Novel 1966 - Kilrone (v5.0) (21 page)

Kilrone was crouching now, to ease the pain in his side. Sproul circled, his big fists poised. He struck and Kilrone turned his head to avoid the blow, bringing his leg around in a sweeping kick that caught Sproul behind the knee. He fell forward, caught himself on one hand; but before he could straighten, Kilrone smashed him with another hammer blow to the kidney.

Sproul grunted and went to his knees. Kilrone split his cheekbone with a blow, and when Sproul got to his feet he backed away, studying the big man. Kilrone was badly hurt, and he had no idea how much longer he could stay on his feet. His breath was coming in ragged gasps, sweat trickled in his eyes, and they stung with the salt. He moved in, feinting; Sproul struck with his left and Kilrone pushed the punch over with his right palm, and then uppercut hard to the belly with his left. Sproul backed off and Kilrone followed. It had to be quick.

He blinked his eyes against the sweat, and crowded after the big man. Suddenly Sproul pivoted on the ball of one foot and kicked out with the other, swinging the leg around in a sweeping arc. Sucking in his mid-section to avoid the kick, Kilrone grasped Sproul’s ankle with both hands and swung from the shoulder with all his strength. Already swinging with the impetus of the kick, Sproul plunged across the room when Kilrone let go, his head crashing into a chair. He fell, started to get up, but fell again.

Kilrone drew back, gasping, each breath a stab of pain. He backed off, watching the fallen man. Suddenly Sproul started to move. He pushed himself up, got his knees under him, and staggered to his feet.

There was no question of quitting now. Kilrone, unable to straighten up, moved in, one hand holding his injured side, the other fist cocked. Sproul got his hands up, but Kilrone moved in, set himself and hooked viciously to the head. Sproul struck out, but the blow missed. Kilrone swung again from the hip, and Sproul staggered and almost went down. Kilrone knew he had strength for one more…just one more. This one had to be it.

He cocked his fist, set himself and let go, his whole side swinging with the leverage of the blow. It caught Sproul on the point of the chin and he turned halfway around and fell, out cold before he hit the floor.

Bloody and battered, his shirt only a few trailing ribbons, Kilrone crouched over him, his breath coming in great gasps. Sweat and blood were dripping down his face, and he blinked at the fallen man, and prayed he would not get up again.

There was scarcely a sound in the room but his own breathing. Slowly, he backed off a step, then went to his knees. He stayed there, staring down at Sproul. But Iron Dave neither stirred nor even seemed to breathe.

Kilrone felt hands lifting him, and he allowed them to help him to his feet. As he turned away he caught a glimpse of a wild, bloody figure in the mirror, a face he no longer recognized. There was a great purplish welt over one eye, a long cut on his cheekbone, lips puffed and swollen…most of the punches he could not even remember.

He turned his head, seeing a hand on his arm, feeling an arm about his waist. It was Betty.

“How did you get here?” he managed to say.

“Let’s go home,” she said. “You need to see Uncle Cart.”

“Not as much as he does,” he said, the words muffled by his swollen lips.

T
HE WHITE SHEETS were immaculate, the room was sunfilled and bright. Barney Kilrone clasped his hands behind his head and stared toward the window, wondering what was happening outside, but not curious enough to get up and look. He simply felt tired—tired from the fighting, tired from the riding, tired from the sheer strain of thinking, planning, wondering if each decision was the best one.

His muscles were sore. His side was taped and bandaged until he felt as if he was in a straight jacket, and every time he spoke or tried to smile he found his lips were stiff.

Betty Considine came into the room. “Uncle Cart will be back in a little while. He wants to look you over again.”

“I’m all right. Has anybody seen Dave Sproul?”

She shook her head. “The Empire is closed and shuttered. Sergeant Dunivant told me most of the people were gone. They just picked up and pulled out after Sproul took that beating from you.”

She looked down at him. “What are you going to do now?”

He shrugged, and tried to smile. “Drift, I guess. What else is there to do?”

“You could go back into the Army. Or you could be an engineer. Frank Paddock told Uncle Cart that you were one of the best in your class at the Point.”

“I won’t do it lying here.” He started to get up and felt a sharp twinge of pain.

Betty put her hands on his shoulders and pressed him back. “You stay there! You are in no condition—”

He was smiling. She flushed and quickly took her hands from his shoulders. “Uncle Cart said you were to stay in bed,” she said primly.

“Ever been to California?” he asked.

“California?”

“It’s a nice place for a honeymoon,” he said.

D
AVE SPROUL TIPTOED across his saloon and peered through a crack in the shuttered window. The street was still…no horses, nothing.

He went back to his quarters, where he knelt and lifted a board in the floor; he could look down into an opening between two of the foundation blocks. He took two sacks of gold from the hole and stuffed them into his saddlebags.

After a last look around, he went to the door and looked across the yard toward the barn. Nothing stirred there.

They were all gone. Everybody was gone. He had been whipped and they had all turned tail and left him. But he knew it was not only that he had been beaten, but that they all knew an order had been issued for his arrest on the testimony of Mary Tall Singer. Selling guns to the Indians…They had other evidence, he supposed, and undoubtedly Kilrone would testify.

They could send him to prison. Dave Sproul faced the fact; he had never dodged reality, and reality in this case meant the law. Well, the West was a big country, and there was always a new name, a new place, and a new beginning.

He went out the back door, closed it softly, and went to the barn. His horse was already saddled, the pack horse loaded. He would ride east, avoid towns, and reach the railroad in Wyoming.

He was stiff and sore, his head throbbing with the heavy ache left from the fight, his face battered almost beyond recognition. He chuckled…anyone who saw him now would not recognize him.

The horses were ones he had never used before. There was every chance he would get away; and he had money banked with Wells Fargo, as well as that he carried with him.

He went along the East Fork trail, camped the first night on Raven Creek, and at daybreak was well away on the route he had chosen, riding southeast. By nightfall he was hunting a camping spot along Wolf Creek.

He was safely away. By the time he got to the railroad he would have grown a beard, and within a month he would be back in business. To hell with them! They couldn’t stop him. As for Kilrone…the son-of-a-gun could hit, damn him…One day Kilrone would be riding or sitting down to eat and he would get a bullet right between the eyes.

That Indian girl, too. No wonder she was always around, watching, listening, saying nothing much. He’d figured she’d been gone on him, and all the while she was gathering evidence. He’d have a bullet for her too.

Sproul was not a frontier man, or a wilderness man, and he did not have the instincts and had not developed the senses as a man accustomed to living in those far-out places does. He found his camping place now, built a fire, and put water on to boil for coffee.

Far up on the slope he caught a flash of sunlight on something—probably it was mica or some other mineral formation. He picketed his horses, and was walking back to the campfire when the bullet hit him.

It took him right between the shoulder blades and turned him halfway around. He fell heavily, but got his hands under himself and, blindly, like a stricken animal, dragged himself toward the fire.

Medicine Dog wanted horses. Horses were important to an Indian: they made him a big man among his people. And the lone man he had seen had two fine animals. The Dog came down off the slope, approached the camp warily, and saw the man lying there, sprawled out. It was not until he turned him over that he saw who it was he had shot.

The Dog gave a grim chuckle. It was an odd thing that this should be the man he had killed. He was tugging the watch chain from Sproul’s vest when Sproul opened his eyes. “Dog!” he said. “I—”

Medicine Dog ignored him, and ripped the nugget chain and the watch from the vest. Sproul was wearing a gunbelt, so the Dog pulled that off too. Sproul tried to sit up, and the Dog calmly smashed him on the skull with the butt of his rifle and continued his looting.

When he had gathered all he wanted, the Dog dumped some coffee into the boiling water and after a while he drank some. He glanced toward the white man—he felt nothing toward him at all.

After some time he mounted one of the horses and, leading the other, was about to leave. But he paused beside the body of Dave Sproul. Holding his Winchester in one hand, he pointed the muzzle at the fallen man and shot him again. Then he rode away, returning to the horses he had left in the hills.

The remains of the coffee boiled away, the coffee grounds burned, and the fire died out. Once, when only a few coals were left, the man moved slightly, then lay still.

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),
Kilrone, 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.

Bantam Books by Louis L’Amour

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