Kid Rodelo (Louis L'Amour's Lost Treasures)

by Louis L'Amour

Dan reached for his shirt pocket, and Joe Harbin went for his gun. It was a difference of six inches in the position of their gun hands, and Joe Harbin was fast.

  His hand dropped, gripped, the gun slid smoothly out and the muzzle came level in one perfectly timed movement, a result of long practice that had left dead men behind him.

  His gun muzzle came level but something struck him hard in the side, and with a startled realization he saw Dan Rodelo was shooting.

  The second shot followed the first so fast that he was turned in his tracks, his own shot drilling into the sand almost at his toes. He backed up and sat down hard on a rock, his six-shooter hanging from his fingers.

  “You told Badger you’d let me have the gold,” Rodelo said mildly.

  “Hell, he was dyin’—it made him feel better. You didn’t figure I’d fall for that, did you?”

  “He was trying to save your bacon, Joe. He knew what was coming. You see, there in the past few days I think he figured out who I was.”

  “You?” Harbin was holding his side where the blood welled out around his hand.

  “I was a kid outlaw-gunfighter back in Texas before I saw it wasn’t getting me any place. That job at the mine, that was my first real job.”

  “That Badger,” Joe Harbin said wonderingly, “always talkin’ me out of it, even with his last breath. I should have listened.” He was breathing now with long, shuddering gasps.

  “You better light that fire,” he said suddenly. Then, “Say, that boat’s makin’ sail?”

  Rodelo turned sharply to look seaward and too late heard the click of the drawn-back hammer. He dove head-first onto the sand, heard the roar of a gun, felt sand bite into his face. And then he was rolling over and came up shooting.

  Three times he triggered the Colt, and with each shot Joe Harbin’s body jerked; it rolled slowly off the rock to the sand.

  White-faced and shaky, Rodelo got to his feet and looked at Nora. “That was close,” he said. Wonderingly, he looked down at Harbin. “He never quit trying.”

  “I’ll light the fire,” Nora said.

  She took his matches and stooped down. When she saw the flames take hold and the column of smoke lift toward the sky, she got up and walked along the side of the bluff, and dug into a crevice in the rocks. The box she brought out was rusted and old, but still solid.

  “I remember the place,” she said. “This is what I came for. All there is of the family I once had.”

  “They’ve lowered a boat,” Rodelo said.

  He picked up the sacks of gold and walked down the beach with them as the boat came in close. Two men were in the boat.

  “You Isacher?” one asked.

  “He’s dead…killed some time back, trying to escape. I’m takin’ his place.”

  “I don’t know about that,” the man protested. “I was to get twenty bucks a day, and—”

  “You’ll get that, and an extra twenty if you’ll bury those two men at sea.”

  “Why do that? Nobody’ll ever find ’em.”

  “There’s an Indian up there who claims a fifty-buck bounty on each prisoner he takes in, dead or alive. They didn’t want to go back.”

  “Twenty bucks? Sure enough.”

  He glanced at the heavy sacks Dan lifted into the boat. “What’s that?”

  “Trouble, friend. Too much trouble. You just forget it.”

  “I got to be an old man mindin’ my own business. It’s already forgot.”

  Nora got into the boat, and Dan walked to the grulla and slipped the bridle off. “All right, boy, you’re free. You go on back to Sam, if you want, and we’ll come and get you one of these days. If you don’t do that, you just run wild.”

  He slapped the mustang on the hip and walked away, trying not to show how much he minded.

  The horse looked after him, then trotted off a few steps toward Pinacate. He stopped and looked back to make sure he was right. Dan Rodelo was getting into the boat.

  Taking his position in the bow of the boat, Rodelo could look shoreward, and he saw Hat come down out of the desert and ride to the shore at Sea Lion Bluff. The Indian sat his horse, looking around, then rode off slowly.

  “Wherever you go,” Nora was saying, “I want to go with you.”

  “All right,” he said.

  She held the rusted box tightly in her hand, but somehow it no longer seemed so important.

  WHAT IS LOUIS L’AMOUR’S LOST TREASURES?

  Louis L’Amour’s Lost Treasures is a project created to release some of the author’s more unconventional manuscripts from the family archives.

  Currently included in the project are Louis L’Amour’s Lost Treasures: Volume 1, published in the fall of 2017, and Volume 2, which will be published in the fall of 2019. These books contain both finished and unfinished short stories, unfinished novels, literary and motion picture treatments, notes, and outlines. They are a wide selection of the many works Louis was never able to publish during his lifetime.

  In 2018 we will release No Traveller Returns, L’Amour’s never-before-seen first novel, which was written between 1938 and 1942. In the future, there may be a selection of even more L’Amour titles.

  Additionally, many notes and alternate drafts to Louis’s well-known and previously published novels and short stories will now be included as “bonus feature” postscripts within the books that they relate to. For example, the Lost Treasures postscript to Last of the Breed will contain early notes on the story, the short story that was discovered to be a missing piece of the novel, the history of the novel’s inspiration and creation, and information about unproduced motion picture and comic book versions.

  An even more complete description of the Lost Treasures project, along with a number of examples of what is in the books, can be found at louislamourslosttreasures.com. The website also contains a good deal of exclusive material, such as even more pieces of unknown stories that were too short or too incomplete to include in the Lost Treasures books, plus personal photos, scans of original documents, and notes on the Sackett, Chantry, and Talon family series.

  All of the works that contain Lost Treasures project materials will display the Louis L’Amour’s Lost Treasures banner and logo.

  POSTSCRIPT

  By Beau L’Amour

  Kid Rodelo is one of several examples of my father’s symbiotic relationship with the motion picture industry.

  Part of the reason Louis chose to live in Los Angeles was the possibility of working in film. Having a secondary market for his prose work close at hand no doubt paid the bills more often than I’m aware of. Early on, he was certainly attracted to the lifestyle, but in the long run he discovered it really wasn’t as good a fit as he had imagined. Writing film and TV scripts required a particular set of skills that he didn’t want to take the time to acquire, and the cost of Hollywood’s glamour is rather strict obedience to its culture—and Dad was never very good at obeying those sorts of rules.

  To make the most of what the entertainment industry had to offer, and yet still play the game in a manner he could tolerate, Dad needed to position himself just outside the boundaries of studio or network control. That meant marketing the film and TV rights to his stories and novels as well as selling concepts or treatments, like East of Sumatra and Stranger on Horseback, without getting bogged down in the endless second-guessing of the screenwriting process.

  In addition, he created novelizations of studio-conceived movies, like How the West Was Won, and executed projects like Sitka, or “The Rock Man” (Louis L’Amour’s Lost Treasures: Volume 2), which were written at the behest of a studio or celebrity so the idea could be developed into screenplay form.

  He also wrote a number of books like Hondo (a novelization of the film based on his short story “Gift of Cochise”), The Shadow Riders, High Lonesome (a novelization of the film Four Guns to the Bo
rder, based on his story “In Victorio’s Country”), and this book, Kid Rodelo, a novelization of the film based on yet another L’Amour short story, “Desperate Men.”

  In these cases, Louis created the initial, underlying concept, often as a short story or movie treatment. That concept was produced as a film, and then Dad went on to write a novel which followed the release of the movie. Except for How the West Was Won, I believe all of these novelizations (even Hondo) were projects that Louis personally set up with his publishers, rather than being books which were directly commissioned by the movie studios. When it came to novelizations Dad was very much the driving force rather than just a gun for hire.

  There are several different reasons for this approach, and it’s completely possible that any or all of them were in effect at different times for each of these titles. The first reason was that in the days when the magazine business was collapsing, quite a few short stories, like “Desperate Men,” failed to sell to his traditional contacts in publishing. Instead of trying to make inroads with editors he did not know, Dad would hand a project off to Mauri Grashin, his movie agent. In the world of publishing, he had no equally trusted representative.

  The next element was that while he might not try to sell a movie treatment to a book publisher for an advance, once a film was in the works, it would have been foolish not to take advantage of the publicity the film would generate for a novel. Throughout most of his career, every opportunity needed to be exploited to the fullest.

  He may also have just wanted the last word. Dad never cared much about how his books were portrayed on the screen. He knew that film and prose were vastly different mediums and required different approaches to telling the story. He was also aware that the filmmaking process is rife with political pressures, which unfortunately tend to express themselves in changes to the script. But that lack of concern didn’t mean he didn’t want to have his version, a novel, out for the public to enjoy. Most of the time he wrote the book without ever reading a script or seeing the film. He didn’t consider himself to be in competition with the movies or to be trying to correct their mistakes; he just wanted to do his own version.

  * * *

  —

  The first certain reference I have found to the title “Desperate Men” is from January of 1949. An earlier journal entry shows up in February of ’48 referencing a story called “Desert Mathematics,” a title which suggests a theme Louis experimented with many times in his career: a group of hard characters thrown together in a life-and-death situation with a certain amount of money; the fewer survivors, the more cash would be available for the rest. It is the same scenario that is present in “Desperate Men.”

  However, “Desert Mathematics” was finished and submitted for publication in ’48. Perhaps it was rejected and Louis began rewriting it the next year as “Desperate Men.” Or perhaps it was a different story altogether. As a famous fictional detective once said: “If you can’t stand not knowing, you’re in the wrong business.”

  Whether “Desert Mathematics” was or was not an early title, by the end of 1950 Dad had finished “Desperate Men.” For a guy who could write a novel in a month or two, this was a very long time for him to spend on one project. On a number of occasions he remarked that he had written “a couple of desultory pages” before putting it aside, or that it was not going well. But one of the aspects of Dad’s creative process that has become clear to me during my work on the Lost Treasures project is that many of these stories took a good deal longer than I thought. Generally, Louis threw himself into a situation hoping that inspiration would strike. When it did he could work very quickly, and when it didn’t he worked on other things but kept himself involved by returning to the project occasionally, biding his time, waiting for the moment to be right.

  In early 1951 “Desperate Men” was rejected by Esquire, Argosy, Adventure, and Better Publications. This was, financially, probably the toughest year in the latter half of my father’s life. The magazine business was in turmoil, and competition among the surviving publications was fierce. Dad only had so much time, and most of it needed to be spent writing rather than trying to find new prospective markets, so he put this story in a box and moved on. “Desperate Men” was finally released in the collection End of the Drive in 1997. Below is the full text of “Desperate Men,” as well as the story of how fifteen years later it was turned into both a feature film and a novel, as Kid Rodelo.

  DESPERATE MEN

  They were four desperate men, made hard by life, cruel by nature, and driven to desperation by imprisonment. Yet the walls of Yuma Prison were strong and the rifle skill of the guards unquestioned, so the prison held many desperate men besides these four. And when prison walls and rifles failed, there was the desert, and the desert never failed.

  Fate, however, delivered these four a chance to test the desert. In the early dawn the land had rolled and tumbled like an ocean storm. The rocky promontory over the river had shifted and cracked in an earthquake that drove fear into the hearts of the toughest and most wicked men in Arizona. For a minute or two the ground had groaned and roared, dust rained down from cracks in the roofs of the cells, and in one place the perimeter wall had broken and slid off, down the hillside. It was as if God or the Devil had shown them a way.

  Two nights later, Otteson leaned his shaven head closer to the bars. “If you’re yellow, say so! I say we can make it! If Isager says we can make it through the desert, I say we go!”

  “We’ll need money for the boatmen.” Rodelo’s voice was low. “Without money we will die down there on the shores of the gulf.”

  All were silent, three awaiting a word from the fourth. Rydberg knew where the Army payroll was buried. The government did not know, the guards did not know, only Rydberg. And Otteson, Isager, and Rodelo knew he knew.

  He was a thin, scrawny man with a buzzard’s neck and a buzzard’s beak for a nose. His bright, predatory eyes indicated his hesitation now. “How…how much would it take?” he asked.

  “A hundred,” Otteson suggested, “not more than two. If we had that much we could be free.”

  Free…no walls, no guards, no stinking food. No sweating one’s life out with backbreaking labor under the blazing sun. Free…women, whiskey, money to spend…the click of poker chips, the whir of the wheel, a gun’s weight on the hip again. No beatings, no solitary, no lukewarm, brackish drinking water. Free to come and go…a horse between the knees…women…

  He said it finally, words they had waited to hear. “There’s the Army payroll. We could get that.”

  The taut minds of Otteson, Rodelo, and Isager relaxed slowly, easing the tension, and within the mind of each was a thought unshared.

  Gold…fifteen thousand in gold coins for the taking! A little money split four ways, but a lot of money for one!

  Otteson leaned his bullet head nearer. “Tomorrow night”—his thick lips barely moved as he whispered—“tomorrow night we’ll go out. If we wait longer they’ll have the wall repaired.”

  “There’s been guards posted ever since the quake,” Rodelo protested.

  Otteson laughed. “We’ll take care of them!” From under the straw mattress he drew a crude, prison-made knife. “Rydberg can take care of the other with his belt.”

  Cunningly fashioned of braided leather thongs, it concealed a length of piano wire. When the belt was removed and held in the hands it could be bent so the loop of the steel wire projected itself, a loop large enough to encircle a man’s head…then it could be jerked tight and the man would die.

  Rodelo leaned closer. “How far to the gold?”

  “Twenty miles east. We’ll need horses.”

  “Good!” Otteson smashed a fist into a palm. “East is good! They’ll expect us to go west into California. East after the gold, then south into the desert. They’d never dream we’d try that! It’s hot as sin and dry as Hades, but I know where the wa
ter holes are!”

  Their heads together, glistening with sweat in the hot, sticky confines of their cells, they plotted every move, and within the mind of three of the men was another plot: to kill the others and have the gold for himself.

  “We’ll need guns.” Rydberg expressed their greatest worry. “They’ll send Indians after us.”

  The Indians were paid fifty dollars for each convict returned alive—but they had been paid for dead convicts, too. The Yaquis knew the water holes, and fifty dollars was twice what most of them could make in a month if they could find work at all.

  “We’ll have the guns of the two guards. When we get to Rocky Bay, we’ll hire a fisherman to carry us south to Guaymas.”

  The following day their work seemed easy. The sun was broiling and the guards unusually brutal. Rydberg was knocked down by a hulking giant named Johnson. Rydberg just brushed himself off and smiled. It worried Johnson more than a threat. “What’s got into him?” he demanded of the other guards. “Has he gone crazy?”

  Perryman shrugged. “Why worry about it? He’s poison mean, an’ those others are a bad lot, too. Otteson’s worst of all.”

  “He’s the one I aim to get,” Johnson said grimly, “but did you ever watch the way he lifts those rocks? Rocks two of us couldn’t budge he lifts like they were so many sacks of spuds!”

  It was sullen dark that night; no stars. There was thunder in the north and they could hear the river. The heat lingered and the guards were restless from the impending storm. At the gap where the quake had wrecked the wall were Perryman and Johnson. They would be relieved in two hours by other guards.

  They had been an hour on the job and only now had seated themselves. Perryman lit a cigarette and leaned back. As he straightened to say something to Johnson he was startled to see kicking feet and clawing hands, but before he could rise, a powerful arm came over his shoulder, closing off his breath. Then four men armed with rifles and pistols went down the side of Prison Hill and walked eastward toward the town.