The smell of the grass was rich and almost unbelievable, and he heard a bird singing, and the sudden whir of wings as some game bird took off in sudden flight. Water sounded, and the gray stallion quickened his pace. He skirted a wide-boled aspen and rode through grass scattered with purple and pink asters, white sego lilies, and red baneberry. Then he saw the water, and rode rapidly toward it.
He dropped from the saddle, taking a quick look around. No human sound disturbed the calm, utter serenity of Big Track. He dropped to his chest on the ground and drank, and beside him, the steel-dust drank deep.
Suddenly, the stallion’s head came up sharply. Warned, Rock felt his every muscle tense. Then, he forced himself to relax. The horse was looking at something, the calling of birds was stilled. He got slowly to his feet, striving to avoid any sudden movement, knowing in every muscle and fiber of his being that he was being watched. He turned, slowly, striving for a casual, careless manner.
Mort Harper was standing a short distance away, a pistol in his hand. He was thinner, wolfish now, his face darkened by sun and wind, his eyes hard and cruel. Backed in a corner, all the latent evil of the man had come to the fore. Quick fear touched Rock.
“Howdy,” he said calmly. “I see you’re not takin’ any chances, Mort. Got that gun right where it’ll do the most good.”
Harper smiled, and with his teeth bared he looked even more vulpine, even more cruel. “We both know what it means to get the drop,” Harper said. “We both know it means you’re a dead man.”
“I ain’t so sure,” Bannon said, shrugging. “I’ve heard of men who beat it. Maybe I’m one of the lucky ones.”
“You don’t beat this one,” Mort said grimly. “I’m going to kill you.” Suddenly his eyes darkened with fury. “I’d like to know how in blazes you got here!” he snapped.
“Figured you’d head for this place if you knew the country at all,” Bannon replied with a shrug. “So I cut across country.”
“There’s no other trail,” Harper said. “It can’t be done.”
Rock Bannon stared at him coldly. “Where I want to go, there’s always a trail,” Bannon said. “I make my own trails, Mort Harper, I don’t try to follow and steal the work of other men.”
Harper laughed. “That doesn’t bother me, Rock. I’ve still got the edge. Maybe I lost on that steal, but I’ve got your woman. I’ve got her, and I’ll keep her! Oh, she’s yours, all right—I know that now. She’s yours, and a hellcat with it, but it’ll be fun breaking her, and before I take her out of these hills she’ll be broken—or dead.
“I’ve got her, and she’s fixed so if anything happens to me, you’ll never find her and she’ll die there alone. It’ll serve both of you right. Only I’m not going to die—you are.”
“All rat,” Rock said coldly. “A rat all the way through. I don’t imagine you ever had a square, decent thought in your life. Always out to get something cheap, to beat somebody, to steal somebody else’s work, and fancying yourself a smart boy because of it.”
Rock Bannon smiled suddenly. “All right, you’re going to kill me. Mind if I smoke first?”
“Sure!” Mort sneered. “You can smoke, but keep your hands high, or you’ll die quick. Go ahead, have your smoke. I like standing here watching you. I like remembering that you’re Rock Bannon and I’m Mort Harper and this is the last hand of the game and I’m holding all winning cards. I’ve got the girl and I’ve got the drop.”
Carefully, Rock dug papers and tobacco from his breast pocket. Keeping his hands high and away from his guns, he rolled a cigarette.
“Like thinking about it, don’t you, Harper? Killing me quick would have spoiled that. If you’d shot me while I was on the ground, it wouldn’t have been good. I’d never have known what hit me. Now I do know. Tastes good, doesn’t it, Mort?”
He dug for his matches and got them out. He struck one, and it flared up with a big burst. Rock smiled, and holding the match in his fingers, the cigarette between his lips, he grinned at Mort.
“Yes,” he said, “it tastes good, doesn’t it? And you’ve got the girl somewhere? Got her hid where I can’t find her? Why, Mort, I’ll have no trouble. I can read your mind. I can trail you anywhere. I could trail a buzzard flying over a snow field, Mort, so trailing you would be—” The match burned down to his fingers and he gestured with it, then as the flame touched them he let out a startled yelp and dropped the match, jerking his hand from the pain—the hand swept down and up, blasting fire!
Mort Harper, distracted by the gesture and the sudden yelp of pain, was just too late. The two guns boomed together, but Mort twisted with sudden shock, and he took a full step back, his face stricken.
Rock Bannon stepped carefully to one side for a better frontal target, and they both fired again. He felt something slug him and a leg buckled, and he fired again, then again. He shifted guns and fired a fifth shot. Harper was on his knees, his face white and twisted. Rock walked up to him and kicked the smoking gun from his hand.
“Where is she?” he demanded. “Tell me!”
Mort’s hate-filled face twisted. “Go to the devil!” he gasped hoarsely. “You go—to the devil!” He coughed, spitting blood. “Go to the devil!” he said again. Suddenly his mouth opened wide and he seemed gasping wildly for breath that he couldn’t get; then he fell forward on his face, his fingers digging into the grass as blood stained the mossy earth beneath him.
Rock walked back to the horse and stood there, gripping the saddlehorn. He felt weak and sick, yet he didn’t believe he had been hit hard. There was a dampness on his side, yet when he pulled off his shirt, he saw that only the skin was cut in a shallow groove along his side above the hip bone.
Digging stuff from his saddlebags, he patched the wound as well as he could. It was only then he thought of his leg.
There was nothing wrong with it, and then he saw the wrenched spur. The bullet had struck his spur. The bullet had struck his spur, twisting and jerking his leg, but doing no harm.
Carefully, he reloaded his guns. Then he called loudly. There was no response. He called again, and there was no answering sound. Slowly, Rock began to circle, studying the ground. Harper had moved carefully through the grass, and had left little trail. Rock returned for his horse, and mounting, began to ride in slow circles.
Somewhere, Mort would have his horses, and the girl would not be far from them. From time to time he called.
Two hours passed. At times, he swung down and walked, leading the stallion. He worked his way through every grove, examined every boulder patch and clump of brush.
Bees hummed in the still, warm air. He walked on, his side smarting viciously, his feet heavy with walking in the high-heeled boots. Suddenly, sharply, the stallion’s head came up and he whinnied. Almost instantly, there was an answering call. Then Rock Bannon saw a horse, and swinging into the saddle he loped across the narrow glade toward the boulders.
The horse was there, and almost at once he saw Sharon. She was tied to the top of a boulder, out of sight from below except for a toe of her boot. He scrambled up and released her, then unfastened the handkerchief with which she had been gagged.
“Oh, Rock!” Her arms went about him, and for a long moment they sat there, and he held her close. After a long time she looked up. “When I heard your horse, I tried so hard to cry out that I almost strangled. Then when my mare whinnied, I knew you’d find us.”
She came to with a start as he helped her down. “Rock! Where’s Mort? He meant to kill you.”
“He was born to fail,” Rock said simply. “He was just a man who had big plans, but couldn’t win out with anything. At the wrong time he was too filled with hate to even accomplish a satisfactory killin’.”
Briefly, as she bathed her face and hands, he told her of what had happened at Poplar. “Your folks will all be back in their homes by now,” he said. “You know, in some ways, Lamport was one of the best of the lot. He was a fighter—a regular bull. I hit him once with everything I had, ev
ery bit of strength and power and drive in me, and he only grunted.”
They sat there in the grass, liking the shade of the white-trunked aspens.
“Dud and Mary are getting married, Rock,” Sharon said suddenly.
He reddened slowly under the tan and tugged at a handful of grass. “Reckon,” he said slowly, “that’ll be two pairs of us!”
Sharon laughed gaily and turned. “Why, Rock! Are you asking me to marry you?”
“Nope,” he said, grinning broadly. “I’m tellin’ you! This here’s one marriage that’s goin’ to start off right.”
The steel-dust stallion stamped his hoofs restlessly. Things were being altogether too quiet. He wasn’t used to it.
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.”
IT 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 bestselling 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.
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
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
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
Monument Rock
Night over the Solomons
Off the Mangrove Coast
The Outlaws of Mesquite
The Rider of the Ruby Hills
Riding for the Brand
The Strong Shall Live
The Trail to Crazy Man
Valley of the Sun
War Party
West from Singapore
West of Dodge
With These Hands
Yondering
SACKETT TITLES
Sackett’s Land
To the Far Blue Mountains
The Warrior’s Path
Jubal Sackett
Ride the River
Sackett
Lando
Mojave Crossing
Mustang Man
The Lonely Men
Galloway
Treasure Mountain
Lonely on the Mountain
Ride the Dark Trail
The Sackett Brand
The Sky-Liners
THE HOPALONG CASSIDY NOVELS
The Riders of the High Rock
The Rustlers of West Fork
The Trail to Seven Pines
Trouble Shooter
NONFICTION
Education of a Wandering Man
Frontier
The Sackett Companion: A Personal Guide to the Sackett Novels
A Trail of Memories: The Quotations of Louis L’Amour, compiled by Angelique L’Amour
POETRY
Smoke from This Altar
This novel is a work of fiction. Any references to real people, events, establishments, organizations or locales are intended only to give the fiction a sense of reality and authenticity. All of the main characters, organizations, events and incidents in this novel are creations of the author’s imagination, and their resemblance, if any, to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
This edition contains the complete text of the original hardcover edition.
NOT ONE WORD HAS BEEN OMITTED.
THE TALL STRANGER
A Bantam Book / March 2005
PUBLISHING HISTORY
A Bantam Book / published by arrangement with the author
Bantam edition / August 1986
Bantam reissue June 1997
All rights reserved.
Copyright © 1957 by CBS Publications, the Consumer Publishing Division of CBS.
Copyright renewed © 1985 by Louis & Katherine L’Amour Trust.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law. For information address:
Bantam Books New York, New York.
Bantam Books and the rooster colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Please visit our website at www.bantamdell.com
eISBN: 978-0-553-90005-7
v3.0
WAR ON THE PLAINS
*
FIRING STEADILY, ROCK Bannon emptied his rifle before the Indians reached the edge of the circled wagons. One brave, his wild-eyed horse at a dead run, shot a blazing arrow into the canvas of the Crockett wagon. Rock fired his righthand pistol and the Indian hit the dirt in a tumbling heap, just as a second arrow knocked off Rock’s hat.
Reaching up with his left hand, Rock jerked the burning arrow from the canvas. Then he opened up, firing his pistol, shifting guns, and firing again. The attack broke as suddenly as it had begun.
Tom Crockett was kneeling behind a water barrel, his face gray. “I never killed nothing human before!” he said weakly.
“You’ll get used to it out here,” Rock Bannon said coldly.
Table of Contents
Title page
Chapter 1
Chapter 2