Novel 1954 - Utah Blaine (As Jim Mayo) (v5.0) (20 page)

Thoughtfully, Utah surveyed the yard. There was a man in the corral. There was a man in the house and there would, without doubt, be one in the stable.

How many in all? Fox did not have as many hands as Nevers, but there could be six or seven men here. More likely there were four or five. And most serious of all, Rink Witter and Hoerner were unaccounted for. Utah finished his cigarette, dropped it and then carefully rubbed it out with his toe.

To hurry would be fatal. First he must find out for sure how many men were here, and unless he was mistaken he would soon have his chance. They had set a trap for him and were waiting, but that fire could only mean breakfast, coffee at least.

Utah grinned wryly, his green eyes lighting with a sort of ironic humor. He could do with some coffee himself. He studied the house speculatively, but the back door was covered by at least one man. Moreover, he could not move to the right because several magpies were scolding around and if he came closer would make enough fuss as to give him away.

There was a deadfall behind him and he sat down on the slanting trunk of the tree and waited. He could hear the rattle of dishes within the house. Had it been Nevers in there he would have gone in. With Nevers there was a chance of bluffing him out of a shooting. If shooting there had to be, killing Nevers would not remain on his conscience. Lee Fox was another thing. There was no chance of bluffing any man on such a hair trigger as Fox. Moreover, Utah understood Fox’s position and appreciated it.

He took out the makings and built another cigarette, taking his time. Impatience now would ruin everything. Now that he was here, now that he could see, the waiting would be harder on them than on him. They would break first.

A half-dozen plans occurred to him and were dismissed as foolhardy or lacking in the possibility of a decisive result. He saw Angie come to the door and throw out some water, saw her hesitate just a minute, and then call out to Machuk. The Table Mountain rider got up from behind the trough and went to the house. Utah heard dishes rattle, and the sound spurred his own ravenous hunger. After awhile, Machuk slipped out and returned to his place behind the trough, calling as he did so to another man. Utah could not distinguish the name.

This man walked with a peculiar droop to one shoulder. He passed the corral, coming from somewhere near the woodpile. That pegged three of them. Where were the others? One in the stable, certainly.

After awhile the man with the drooping shoulder came out of the house. He paused near the trough and Blaine heard his voice clearly. “Lee figures it won’t be much longer.”

“I hope not. I’m full up to here with settin’ here in the dust.”

“Gonna be a hot day, too.”

“Yeah.”

“Well, I gotta call Nevers.” The man moved on and paused at the stable.

Nevers crossed the yard to the back door. He looked ugly. His face was black with a stubble of beard and Utah Blaine studied him shrewdly. Nevers was hopping. He was ready to go, just any time. He was a strange combination of qualities. At no time a good man, he had been on the side of decency by accident only. Now he was over the edge. He would not go back.

Nevers entered the house and there was the rattle of dishes again, and then Nevers’ voice lifted. “Who’s off station now?” he demanded.

Somebody, probably Fox, spoke in a lower tone. Then Nevers replied, “Oh, yeah? You’ll butt in the wrong place, sometime, Lee! Damn you, I’ll—”

The words trailed off with some kind of an interruption, and then Utah heard an oath from the house. “What is she anyway? Nothin’ but a damned—”

“Don’t say it!”
That was Fox, definitely. The man’s voice was sharp, dangerous. Utah tensed, ready to move forward. What was the matter with Nevers? Couldn’t he see the man was on a hair trigger? For that matter, Nevers was, too. But not like Lee Fox. In a fight between the two, Fox was top man—any time.

Nevers must have realized it, for he could be heard growling a little. Finally, he came from the house and walked back to the stable, picking his teeth and muttering.

Utah waited…and waited. There were no more. Four was all. And he had them all spotted.

This could be the showdown. He knew where Nevers was. If Nevers was out of it he might reach some settlement with Fox. The Table Mountain rancher was rational enough at times. It was Nevers then. Nevers was the man to get.

Angie was safe enough with Lee Fox. His brow furrowed. Where was Ben Otten? In town? On the run?

Utah moved back into the brush, taking plenty of time. He worked his way around through the brush, avoiding the corral, and making for the back of the stable. He was tempted to move up on the man behind the woodpile, but did not. Avoiding him, he finally reached the stable. Here he had to leave the brush and move out into the open. Moving carefully, he made it to the corner. Then he stepped past the corner to merge with the shadow of a giant tree. One more step and he could get inside the stable with Nevers.

The stable was of the lean-to variety: the front closed across two-thirds of its face, with doors open at each side. It was through one of these doors that Utah expected to step. He knew Nevers was watching from the other door. He could see occasional movement there.

Utah hesitated, then stepped out. Yet even as he stepped he heard a cold, triumphant voice behind him.

“Been watchin’ for you, Blaine!”

Utah turned, knowing what he would see. Rink Witter was standing there, not thirty yards away. He had come from the rocks near the trail from the river. Twenty yards further to the right was Hoerner.

Utah Blaine was cold and still. He was boxed: Nevers behind him, Witter and Hoerner in front; Fox at the house, and his two hands.

Six of them. “This is it, Utah,” he whispered to himself. “You’ve played out your hand.”

Yet even as he thought this, his mind was working. There was no chance for him to come out of this alive. The thing to do was take the right ones with him. Rink, definitely. Rink and Nevers. That meant a quick shot at Rink—but not too quick. Then a turn and a shot that would nail Nevers.

After that, if he was still alive, he could get into the stable. But all this meant ignoring the fire of four men, one of them a killer for hire—Hoerner—a man skilled in his business.

Utah Blaine stood beside the tree, his feet apart, his head lowered just a little, and he looked across the hot bare ground of morning at the blazing blue-white eyes of Rink Witter. All was very still. In the house a floor board creaked. Somewhere a magpie called. And Utah Blaine knew the girl he loved was in that house…depending on him.

Then mounting within him he felt it, the old driving, the surge of fury that came with the fight, the old berserk feeling of the warrior facing great odds. Suddenly doubt and fear and waiting were shed from him, and in that moment he was what he had been created for: a fighting man—a fighting man alone, facing great odds, and fighting for the things he valued.

He looked, and then suddenly he started to chuckle. It started deep down within him, a sort of ironic humor, that he, Utah Blaine, after all his careful figuring had been trapped, surrounded. He laughed, and the sound cracked the stillness like a bullet shattering thin glass.

“Glad to see you here, Rink,” he said. “I was afraid you’d be late for the party!”

“I’m goin’ to send you to hell, Blaine!” Rink’s voice was low, cold.

Utah Blaine wanted to shatter that coldness. He wanted to break that dangerous icy calm. “You?” Utah put a sneer in his voice. “Why, Rink, without help you never saw the day you could send me anywhere! I’ve seen you draw, Rink. You’re a wash-woman, so beggarly slow I’d be ashamed to acknowledge you a Western man. You—a gunfighter?”

He laughed again. “As for sendin’ me to hell, with all this help you might do it. But you know what, Rink? If I go to hell I’ll slide through the door on the blood I drain from you an’ Nevers. I’ll take you two sidewinders right along, I’ll—” He had been talking to get them off edge, and now—“take
you!
”

Incredibly fast, his hands flashed for their guns. Rink was ready, but the talk had thrown him off. Yet even without that split second of hesitation he could never have beaten that blurring swift movement of hands, the guns that sprang up. His own gun muzzle was only rising when he saw those twin guns and knew that he was dead.

He knew it with an instant of awful recognition. It seemed that in that instant as if the distance was bridged and he was looking right into the blazing green eyes of Blaine. Then he saw the flame blossom at the gun muzzle and he felt the bullet hit him, felt himself stagger. But he kept on drawing. And then the second bullet, a flicker of an instant behind the first, hit him in the hip and he started to fall.

His gun came out and he fired and the bullet hit the tree with a thud. With an awful despairing he realized he was not going to get even one bullet into Blaine, and then he screamed. He screamed and lunged up and fired again and again, his bullets going wild as death drew a veil over his sight and pulled him down…down…down.

Blaine had turned. Those two shots had rapped out as one and he spun, getting partial shelter from the tree, and in the instant of turning he saw an incredible thing: instead of firing at him, Nevers lifted his gun and shot Lee Fox in the stomach!

Fox stared at him, his eyes enormously wide, the whites showing as he staggered down the steps, trying to get his gun up. “I should—I should have—killed you!” His head turned slowly, with a sort of ponderous dignity and he looked at Blaine. “Kill him,” he said distinctly. “He is too vile to live!” And Lee Fox fell, hitting the ground and rolling over.

Hoerner was running and now he was behind Blaine. He fired rapidly into Utah’s back. He shot once…twice…three times.

The yard broke into a thunder of shooting and Blaine, shot through and through, staggered out from the tree. He slammed a shot into Nevers that ripped the rancher’s shoulder; a second shot that knocked the gun from his hand. Turning, Blaine dropped to one knee, red haze in his eyes, and smashed out shots at Hoerner.

He saw the big body jerk, and he shifted guns and shot again and saw Hoerner falling. Then Utah turned back and he saw Nevers standing there, his right side red with his own blood.

“You’re a murderer, Nevers!” Blaine’s voice was utterly cold. “You started this! You were there with Fuller when they hung Neal! I heard your voice! You were behind it! Good men have died for you!”

Utah Blaine’s gun came up and Nevers screamed. Then Blaine shot him through the heart, and Nevers stood there for an instant, rocking with the shock of another bullet and then fell against the tree. The man with the drooping shoulder was lifting a Winchester and taking a careful sight along it when a rifle roared from the house door.

Amazed, Utah turned his head. Angie stood in the doorway, her father’s Spencer in her hands. Coolly, she fired again, and Blaine looked toward the corral. “Come out, Machuk! Come out with your hands up!”

There was a choking cry, then Machuk’s voice, “Can’t. You—you busted my leg!”

Blaine turned and stared at Angie. One hand clung to a tree trunk. His body sagged. “Angie—you—you—all right?”

Then he heard a thunder of hoofs and he fell, and the ground hit him and he could smell the good fresh dust of the cool shadows. He heard the crinkle of a dried leaf folding under his cheek and the soft…soft…softness of the deep darkness into which he was falling away.

H
E OPENED HIS eyes into soft darkness. There was a halo of light nearby. The halo was around a dimmed lamp, and it shone softly on the face of the girl in the chair beside his bed. She was sleeping, her face at peace. At his movement, her eyes opened. She put out a quick hand. “Oh, you mustn’t! Lie still!”

He sagged back on the pillow. “What—what happened?”

“You were wounded. Three shots. You’ve lost a lot of blood.”

“Nevers? Rink?”

“Both dead. Rals Forbes was here, and Padjen stayed here. He’s sleeping in the other room. Rocky White was here, too.”

“White?”

“He’s the new marshal of Red Creek.”

White, a tall rugged young puncher, looked like a good man. So much the better.

“What happened to Ben Otten?”

“Nevers killed him the night before you got here. Ben came here—for what I don’t know—and Nevers shot him. Maybe he thought he was you. Maybe he didn’t care. His body was lying in the stable all night and all the morning before the fight.”

Otten…Nevers…Witter. And then Miller and Lud Fuller, and before them Gid Blake and Joe Neal…and for what?

“Country’s growin’, Angie,” he whispered, “growin’ up. Maybe this was the last big fight. Maybe the only way men can end violence is by violence, but I think there are better ways.”

“They are setting up a city government in Red Creek,” Angie said. “All of them are together.”

“That’s the way. Government. We all need it, Angie.” He was silent. “Government with justice…sometimes the words sound so…so damn’ stuffy, but it’s what men have to live by if they will live in peace.”

“You’d better rest.”

“I will.” He lay quiet, staring up into the darkness. “You know,” he said then, “that 46—it’s a good place. I’d like to see the cattle growin’ fat on that thick grass, see the clear water flowin’ in the ditches, see the light and shadow of the sun through the trees. I’d like that, Angie.”

“It’s yours. Joe Neal would like it too. You held it for him, Utah.”

“For him…and for you. Without you it wouldn’t be much, Angie.”

She looked over at him and smiled a little. “And why should it be without me?” she asked gently. “I’ve always loved the place…and you.”

He eased himself in the bed and the stiffness in his side gave him a twinge. “Then I think I’ll go to sleep, Angie. Wake me early…I want to drink gallons and gallons of coffee…” His voice trailed away and he slept, and the light shone on the face of the woman beside him. And somewhere out in the darkness a lone wolf called to the moon.

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.”

I
T 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 best-selling 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),
Utah Blaine, 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.