to the Far Blue Mountains (1976) (40 page)

They were going to come for me again. I reached down and caught up my powder horn, pulled off the stopper and threw it into the fire. There was an explosion and a puff of fire shot out, and the Indians leaped back.

Tom, who had evidently been knocked out, came up then, and for a few minutes we stood back to back. I retrieved my knife and we fought, working our way back toward the cave mouth.

"Barn ... I'm goin', I-"

He went down again but I caught up his cutlass. For a minute or more I held them off with that swirling, thrusting blade, but I was weaker.

I was bleeding ... I was hurt.

Suddenly, I was down. There was a thrown lance in my chest. I tried to move, could not.

I gripped the knife. "Come on, damn you! I can kill another of you!"

They stared at me, and drew slowly back. I was dying and I knew it.

They knew it, too.

Suddenly one of them dropped to his knees and began to sing a death-song.

My death-song. He was singing it for me.

Turning my knife, I handed it to him, hilt forward. "Th ... anks," I said.

Or thought I said.

"Ah-? Abby? I-I wish-" In the dust, my finger moved ... stirred.

Kin ... Yance ... the boys and Noelle. Had they found a path, as I had? Did they know the way to go?

Who would live to tell the story-our story?

My finger wrote in the dust. I looked, my gaze blurred.

I had written: Give them tomorrow ...

Dead I was, yet not quite dead, for I felt the Indian stoop above me, covering me gently with a blanket.

There was a whisper of moccasins, withdrawing ...

The dawn wind stirred the corner of the blanket. One of the horses whinnied ... for a long, long time, there was no other sound.

In the lodges of the Senecas there was silence. And into the darkened lodge of the old chief the four warriors came and they stood tall before him.

For a long time they stood in silence, arms folded. Then one said, "He is finished."

"You have his hair?"

"We were twelve. Four came away. We left his scalp with him ... and the other, also."

Another spoke. "We covered them with blankets, for they were brave."

"He was ever brave." The old man was silent. "You have done well."

And when they had walked from the lodge the old man took a pinch of tobacco and threw it into the fire.

Then sadly he said, "Who now is left to test our young men? Who now?"

About the Author Louis L'Amour, born Louis Dearborn L'Amour, is of French-Irish descent. Although Mr. L'Amour claims his writing began as a "spur-of-the-moment thing" prompted by friends who relished his verbal tales of the West, he comes by his talent honestly. A frontiersman by heritage (his grandfather was scalped by the Sioux), and a universal man by experience, Louis L'Amour lives the life of his fictional heroes. Since leaving his native Jamestown, North Dakota, at the age of fifteen, he's been a longshoreman, lumberjack, elephant handler, hay shocker, flume builder, fruit picker, and an officer on tank destroyers during World War II.

And he's written four hundred short stories and over fifty books (including a volume of poetry).

Mr. L'Amour has lectured widely, traveled the West thoroughly, studied archaeology, compiled biographies of over one thousand Western gunfighters, and read prodigiously (his library holds more than two thousand volumes). And he's watched thirty-one of his westerns as movies. He's circled the world on a freighter, mined in the West, sailed a dhow on the Red Sea, been shipwrecked in the West Indies, stranded in the Mojave Desert. He's won fifty-one of fifty-nine fights as a professional boxer and pinchhit for Dorothy Kilgallen when she was on vacation from her column. Since 1816, thirty-three members of his family have been writers. And, he says, "I could sit in the middle of Sunset Boulevard and write with my typewriter on my knees; temperamental I am not."

Mr. L'Amour is re-creating an 1865 Western town, christened Shalako, where the borders of Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado meet. Historically authentic from whistle to well, it will be a live, operating town, as well as a movie location and tourist attraction.

Mr. L'Amour now lives in Los Angeles with his wife Kathy, who helps with the enormous amount of research he does for his books. Soon, Mr. L'Amour hopes, the children (Beau and Angelique) will be helping too.