Yondering: Stories

by Louis L'Amour

  “It is a question, Madam. Sometimes I wonder if I remember who I am myself. Identities are, you understand, a matter of convenience, but I seem to remember that my name is Ali O’Mara. The name is from my father…the O’Mara is. He was from Tipperary. My mother was a Circassian, and I was born in Istanbul. I am a man of several passports, Madam, and no loyalties.”

  “You will have no money from me,” she replied coolly. “I am broke.”

  “Who is not, Madam? Even you, the incomparable Villette, can be broke. There is always another gentleman….Of course, the Marquis was scarcely worthy of you, but the Maharajah! Ah, there was a man!”

  Pausing slightly, I said, “You say you are broke, but you cannot be. You have the rug…a gift from the Maharajah, I believe…and now you have my friendship.”

  Taking the rug from her hands I spread it atop the ruined wall. It was a Ghiordes prayer rug. The shape of the Prayer Arch with its high central spire and strongly defined shoulders were a distinctive feature of its design. The elegance of design and the beauty of color were typical of the Middle Period, but all that was obvious. What was obvious also was the masterful workmanship that had gone into the making of this rug….It was by no means an ordinary rug, by no means even a special rug of the period…it was a masterpiece, and it was unique.

  “It is superb,” I said quietly. “I have seen no rug like it.” As I spoke my eyes were eagerly tracing out the design, searching for the clue. Here, within my hands, I held the clue to the burial of a vast treasure of gold and jewels, for if the legends were true the secret was woven into this rug.

  Yet the rug itself fascinated me. Typical of the Ghiordes prayer rugs, the nap brushed toward the top of the arch, and that arch pointed toward Mecca when the rug was placed on the ground. The Ghiordes rugs were made of wool through which a little cotton had been woven. A rug entirely of wool would be perfect, and by mixing the cotton the weaver symbolized his humility before Allah.

  Scanning the rug quickly, I searched for a clue, knowing the opportunity might never be mine again. The spandrel, or that area directly above the arch, was of deep blue, symbolizing the vault of the heavens, and there could be no clue there. The clue must therefore be in the border, the panel, or the supporting pillars of the arch…or, and I glanced searchingly, the temple lamp suspended from the peak of the arch. Only in this case, as in some others, the lamp hung free in the arch.

  “They come.” It was Rashid, who had watched us with interest.

  Our eyes turned toward the road. The black car was there again, and several men were getting out. It was the first time the car had stopped….It was three hundred yards off down the hill, and there was little time.

  “They must not find you.” I caught Villette’s arm quickly. There was no hiding place among the ruins, and the hillside was totally without cover. The grass was short and there were only the scattered goats….

  There was a slight depression in the face of the slope down which run-off water had found a way. “Go up there,” I said to her, “with Rashid, and lie down among the goats, your back down slope, knees drawn up. And whatever you do…don’t move!”

  She quickly understood, and as quickly disappeared. Shallow as the depression was, it gave them cover for the space of time necessary for them to mount the slope. There was an instant when she might have been seen for what she was, and then she was lying down, looking but little different than the goats, some of which were lying down, some grazing, the nearest of them more than a hundred yards up hill.

  As for me, I opened my camera, checked my light meter, and gave the camera the proper setting. A camera, I have observed, offers concealment for a multitude of sinful plans. A man with a camera might be photographing anything…in those nations accustomed to tourists a man with a camera might be anywhere, even among the ruins of El Walarieh.

  There were four men, and two were dark, sallow men with suspicious eyes. One was a European, the last an American. It was this one about whom I worried for of them all he was the only one who might know me….He was an ex-G.I. who had remained behind in Europe, buying and selling on the black market, smuggling a little, dealing in contraband.

  “Good afternoon,” I said cheerfully, and checked my light meter again.

  They looked at me suspiciously, and then they looked around, their eyes searching every nook and cranny of the ruins.

  “It isn’t much of a ruin,” I said, “but against the green hillside, with the sea beyond and the white clouds on that sky…I’ll get some good color shots.”

  “There was a girl here?” The American’s name was Butler.

  “A girl?” I winked at him. “Ah, now that would be something. Were you expecting a girl?”

  Butler was staring at me, and under the stare I grew uneasy. If he knew me by sight or name, I did not know, but the others did not. Seeing them now at close range, I recognized them all, and they were trouble, real trouble. These men were not casual thieves following up a rumor from the bazaar, they were as dangerous as any men in North Africa or Europe.

  “If you want a good shot,” I ventured, “there’s a place with a great view of the cliffs, the hillside and the sea with the white line of the surf breaking.”

  They ignored me. One of the Greeks, for such he was, prowled among the ruins and finally returned. “Nobody here,” he said, with disgust. “Probably mistook that goat-herd for a woman.”

  Walking away, toward their car, Butler turned and glanced back at me. Something was riding his memory, and I was worried. There was one thing to do: study the rug, discover its secret, find the cache of jewels and get away. And the quicker the better.

  When the car had gone I strolled up the hillside toward the goats, occasionally stopping for a picture.

  Villette lay still, and I admired her. She’d done what was necessary with no questions. A moment of hesitation or panic might have been disastrous.

  She sat up when I spoke to her. “It was Hans Butler,” I said, “and Armand Vico and that scarred Greek. Do you know them?”

  “I know them,” she said, and from her tone I surmised she knew them well enough.

  “The rug,” I said, and sat down beside her. “We must do what we can, at once.”

  Rashid came to join us. He had been seated with his goats higher on the hill.

  Seated on the wall of the ruin in the light of a fading afternoon, I studied the rug. The border offered nothing. Each design on such a rug has meaning, or once had meaning; much knowledge is required to comprehend the designs used in rug design. Jewish and Christian symbols may be found as well as Moslem, and many a pagan symbol has held over, but there was once a group of Chinese weavers who settled in the Middle East and wove rugs there, and their dragon symbols, altered but recognizable, can often be found.

  The temple lamp…it always came back to that in the end. The design of the lamp was simple but unlike any I had ever seen. The pattern was geometrical, but broken and distorted. Study it as I would, it made no sense.

  The story of the Weaver of El Walarieh was a strange one, although in North Africa the weird and unusual is so common as to be almost the usual.

  The Weaver had been friend and adviser to Moulay Ismail, a powerful prince who at one time wished to join with Queen Elizabeth and divide the empire of Spain. The Weaver had been just that—a weaver of rugs in Turkey, a wanderer in Persia, a shrewd and cunning man wherever he was. Above all he was the most trusted adviser to Moulay Ismail, and as such he gathered wealth.

  Moulay Ismail himself was one of the most fabulously rich rulers who ever lived, but the amount of the Weaver’s wealth was never known. The truth of the matter was, that the Weaver was a

  Yes, again…that is where it ends. There is a great deal more information about how this story eventually developed in my comments in “The Golden Tapestry” chapter of
Louis L’Amour’s Lost Treasures: Volume 1—more on Villette Mallory, more on her late husband the Maharajah, and more on the secret of the rug and the men who want to possess it.

  Next we look at “The Cross and the Candle” and the out-of-the-way Paris café featured in it. The place seems to be a quainter and quieter version of the nightclub owned by the notorious Suzy Solidor. Here are a couple of bits extracted from letters Louis wrote to his parents from France during the waning days of the war:

  There seems some evidence that part of the family [the L’Amour family] either were connected with Surcouf, the corsair and great Breton hero, or were with him on his ships. So, I’m going down tomorrow evening to see Suzy Solidor, a great grand daughter of his who owns the Chez Suzy, a night club on the Rue St. Anne, near the Louvre….It seems she was a few years ago one of the great beauties of Europe; that she was also a famous model; that she is still striking and attractive….I dropped by the night club last night but it was full to the doors and not a place anywhere, but I told the doorkeeper I was a writer, and came of an old Breton family….So I have an appointment with Suzy tomorrow night at ten.

  And…

  The place has over a hundred portraits of her done by all the famous artists of the past thirty years. She is about fifty, or perhaps a few years younger, and still something of a woman.

  It is well known that many of these portraits were indeed created by significant painters like Picasso, Braque, and Tamara de Lempicka. If Solidor’s “nightclub” and the “café” Louis describes in “The Cross and the Candle” are the same place, its formal name was La Vie Parisienne.

  Ironically, given the subject of Louis’s story, Suzy herself was eventually convicted of being a collaborator. I am unaware of the exact charges, but no doubt this was more related to the popularity of her club with Nazi officials than to her having possibly betrayed beautiful resistance fighters or secret societies of crusaders.

  For any students of writing who may be reading these Lost Treasures postscripts, it is worth noting my father’s ability to manipulate actual events into various story lines. These stories were “inspired by” real life but not, with a few exceptions, intended to be exact depictions of it. However, if you look closely, you can see how the addition or subtraction of an element or two can turn an event, like visiting Suzy Solidor’s café, into a complete and satisfying short story about family histories, Nazi collaborators, and ex-sailors who have fallen in love with aristocratic Frenchwomen.

  One of my favorites of all Dad’s short stories is “A Friend of the General.” It ties together Paris and Shanghai and joins the two extremes of my father’s possibly true or possibly mythical lives. I can remember hearing the story of Milton, originally named Mason, long before Louis actually wrote this story. As I’ve said before in this postscript, I have no evidence that Dad returned to Shanghai, or if he made up these stories, remembered others telling them, or read them in the newspapers of the era. It is slightly possible that he witnessed Milton’s fate, but more likely that he heard about it…providing he didn’t just make it all up.

  But what I do know is that the countess who lived in the lavish gardener’s cottage while troops (first German, then American) were quartered in her husband’s château was a real person, actually an American married to a Frenchman. While I corresponded with her prior to her death, she claimed not to remember my father or to be aware of any of the events in this story. She did, however, affect a very French weariness with life and, while very willing to talk to me, was unwilling to take my questions very seriously….I don’t know if that means anything or not. There is also a bit of Countess Marguerite “Guitou” de Felcourt in this character. Guitou was a wonderful lady whom my father was engaged to for much of the war and its aftermath and whose family is still friends with ours.

  The “old marshal” is probably based on Chang Tso-lin, or in its more modern version, Zhang Zuolin. Chang was a warlord and tuchun (governor) of Manchuria for a dozen or so years. However, he died when a Japanese agent planted a bomb in his train in June of 1928 and so, in reality, would not have been alive at the end of World War II.

  Tex Milligan, the old China hand who rents out his services as a pilot, also appears in the “Journey to Aksu” chapter of Lost Treasures: Volume 1. Additionally, some of the discussion that the lieutenant and the general have about Chabrang and the ruins of Tsaparang in Central Asia (especially the moment where the lieutenant says, “I believed it was a way out for me, too…but I was not so lucky. I had to turn back”) may have been Dad trying to have some fun by hinting that the two stories, the unfinished “Journey to Aksu” and “A Friend of the General,” were part of the same continuum.

  The last story in the collection, “Author’s Tea,” humorously draws on my father’s experience at the many poetry and writers’ society meetings he attended from the 1930s into the 1950s. Unlike the somewhat jaded character of “Dugan,” I believe that Dad enjoyed these get-togethers. Among the Oklahoma writers, he got the opportunity to market his book of poetry, spend time with many different types of authors, including old ladies who wrote about their dogs, and establish some support for his budding career. Later, in Los Angeles, he made connections that helped him make his way through the byzantine environment of Hollywood. I imagine there were plenty of times that he did feel like a wolf strolling through a herd of sheep, but there were always a few successful professionals at these affairs who could both teach him a thing or two and help keep his ego in check.

  The poem “Let Me Forget….” was written in 1942, three years too late to be included in Smoke from This Altar. Along with the short piece created for the beginning of this volume, it forms a wonderful bookend for Yondering, and also celebrates a line of demarcation in my father’s life: the wanderer becoming a storyteller. More than anything else, what he wanted in the early 1940s was to be allowed the time to perfect his craft and to set the foundations of a successful career. But all the literary potential of that period was snatched away on the first Sunday of December 1941.

  Reading that last poem with fresh eyes, I found myself wondering if the reason he had included it didn’t contain a double layer of nostalgia: first and foremost for his Yondering past, but also for the poor but comfortable existence he had enjoyed as a struggling artist living with his parents in rural Oklahoma.

  Within a year he would be thrown back into a world of foreign travel, high adventure, and epic violence. Dad had always found his own personal meaning in Shakespeare’s line “No traveller returns.” To him it suggested not only the one-way journey into death that every human will experience, but the fact that none of us return to the places, people, and situations we once knew without all having undergone significant change. Indeed, in 1942, my father could never have guessed at the joys and heartaches to come. Like all of us, he ventured into the future, never to return….

  Beau L’Amour

  November 2018

  To Marc Jaffe…

  a good friend

  and a fine gentleman

  from New York

  whom I met in a saloon

  in Elko, Nevada

  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

  The Collected Short Stories of Louis L’Amour (vols. 1–7)

  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