The Lonesome Gods (Louis L'Amour's Lost Treasures)

by Louis L'Amour

  It was point-blank with a rifle at less than twenty yards, and I missed.

  At the instant I spoke, Chato, the most experienced fighting man of the lot, instinctively jumped his horse, and the bullet intended for him hit Rad Huber and knocked him sidewise in the saddle, almost unseating him. His horse jumped, and Huber, wounded, fought for control.

  Chato fired, as did Fletcher and Federico. A bullet burned my hand, and I dropped my rifle just as I got off a second shot.

  Palming my six-shooter, I put two bullets into Federico.

  Then suddenly the afternoon exploded with roaring guns and charging horses. Flashes stabbed the air, and there was a smell of gunpowder. The black stallion swung away, and I fired into Huber as he turned toward me, blood staining his shirt.

  Fletcher was down, but other riders had come in, and all were shooting. Wheeling the stallion, I was in time to see Monte McCalla put a finishing shot into Fletcher as he tried to rise. As quickly as it had begun, it was over.

  Besides McCalla I recognized Jacob Finney, Owen Hardin, and Yacub Khan. Two others were strangers; by their style, they were El Monte boys.

  Thumbing cartridges into my pistol, I holstered it.

  Hardin swung down, picked up my rifle, and handed it to me. “What’s the matter?” he said, smiling. “Can’t you keep out of trouble?”

  “Where’d you come from?”

  “Miss Nesselrode sent us to round up Meghan Laurel, and we were just tryin’ to catch up when we ran into Khan here. He come down Mills Creek an’ ran right into us.

  “We were ridin’ along enjoyin’ the afternoon when we saw your dust up ahead, and when you topped a rise, we recognized you. Just about that time we saw four riders headin’ into the creek bottom, so we used our spurs, an’ all hell busted loose.”

  “Where is she?” Jacob looked around. “Where’s the girl?”

  “Gone along to the cantina,” I said, and for the first time I looked down at the bodies.

  There were but three: Rad Huber, Fletcher, and the don.

  Chato? Chato was gone!

  “Meghan!” I shouted, and I slapped spurs to that black stallion and took off with a lunge.

  That cantina was only a little way ahead, and Chato…!

  The others were behind me, running their horses. The clump of trees, the hitching rail, the patio with its tables…

  I hit the ground running.

  Chato was standing in the shade of a big oak on the edge of the patio. His gun was in his hand.

  “Meghan?” I shouted.

  “I do not fight women,” he said. “I fight only men.”

  “I am a man,” I said. I was fairly certain now that he had not harmed Meghan, so I could concentrate fully on the job I had to do.

  Shadows fell on the cruel face, the flat nose, the old scars. “I should have killed you then, in spite of the old man. You were trouble. I could see it in your eyes, and you were but a baby.”

  “I am a man now,” I said, and I shot above the stabbing flame from his gun.

  He took a slow step back, and I shot again. The gun fell from his hand, and he grabbed for it, falling to his knees. He tried to get up then, and fell headlong, his hat rolling free.

  “You should have died in the desert,” he said.

  “I am Johannes Verne,” I said, “and I was not afraid.”

  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, which published in the fall of 2017, and Volume 2, which 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 released 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.

  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

  My father had a deep and abiding love for Southern California, the place that was his home for forty-two years. As a teenager looking for a job as a sailor, he first visited the area in early 1926 and came back for a short time later in the year. He returned, possibly more than once, in 1928 and spent some time traveling around, experiencing life in Los Angeles as well as up and down the coast.

  By the time he moved permanently to L.A., just after World War II, the landscape had changed significantly. I suspect Dad’s earlier visits allowed him to really appreciate what Southern California must have been like a generation or two before he arrived. In those days, Los Angeles still contained a sense of Old California, Spanish California, Mexican California.

  It was always a special place, isolated by deserts, mountains, and the sea. It was one of the “ends of the earth,” and the people who washed up there were those who belonged nowhere else. Misfits, outcasts, escapees—artists, inventors, and those with visions that were too big or too different for the cultures from which they came.

  Up through the end of the twentieth century, Southern California was a mecca for those with unstructured libertarian tendencies, a place where you could remake yourself, change your name and live your dreams. People from all over the world built a constellation of cities where they could be artists, architects, filmmakers, aircraft designers, and computer scientists. They started religions, wrote novels, tinkered with racing cars, and constructed contraptions that would fly to the moon and Mars. It was a place where anything was possible, but this freedom came with a cost—the California dream attracted Jonas Salk, but it also attracted Charles Manson. It was the Wild West—the perfect spot for a man like my father.

  Dad’s first attempt at some of the themes contained in The Lonesome Gods was a short story written in 1951. This story, also titled “The Lonesome Gods,” is set in the desert along the Colorado River, an area that at the time was much more familiar to him than Palm Springs or the areas surrounding Los Angeles.

  The Lonesome Gods

  Who can say that the desert does not live? Or that the dark, serrated ridges conceal no spirit? Who can love the lost places, yet believe himself truly alone in the silent hills? How can we be sure the ancient ones were wrong when they believed each rock, each tree, each stream or mountain possessed an active spirit? Are the gods of those vanished peoples truly dead, or do they wait among the shadows for some touch of respect, the ritual or sacrifice that can again give them life?

  It is written in the memories of the ancient peoples that one who chooses the desert for his enemy has chosen a bitter foe, but he who accepts it as friend, who will seek to understand its moods and whims, shall
feel also its mercy, shall drink deep of its hidden waters, and the treasures of its rocks shall be opened before him. Where one may walk in freedom and find water in the arid places, another may gasp out his last breath under the desert sun and mark the sands with the bones of his ending.

  Into the western wastelands, in 1807, a man walked dying. Behind him lay the bodies of his companions and the wreck of their boat on the Colorado River. Before him lay the desert, and somewhere beyond the desert the shores of the Pacific.

  Jacob Almayer was a man of Brittany, and the Bretons are an ancient folk with roots among the Druids and those unknown people who vanished long ago, but who lifted the stones of Karnak to their places. He was a man who had walked much alone, a man sensitive to the wilderness and the mores of other peoples and other times, and now he walked into the desert with only the miles before him.

  The distance was immeasurable. He was without water, without food, and the vast waste of the desert was the sickly color of dead flesh deepening in places to rusty red or to the hazy purple of distance. Within the limits of his knowledge lay no habitation of men except the drowsy Spanish colonies along the coast. Yet, colonies or not, the sea was there, and the men of Brittany are born to the sea. So he turned his face westward and let the distance unroll behind him.

  Now he had not long to live. From the crest of the ridge he stared out across the unbelievable expanse of the desert. The gourd that hung from his shoulder was empty for many hours. His boots were tatters of leather, his cheeks and eyes sunken, his lips gray and cracked.

  Morning had come at last, and Jacob Almayer licked the dew from the barrel of his rifle and looked westward. Although due west was the way he had traveled and due west he should continue, off to his right there lay the shadow of an ancient trail, lying like the memory of a dream across the lower slope of the mesa.

  The trail was old. So old the rocks had taken the patina of desert time, so old that it skirted the curve of an ancient beach where once lapped the waters of a vanished sea. The old trail led away in a long, graceful sweep, toward the west-northwest, following the high ground toward some destination he could not guess.

  West was his logical route. Somewhere out there the road from Mexico to the California missions cut diagonally across the desert. By heading directly west he might last long enough to find that road, yet the water gourd was dry and the vast sun-baked basin before him offered no promise. The ancient folk who made this path must have known where water could be found, yet if the sea had vanished from this basin might not the springs have vanished also?

  Jacob Almayer was a big man, powerful in the chest and broad in the shoulders, a fighter by instinct and a man who would, by the nature of him, die hard. He was also a man of ironic, self-deriding humor, and it was like him to have no illusions now. And it was like him to look down the ancient trail with curious eyes. For how many centuries had this trail been used? Walked by how many feet, dust now these hundreds of years? And for how long had it been abandoned?

  Such a path is not born in a month, nor are the stones marked in a year. Yet the ages had not erased the marks of their passing, although without this view from the crest it was doubtful if the trail could be seen. But once seen and recognized for what it was, following it should not be hard. Moreover, at intervals the passing men had dropped stones into neat piles.

  To mark the miles? The intervals were irregular. To break the monotony? A ritual, perhaps? Like a Tibetan spinning a prayer wheel? Was each stone a prayer? An invocation to the gods of travelers? Gods abandoned for how long?

  “I could use their help,” Jacob Almayer said aloud. “I could use them now.” Either path might lead to death, and either might lead to water and life, but which way?

  Curiosity triumphed, or rather, his way of life triumphed. Had it not always been so with him? And those others who preceded him? Was it not curiosity more than desire for gain that led them on? And now, in what might be the waning hours of life, it was no time to change.

  Jacob Almayer looked down the shimmering basin and he looked along the faint but easy sweep of the trail. He could, of course, rationalize his choice. The trail led over high ground, along an easier route; trust an Indian to keep his feet out of the heavy sand. Jacob Almayer turned down the trail, and as he did so he stooped and picked up a stone from the ground.

  The sun lifted into the wide and brassy sky and the basin swam with heat. The free-swinging stride that had carried him from the Colorado was gone now, but the trail was good and he walked steadily. He began to sweat again, and smelled the odors of his unwashed clothes, his unbathed body; the stale smell of old sweat. Yet the air he breathed, however hot, was like wine—like water, one could almost swallow it. Soon he came to a pile of stones and he dropped the stone he carried and picked up another, then walked on.

  Upon his shoulder the gourd flopped loosely, and his dry tongue fumbled at the broken flesh of his lips. After several hours he stopped sweating, and when he inadvertently touched the flesh of his face it felt hot and dry. When he paused at intervals he found it becoming harder and harder to start again but he kept on, unable to rest for long, knowing that safety if it came would be somewhere ahead.

  Sometimes his boots rolled on rocks and twisted his feet painfully, and he could feel that his socks were stuck to his blistered feet with dried blood. Once he stumbled and fell, catching himself on his hands, but clumsily so that the skin was torn and lacerated. For a long minute he held himself on his hands and knees, staring drunkenly at the path beneath him, caught in some trancelike state when he was neither quite conscious nor quite unconscious, but for the moment was just flesh devoid of animation. Finally he got to his feet and, surprised to find himself there, he started on, walking with sudden rapidity as if starting anew. Cicadas hummed in the cacti and greasewood, and once he saw a rattler coil and buzz angrily, but he walked on.

  Before him the thread of the trail writhed among the rocks, emerged, and then fell away before him to a lower level, so faint yet beckoning, always promising, drawing him into the distance as a magnet draws filings of iron. He no longer thought, but only walked, hypnotized by his own movement. His mind seemed to fill with the heat haze and he remembered nothing but the rocks, dropping and carrying stones with the deadly persistence of a drunken man.

  Now the trail skirted the white line of an ancient beach, where the sand was silver with broken shell and where at times he came upon the remains of ancient fires, blackened stones, charred remains of prehistoric shells and fish bones.

  His eyes were bloodshot now, slow to move and hard to focus. Dust devils danced in the desert heat waves. He clung to the thread of the path as to the one thing in this shimmering land of mirages that was real, that was familiar.

  Then he tripped.

  He fell flat on his face, and he lay still, face against the gravel of the partial slope, the only sound that of his hoarse breathing. Slowly he pushed himself up, got into a sitting position. Drunkenly he stared at his palms, scraped and gouged by the fall. With infinite and childish concentration he began to pick the sand from the wounds, and then he licked at the blood. He got up then, because it was his nature to get up. He got up and he recovered his gun, making an issue of bending without losing balance, and triumphant when he was successful.

  He fell twice more in the next half hour, and each time it took him longer to rise. Yet he knew the sun was past its noontime high, and somehow he must last out the day. He started on but his mouth was dry, his tongue musty, and the heat waves seemed all around him. He seemed to have, at last, caught up with the mirage, for it shimmered around him and washed over him like the sea but without freshness, only heat.

  A man stood in the trail before him.

  An Indian. Jacob Almayer tried to cry out but he could not. He started forward, but the figure of the man seemed to recede as he advanced…and then the In
dian’s arm lifted and pointed.

  Almayer turned his head slowly, looking toward the ridge of upthrust rock not far off the trail. Almayer tried to speak, but the Indian merely pointed.

  Jacob Almayer leaned back and tried to make out the looks of the Indian, but all he could see was the brown skin, breech-clout, and some sort of a band around his head. Around his shoulders was some sort of a fur jacket. A fur jacket? In this heat? Almayer looked again at the rocks; when he looked back, the Indian was gone.

  The rocks were not far away and Almayer turned toward them, but first he stopped, for where the Indian had been standing there was a pile of stones. He walked toward it and added his stone to the pile. Then he picked up another and turned toward the ridge. There was a trail here, too. Not quite so plain as the other, but nevertheless, a trail.

  He walked on, hesitating at times, reluctant to get away from the one possibility of safety, but finally he reached the ridge where the trail rounded it, and he did likewise, and there in a corner of the rocks was white sand overgrown with thin grass, a clump of mesquite, a slim cottonwood tree, and beneath it, a pool of water.

  Jacob Almayer tasted the water and it was sweet; he put a little on his lips, and it had the coolness of a benediction. He put some in his mouth and held it there, letting the starved tissues of his mouth absorb the water, and then he let a little trickle down his throat, and felt it, all the way to his stomach. After a while he drank, and over his head the green leaves of the cottonwood brushed their green and silver palms in whispering applause. Jacob Almayer crept into the shade and slept. He awoke to drink, then slept again, and in the paleness of the last hours of night he awakened and heard a faint stir upon the hillside opposite the ridge beside which he lay. He squinted his eyes, then widened them, trying to see, and then he did see.

  There were men there, men and women, and even he in his half-delirium and his half-awareness knew these were like no Indians he had seen. Each carried a basket and they were gathering something from among the squat green trees on the hill. He started up and called out, but they neither turned nor spoke, but finally completed their work and walked slowly away.