The Trail to Crazy Man

by Louis L'Amour

“Take off your guns, Caradec, and I’ll kill yuh,” Shute said softly.

  “It’s their fight,” Gill said suddenly. “Let ’em have it the way they want it!”

  The voice startled Gomer so that he jerked, and he glanced over his shoulder, his face white. Then the front door pushed open, and Higley came in with Baker. Pod Gomer touched his lips with his tongue and shot a sidelong glance at Benson. The saloonkeeper looked unhappy.

  Carefully Dan Shute reached for his belt buckle and unbuckled the twin belts, laying the big guns on the bar, butts toward him. At the opposite end of the bar, Rafe Caradec did the same. Then, as one man, they shed their coats.

  Lithe and broad-shouldered, Rafe was an inch shorter and forty pounds lighter than the other man. Narrow-hipped and lean as a greyhound, he was built for speed, but the powerful shoulders and powerful hands and arms spoke of years of training as well as hard work with a double jack, axe, or heaving at heavy, wet lines of a ship.

  Dan Shute’s neck was thick, his chest broad and massive. His stomach was flat and hard. His hands were big, and he reeked of sheer animal strength and power. Licking his lips like a hungry wolf, he started forward. He was grinning, and the light was dancing in his hard gray-white eyes. He did not rush or leap. He walked right up to Rafe, with that grin on his lips, and Caradec stood flat-footed, waiting for him. But as Shute stepped in close, Rafe suddenly whipped up a left to the wind that beat the man to the punch. Shute winced at the blow, and his eyes narrowed. Then he smashed forward with his hard skull, trying for a butt. Rafe clipped him with an elbow and swung away, keeping out of the corner.

  XXII

  Still grinning, Dan Shute moved in. The big man was deceptively fast, and, as he moved in, suddenly he left his feet and hurled himself feet foremost at Rafe. Caradec sprang back, but too slowly. The legs jack-knifed around him, and Rafe staggered and went to the floor. He hit hard, and Dan was the first to move. Throwing himself over, he caught his weight on his left hand and swung with his right. It was a wicked, half-arm blow, and it caught Rafe on the chin. Lights exploded in his brain, and he felt himself go down. Then Shute sprang for him.

  Rafe rolled his head more by instinct than knowledge, and the blow clipped his ear. He threw his feet high, and tipped Dan over on his head and off his body. Both men came to their feet like cats and hurled themselves at each other. They struck like two charging bulls with an impact that shook the room.

  Rafe slugged a right to the wind and took a smashing blow to the head. They backed off, then charged together, and both men started pitching them—short, wicked hooks thrown from the hips with everything they had in the world in every punch. Rafe’s head was roaring, and he felt the smashing blows rocking his head from side to side. He smashed an inside right to the face, and saw a thin streak of blood on Shute’s cheek. He fired his right down the same groove, and it might well have been on a track. The split in the skin widened, and a trickle of blood started. Rafe let go another one to the same spot, then whipped a wicked left uppercut to the wind.

  Shute took it coming in and never lost stride. He ducked and lunged, knocking Rafe off balance with his shoulder, then swinging an overhand punch that caught Rafe on the cheek bone. Rafe tried to sidestep and failed, slipping on a wet spot on the floor. As he went down, Dan Shute aimed a terrific kick at his head that would have ended the fight right there but, half off balance, Rafe hurled himself at the pivot leg and knocked Dan sprawling.

  Both men came up and walked into each other, slugging. Rafe evaded a kick aimed for his stomach and slapped a palm under the man’s heel, lifting it high. Shute went over on his back, and Rafe left the floor in a dive and lit right in the middle of Dan Shute and knocked the wind out of him, but not enough so that Dan’s thumb failed to stab him in the eye.

  Blinded by pain, Rafe jerked his head away from that stabbing thumb and felt it rip along his cheek. Then he slammed two blows to the head before Shute heaved him off. They came up together.

  Dan Shute was bleeding from the cut on his cheek, but he was still smiling. His gray shirt was torn, revealing bulging white muscles. He was not even breathing hard, and he walked into Rafe with a queer little bounce in his step. Rafe weaved right to left, then straightened suddenly and left-handed a stiff one into Shute’s mouth. Dan went under a duplicate punch and slammed a right to the wind that lifted Rafe off the floor. They went into a clinch then, and Rafe was the faster, throwing Dan with a rolling hillock. He came off the floor fast, and the two went over like a pinwheel, gouging, slugging, ripping, and tearing at each other with fists, thumbs, and elbows.

  Shute was up first, and Rafe followed, lunging in, but Dan stepped back and whipped a right uppercut that smashed every bit of sense in Rafe’s head into a blinding pinwheel of white light. But he was moving fast and went on in with the impetus of his rush, and both men crashed to the floor.

  Up again and swinging, they stood toe to toe and slugged viciously, wickedly, each punch a killing blow. Jaws set, they lashed at each other like madmen. Then Rafe let his right go down the groove to the cut cheek. He sidestepped and let go again, then again and again. Five times straight he hit that split cheek. It was cut deeply now and streaming blood.

  Dan rushed and grabbed Rafe around the knees, heaving him clear of the floor. He brought him down with a thunderous crash that would have killed a lesser man. Rafe got up, panting, and was set for Shute as he rushed. He split Dan’s lips with another left, then threw a right that missed and caught a punch in the middle that jerked his mouth open and brought his breath out of his lungs in one great gasp.

  All reason gone, the two men fought like animals, yet worse than animals for in each man was the experience of years of accumulated brawling and slugging in the hard, tough, wild places of the world. They lived by their strength and their hands and the fierce animal drive that was within them, the drive of the fight for survival.

  Rafe stepped in, punching Shute with a wicked, cutting, stabbing left, and his right went down the line again, and blood streamed from the cut cheek. They stood then, facing each other, shirts in ribbons, blood-streaked, with arms a-swing. They started to circle, and suddenly Shute lunged. Rafe took one step back and let go a kick from the hips. An inch or so lower down and he would have caught the bigger man in the solar plexus. As it was, the kick struck him on the chest and lifted him clear of the floor. He came down hard, but his powerful arms grabbed Rafe’s leg as they swung down, and both men hit the floor together.

  Shute sank his teeth into Rafe’s leg, and Rafe stabbed at his eye with a thumb. Shute let go and got up, grabbing a chair. Rafe went under it, heard the chair splinter, and scarcely realized in the heat of battle that his back had taken the force of the blow. He shoved Dan back and smashed both hands into the big man’s body, then rolled aside and spilled him with a rolling hillock.

  Dan Shute came up, and Rafe walked in. He stabbed a left to the face, and Shute’s teeth showed through his lip, broken and ugly. Rafe set himself and whipped an uppercut that stood Shute on his toes.

  Tottering and punch-drunk, the light of battle still flamed in Shute’s eyes. He grabbed at a bottle and lunged at Rafe, smashing it down on his shoulders. Rafe rolled with the blow and felt the bottle shatter over the compact mass of the deltoid at the end of his shoulder, then he hooked a left with that same numb arm, and felt the fist sink into Shute’s body.

  The strong muscles of that rock-ribbed stomach were yielding now. Rafe set himself and threw a right from the hip to the same place, and Shute staggered, his face greenish-white. Rafe walked in and stabbed three times with a powerful, cutting left that left Shute’s lips in shreds. Then, suddenly calling on some hidden well of strength, Dan dived for Rafe’s legs, got him around the knees, and jerked back. Rafe hit the floor on the side of his head, and his world splintered into fragments of broken glass and light, flickering and exploding in a flaming chain reaction. He rolled over, took a kick on the chest, then s
taggered up as Shute stepped in, drunk with a chance of victory. Heavy, brutal punches smashed him to his knees, but Rafe staggered up. A powerful blow brought him down again, and he lunged to his feet.

  Again he went to his knees, and again, he came up. Then he uncorked one of his own, and Dan Shute staggered. But Dan had shot his bolt. Head ringing, Rafe Caradec walked in, grabbed the bigger man by the shirt collar and belt, right hand at the belt, then turned his back on him and jerked down with his left hand at the collar and heaved up with the right. He got his back under him, and then hurled the big man like a sack of wheat.

  Dan Shute hit the table beside which Gene Baker was standing, and both went down in a heap. Suddenly Shute rolled over and came to his knees, his eyes blazing. Blood streamed from the gash in his cheek, open now from mouth to ear, his lips were shreds, and a huge blue lump concealed one eye. His face was scarcely human, yet in the remaining eye gleamed a wild, killing, insane light. And in his hands he held Gene Baker’s double-barreled shotgun! He did not speak—just swept the gun up and squeezed down on both triggers.

  Yet at the very instant that he squeezed those triggers, Rafe’s left hand had dropped to the table near him, and with one terrific heave he spun it toward the kneeling man. The gun belched flame and thunder as Rafe hit the floor flat on his stomach, and rolled over to see an awful sight.

  Joe Benson, crouched over the bar, took the full blast of buckshot in the face and went over backward with a queer, choking scream.

  Rafe heaved himself erect, and suddenly the room was deathly still. Pod Gomer’s face was a blank sheet of white horror as he stared at the spot where Benson had vanished.

  Staggering, Caradec walked toward Dan Shute. The man lay on his back, arms outflung, head lying at a queer angle.

  Mullaney pointed. “The table,” he said. “It busted his neck.”

  Rafe turned and staggered toward the door. Johnny Gill caught him there. He slid an arm under Rafe’s shoulders and strapped his guns to his waist.

  “What about Gomer?” he asked.

  Caradec shook his head. Pod Gomer was getting up to face him, and he lifted a hand. “Don’t start anything. I’ve had enough. I’ll go.”

  Somebody brought a bucket of water, and Rafe fell on his knees and began splashing the ice-cold water over his head and face. When he had dried himself on a towel someone had handed him, he started for a coat. Baker had come in with a clean shirt from the store.

  “I’m sorry about that shotgun,” he said. “It happened so fast I didn’t know.”

  Rafe tried to smile, and couldn’t. His face was stiff and swollen. “Forget it,” he said. “Let’s get out of here.”

  “Yuh ain’t goin’ to leave, are yuh?” Baker asked. “Ann said that she …”

  “Leave? Shucks, no! We’ve got an oil business here, and there’s a ranch. While I was at the fort, I had a wire sent to the C Bar down in Texas for some more cattle.”

  Ann was waiting for him, wide-eyed when she saw his face. He walked past her toward the bed and fell across it. “Don’t let it get you, honey,” he said. “We’ll talk about it when I wake up next week.”

  She stared at him, started to speak, and a snore sounded in the room. Ma Baker smiled. “When a man wants to sleep, let him sleep, and I’d say he’d earned it.”

  THE END

  About the Author

  Louis Dearborn LaMoore (1908–1988) was born in Jamestown, North Dakota. He left home at fifteen and subsequently held a wide variety of jobs although he worked mostly as a merchant seaman. From his earliest youth, L’Amour had a love of verse. His first published work was a poem, “The Chap Worth While,” appearing when he was eighteen years old in his former hometown’s newspaper, the Jamestown Sun. L’Amour wrote poems and articles for a number of small circulation arts magazines all through the early 1930s and, after hundreds of rejection slips, finally had his first story accepted, “Anything for a Pal” in True Gang Life (10/35). He returned in 1938 to live with his family where they had settled in Choctaw, Oklahoma, determined to make writing his career. He wrote a fight story bought by Standard Magazines that year and became acquainted with editor Leo Margulies who was to play an important rôle later in L’Amour’s life. “The Town No Guns Could Tame” in New Western (3/40) was his first published Western story.

  During the Second World War L’Amour was drafted and ultimately served with the U.S. Army Transportation Corps in Europe. However, in the two years before he was shipped out, he managed to write a great many adventure stories for Standard Magazines. The first story he published in 1946, the year of his discharge, was a Western, “Law of the Desert Born” in Dime Western (4/46). A call to Leo Margulies resulted in L’Amour’s agreeing to write Western stories for the various Western pulp magazines published by Standard Magazines, a third of which appeared under the byline Jim Mayo, the name of a character in L’Amour’s earlier adventure fiction.

  L’Amour’s first Western novel under his own byline was Westward the Tide (World’s Work, 1950). L’Amour sold his first Western short story to a slick magazine two years later, “The Gift of Cochise” in Collier’s (7/5/52). Robert Fellows and John Wayne purchased screen rights to this story from L’Amour for $4,000 and James Edward Grant, one of Wayne’s favorite screenwriters, developed a script from it. L’Amour retained the right to novelize Grant’s screenplay, which differs substantially from his short story. Hondo (Fawcett Gold Medal, 1953) by Louis L’Amour was released on the same day as the film, Hondo (Warner, 1953), with a first printing of 320,000 copies.

  With Showdown at Yellow Butte (Ace, 1953) by Jim Mayo, L’Amour began a series of short Western novels for Don Wollheim that could be doubled with other short novels by other authors in Ace Publishing’s paperback two-fers. Advances on these were $800 and usually the author earned few royalties. Heller with a Gun (Fawcett Gold Medal, 1955) was the first of a series of original Westerns L’Amour had agreed to write under his own name following the success for Fawcett of Hondo. The great turn in L’Amour’s fortunes came about when he was signed by Bantam Books. By 1962 he was writing three original paperback novels a year. All of his Bantam Western titles came to be continuously kept in print. Independent distributors were required to buy titles in lots of 10,000 copies if they wanted access to other Bantam titles at significantly discounted prices. L’Amour himself comprised the other half of this successful strategy. He dressed up in cowboy outfits, traveled about the country in a motor home visiting with independent distributors, taking them to dinner and charming them, making them personal friends. He promoted himself at every available opportunity, insisting he was telling the stories of the people who had made America a great nation and he appealed to patriotism as much as to commercialism in his rhetoric. There are also several characteristics in purest form that, no matter how diluted they ultimately would become, account in largest measure for the loyal following Louis L’Amour won from his readers: the young male narrator who is in the process of growing into manhood and who is evaluating other human beings and his own experiences; a resourceful frontier woman who has beauty as well as fortitude; a strong male character who is single and hence marriageable; and the powerful, romantic, strangely compelling vision of the American West which invests L’Amour’s Western fiction and makes it such a delightful escape from the cares of a later time—in this author’s words that “big country needing big men and women to live in it” and where there was no place for “the frightened or the mean.”

 

 

 
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