A Hereford, or whiteface, was less likely to stampede, but if one started the rest would go along with the crowd. There was no way I could tackle that bunch of land-grabbers head-on, but there were several ways I might give them trouble. The first thing I had to do was to worry those longhorns. They were probably nervous enough but I’d leave nothing to chance.
So far as I’d been able to see they had altered no brands. They had simply drifted cattle over to range they claimed, and as cattle often strayed far afield nobody could then move in and brand whatever cattle there were.
Until now they had been doing all the scaring and the threatening. If all went well we would see how they liked it when somebody put a saddle on their own horse.
Mounted on the gray I scouted their camp. There were
COMMENTS: Yes, that is exactly how this story ends! Its beginning has something in common with the “suddenly out of place” situation found in Louis’s novel The Man Called Noon and it also harkens back to a few of his noir or crime thrillers from the days when he was writing for the pulp magazines.
Like “Borden Chantry” and several of Louis’s other stories, this looks like it is headed toward being a melding of the mystery and Western genres. I can never quite figure out how they did it, but Louis wasn’t the only writer who tried to create and solve mysteries in just one draft. I had a couple of conversations with novelist Tony Hillerman about how to pull this off, and it’s not easy. However, as in quite a few of the works in this book, I think Louis finally got to a point where he needed to do some more figuring before he continued. Here are a few lines out of his notes on this story:
Somebody seems to have visited the ranch during the night.
What was CARRIE doing in that cheap hotel where Bud Aylmer was killed?
Where are CARRIE’S cattle? Where are the horses? Why are the horses kept some distance from the ranch house?
Some of these questions may simply have been things that Dad figured he’d better clarify, but others may have been intended to be part of the mystery. Your guess as to which is which is as good as mine.
* * *
JACK CROSS
* * *
The Beginning of an Adventure Story
CHAPTER I
The name is Jack Cross, John Cross, if you want to be particular, and I’m a guy in need of a fast buck. So I’m standing on the Avenida de Almeida Ribeiro in Macao with ten dollars in my pocket and a .45 Colt in a shoulder holster.
Sure…I’m broke…but this is my backyard. Or it used to be, ’way back before the war. They knew me here in those old days, and they knew me on Malay Street in Singapore, in Shanghai’s Blood Alley, and on Grant Road in Bombay…and in a dirty little bar in a backstreet of Bangkok there’s a guy who holds mail for me.
Profession? Well…what can I say? I’m a guy who has been around, a guy who knows most of the answers but is quite sure he doesn’t know them all. I’m a guy who can use his mitts, a guy who can handle a rod, and I’ve run a machine gun a couple of times in wars that didn’t belong to me.
Beginning? Maybe there was never a beginning, and maybe there was a map of the world hanging on the wall when I was born. Maybe it was reading Jack London and Stevenson and Conrad. More likely it was a melody of foreign names, the sound of names that rang little bells in my brain, or great gongs. Names like Bangalore, Gorontalo, and Taku Bar.
Way down in my guts there was something that liked the sound of those strange and far-off places. Samarkand…Makassar…Kuala Lumpur…Chittagong…the Malabar Coast…the Banda Sea.
Education? Mostly the kind you get from learning what to do when somebody stabs a fast left for your mouth or when a guy comes at you with a shiv or sticks a rod into your belly.
The kind of education that enables you to take a Browning apart in the dark and under fire, or tells you how to tell the feel of gold from silver, or how to con a ship through a reef-strewn sea somewhere south of the Line.
Sure, I’ve read a book. In fact, I’ve read a lot of books, read them in the aimless, casual way of a man who loves to read and loves books for themselves. I’ve read them in fo’c’sles and bunkhouses from Magallanes to the Yukon, read them all, Plutarch, Thucydides, Homer, and Shakespeare, from the classics to the fast action magazines, and found plenty of interest in all of them.
What did I want from life? The sound of bow wash about the hull…the slat and slap of empty sails on a dead calm sea…the smell of copra and tar and musk and the acrid smell of burning camel dung.
Sure. And temple bells and elephant gongs, the hot, excited bodies of tan-skinned girls…the feel of a Colt butt bucking in my hand…the solid thrill of a hard punch landed…the knowledge of far-off places and seas untracked and unmarked…the smell of opium in the Shanghai “Trenches” and all the fierce, hard, lonely, beautiful intoxication of living all of life that I could get hold of.
Put it down in your book that I’m an unreconstructed savage, that I’m born out of time, that the Spanish main is gone and the free companies are gone and that Drake and Hawkins and even O’Reilly and Christmas have passed the way of all flesh. But put it down, too, that there’s always a war somewhere, always a fast buck to be made, and always a man or a woman who will take a chance when the going is rough. And put it down that the old spirit isn’t dead yet, and that if tomorrow, in spite of all those boys who are still babies at eighteen, if tomorrow somebody said they would need a crew to build a bridge on the moon, they’d have the office jammed within an hour.
Put it down that I’m a fool, that I’ll find my finish someday cursing my luck on some lonely reef in the wash of a weedy sea, or in some barroom with a knife in my back or some lead in my guts…but put it down that when that day comes I’ll have lived. I’ll have seen it all, known it all, and tasted it all.
So it’s been…and so it was last night when I heard that sampan paddle chunking astern of the freighter, the freighter that had been my home for the past three months.
It was past two a.m. and the ship was dark except for the anchor light forward and a bulb by the gangway where the night watch was loafing. We were due to put out to sea shortly after daybreak and I was restless. Standing beside the rail looking at the lights of Macao, I heard the paddle moving in its locks.
Then I saw the sampan not far off the stern, and just like that my mind was made up. He came at my low call and waited alongside. So I got my gear and lowered it with a heaving line then went down beside it.
It was an ugly part of town where he landed me and an ugly hour of night, but I’d landed in a lot of towns and this was no worse than many. Finally, I found a sleepy rickshaw coolie and shook him awake.
So I was on the beach again…like that first time, so long ago in Shanghai. Oh, those had been the good, hot, wonderful days! I’d landed there with forty cents, had a fight in the ring for a few bucks, a fight won quickly….Then there was the matter of some guns up the river in piano boxes, and of a man who ended his career with his head on a piece of pipe….There was a poker game up the Yangtze near Yichang with twenty thousand dollars on the table at one time….There had been jai alai games and horse races and dog races….And then there had been some tribute silk smuggled from the Forbidden City in Peiping in the darkness of a rainy night and sold to a Greek with a sweat-soiled collar….There had been dinners at the Del Monte, and dancing with Rose Marie of the Lido…the Peach Blossom Palace and there had been trips to that Venice of China, Hanchow.
There had been songs and laughter and stories told, and there were fights in the streets and there were dark-eyed Eurasian girls and sad Russians and turban-wearing Sikhs and a fortune teller who failed to tell his own and there was a dark night and a dark street and a time when two good British seamen jumped into a fight to help me and were killed for their pains…but several of the Chinese rivermen died, too, and I came away with a bloody coat and a half-dozen minor cuts and a gun in my pocket that I forgot to use…which comes of fighting with your hands until it is second nature to th
ink of no other weapon.
And those wonderful hours of talk over wine or whiskey, talk of the names of which history never speaks, the men like General Lee Christmas, Tracy Richardson, Tex O’Reilly, One-Arm Sutton, Rafael de Nogales, Larson of Mongolia, and Rajah Brooke, and other names that echo down the brassy halls of warlike memory.
These were the men of whom we talked for these were the men of our kind…and some of them were there among us.
So I was back again…back on the beach in the Far East and north of me there was war…and all over the East there was a stirring and moving of new forces rising…the Malays, the Chinese, the Tamils, the Bengalese…all of whom were feeling their own urge to freedom, to throw off the old shackles of colonial government, to remove the burden from the white man (who relinquished that burden bitterly), and to look around with a new awareness. But it was my East, the place I knew best.
The fingers of dawn felt their way down the quiet avenues of Macao, life began to stir again and the working citizens began to go about their business. I found my way to a seaman’s hotel and checked in, and after breakfast I started making the rounds.
Haig…he might be in Macao. The last I’d seen of him was before the war and probably he had been recalled to service. Giacomo…where was he?
It was past noon before I saw a familiar face. I was behind a table in a little bistro on a side street off the Avenida when he came in…Jimmy Pak Lung.
He turned quickly when I started up and then his face smoothed out and he came to me, his grin spread wide, his hand out. “John!” he said. “You’re back!”
We gripped hands and stared at each other and I never felt better. Jimmy was born in California, but nobody would have guessed he was anything but Chinese. He could play the cynical denizen of a treaty port or a wide-eyed rube from the interior, but he had all the mannerisms of an American, too.
So we talked, and the hours went by, and then he said, “You want to make a spot of cash?”
“Who doesn’t?”
“You’ve been up-country in China. I know a man who wants to go there.”
“Now?”
“Right now. And he’s got money, plenty of money.”
“What’s he after? He’s not a Russian, is he?”
“He’s a Yank, like you. I don’t know what he’s after, but it smells of money.”
So there was talk of this and that again, and finally back to this American, Jonathan Spurr, who wanted to fly into Red China at a time when Americans were hated by many and especially by the government. It was just such a trip as appealed to me…full of risk, yes, but a quick reward too.
So we went to see him, this Jonathan Spurr….
He rolled a fat cigar in his lips and he looked at me, and he didn’t like what he saw. I’ve read that look in the eyes of too many men before this and didn’t like it any better from him. I’m a big guy, six-one and an even two hundred pounds, but I carry no scars and your average punk who has never been across the street from home thinks a tough man should swagger and talk out the side of his mouth and act hard. It always irritates me because I’ve licked fifty guys who were just like that.
“You’ve been to Kansu?”
“Yeah.”
“Ever hear of Choni?”
“I’ve been there.”
That surprised him. He looked at me with more respect and some doubt. That I could understand, for Choni is one of the most out–of-the-way places in the world. Wars and revolutions had passed and repassed over China without ever touching it.
“Are there any white men there?”
A test question. “There was. A missionary, some kind of a Scandinavian. He’d been there a long time.”
“What were you doing there?”
When he asked me that I just looked at him. “We’re talking business, not history,” I said.
He didn’t like it and I didn’t give a damn. This guy was used to throwing his weight around, used to being obeyed. He would be hell to get along with until I’d broken him in…and I was ready to start just anytime.
“Could you take us there? In a plane?”
“Who,” I asked, “is ‘us’?”
“There will be four of us. The plane will carry eight and some freight. It’s an amphibian.”
“For enough money I’ll take you any place you damn well please.”
He rolled his cigar in his fat lips. “I’ve heard you were tough. You don’t look it.”
It was a stupid remark. The remark of a fool or some romantic girl who has never been out of her home circle. “And what,” I asked him, “does a tough man look like?”
“I know one when I see one.”
“You’re fortunate. It will save you a lot of trouble while you’re looking for one.” I got to my feet. “Look, friend, you’d better not tackle this sort of deal. You’re not going to be up to it.”
My hat was in my hand and I started around the table toward the door.
“What’s the matter?” he demanded. “You walking out?”
I turned back. “You may know a tough man when you see one but to me you assay like a forty-eight-carat sap.”
His face got red and he started to say something he would have been sorry for—after I’d hit him.
Then from behind me was another voice. “Take it easy, Jonathan. I think this is our man.”
He came into the room, a lean-bodied, older man with cold gray eyes and white hair. His face was weathered with the fine lines at the corners of his eyes that come from looking at too many hot suns.
“No man can talk to me like that!” Jonathan Spurr was a big wide-beamed man and he came blustering around the corner of his desk. He came around the corner of his desk and I stood there waiting for him, knowing how much I was going to enjoy it. Maybe he saw something of it in my eyes, maybe some little sixth sense of caution warned him he was running into trouble. Anyway, he slowed down.
“What’s the matter?” I asked him. “Don’t you want to lose some teeth?”
“Forget it!” It was the older man. “Take it easy, Cross. Spurr’s just on edge, that’s all. This is a big deal and we’ve got to keep our heads.”
Spurr mopped his face. “All right,” he said, more quietly, “let’s forget it. No need to go off half-cocked. If you’ve been in Choni you’re just the man we want.”
Right then the door opened again and a girl walked into the room. She was a blonde with a golden tan, and lovely blue eyes with a hint of Hell in them.
She came right up to me, and Spurr said, “Mr. Cross, my niece, Joan Iveson. And Doc Pardee, a friend of Joan’s father.”
“How do you do, Mr. Cross?”
“Better,” I said, letting my feelings show in my eyes with an overcoating of insolence. She stiffened a little. “Much better.”
Then I turned away from her and said to Spurr, “All right, lay it out for me. What’s the score? What’s in Choni that you want bad enough to risk your life to get?”
“Research,” he said. “I’m doing some research into the—”
“Nuts,” I replied shortly, “save that for somebody who will believe it. Talk turkey with me or get yourself another boy. You never went after anything in your life unless there was money in it.”
That he didn’t like, either, but he chewed on his cigar and then Pardee said, “Go ahead and tell him. He’ll have to know anyway.”
“Joan’s father had an uncle who was a missionary in western China. He saw something very valuable in a remote place. We’re going after it. We’re going to bring it back.”
He rolled his cigar in his lips and looked at me. “I want a man who knows that country,” he said, “and one who can handle a gun.”
CHAPTER II
“It will cost you,” I said, “it will cost plenty. Is there enough up there to pay for the trip?”
“There is,” he said, “and more.”
“Know anything about that country?”
“A little. We looked it up, studied it in books and ma
gazines.” Then he indicated Joan. “And she has her great-uncle’s notes. He was very accurate as to details.”
“That will help. As for the books and magazines, few of them can give you anything that will help in that country. In the first place, nobody out here knows what has happened back there. Not even me. Choni has lived under the rule of a hereditary prince for many years, and maybe it still does. It is an out-of-the-way valley green and lovely, and not too easy of access. But the Reds have been getting in everywhere so they are probably there, too.”
“We expected that. However, we heard that a little money…” Spurr rubbed his fingers together suggestively.
“Maybe. Money used to buy almost anything in China, and with some of them it will yet. But a true Communist? Forget it. Money won’t work and whatever you bring with you they can take by force. Any plane that can make it in there will be especially valuable.”
“We’ve thought of that. That’s one reason why we want a man who can handle a gun.”
“Is what you want right at Choni?”
“No…it is beyond Choni.”
Beyond…mountains and gorges, high, cloud-piercing peaks, black canyons, trackless and lonely, boiling rivers of black water laced with white. The strange, bleak, lonely land lost in the interior of a vast continent. The very thought of it made me stir restlessly, for it was that sort of thing that had drawn me back.
That vast and lonely land where Tibet meets Sinkiang, the land of the Kun Luns, the Altin Tagh, the Chang Tang. A land of lonely ice lakes and forbidding mountains, the land of the white bear and the snow man, the land of the Lolos and the Ngoloks. A bitter, savage mountain fastness where the outside world was a rumor and nothing more, where the wars and dynasties of China were only travelers’ tales and the doings of the outside world were misty legends, faintly known and altogether, to those people, unbelievable.
Volume 1: Unfinished Manuscripts, Mysterious Stories, and Lost Notes from One of the World's Most Popular Novelists Page 35