Hondo (Louis L'Amour's Lost Treasures)

by Louis L'Amour

  The Indian sprang again, like a clawing cat, streaming blood. Ches moved aside, but a backhand sweep nicked him, and he felt the sharp bite of the blade. Turning, he paused on the balls of his feet.

  He had had no water in hours. His lips were cracked. Yet he sweated now, and the salt of it stung his eyes. He stared into the malevolent black eyes of the Apache, then moved to meet him. The Indian lunged, and Ches sidestepped like a boxer and spun on the ball of his foot.

  The sudden sidestep threw the Indian past him, but Ches failed to drive the knife into the Apache’s kidney when his foot rolled on a stone. The point left a thin red line across the Indian’s back. The Indian was quick. Before Ches could recover his balance, he grasped the white man’s knife wrist. Desperately, Ches grabbed for the Indian’s knife hand and got the wrist, and they stood there straining, chest to chest.

  Seeing his chance, Ches suddenly let his knees buckle, then brought up one knee and fell back, throwing the Apache over his head to the sand. Instantly, he whirled and was on his feet, standing over the Apache. The warrior had lost his knife, and he lay there, staring up, his eyes black with hatred.

  Coolly, Ches stepped back, picked up the Indian’s knife, and tossed it to him contemptuously. There was a grunt from the watching Indians, and then his antagonist rushed. But loss of blood had weakened the warrior, and Ches stepped in swiftly, struck the blade aside, then thrust the point of his blade hard against the Indian’s belly.

  Black eyes glared into his without yielding. A thrust, and the man would be disemboweled, but Ches stepped back. “He is a strong man,” Ches said in Spanish. “It is enough that I have won.”

  Deliberately, he walked to his horse and swung into the saddle. He looked around, and every rifle covered him.

  So he had gained nothing. He had hoped that mercy might lead to mercy, that the Apache’s respect for a fighting man would win his freedom. He had failed. Again they bound him to his horse, but they did not take his knife from him.

  When they camped at last, he was given food and drink. He was bound again, and a blanket was thrown over him. At daylight they were again in the saddle. In Spanish he asked where they were taking him, but they gave no indication of hearing. When they stopped again, it was beside a pole corral, near a stone cabin.

  When Jimmy spoke, Angie got quickly to her feet. She recognized Cochise with a start of relief, but she saw instantly that this was a war party. And then she saw the prisoner.

  Their eyes met and she felt a distinct shock. He was a white man, a big, unshaven man who badly needed both a bath and a haircut, his clothes ragged and bloody. Cochise gestured at the prisoner.

  “No take Apache man, you take white man. This man good for hunt, good for fight. He strong warrior. You take ’im.”

  Flushed and startled, Angie stared at the prisoner and caught a faint glint of humor in his dark eyes.

  “Is this here the fate worse than death I hear tell of?” he inquired gently.

  “Who are you?” she asked, and was immediately conscious that it was an extremely silly question.

  The Apaches had drawn back and were watching curiously. She could do nothing for the present but accept the situation. Obviously they intended to do her a kindness, and it would not do to offend them. If they had not brought this man to her, he might have been killed.

  “Name’s Ches Lane, ma’am,” he said. “Will you untie me? I’d feel a lot safer.”

  “Of course.” Still flustered, she went to him and untied his hands. One Indian said something, and the others chuckled; then, with a whoop, they swung their horses and galloped off down the canyon.

  Their departure left her suddenly helpless, the shadowy globe of her loneliness shattered by this utterly strange man standing before her, this big, bearded man brought to her out of the desert.

  She smoothed her apron, suddenly pale as she realized what his delivery to her implied. What must he think of her? She turned away quickly. “There’s hot water,” she said hastily, to prevent his speaking. “Dinner is almost ready.”

  She walked quickly into the house and stopped before the stove, her mind a blank. She looked around her as if she had suddenly waked up in a strange place. She heard water being poured into the basin by the door, and heard him take Ed’s razor. She had never moved the box. To have moved it would—

  “Sight of work done here, ma’am.”

  She hesitated, then turned with determination and stepped into the doorway. “Yes, Ed—”

  “You’re Angie Lowe.”

  Surprised, she turned toward him, and recognized his own startled awareness of her. As he shaved, he told her about Ed, and what had happened that day in the saloon.

  “He—Ed was like that. He never considered consequences until it was too late.”

  “Lucky for me he didn’t.”

  He was younger-looking with his beard gone. There was a certain quiet dignity in his face. She went back inside and began putting plates on the table. She was conscious that he had moved to the door and was watching her.

  “You don’t have to stay,” she said. “You owe me nothing. Whatever Ed did, he did because he was that kind of person. You aren’t responsible.”

  He did not answer, and when she turned again to the stove, she glanced swiftly at him. He was looking across the valley.

  There was a studied deference about him when he moved to a place at the table. The children stared, wide-eyed and silent; it had been so long since a man sat at this table.

  Angie could not remember when she had felt like this. She was awkwardly conscious of her hands, which never seemed to be in the right place or doing the right things. She scarcely tasted her food, nor did the children.

  Ches Lane had no such inhibitions. For the first time, he realized how hungry he was. After the half-cooked meat of lonely, trailside fires, this was tender and flavored. Hot biscuits, desert honey…Suddenly he looked up, embarrassed at his appetite.

  “You were really hungry,” she said.

  “Man can’t fix much, out on the trail.”

  Later, after he’d got his bedroll from his saddle and unrolled it on the hay in the barn, he walked back to the house and sat on the lowest step. The sun was gone, and they watched the cliffs stretch their red shadows across the valley. A quail called plaintively, a mellow sound of twilight.

  “You needn’t worry about Cochise,” she said. “He’ll soon be crossing into Mexico.”

  “I wasn’t thinking about Cochise.”

  That left her with nothing to say, and she listened again to the quail and watched a lone bright star.

  “A man could get to like it here,” he said quietly.

  In the fall of 1951 Dad was having a very hard time making ends meet. The pulp magazines were failing, and competition for space in the high-end “slick” magazines was fierce. Both the writers who had traditionally sold to the slicks and those from the pulp world, like my father, were fighting tooth and nail for every opportunity they could find. Dad skipped a lot of meals that year and he got into some debt, which, because of his lack of regular income, made him very nervous. He was as close to living on the street as he had been since actually living on the street as a teenager in the 1920s.

  Even though the number of short stories he completed remained high, what he was able to sell was only half that of a good year. In desperation, he bluffed his way onto the lot at Telemount Pictures and managed to sell Cowboy G-Men producer Henry Donovan four episode treatments at $75 each. He was also able to sell a story, “One Night Stand,” to Bing Crosby’s Rebound television anthology series. However, none of these sales paid enough to help out for more than a month or two. He was suffering and there was no end in sight.

  When his old friend and constant supporter, Leo Margulies at Better Publications, turned down his most rece
ntly completed short story, “The Gift of Cochise,” it truly seemed that he had hit rock bottom.

  In those days my father had a literary agent in New York City, a man who was exceedingly charming and had a number of famous clients. The agent had not been very effective in selling Dad’s material, and so Louis was cautious about what he sent him. Feeling he had nothing to lose in this case, Louis sent “The Gift of Cochise” to the agent…who promptly sold it to Collier’s magazine, which after The Saturday Evening Post was one of the best venues in the country.

  On the surface this was a nice, but not life-changing, turn of events. Collier’s paid well, but not well enough to make up for all the stories that Dad had not been able to sell that year. Also, like many of the slick magazines, it did not pay until actual publication, a date which might be many months in the future. What the Collier’s acceptance did do was create just enough buzz about the story for Louis’s movie agent, Mauri Grashin (a different and far more respectable man than the literary guy), to find a producer who wanted to option the story as a possible feature film. This put some money in Louis’s pocket and eased his financial situation slightly.

  An option is a contract that allows producers to “rent” a literary property while they attempt to put together all the elements needed to get a motion picture production started. In this case the producer was Grant Withers, an actor with a long resume dating back to the last days of silent movies. The option period was 105 days, and, rather typically, nothing came of it. But some strange sort of momentum did seem to be building.

  Over the next two months, Louis sold the rights for a short story to Fireside Theater, a popular TV anthology show. Another story, a treatment this time, became the feature film East of Sumatra. Then, not long after the Withers option expired, a Hollywood agent offered Louis a new option for “Gift of Cochise” on behalf of a mysterious “independent producer.” I suspect that this was actually a production company owned by John Wayne and Robert Fellows, and that they were attempting to establish Louis’s price before letting on that Wayne, one of the biggest stars in the business, was interested. I have also wondered if the story hadn’t been on Wayne’s radar for months—Grant Withers was a longtime friend of his.

  In any event, “Cochise” was formally submitted to Wayne-Fellows on June 24, 1952, the week before Collier’s finally published the story. The film contract was finalized in October and the movie, when it was made the following year, was titled Hondo, borrowing the name from The Hondo Kid, a character in Dad’s “One Night Stand.”

  Financially, this was all a great relief for Louis. In fact, before subtracting the money he owed, it made 1952 equal to some of his better years. He was still living in a small room in the back of another family’s flat, but he had dodged true insolvency by a hair’s breadth. The day after he signed the contract with Wayne-Fellows, he wrote the following to his mother:

  7 October 1952

  Dear Mother:

  Inclosed is a M.O. for $100.00 for Alice [Dad’s mother was living with his brother, Yale, and sister-in-law, Alice]…

  Finally completed the Cochise story and have the money in the bank. The most since the end of the war. I hope to touch little of it until I can hope to add more—and use it only for marriage.

  I am completing another story that will be written into a screenplay for the movies and we will hope it sells. In the meantime I shall be busy on some magazine stuff….

  Dad did better than to get “busy on some magazine stuff.” Realizing that the magazine business was dying and that Hollywood was too fickle to be his primary market, he used some of his newfound cash to hop a flight for New York. Once there he made a whirlwind tour of the publishing world, meeting with every editor who would let him in the door and touting himself as a writer of Westerns who would soon have more than one major motion picture in the theaters. His goal was to sell himself, and to do so he focused on his area of greatest success; up until that moment he had never considered specializing in just one genre.

  Dad returned to L.A. with a deal from Ace Books for three of his old magazine novels and for a new paperback original, Utah Blaine. In addition, and likely because of meetings that occurred on that trip, Fawcett’s Gold Medal Books asked Louis to create a novel based on his “Cochise” story.

  It is not entirely clear that this novel was initially intended as a “novelization” of the movie, but ultimately that’s what the publisher and the studio decided they wanted. I think it is unlikely that Dad had much in the way of direct contact with the Wayne-Fellows group after he signed the contract selling them the movie rights to “Gift of Cochise.” On the other hand, the paperback publishers of that era were fascinated with Hollywood’s potential for marketing books, so it is logical that Gold Medal would want to pursue a tie-in opportunity with the production company on what would probably be a popular film.

  Regardless, Louis soon noted that Fawcett had sent up “an S.O.S.” and that they would like him to “start on the novelization immediately.” They also mentioned that they would like to publish an additional book a year as a paperback original. Along with the books he had sold to Ace, this was truly the beginning of Dad’s career as a novelist: He had finally made the transition from being a writer of magazine short stories to an author of novels. This was all good news, but the positively charged yet confusing drama surrounding Hondo wasn’t over quite yet.

  In February 1954 the Academy Award nominations were released, and Louis L’Amour was included under the category of Best Story for the motion picture Hondo. Best Story was an award that was offered until 1957, when it was replaced by the more specific category of Best Original Screenplay. In ’53, however, the qualifications for Best Story read: “only stories written for the screen not previously published or produced in any other medium.”

  In the case of Hondo, the short story “The Gift of Cochise” had been submitted to Wayne-Fellows as a manuscript, before its official publication in Collier’s. However, the short story had been acquired by Collier’s prior to the Wayne-Fellows option of the movie rights. The Academy had apparently made a mistake, possibly based on the fact that, for reasons I still find unclear, Wayne-Fellows had applied for a waiver with the Writers Guild which allowed the production company to list Louis’s name yet omit the title of his short story from the credits of the film. Concerned about the legitimacy of his inclusion on the Academy ballot, Dad wrote the following:

  This is to acknowledge and to thank members of the Academy for the story nomination for “HONDO”, an honor that brings me the mixed emotions of pride, pleasure, and some apprehension. With reluctance, I must point out that it is entirely possible that I may not be eligible for this distinction. Therefore I am writing to ask you for a ruling on the matter, rather than remain a candidate for an award to which I am not entitled if such is the case. Newspaper reports of the nomination describe the category as that of “The best original story written directly for the screen.”…An early story version of “HONDO” appeared in Colliers magazine as “The Gift of Cochise”. I later rewrote the story as a pocket novel, and this is essentially the story as produced by Wayne-Fellows with John Wayne in the stellar role. I would greatly appreciate it if you could inform me whether or not the story is actually eligible. Despite the great honor of the nomination, I could not in all fairness to the other contenders remain in the race if there is any question of proper eligibility.

  Hondo was withdrawn from consideration at the last minute and the award ultimately went to Ian McLellan Hunter for Roman Holiday. Though it was little known at the time, Hunter was acting as a front for blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo.

  As you can see, though Louis later credited Hondo with starting his career as a novelist, it was really not the first novel he had sold—in addition to the books purchased by Ace after his trip to New York there were his four Hopalong Cassidy novels and Westward the Tide, which had been published in Eng
land even earlier; nor was it his first sale to film or TV. By my count, it was his seventh. Hondo was simply the highest-profile project of the bunch…and it was the project that he ultimately used to promote himself as an author to the book publishing world.

  “Success is not a trollop that gives herself to every comer,” he later wrote, “success must be lured and trapped….Hondo was not my break through, my use of Hondo was.”

  Hondo was the story that launched Louis L’Amour out of obscurity and poverty and led him to specialize in Westerns. It was the hinge point of his career.

  Beau L’Amour

  August 2019

  Bantam Books by Louis L’Amour

  NOVELS

  Bendigo Shafter

  Borden Chantry

  Brionne

  The Broken Gun

  The Burning Hills

  The Californios

  Callaghen

  Catlow

  Chancy

  The Cherokee Trail

  Comstock Lode

  Conagher

  Crossfire Trail

  Dark Canyon

  Down the Long Hills

  The Empty Land

  Fair Blows the Wind

  Fallon

  The Ferguson Rifle

  The First Fast Draw

  Flint

  Guns of the Timberlands

  Hanging Woman Creek

  The Haunted Mesa

  Heller with a Gun

  The High Graders

  High Lonesome

  Hondo

  How the West Was Won

  The Iron Marshal

  The Key-Lock Man

  Kid Rodelo

  Kilkenny

  Killoe

  Kilrone

  Kiowa Trail

  Last of the Breed

  Last Stand at Papago Wells

  The Lonesome Gods

  The Man Called Noon