrode said.

  Wilson shrugged, with a wry smile. “I suppose that explains everything. I’ve been across that desert, and I would say somebody had better bring her back before she dies out there.”

  A young girl out there alone? Finney swore under his breath. Tomás was all right, but who were the others? And there were bandits out there, several roving bands along the fringe of the settlements, to say nothing of Indians.

  He put down his cup and got to his feet. “I’ll get some boys together,” he said. “We’ll go after her.”

  “Johannes will thank you for it. So will I.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  There were so many routes, so many trails. Could he find hers now?

  He got to his feet. Wilson glanced at him over the rim of his cup. “It’s a big country,” he said.

  “Yeah,” Finney said dryly.

  Wilson glanced at him again. “If she’s in a hurry, as she probably is, they will need fresh horses.”

  Their eyes met. Ben Wilson knew this country as well as anybody could, and he knew the only ranch where they could get fresh horses. It was a hangout for outlaws, for Vásquez and his lot, and Ben Wilson knew it. He also knew that Finney knew it.