Suddenly we were both laughing like fools and I was kissing her there on the street where all of Hattan’s Point could see us. People had come from saloons and stores and they were standing there grinning at us, so I kissed her again.
Then I let go of her and stepped into the saddle. “Tomorrow noon,” I said, “I’ll be back.”
And so I rode again from Hattan’s Point
Chapter Twenty-Four
DID YOU ever feel so good the world seemed like your big apple? That was how I felt then. We had our showdown, and we had peace between the three ranches. We could live together now, and we could make our acres fertile and make our cattle fat.
There was grass on the range, water in the creeks, and the house I had built would have the woman it needed to make it home. From the smoke of battle I had built a home and won a wife. The world was mine.
Morgan Park was dead … he had died in violence, as he had lived, died from striking the wrong man, heedless of others, believing that his strength would pull him through. Only an Apache had fired from the ground and the bullet had torn through his skull.
I would go home now. I would make ready the house for the wife I was to have, I would care for my horses in the corral, and I would change my clothes and ride back to town to become a bridegroom.
The trail to the Two-Bar swung around a mesa and opened out on a wide desert flat, and far beyond I could see the pinnacles of the badlands beyond Dry Mesa.
A rabbit burst from the bush and sprinted off across the sage, and then the trail dipped down into a hollow, with junipers growing in and around it And there in the middle of the road was Bodie Miller.
He was standing with his hands on his hips laughing, and there was a devil in his eyes. Off to one side of the road was Red, holding their horses.
Miller’s hair was uncut and hung over the collar of his shirt. The hairs at the corners of his upper lip seemed longer and darker. But the two guns tied down to his thighs were nothing to smile about.
“Too bad to cut down the big man just when he’s ridin’ highest.”
The horse I rode was skittish and unacquainted with me. I’d no idea how he’d stand for shooting, and I wanted to be on the ground. But there was little time. Bodie was confident, but he did not know but what I might have company further back along the road.
Suddenly I slapped spurs to the gelding and when he sprang at Bodie, I went off the other side. Hitting the ground, I ran two steps and drew as I saw Bodie’s hands blur.
His guns came up and I felt mine buck in my fist. Our bullets crossed each other, although mine got off a shade the faster despite that instant of hesitation to make sure my bullet would shoot true.
His slug ripped a furrow across the top of my shoulder that stung like a million needles, but my own bullet struck him in the chest and he staggered, his eye wide and shocked.
Suddenly the devil of eagerness was in me. I was mad, mad as I had never been before. Guns up and blasting, I started for him.
“What’s the matter? Don’t you like it?”
I was yelling as I walked, my guns blasting and the lead ripping into and through him.
“Now you know how the others felt, Bodie. It’s an ugly thing to die because some punk wants to prove he’s tough. And you aren’t tough, Bodie, just a mean, nasty kid.”
He swayed on his feet, bloody and finished. He was a slighter man than I, the blood staining his shirt crimson, his mouth ripped wider by a bullet. His face was gray and slashed across by the streak left by the bullet
He stared at me, but he did not speak. Something kept him upright, but he was gone and I could see it. He stood there in the white hot sunlight and stared into my face, the last face he would ever see.
“I’m sorry, Bodie. Why didn’t you stick to punching cows?”
He backed up a slow step and the gun slid from his fingers. He tried once to speak, but his lips were unable to shape the words, and then his knees buckled and he went down.
Standing over his body I looked at Red. The cowhand seemed unable to believe his eyes. He stared at Bodie Miller’s used-up body, and then he lifted his eyes to me.
“I’ll ride … just give me a chance.”
“You’ve got it.”
He swung into the saddle, then looked back at Bodie. He studied him, as if awakening from a dream.
“He wasn’t so tough, was he?”
“Nobody is,” I said, “especially with a slug in his belly.”
He rode away then and I stood there in the lonely afternoon and saw Bodie Miller dead at my feet.
It wasn’t in me to leave him there, and I did not want to find him there when I returned. There was a gully off the trail, a little hollow where water had washed before finding a new way. So I rolled him in and shoved the banks in on top of him and then piled on some stones.
Sitting in the shade of a juniper I put together a cross, and on an old wagon tail-gate that had laid beside the road for a long time, I carved out the words:
HE PLAYED OUT HIS HAND
1881
It was not much of an end for a man, but Bodie was not much of a man.
Beside some campfire Red might talk, someday, somewhere. Sooner or later the story might travel, but it would take time, and I wanted no more reputation as a gunfighter. There had been too much of that.
There was a stinging in my shoulder, but only from cut skin. At the ranch I could care for that. And it was time I was getting on.
Ahead of me the serrated ridges of the wild lands were stark and lonely against the late afternoon sky. The sun setting behind me was picking out the peak points to touch them with gold. The afternoon was gone and now I was riding home to my own ranch, riding home with the coolness of evening coming on … and tomorrow was my wedding day.
About The Author
“I think of myself in the oral tradition ��� of 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 wrote about, but he literally “walked the land my characters walk.” His personal experiences as well as his lifelong devotion to historical research combined to give Mr. L’Amour the unique knowledge and understanding of people, events, and the challenge of the American frontier that became the hallmarks of his popularity.
Of French-Irish descent, Mr. L’Amour could 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 won fifty-one of fifty-nine fights as a professional boxer and worked as a journalist and lecturer. He was a voracious reader and collector of rare books. His personal library contained 17,000 volumes.
Mr. L’Amour “wanted to write almost from the time I could talk.” After developing a widespread following for his many frontier and adventure stories written for fiction magazines, Mr. L’Amour published his first full-length novel, Hondo, in the United States in 1953. Every one of his more than 100 books is in print; there are nearly 230 million copies of his books in print worldwide, making him one of the bestselling authors in modern literary history. His books have been translated into twenty languages, and more than forty-five of his novels and stories have been
made into feature films and television movies.
His hardcover bestsellers include The Lonesome Gods, The Walking Drum (his twelfth-century historical novel) Jubal Sackett, Last of the Breed, and The Haunted Mesa. His memoir, Education of a Wandering Man, was a leading bestseller in 1989. Audio dramatizations and adaptations of many L’Amour stories are available on cassette tapes from Bantam Audio Publishing.
The recipient of many great honors and awards, in 1983 Mr. L’Amour became the first novelist ever to be awarded the Congressional 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 Reagan.
Louis L’Amour died on June 10, 1988. His wife, Kathy, and their two children, Beau and Angelique, carry the L’Amour tradition forward with new books written by the author during his lifetime to be published by Bantam well into the nineties ��� among them, four Hopalong Cassidy novels: The Rustlers of West Fork, The Trail to Seven Pines, The Riders of High Rock, and Trouble Shooter.
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