Suddenly, a shadow loomed between the fire and himself. He tilted his head, and a stunning blow knocked it down again.
“So?” The voice was a hiss. “You?”
He looked up, brow wrinkled with anguish. Commander Ishimaru stared down at him. He remembered the man from an event on the coast of China. He forced a grin. “Sure, it’s me, Mike Thorne. How’s tricks?”
Ishimaru studied him.
“No change, I see,” he said softly. “I am glad. You will break harder, my friend.” He bowed, and his eyes glittered like obsidian in the firelight.
The Japanese officer studied him. “Where did you come from?” he went on. “How many are there? Why did you come here?”
“Side issue,” Mike replied. “Doolittle and his boys are taking another sock at Tokyo. They sent me down here to keep you boys busy while the big show comes off.”
Ishimaru struck him viciously across the face. Once, twice. Then again.
“You tell me how many, and where they are.” Ishimaru’s voice was level. “Otherwise, you burn.”
“Go to the devil,” Mike replied.
“You have ten minutes to decide.” Ishimaru’s voice was sharp. He spun on his heel and walked away.
Mike Thorne’s lips tightened. His legs were already feeling their cramped position. The position alone would soon be torture enough, but the Japanese would not let it rest there. He had seen men after Japanese torture, and it had turned him sick. And Mike Thorne wasn’t a man to be bothered easily.
If he was to escape, it must be now, at once. From the activity around the landing field he could see that the hour of attack was approaching. The wreckage of the two burned pursuit ships had been hurriedly cleared away. The other planes were being fueled and readied for the takeoff. From his position his view was limited, but there were at least fifty Zeros on the landing field.
More, the Japanese were wheeling attack bombers from concealed positions. In the confusion he was almost forgotten.
DESPERATELY, HE TRIED to pull himself erect. It was impossible. The cramped position of his legs was slowly turning them numb. He strained against the ropes that bound him, but without success.
His arms were not only bound around the tree, but were higher than his head, and tied there. By pressing the inside of his arms against the tree trunk he succeeded in lifting himself a bare inch. It did no good and only caused the muscles in his legs to cramp.
Trying to get the ropes that bound his wrists against the tree bark did him no good. He sawed but only succeeded in chafing his wrists.
A movement in the shadow of some packing cases startled him. Suddenly, to his astonishment, Jerry Brandon emerged from behind the cases. She walked across to him, unhurriedly, then bent over his wrists.
“Get out of here!” he snapped, and was astonished by the fierceness of his voice. “They’ll get you! These devils—!”
“Be still!” Jerry sawed at the ropes, and suddenly his wrists were free, then his feet. Slowly, carefully, she helped him up.
“Beat it,” he said tersely. “You’ve done enough. If they catch you, death will be too easy for you. I can’t run now. I doubt if I can even walk.”
Her arm about him, he tottered a few steps and almost fell. The pain in his legs was excruciating. Suddenly he saw the smatchet he’d had lying on a case beside some rifles. He staggered to the case and picked it up. They each took a rifle.
A Japanese dropped a sack to the ground at the nearest plane and started to turn. He saw them, hesitated, then started forward.
“This is it,” Mike said. “Get out of here. I’ll get away now. Anyway, no use both of us being caught.”
The soldier halted, stared, then turned to shout. Mike Thorne lifted the rifle and fired. His first bullet struck the man in the head and he pitched over. The second smashed into the plane.
Jerry Brandon was beside him, and she fired also. Slowly, they began to back away, taking advantage of every bit of cover, firing as they retreated. A bullet smashed into a tree trunk beside Mike, and he stepped back, loading the rifle again.
They were almost to the brush, and turning, he started for it in a tottering run. Jerry fired another shot, then ran up alongside him. Together they fled into the brush.
Behind them the field was in a turmoil. The escape had come without warning, the sudden firing within the camp had added to the confusion, and it had been a matter of minutes before anyone was aware of just what had happened.
But now a line of soldiers fanned out and started into the jungle.
Mike Thorne stopped, wetting his bruised lips. This was going to be tough. The Japanese would cut them off from his trail up the mountain. They knew where they had lost him before and this time would take care to prevent that. Furthermore, they were closer to the path up the mountain than he.
Worse, the ascent of the precipice down which he had come might be impossible for him in his present condition. And it was a cinch Jerry would never be able to make it.
His own problem was serious, but there was another, greater than that. Death for himself, even for Jerry Brandon, was a small thing compared to the fearful destruction of a sudden, successful attack on grounded planes and ships at anchor. The loss of life would be terrific. But what to do? What could two people do in such a case, far from means of communication….
But were they? The idea came suddenly.
Instantly, he knew it would work. It was the only way, the only possible way. He smiled wryly into the darkness. Was it possible? It meant climbing the cliff in the darkness, climbing along the sheer face, feeling for handholds, risking death at every second. It meant doing what only a moment before he had thought was impossible.
They slid swiftly through the jungle, but now, taking the girl’s hand, he chose a new path. He was going to the cliff.
Suddenly, the girl’s grip tightened.
“Mike, you’re not going to…?”
“Yes, I am,” he said quietly. “Something big’s coming off. I’m not going to sit by and see the enemy close in on those boys on Guadalcanal.”
“But what can you do?” Jerry protested. “Getting up that cliff won’t help. And I can’t climb it, even in daytime.”
“You aren’t going to,” he told her. “I know a cave in the rocks down below. You can stay there. I’m going up, somehow, some way. If I should fall, you’ll have to try. Up on that peak there is heaped-up forest, forest dead and parched by sun and wind, rotting in places, but mostly just dry. We’ve got to set fire to it.”
“Could they see it from there, Mike? It’s so far!”
He shrugged. “You can see a candle twelve miles from a plane on a dark night. I’m hoping some scout will sight this flame. It should be visible for miles and miles.”
“But won’t the Japanese put it out?” Jerry protested.
“They’ll try.” He laughed softly.
WHEN HE REACHED THE FOOT OF THE CLIFF he stopped dead still. Suddenly, despite the oppressive heat, he felt cold. Above him, looming in the darkness, the gigantic precipice towered toward the stars. Somehow, along the face of that awful cliff, he had climbed down, feeling his way. Now he must go back.
A slip meant an awful death on the jagged rocks below. Yet not to climb meant that many men would die, brave men who would perish in a world of rending steel and blasting, searing flame.
HIS HANDS FOUND a crevice, and he started. Inch by inch, he felt his way along, the awful void growing below him as he mounted upward. Rocks crumbled under his fingers, roots gave way, he clung, flattened against the rock as though glued to it, living for the moment only. His flesh damp with cold sweat, his skin alive, the nerves sensing every roughness in the rock.
Time and again he slipped, only to catch hold, then mount higher. A long time later, his clothing soaked, his fingers torn and bleeding, he crawled over the ridge and lay facedown on the rock. His pounding heart seemed to batter the solid surface beneath him, his lungs gasped for air, his muscles felt limp.
; “So…I was correct.”
The voice was sibilant, cold. Mike Thorne’s eyes opened wide, suddenly alert. Ishimaru’s voice broke into the feeling of failure, of utter depression that swept over him. “I knew you would try it, American. So foolish to try to outwit Ishimaru.”
Mike knew he was covered, knew a move meant death. Yet he moved suddenly and with violence. He had drawn his hands back to his sides unconsciously, and with a sudden push up he hurled himself forward against the soldier’s legs.
A gun roared in his ears, and he felt the man go down before him. He lunged to his feet, and Ishimaru, wild with fury, fired from the ground. A searing flame scorched the side of Thorne’s face, and then he dove headfirst onto him.
Like a cat, the Japanese officer rolled away. He came up quickly and, as Mike lunged in, grabbed at his wrist. But Mike was too wise in the ways of judo, swung away, and whipped a driving right to the chin. The officer went down, hard.
Feet rushed, and Mike saw a man swinging at him with a rifle butt. He dropped in a ball at the man’s feet, and the fellow tripped and fell headlong, rolling over the edge of the cliff. The Japanese made one wild, futile grab with his fingers, then vanished, his scream ringing into the heavens.
Mike’s rifle had fallen from his shoulders where it had been slung. Now he grabbed it up and fired two quick shots, then dove into the brush. He staggered through the jungle toward the place he had chosen to start the fire. Heedless of danger, he dropped to his knees, scraped together some sticks, and with paper from his pocket, lit the fire.
A shot smacked dully into the log near him, and he rolled over. The flame took hold, then a volley of shots riddled the brush around him. By a miracle he was unhurt. A Japanese came leaping into the growing firelight, and Mike’s rifle cracked. The soldier fell headlong. Another, and another shot.
The flame caught in a heap of dead branches, flared, and leaped high. In a roaring holocaust, it swirled higher and higher, mounting a fast crescendo of unbelievable fury toward the dark skies. The scene around was lit by a weird light, and into it came the Japanese.
Desperately, yet methodically, making every shot count, Mike Thorne began to fire. He sprang to his feet, rushed, changed position, opened fire again. A bullet stung him along the arm, something struck his leg a solid blow. He raised to one knee, blood trickling from a cut on his scalp, and fired again.
Then, suddenly, another rifle opened fire across the clearing. Taken on the flank, the advancing enemy hesitated, then broke for the jungle.
Suddenly, over the roar of the fire, Mike heard the roar of motors. Their planes, taking off!
He saw them mount, swing around, then a bomb dropped. He heard it one instant before it exploded and hurled himself flat. The earth heaved under him, and the fire lifted and scattered in all directions, but roared on.
THEN OUT OF THE NIGHT he heard the high-pitched whine of a diving plane, and the night was lit with the insane lightning of tracer gone wild, while over his head the sky burst into a roaring, chattering madness of sound.
Battle! Planes had come, and there was fighting up there in the darkness. He rolled over, swearing in a sullen voice, swearing in sheer relief that his warning had been successful. He fired at a Japanese soldier, saw the flames catch hold anew, and then as his rifle clicked on an empty chamber, he lunged erect, hauling out the smatchet.
Suddenly, something white loomed in the sky, and then a man hit the ground beside him. It was a paratrooper! An American! Then the night was filled with them, and Mike staggered toward the man.
A forward observer grabbed Mike’s arm. “What is it? Where the devil are they coming from?”
Mike roared the information into his ear, and the officer began a crisp recital of the information into the radio.
A plane roared over, then explosions came from the chasm below, the night changed from the bright rattle of machine-gun fire to the solemn, unceasing thunder of big bombs as the bombers shuttled back and forth, releasing their eggs over the enemy field.
Mike staggered back, feeling his numbed leg. It wasn’t bleeding. Evidently a stick knocked against his leg by a bullet, or a stone. He turned, dazed.
Jerry Brandon came running toward him. “Mike! Are you all right?”
“Sure,” he said. “Where…?”
“I came up the trail. I thought maybe I could make it, and when the fighting started up there, I got through all right.”
The Army officer walked back through the smoke and stopped beside Mike. “This is a good night’s work, friend,” he said. “Who are you?”
Briefly, Mike told him. The officer looked curiously at Jerry. Mike explained, and the officer nodded. “Yes,” he said dryly, “we heard about you. Incidentally, your father’s safe. He got into Henderson Field last night.”
They turned away. Mike looked at Jerry, smiling wearily. “Lady,” he said, “tired as I am, I can still wonder at finding a girl like you in the Solomons. If there wasn’t a war on…” He looked at her again. “After all,” he said thoughtfully, “what’s a war between friends?”
Jerry laughed. “I think you could handle the war, too,” she said.
Afterword
Of all these volumes of the Collected Short Stories series this one is my favorite. Tales that for years have cried out to be presented together have now found a home in the same binding. An era in the life of Louis L’Amour is finally available in a manner where the work almost becomes an autobiography in fiction.
The first several stories in this collection are some of the most recently written, stories that Louis wrote from the early 1950s to the early 1960s; they show the end of an arc that also included “The Moon of the Trees Broken by Snow,” a story published in The Collected Short Stories, Volume One. The rest of this collection, however, flashes back to Louis’s very beginnings as a writer and, in fact, includes the first story he ever published: one recently unearthed and offered here for the first time.
“Death, Westbound” was actually mentioned by Louis in his memoir, Education of a Wandering Man, although he didn’t mention the title. “I placed my first story for publication,” he wrote. “It was a hobo story, submitted to a magazine that had published many famous names when they were starting out. The magazine paid on publication, but that never happened. The magazine folded after accepting my story and that was the end of it.”
Interesting, but not exactly true….
Fifty-five years earlier Louis had written to a girlfriend of his saying, “I have…managed to have one short story accepted by a small magazine one finds on the newsstands. It pays rather well but is somewhat sensational. The magazine…is generally illustrated by several pictures of partially undressed ladies, and they are usually rather heavily constructed ladies also. It is called 10 Story Book. My story was a realistic tale of some hoboes called “Death, Westbound.”
Now, I knew for a fact that Dad was trying to impress this gal like all get out. But it seemed like he was talking about the same story that he mentioned many years later. A check of his list of story submissions for the nineteen thirties revealed that he had continued to submit work to 10 Story Book for the next several years…. Not what you’d expect if they had “folded.” Much later in life, had Louis felt compelled to mention this early moment of triumph but at the same time deny his connection to the magazine’s somewhat sleazy content?
A number of searches showed that very few copies of 10 Story Book existed in libraries or public archives. So I began to put the word out to magazine aficionados, pulp collectors, and the fairly offbeat subculture of antique pornography collectors. About five years passed with little result other than occasionally calling or e-mailing various people and reminding them that I was still interested. But one day my in-box divulged a scan of “Death, Westbound” by Louis D. Amour. One of my contacts had finally come through. I don’t know if the name, D. Amour, was a mistake or an early attempt at a pseudonym, but this was Louis L’Amour’s first recorded sale.
Sensational
photos (for the 1930s) aside, Dad seems to have been in good company; Jack Woodford is listed in the table of contents of the edition and I assume that this is the novelist, screenwriter, and short-story master of Jack Woodford on Writing fame. Other famous writers of the early twentieth century are also reputed to have been published here, too; 10 Story Book following a model later used by Playboy, where the promise of unclothed women draws in readers who otherwise would never have bothered with literature at all; and the literature gave the magazine some class and protection from the opinions of moralists and pro-censorship types.
In this collection, “Death, Westbound” begins a cycle that will carry the reader through stories that relate to many actual events in Louis’s early life. It should not be assumed that these stories are always literally true but they are a snapshot of the times—the 1920s and 1930s—and how Louis L’Amour experienced those times. Greatly influenced by Jack London, Eugene O’Neal, and later John Steinbeck, Louis began his career by trying to document the era that he lived in. Whether “Death, Westbound” is a “true story” or not, Louis did ride the side-door Pullman’s of the Southern Pacific on many occasions; from Arizona to Texas and back again, and from Arizona to California even more often.
The stories “Old Doc Yak,” “It’s Your Move,” and “And Proudly Die,” soon followed, and were drawn from actual people that Louis knew in the time he spent waiting for a ship or “on the beach,” as the sailors called unemployment, in San Pedro, California. Louis wrote of that time in an introduction from Yondering: “Rough painting or bucking rivets in the shipyards, swamping on a truck, or working ‘standby’ on a ship were all a man could find. It wasn’t enough. We missed meals and slept wherever we could. The town was filled with drifting, homeless men, mostly seamen from all the countries in the world. Sometimes I slept in empty boxcars, in abandoned buildings, or in the lumber piles on the old E. K. Wood lumber dock.”
The Collected Short Stories of Louis L'Amour, Volume Four Page 84