The Collected Short Stories of Louis L'Amour, Volume 7

by Louis L'Amour

  When the water was hot, he made coffee and laced it with whisky and burned his mouth gulping a cup of it, then another. Then he pulled himself, sliding the chair by gripping the wall, until he was close to Cap Moffit. He tied the wounded killer’s wrists and ankles. Some time later, sprawled on the bed, he passed out again.

  HOURS LATER, WITH daylight streaming in the door from a sinking sun, he awakened. His eyes went at once to Moffit. The wounded man lay on the floor, glaring at him.

  Bostwick swung his feet to the floor and stared blearily at Moffit. “Trussed up like a dressed chicken!” he sneered. “A hell of a gunman you are!”

  Moffit stared at him. “You don’t look so good yourself!” he retorted.

  Bostwick caught the ledge along the wall with his good hand and pulled himself erect. He slapped the gun in his waistband. “I still got a gun,” he said, and crept along the wall to the kitchen where he got the fire going, then fell into a chair. “You ain’t so hot with a short gun,” he said.

  “I got you.”

  Bostwick chuckled. “Yeah, you’re holding me, ain’t you? I’m dead, ain’t I? You two-bit imitation of a killer, you never saw the day you could kill me.”

  Moffit shook his head. “Maybe you’re right,” he said. “You must have three bullets in you now.”

  “Four hits you made.” Bostwick chuckled. “I’m carrying no lead.”

  His stomach felt sick, but he managed to get water on the stove and make coffee. When he fell back in the chair again he felt weak and sicker.

  “You better set still,” Moffit said. “You’re all in.” He paused. “Whyn’t you shoot me when you had the chance?”

  “Aw”—Bostwick stared at him, grim humor in his eyes—“I like a tough man. I like a fighter. You did pretty good up on that mountain last night, pretty good for a drygulching killer.”

  Cap Moffit said nothing. For the first time the words of another man hurt. He stared down at his sock feet, and he had no reply to make.

  “You going to turn me in for a hanging?” he finally asked.

  “Naw.” Bostwick poured coffee into a cup and slid it across the table. “Somebody’ll shoot you sure as the Lord made little apples. You ever come back around here and I will. This here Tom Utterback who owns this spread, he’s a good man.”

  “He’s got a good man for a friend.”

  TWO SICK, WOUNDED MEN struggled through four days, but it was Bostwick who struggled the hardest. Moffit watched him, unbelieving. It was impossible that any man could be so tenacious of life, so unbelievably tough. Yet this big, hard man was not giving up. No man, Moffit felt suddenly, could kill such a man. There was something in him, something black, bitter and strong, something that would not die.

  On the sixth morning, Cap Moffit was gone. He had taken a gray from the other corral and he had gone off, riding his recovered saddle—wounded, but alive.

  Tom Utterback rode up to the ranch on the ninth day. He stared at the pale shadow of a man who greeted him, gun in hand. He stared at the bloody bandage on the leg.

  “You wasn’t in that gunfight in town, was you?” he demanded.

  “What gunfight?”

  “Stranger name of Cap Moffit. He had some words with Charley Gore and two of his boys. They shot it out.”

  “They get him?”

  “Don’t know. He was shot up bad, but he rode out on his own horse.”

  “What happened to Gore?”

  Utterback shook his head. “That stranger was hell on wheels. He killed Gore and one of his men and wounded the other.”

  “Yeah, he was a good man, all right.” Jim Bostwick backed up and sat down in a chair. “Make some coffee, will you? And a decent meal. I’m all in.”

  A few minutes later he opened his eyes. He looked up at the ceiling, then out the door where another sun was setting.

  “I’m glad he got away,” he muttered.

  Trail to Squaw Springs

  Jim Bostwick was packing a grouch, and he didn’t care who knew it. The rain that began with a cloudburst had degenerated into a gully-washing downpour that for forty-eight hours showed no indication of letup. Bostwick, riding a flea-bitten cantankerous roan, was headed for the mountains to file a claim.

  Rain slanted dismally across the country before him, pounding on his back and shoulders, beating on his waxed canvas slicker until his back was actually sore. Under a lowering gray sky the rain drew a metallic veil over the country, turning the road into a muddy path across what had been desert two days ago and would be desert again within two hours after the rain ended.

  Bostwick swore at the roan, who merely twitched his ears, being familiar with cowhands and their ways. He knew the cussing didn’t mean anything, and he knew the man who rode him took better care of him than any rider he’d had.

  Bostwick swore because he wanted breakfast, wanted a drink, because he hadn’t slept the night before, because he needed a shave and his face itched, and he swore on general principles.

  His boss on the Slash Five had given him five days off in which to file on his claim, get drunk or whatever he pleased, and it looked like it would rain the whole five days, which Bostwick took as a personal affront.

  Bostwick was a cowhand. Not a top hand, just a good, six-days-a-week, fourteen-hours-a-day cowhand who could handle a rope or a branding iron, dig post-holes, mend fences, clean water holes, shoe a horse, and play a fair hand of bunkhouse poker.

  He was twenty-nine years old, had never married, and he made forty dollars a month. Several times a month he managed to get good and drunk. And every drunk began or ended with a fistfight. To date he was breaking even on the fights.

  He wore a gun but had never drawn it in anger in his life. He had killed only one man he knew of, an Indian who was trying to steal his horse. That was when he was sixteen and coming West in a covered wagon.

  At five eleven and weighing one hundred and seventy pounds his method of fighting was simple, to wade in swinging until something hit the dirt, either him or the other fellow. He fought because he enjoyed it and never carried a grudge that lasted longer than the headache.

  The rain-blackened lava flow on his left ended and the trail curved around it into a huddle of nondescript buildings, for the most part unpainted and weather-beaten. This was the town of Yellowjacket.

  The main street was empty, empty except for a covered wagon whose off wheels were on higher ground, giving a precarious tilt to the wagonbed. A man in a tattered slicker stood before the wagon talking to a girl whose face was barely revealed through the parted canvas.

  “He doesn’t plan to give them back, Ruthie,” the old man was saying. “He doesn’t aim to ever give them back. He says we owe him because he fed them.”

  The thin, querulous voice carried through the rain to Bostwick, who turned his eyes to them. There was something about the large dark eyes and the thin child’s face that disturbed him. As he drew abreast of them the old man looked up at him out of faded blue eyes, then back to the girl.

  “You’d better get into the wagon, Grandad. We can’t do anything until the storm breaks.”

  Bostwick rode to the livery stable, stripped the gear from the roan and rubbed the horse reasonably dry with handfuls of hay, but the ungrateful beast nipped at his elbow and, as he departed the stall, took a playful kick at him that he evaded more from habit than attention. Without looking back he slogged through the mud to the saloon. There was no sound from the wagon as he went by.

  The Yellowjacket Saloon was a bar fifteen feet long with a row of bottles behind, mud mixed with sawdust on the plank floor and a potbellied stove glowing red like an expectant boil. Behind the bar there was a big man with a polished face and a handlebar mustache. His hair started midway on the top of his head and was jet-black. He had big, square fists and his hands and arms were white as a woman’s.

  A man dozed in a chair against the wall, his hat over his eyes, another slept with his head on a card table. At the other table four men played a lackluster game
in a desultory fashion with a dog-eared deck of cards. From time to time one or the other of them would turn his head to spit at a box of sawdust, and from time to time one of them hit it.

  Bostwick removed his hat, slapped the raindrops from it with a blow against his leg and said, “Gimme a shot of rye.” The bartender glanced at Jim’s broken nose as he poured the drink.

  A man in a mackinaw who sat near the glowing stove took his pipe from his mouth. “Just the same, I think it’s mighty mean of him to take their horses. How are they going to get out of here?”

  A man with a streaked blond mustache glanced cynically at the first speaker. “You know Pennock. He doesn’t plan for them to leave, not a-tall!”

  “He seen that girl,” the man in the mackinaw said. “Ain’t many women come to Yellowjacket. Besides, that old man was all set to file on Squaw Springs, and Pennock figures that’s his’n.”

  Jim Bostwick downed his drink. Squaw Springs? That was the claim he’d planned to file on.

  He let the bartender refill his glass. “He filed on Squaw Springs?”

  “Pennock? Why should he? Who’s going to butt in when he says it’s his’n? They say that gun of his packs seven notches, or could if he wished it.”

  “It could,” the bartender said. “We all know two notches that could go on it. Sandy Chase tried Pennock’s game and came up a loser.”

  “Ought to be a law against killin’ when the ground’s all froze up. Grave diggin’ no pleasure any time, but in frozen ground?”

  “Makes for shallow graves,” somebody said, “better when Judgment Day comes.”

  “That girl ain’t no more’n sixteen or seventeen. It’s a damn shame.”

  “You go tell that to Pennock.”

  Nobody replied to that. Well, it was none of his fuss. Besides, they planned to file on his claim, as did Pennock. “Where’s the grub-pile?” he asked.

  “Two doors down.” He glanced again at the broken nose. “You a fighter?”

  Bostwick buttoned his slicker. “Only when I’m pushed.” He started for the door and heard the man in the mackinaw say, “He killed Chase over a woman. What was the other one about?”

  “Feller aimed to file on Squaw Springs. Pennock brought some sort of a charge against him, and the feller got riled. Figured he was a tough case and maybe in his home country he was.”

  “He was too far from home, then. I’m not hunting any beef with Jack Pennock!”

  Jim pulled his hat low over his eyes. Shoulders hunched against the rain, he slopped through the mud to the light already showing from the boardinghouse window. The covered wagon was directly across the street and, as he glanced over, he saw the girl getting down from the wagon. Averting his eyes he ducked into the door.

  A big-bosomed woman with a red, Irish face pointed at the mat. “Wipe your feet, an’ wipe ’em good!”

  Meekly, Bostwick did as he was told. Taking off his hat and slicker he hung them from pegs near the door and seated himself at the long table.

  “You’re early, stranger,” the Irish woman said, “but you look hungry, so set up. I’ll feed you.”

  Bostwick looked up as the door closed. It was the girl from the wagon. She had dark hair and large dark eyes. Her face was oval and quite pretty. She had a coffeepot in her hand. She looked at him, then turned hastily away as if she had seen too many of his kind. Bostwick flushed.

  “Ma’am? Can I buy some coffee? Grandad’s having a chill.”

  “I shouldn’t wonder, sloppin’ around in the rain like he’s been doin’. You two goin’ to pay Jack Pennock what he asks?”

  Her lips, delicate as rose petals, trembled. “We can’t. We just don’t have it.”

  The woman filled the coffeepot and waved payment aside. “You take it along, honey. I wouldn’t know what to charge for that little dab of coffee.”

  “But I—! I do want to pay.”

  “You go along now. It’s all right.”

  When the girl had gone, she brought food to Bostwick. “It’s a shame!” she said. “A downright shame!”

  Jim Bostwick helped himself to a slab of beef and some mashed potatoes. “Who is this Pennock?” he asked, without looking up.

  The woman turned to look at him. “He’s the town marshal. More, he’s the boss around here, and folks know it.”

  “Nobody stands against him?”

  “Some tried. Things happened to them. Jack Pennock is a hard man.”

  He was getting bored by that repeated comment. “When did those folks get here?”

  “Yesterday. Pennock took their horses, impounded them for being in the street all night. Back when the mining boom was on, the town council passed that rule because the streets were so crowded at night a body couldn’t get through. After the boom died people forgot about it until Pennock was elected marshal, then he dug into the town laws and dug up a lot of regulations, all of which show profit for him.”

  The door opened and the man in the mackinaw came in followed by his blond-mustached friend. Jim was aware of their attention.

  “Howdy, Kate!”

  “Howdy, Harbridge! How are you, Grove? How’s Emma doin’?”

  “Ailin’,” Grove replied cheerfully.

  The bartender came in and behind him, another man. Talk around the table died and Bostwick looked up. The newcomer was a big man, heavy-shouldered with bold black eyes. Instinctively, Bostwick knew this was Pennock. The man sat down near him and instantly Bostwick felt the stirring of an inner rebellion. There was something deep within him that deeply resented such men.

  Bostwick was, as many an American has been before and since, a man who resented authority. He knew its necessity and tried to conform but when that authority became domineering, as this man obviously was, Bostwick’s resentment grew.

  More than that, very big men who used their size to overawe others irritated him. That accounted for the fact that he had lost as many fights as he had, for he was always choosing the biggest, toughest ones. Large men put him on edge, and he was on edge now.

  “Stranger in town?” Pennock asked abruptly.

  “No.” Bostwick could not have told why he chose to deliberately antagonize the man. “I been in town more’n an hour.”

  Pennock did not reply, but Bostwick was aware of a subdued stir down the table. He reached over and took the coffeepot almost out of Pennock’s hand and filled his cup. The big man’s eyes hardened, and he studied Bostwick carefully.

  “Don’t look at me,” Jim said, “I put my horse in the barn.”

  Somebody snickered and Pennock said, “I didn’t ask about your horse. Seems to me, stranger, you’re somewhat on the prod.”

  “Me?” Bostwick looked surprised. “I’m not huntin’ trouble. I’m not expectin’ trouble, either. Of course, if I was an old man with a pretty young granddaughter I might feel different.”

  Pennock put his cup down hard. “I don’t like that remark. If you’re huntin’ trouble you’re sure headed right at it.”

  “I ain’t huntin’ trouble, but there’s no law against a man thinkin’ out loud. I’m just of the opinion that a town that will make trouble for a sick old man and his granddaughter is pretty small stuff.”

  “Nobody asked you,” Pennock said.

  Pennock had an ugly expression in his eyes, but Bostwick was suddenly aware that Pennock was in no hurry to push trouble. That was an interesting point. Because he was a stranger? Because the attack had surprised him? Because Pennock was a sure-thing man who had no desire to tackle tough strangers? It was a point worthy of some thought.

  Talk started up again, and Kate came around and laid an enormous slab of apple pie on Bostwick’s plate. When he looked up, she was smiling.

  No man such as Pennock just happens. Each has a past and perhaps somewhere back down the line Pennock was wanted. Or maybe he had taken water for somebody—

  “Pennock?” he muttered. “That name does sound familiar.” Bost-wick looked him over coolly. “Been around here long?”


  Pennock’s lips thinned out, yet he fought back his anger. “I’ll ask the questions here. What do you want in Yellowjacket?”

  “Just passin’ through.”

  “A drifter?”

  “No, I’m with a big outfit south of here, below the Bradshaws. The Slash Five.”

  Grove looked up at the mention of the name. “Ain’t that the outfit that treed Weaver?”

  It had been a fight with some tinhorn gamblers, but Bostwick lied, “We didn’t like the town marshal. He gave one of our boys a rough time, so we just naturally moved in.”

  Kate asked, “What happened to the marshal?”

  “Him? Oh, we hung him!” Bostwick said carelessly. “That is, we hung the body. I figure he was already dead because we dropped a loop on him and drug him maybe three hundred yards with some of the boys shootin’ into him as we drug him. He was a big feller, too.”

  “What’s that got to do with it?” Pennock’s face had lost color but none of the meanness in his eyes.

  “Huh? Oh, not much! Only them big fellers don’t hang so good. Bodies are too heavy. This feller’s head pulled off. Would you believe it? Right off!”

  Pete and Shorty would get a hoot out of that story. Just wait until he told them! They’d never hung anybody or dragged anybody. A couple of the tinhorns tried to shoot it out but Shorty was, for a cowhand, mighty good with a gun. He nailed one, and Pete wounded the other one. Then they had pitched all the rest of the tinhorns’ gear into the street and ran them out of town in their sock feet.

  He was aware the others were enjoying his baiting of the town marshal. He was enjoying it himself, and with a good meal inside him he had lost his grouch. But none of this was getting him anywhere closer to Squaw Springs—nor was it getting that girl and her grandad out of trouble.

  It was then he remembered they were planning to file on Squaw Springs themselves, so if somehow he got them out of trouble—

  He stopped abruptly. Now who said he was getting them out of trouble? What business was it of his? A man could get himself killed, butting into such things.

  But saying he did get them out of trouble, then they would be going after the same claim he wanted!