He was still smiling - and he was dead.
Ruble Noon tried to get up. He heard running feet, and then hands caught him and he felt himself eased back to the ground.
"He's hit hard," someone said, a cool, woman's voice, "I used to help my father - he was an Army surgeon. I think he knew more about bullet wounds than any man alive."
Wind brushed his face. His eyes opened and he looked at a curtain, a white, lacy curtain at a window that looked out on green grass. Everything was peaceful and still.
He lifted his hand to his face. Just then someone came in the door. It was Fan.
"Where are we?" he asked.
"In Alamosa. You've had a hard time of it, Jonas."
"How long have I been here?"
'Two weeks. Mrs. McClain stayed on to help you through the worst of it. She said the doctor was incompetent. She left just last night."
"I'd like to thank her."
"You did, a number of tunes."
He was silent for a while, and then he said, "Who shot Peg Cullane? You?"
"Rimes. He shot at her gun, and he was not far-off. He was using a rifle, you know. She lost two fingers."
"I'm sorry."
"I'm not. She was asking for trouble."
The curtain blew a little in the wind. The air was cool and pleasant. He felt tired, but at the same time he felt good.
"I want to go back," he said.
"Back east?"
"Back to the Rafter D. That's a good outfit-and run the right way ..."
He closed his eyes, and in his mind he could see the late snow on the ridge near the high cabin, and the way the grass bent before the wind in the meadows back of the ranch house.
"All right," she said.
About The Author
"I think of myself in the oral tradition-as a troubadour, a village taleteller, the man in the shadows of the campfire. That's the way I'd like to be remembered - as a storyteller. A good storyteller."
It is doubtful that any author could be as at home in the world recreated in his novels as Louis Dearborn L'Amour. Not only could he physically fill the boots of the rugged characters he writes about, but he has literally "walked the land my characters walk." His personal experiences as well as his lifelong devotion to historical research, that have combined to give Mr. L'Amour the unique knowledge and understanding of the people, events, and challenge of the American frontier have become the hallmarks of his popularity.
Of French-Irish descent, Mr. L'Amour can trace his own family in North America back to the early 1600s and follow their steady progression westward, "always on the frontier." As a boy growing up in Jamestown, North Dakota, he absorbed all he could about his family's frontier heritage, including the story of his great-grandfather who was scalped by Sioux warriors.
Spurred by an eager curiosity and desire to broaden his horizons, Mr. L'Amour left home at the age of fifteen and enjoyed a wide variety of jobs including seaman, lumberjack, elephant handler, skinner of dead cattle, assessment miner, and officer on tank destroyers during World War II. During his "yondering days" he also circled the world on a freighter, sailed a dhow on the Red Sea, was shipwrecked in the West Indies and stranded in the Mojave Desert. He has won fifty-one of fifty-nine fights as a professional boxer and worked as a journalist and lecturer. A voracious reader and collector of rare books, Mr. L'Amour's personal library of some 10,000 volumes covers a broad range of scholarly disciplines including many personal papers, maps, and diaries of the pioneers.
Mr. L'Amour "wanted to write almost from the time I could walk." After developing a widespread following for his many adventure stories written for the fiction magazines. Mr. L'Amour published his first full-length novel, Hondo, in 1953. Mr. L'Amour is now one of the four bestselling living novelists in the world. Every one of his more than 85 novels is constantly in print and every one has sold more than one million copies, giving him more million-copy bestsellers than any other living author. His books have been translated into more than a dozen languages, and more than thirty of his novels and stories have been made into feature films and television movies.
Among Mr. L'Amour's most popular books are The Lonesome Gods, Comstock Lode, The Cherokee Trail, Flint, Son of a Wanted Man, The Shadow Riders, Silver Canyon, Bowdrle, the 18 novels featuring his fictional Sackett family, and his historical novel of the 12th Century, The Walking Drum.
The recipient of many great honors and awards, in 1983 Mr. L'Amour became the first novelist ever to be awarded a Special National Gold Medal by the United States Congress in honor of his life's work. In 1984 he was also awarded the Medal of Freedom by President Ronald Reagan.
Mr. L'Amour lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Kathy, and their two children, Beau and Angelique.
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