Volume 1: Unfinished Manuscripts, Mysterious Stories, and Lost Notes from One of the World's Most Popular Novelists

by Louis L'Amour

  In one out of the dozen drafts of Journey to Aksu, Louis’s initial description of Sinkiang, the mysteries of the Taklamakan Desert, and the City of the Blue Wall were followed by these words:

  For I, at last, had come to this place, a place I remembered, yet did not remember, brought here by a series of seemingly casual meetings, objects, ideas…even dreams.

  And by several people…a Gypsy man in my own backyard, by Sleeth in San Pedro, a Buddhist monk on the Irrawaddy, and by Haig, that causal wanderer.

  The night winds rustle the leaves….The desert waits, softly, like a cat, crouching.

  Then the manuscript goes into a flashback that is, for all intents and purposes, the version of the Samsara fragment that begins in young Louis Lamoore’s home in Jamestown, North Dakota:

  A man with gold rings in his ears…a vase of ancient glass…a fragment of carved stone…and a girl.

  There is no indication of how we get from the boy who meets a mysterious Gypsy in his backyard, or from the uncertain young man trying to go to sea, to the cynical and worldly professional soldier, Medrac. Perhaps there were many other adventures between the time he shipped out and when he arrived in China, adventures that brought maturity and toughness. Certainly, the story mentions nearly a year spent in the west of China….However, it is best to remember that these were drafts, written at different times and with different intents. It is fun to look at Samsara and Journey to Aksu as one consistent story, but that is not the only possibility.

  It is much more likely that, over the years, Louis split this story into two separate tales, or was combining two tales to make just one….I cannot tell.

  What I do have is some other pieces of the narrative, so we can put together a bit more of what he intended. All in all, Dad left behind twenty-two separate fragments of Journey to Aksu. He attempted to begin it over and over. Sometimes these attempts were nearly identical and other times quite different. On many occasions, we have only a page or two from the midst of a more complete manuscript. The rest of the clues to what Louis was attempting are lost forever.

  The following is from a flashback that deals with Medrac’s first arrival in China:

  To be frank, I was puzzled over my situation, but had accepted it with caution. From my arrival in Shanghai with forty cents in my pocket to my present predicament, events had moved without seeming purpose.

  From that first evening when I came ashore from a sampan at Wayside Pier, my situation was clear. I needed money. Forty cents was not going to get me far.

  My assets, except the obvious physical ones, were few. I was tall, dark, and broke. A satisfactory able-bodied seaman with the rudiments of navigation, a good hard-rock miner, a fair to middling lumberjack, and better than average at prizefighting, judo, and karate. None of these talents seemed calculated to help me find a place to sleep or anything to eat in a town where none of them were particularly in demand.

  The theoretical skills that I possessed were hard to evaluate and had never been tested. From my grandfather, an officer in the Civil and Indian Wars, I had learned the basic fundamentals of military tactics, developed by much discussion of the methods used by Grant, Lee, Stonewall Jackson, Sherman, and Thomas, to name a few. Along with some mildly profane comments on Nathan Bedford Forrest and John Singleton Mosby, there had been out-and-out respect for the Sioux.

  That initial curiosity had led me to a study of the tactical writing of Sun Tzu, Vegetius, Marshal Saxe, Napoleon, and a few dozen others. And along the way I had picked up the working fundamentals of various guns and weapons. In the China in which I had landed these were marketable talents.

  My first move after landing was to find a seaman’s hangout on the chance that I would come across someone I knew who would stake me to a few dollars until I could find a job or a ship. What I found was a girl.

  Or she found me.

  Contrary to the movies, merchant seamen do not go ashore in their working clothes; several of the men in the place were fairly well dressed, and most of them were neat, although occasionally one was rumpled and unshaved. These were usually the ones who had been ashore several days and were obviously influenced by the cup. My own suit was dark blue, tailored on London’s Bond Street, my hair trimmed, my shoes polished. Looking like someone to the manor born, I had in my pockets just the price of a bottle of beer.

  COMMENTS: Could the girl mentioned above be the one referred to in the opening lines of Samsara? Was she the emissary of the crippled arms dealer known to Sleeth? I have no idea. What I do know is that Medrac’s background of learning military tactics from his grandfather is identical to my father’s, and the story of jumping ship in Shanghai, which is also described in the Jack Cross fragment, is one he told too.

  From Shanghai, the information we have picks up Medrac in Suchow (Suzhou) a city in the western Chinese province of Kansu (Gansu). This would have been weeks or months after his arrival in China, and certainly weeks or months before his arrival at the City of the Blue Wall. At some point during his stay in Shanghai, Medrac has been hired to perform a minor military mission by a corrupt Chinese general. He has traveled to the western edge of China proper, and with his small detachment of troops, is just about to head into Sinkiang. He must decide whether to follow the northern route or the more obscure southern Silk Route around the Taklamakan Desert to Aksu near the Soviet border:

  “You go to Aksu?”

  “Those are my orders.”

  “On the northern road there are Tungan soldiers, soldiers turned bandit since General Ma was defeated.”

  “Nonetheless…”

  “Of course. It is your duty.”

  The words were gently spoken, but they posed a delicate question also, a question I had been asking myself. How much duty did I owe?

  The Ladakhi with the pockmarked face was, it appeared, a chance traveler, also going west. “A man must follow his destiny,” he said. “If your journey is to Aksu, so be it.”

  He must have guessed my uneasiness, must have seen how alone I was. For that matter he was also alone, or appeared to be.

  Throughout the day he had loitered about the camp, talking to me whenever the others could not listen, reaching out with tentative fingers toward my plans. Had we not been soldiers and well armed I should have suspected him of being a spy for thieves, but at the time I had thirty-two men equipped with modern rifles, five machine guns, and two mortars.

  “Even to Aksu the southern way is best. You will find no Tungans there, and at a point due south of Aksu you may strike north across the Taklamakan and come easily to its gates. That is, if you still wish…”

  The note was crumpled in my pocket and he had been close by when the ragged boy brought it to me. Had he seen it? The boy had been clever, so it was unlikely that the loiterer had seen anything. Yet the note was itself mysterious.

  Using one hand only I had thumbed open the folded paper and glanced at it by firelight.

  Come to the House of the Five Dragons. The one who loaned you the Tao-Te-Ching sent me. I have only three hours.

  There was no signature, and I knew it could be a trap. Suspicion is a friend to the stranger, yet who could know about the loaning of the Tao-Te-Ching?

  Only Haig had been present that afternoon in the apartment on Avenue Edward VII in Shanghai.

  The wind was rising. Ragged clouds raced the moonlit sky. A wall of wind struck the building in whose courtyard we were camped. Ancient timbers creaked, dust swirled.

  Kicking dirt over the fire, I smothered the coals. The man with the pockmarked, knife-scarred face had wandered off. When I stepped over the collapsed timbers of the gate the wind tore at my throat, blowing the breath back into my lungs.

  The House of the Five Dragons had been pointed out to me as one of the oldest in Suchow, dating back to the time of the Old City.

  The midnight streets were empty of all save the wind that roared in from the western desert, bringing with it a driving storm of fine gravel and sand.

  Several t
imes I hesitated at corners or in the shadow of a wall to look behind me, but I seemed not to have been followed. I had no idea why I should be followed, but I was in a strange land, among strangers, and the circumstances were unusual. Lately, I found myself growing suspicious. That was why we were still here when two days ago we should have gone on, toward Aksu.

  The vast old structure of the House of Five Dragons was dark and silent but for the ocean of wind that beat against its walls.

  Undoubtedly I was a fool to have come here. Who, in this place, would know Haig? Or know that I knew him? Yet Haig was a peculiar man, with friends in all manner of odd places, and he had, so I’d heard, a way of disappearing for months on end, going off somewhere inland. But why should Haig send a message to me across more than a thousand miles of China?

  There was a huge wooden gate, and beside it, a door. Lifting the latch—there was no question of knocking on such a night—I stepped inside. Behind my belt my pistol was a comforting thing, and I unbuttoned my coat with my left hand.

  The outer court was bare under the moon. An ancient cart leaned drunkenly against the far wall, poplars lashed about with slender limbs so the wind might know their agony, and down a long arcade there was a faint gleam of light. Like the house where we had camped, this was an abandoned place…or so it seemed. The wind thundered among the roofs. Opening the door, I stepped inside.

  The room was large, drafty, and high of ceiling. At the far side was a k’ang…a raised portion of the floor heated by a stone fireplace and used as a bed. At a small table alongside the k’ang a solitary man sat smoking a cigarette. A lean, raw-boned man with a narrow, tough face and a lantern jaw, he wore a leather jacket unbuttoned down to the last two buttons, a gray wool shirt, and a scarf tied around his throat, cowboy style. His hair was rust-colored and there was a hint of freckling under the skin. “I’m Milligan,” he said.

  A battered coffeepot stood at the edge of a fire, and from the edge of the k’ang he took a spare cup and saucer and filled the cup with coffee, black and steaming.

  “You got a friend, Medrac. A mighty good friend.”

  “How do you happen to be away up here?” I asked.

  “I get around. Flew up to Kanchow for a fella. I got my own ship. Fly charters for whoever.” He rubbed out his cigarette and started to shape another. “Haig asked me to tip this hand for you.” He looked at me over the cigarette he was building, his eyes slate-gray. “You’re in trouble, amigo, plenty of trouble.”

  “I’ve had a hunch.”

  “Why do you think you were picked for this job? Because you’re a foreigner, you’re the fall guy. If anything goes haywire, you get the ax…and I mean ax.”

  He lighted the fresh cigarette. “Haig steered me into half the money I’ve made in this godforsaken country.”

  The coffee was good. The last time I’d tasted coffee like that was in a cow-camp down in the Big Sandy, in Arizona.

  “Did you ever think why the general picked you for this job? You ain’t been in the country long and he’s got you figured for a greenhorn. If anything goes wrong, if his buddies find those guns are going to the Communists, then this is your deal, not his. You get knocked off and you can’t talk and nobody can prove anybody was in it but you. If you bring it off, then the general has sold a big load of contraband at four or five hundred percent profit.”

  “I was told to drive back six hundred horses.”

  “From Aksu? They’ve got horses there, all right, and those horses will be loaded with goods brought over from Alma-Ata, in Soviet Russia.

  “As for horses, there’s no need to go as far as Aksu if they want horses for the army, like they claim.“

  “Nothing was said about those horses carrying packs.”

  “Of course not. But you’ll find they are. And the packs they carry will be machine guns, rifles, mortars, and ammo.”

  “The general is a Kuomintang man.”

  “Don’t kid yourself, friend. He’s like all the rest, feathering his own nest, playing both ends against the middle. I don’t know about Chiang, but that crowd around him are a bunch of highbinders. They rob the country and they rob each other.”

  He gulped the hot coffee, then took up his cigarette.

  “Look,” he said after a pause, “you picked yourself a hot package. The way I see it you got two choices. First, you drop it right here and fly out with me, then grab yourself a ship out of Shanghai, work-away or anything you can get.”

  “And the other choice?”

  “Go ahead with the deal. Accept the goods all innocent as you please, then meet me somewhere and we’ll take your cargo and fly it elsewhere. We sell the goods to the highest bidder, split the take, and scram.

  “Now you take Feng…the Christian General…I know him and like him and he’d give his eyeteeth to lay hands on that cargo. Say ten percent off the top for squeeze and we split the rest any way you want it.”

  He squinted his eyes through the smoke. “You got any idea what that cargo will be worth, delivered in the middle of China today? A quarter, maybe even a half-million dollars. I know at least three places I could turn that cargo over for gold money…cash on the barrelhead.”

  He paused again, finishing his coffee. “There’s one thing. Like I said, if anything goes wrong you get the ax, and the man who’ll use it on you is right along with you.”

  Well, I just looked at him.

  “Fact,” he said. “Haig told me that, too.”

  Mentally, I considered the men with me. There was no reason to doubt it; certainly none of them owed any loyalty to me.

  “Did he have any idea who it was?”

  “No…and there might be more than one. I’d guess there would be at least two.” He grinned at me. “The general would be worried for fear one might sell out.”

  Of course, Milligan was right. The quickest, simplest, and smartest thing was to cut and run. Drop the whole thing now, fly out to Shanghai, and grab the first ship off the waterfront.

  The trouble was I was tired of being broke. At fifteen I’d left home and since then had worked in construction camps, mines, and lumber mills, drifting from job to job, going to sea occasionally and prizefighting when the chance offered. It all added up to nothing except that in the process I had gotten the edges of an education in libraries and from books carried along as I traveled.

  Milligan picked up the cups and rinsed them out with what remained of the coffee. “I got to take out.” He dumped the pot and the cups into a canvas sack.

  “Thanks. I’ll stay on.”

  “Your funeral.” He glanced at me. “You got a rod?”

  Pulling back my coat, I showed it to him.

  “May be the only friend you got. Keep it handy.” He started buttoning his coat. “You bring that stuff here, to this house. I’ll find a buyer. We split and I’ll fly you the hell out of the country.”

  He picked up an old baseball cap and put it on. “You get caught with this stuff and they’ll shoot you. The Chinese will believe anything of a white man; you’re just a renegade. That’s why they picked you.”

  There were thirty-two men waiting for me on the edge of town and any one of them might be the hatchet man. And they spoke a language I did not know, except for the two noncoms, who spoke English.

  “You get back with those guns and stash them here. There’ll be a man around, a man you can trust.”

  Suddenly, he seemed to think of something. “Look, you’ll go from here to Anshi. Now in Anshi there’s an old house”—he drew a design on the wall with his finger—“it stands about there. In that house there’s a small cache of guns and ammunition. Might he helpful, for your men or bribes or some such.

  “Joe Davenport was a buddy of mine. We did a piece in the Marines together when I first came out. When he got his discharge he went into the munitions business, smuggling and selling. This lot in Anshi he was supposed to deliver to General Ma, but after he’d cached them some trigger-happy son-of-a-bitch went and shot him. So far as I
know, those guns are still there.”

  “You’ve been here a long time.”

  He hunched his shoulders against the wind and grinned at me with one side of his mouth. “I’m an old hand, son. I came out in ’21 with the Marines, and there was eight years of that; when I paid out of the service I stayed on, wanting to make a fast buck.

  “Well, I learned to fly, bought myself an old crate, and went into business. This is my third ship.”

  “How about the fast dollars?”

  “Oh, I had ’em! I had ’em three or four times, but have you ever been in Shanghai with twenty thousand dollars in your kick? It doesn’t stay there long!”

  He dropped his cigarette and thrust out his hand. “All right, boy…Luck. You’ll need it.”

  He turned away from me and started off, walking into the wind, and for a moment or two I had to fight down an impulse to run after him. But I stood there until he disappeared in the night and then I turned and went back to camp.

  —

  My orders had been definite. Follow the route north of the Taklamakan to Aksu…but suppose I didn’t? Suppose, without even suggesting it to any of the others, I cut off to the south?

  It was a rare Han Chinese who liked the desert or the wild country, and from ancient times until now, these western deserts had been considered the end of the world. The route to Anshi and beyond would wind among the dunes somewhat, and there would be several changes of direction. Suppose I followed the advice of my pockmarked friend and went off to the south; how would that affect the plans of those with me, whose mission it was to eliminate me if anything went wrong?

  Suppose I got them into wild country where nobody but me actually knew where we were?