The man riding with her opened his valise. He handed Ruble a towel. “It’s the only one I’ve got. We’ll have to share it.”
Ruble Noon dried his face and hands, then took off his wet coat. He checked his gun, drying it carefully with his handkerchief.
The two easterners were silent while they looked on unbelievingly. As they watched, the older woman bathed and cleansed the gunshot wound. Lebo had been hit in the side, the bullet ripping the skin along his left ribs and cutting through the muscle. It was a bloody wound, but not a dangerous one.
Lebo looked up at Ruble Noon. “I got Cristobal,” he said.
“You knew him?”
“He was my brother-in-law.”
“Your brother-in-law!”
Lebo tried to shrug, wincing from the pain. “Por nada.…He married my sister, and he left her. He was no good. He was a loudmouth. But he could shoot—he always could shoot.”
Ruble Noon sat down beside Rimes. The train was rolling south. Soon it would turn east, running along the border briefly. He put his head back against the red plush upholstery and closed his eyes.
There was only the rumbling of the train, the creaking of the car as it rounded a small curve, the occasional sound of the engine’s whistle, the pound of its drivers, and the clicking of the wheels crossing the rail-ends. He could hear the quiet talk of Fan and the older woman while they bandaged Lebo’s wound.
For the first time in weeks he could relax. Rimes was talking to the older woman’s husband, who said he operated a mine near Central City, and had come west to look over some properties.
“…deserved killing,” the mining man was saying. “Manly was involved in claim-jumping in Nevada. He always was a troublemaker.”
The train slowed, and Ruble Noon opened his eyes. “Are we stopping?”
“La Boca,” Rimes said. “Just a station. We take a big bend and go east now.”
Noon heard someone drop to the roadbed from the rear car. He listened to the sound of boots along the cinders—more than one person.
Lebo was leaning back, his eyes closed, his face pale. Fan was sitting opposite him. The older woman had gone back to the seat by Rimes and her husband.
There was a faint sound from the front of the car, a sound so faint that Ruble Noon doubted if he had heard it—it sounded rather like the rattle of a brake pin.
Suddenly he heard the sound of the engine moving again, but their car was standing still.
He spun around and hit the aisle running. He reached the end of the car in three long strides, just in time to see the express car and the engine moving away—too far to jump.
He dropped to the roadbed, and the first person he saw was Peg Cullane. She had a rifle in her hands, and she was lifting it to shoot. The second person he saw was Finn Cagle.
The gunman fired, his bullet clanging against the back of the car, within inches of Ruble Noon’s head. Noon stepped back for partial protection from the rifle, and then as Peg fired he ran forward three quick, short steps, stopped, and shot from the hip. The bullet spun Cagle around, throwing him off balance. Dropping to one knee, Noon laid the barrel of his gun across his left forearm and shot again, and Cagle backed up and fell.
Two rifle shots spat sand and dirt in front of Noon, and then a shot came from the train.
The engine and express car had stopped. He saw that Finn Cagle was getting up, and shot into him again. Somebody shot from the car behind him, and he saw Peg Cullane drop her rifle.
Ruble Noon ran forward. Suddenly he heard the drivers spin as the power was thrown to the engine and he jumped for the rear of the express car.
He grabbed the door and ripped it open. The express messenger lay sprawled on the floor, his scalp laid open from a blow. The gold was still there in its neat sacks. He ran the length of the car, loading three chambers as he ran, and scrambled up on the tender.
Bayles, the one who ran with Cagle, turned sharply as the coal rattled and threw up his gun for a shot. The engineer lunged into him, and Bayles fell from the train, hitting the edge of the roadbed and rolling over into the grass and pine needles alongside the track.
He sprang to his feet, staggered, and the stagger made Noon miss his first shot. He swung to the ground and they faced each other.
Bayles was badly shaken, and the side of his face was bleeding from hitting the ground, but he still gripped his gun.
“Ruble Noon, is it?” he said. “I’ve heard of you. Now it’s you an’ me.”
“You can drop it and ride out,” Noon said, “and it can end here.”
“You joke. You think I will end it so? I am not afraid of you, Ruble Noon. German Bayles has killed his men, too.”
“We’d both be better off at some other occupation,” Ruble Noon replied calmly. “Enough men have died.”
“Sooner or later we all die. I think it is your time now, Ruble Noon. I think tomorrow in the saloons they will be telling how German Bayles killed you…face to face beside the railroad tracks.”
“Cagle’s had it,” Noon said. “He’s dead, or close to it.”
“And now—” Bayles’s gun was in his hand, and so was Ruble Noon’s. Both men fired at the same instant. Noon felt the bullet strike him, felt his leg buckle under him, and he went down.
He was still shooting, but Bayles was walking in, smiling, confident. “Tomorrow in the saloons they will be talking, he said, “talking of how…” He fired again as he spoke, and Ruble Noon’s body jerked with the shock of the bullet. “…of how German Bayles killed Ruble Noon…the great Ruble Noon.” The words came out slowly.
Ruble Noon was down, his brain a dizzy buzzing, his body numb. He tried to rise as German Bayles came toward him, but his leg refused to function.
Bayles was lifting his pistol for a final shot. The sun was hot on his face, a white cloud was drifting behind Bayles’s head; Noon could hear the crunch of gravel and the whisper of the coarse weeds as Bayles came on.
He noticed with surprise that there was blood on Bayles’s shirt…he did not remember hitting him…and the German’s face was beginning to streak with blood from a scalp wound. He was coming in close, still smiling. He stopped and spread his legs, seeming to waver just a little.
Ruble Noon saw the dirty blue of Bayles’s shirt, saw the gun coming level, and then he fired twice, and heard the gun click on an empty chamber.
He flicked open the loading gate with his thumb, but he was lying on his elbow and he could not bring the other hand into play, so he tried to sit up, and failed. Bayles fell heavily beside him.
Ruble Noon rolled over on the hot gravel, smelling the dusty smell of the weeds, and he worked the ejector rod and thrust out a shell, loading the cartridge in its place.
He spun the cylinder and looked over at Bayles. The German was staring at him, smiling. “Tomorrow in the saloons…they will be saying…” His voice trailed off, but he still looked at Ruble Noon.
“You are a good man, Ruble Noon,” he was saying, “…a good man…with a gun.…”
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 times.”
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 Louis L’Amour
*
“I think of myself in the oral tradition—
as a troubadour, a village tale-teller, 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 re-created 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, miner, and an officer in the transportation corps 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 120 books is in print; there are nearly 270 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), The Man Called Noon, 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 publishing tradition forward.
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
The Man from Skibbereen
The Man from the Broken Hills
Matagorda
Milo Talon
The Mountain Valley War
North to the Rails
Over on the Dry Side
Passin’ Through
The Proving Trail
The Quick and the Dead
Radigan
Reilly’s Luck
The Rider of Lost Creek
Rivers West
The Shadow Riders
Shalako
Showdown at Yellow Butte
Silver Canyon
Sitka
Son of a Wanted Man
Taggart
The Tall Stranger
To Tame a Land
Tucker
Under the Sweetwater Rim
Utah Blaine
The Walking Drum
Westward the Tide
Where the Long Grass Blows
SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS
Beyond the Great Snow Mountains
Bowdrie
Bowdrie’s Law
Buckskin Run
Dutchman’s Flat
End of the Drive
From the Listening Hills
The Hills of Homicide
Law of the Desert Born
Long Ride Home
Lonigan
May There Be a Road
Monument Rock
Night over the Solomons
Off the Mangrove Coast
The Outlaws of Mesquite
The Rider of the Ruby Hills
Riding for the Brand
The Strong Shall Live
The Trail to Crazy Man
Valley of the Sun
War Party
West from Singapore
West of Dodge
With These Hands
Yondering
SACKETT TITLES
Sackett’s Land
To the Far Blue Mountains
The Warrior’s Path
Jubal Sackett
Ride the River
The Daybreakers
Sackett
Lando
Mojave Crossing
Mustang Man
The Lonely Men
Galloway
Treasure Mountain
Lonely on the Mountain
Ride the Dark Trail
The Sackett Brand
The Sky-Liners
THE HOPALONG CASSIDY NOVELS
The Riders of the High Rock
The Rustlers of West Fork
The Trail to Seven Pines
Trouble Shooter
NONFICTION
Education of a Wandering Man
Frontier
The Sackett Companion: A Personal Guide to the Sackett Novels
A Trail of Memories: The Quo
tations of Louis L’Amour, compiled by Angelique L’Amour
POETRY
Smoke from This Altar
THE MAN CALLED NOON
A Bantam Book / November 2004
PUBLISHING HISTORY
Bantam edition published January 1970
New Bantam edition published May 1971
Bantam reissue / September 2002
All rights reserved.
Copyright © 1970 by Louis & Katherine L’Amour Trust
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