“I did, you damn’ fool! Merriam thought he did. They were arguing, and I saw Clagg was gettin’ nowhere, so when Merriam shot and missed, I killed Eli—from my office window.”
Mike tugged off one boot, then the other. He was wearing thick woollen socks. He felt sure that Ben was creeping closer, for the sound of those last words had been nearby and close to the ground. Ben had been shooting a pistol, but he still had a shotgun or a rifle … at this distance those shotgun slugs would cut a man in two.
Suddenly Ben Stowe spoke. “You can still cut out, Mike. You don’t need to die.”
How far away was he now? Maybe twenty paces. And Ben was without doubt in shelter of some kind, waiting for Mike’s reply, to cut him in two.
Turning quickly, Mike ran back along the track, his socks making no sound on the wooden cross-ties. He heard the train, closer now, whistling for the station. Leaping to clear the cinders of the roadbed, he landed close against the pens, then with a swift lunge he rounded the corner.
The headlight of the train was shining off across the flat, for the train had not yet rounded the bend toward the station. When the locomotive rounded the bend, the headlight would throw the whole area into sharp relief.
The train whistled again, and then the light swung as the engine came around the bend. There was Ben Stowe, standing squarely in the middle of the track, the shotgun in his hands, waiting for that glare of light.
They saw each other at the same instant—or maybe Mike had a bit the best of it, for he was not where Ben Stowe might have expected him to be. The shotgun came up and Mike fired. Slugs ripped through the air around him, something tugged at his pants. He stepped forward and shot again, and Ben Stowe went down to his hands and knees. The train was thundering down upon him, and Mike rushed forward in a desperate lunge, jerking Stowe free of the tracks with only seconds to spare.
The train roared by within inches of them, then Ben Stowe came up on his knees, a Colt gripped in his fist. “Thanks, Mike!” he yelled, and fired.
Shevlin felt the shock of the bullet, and he knew he had dropped his gun. He had reloaded behind the stock pens, and there were still one or two—
Stowe was resting his gun across a forearm for dead aim, so Mike Shevlin drew Hollister’s gun from his waistband and as he swung it around he fired three shots as fast as he could make them roll.
Stowe fired once. The bullet missed, struck the steel rail, and ricocheted off into the night with a nasty whine.
Mike caught hold of the rail and pulled himself around. He was conscious that men had gotten down from the train and others had come up on horseback, but he was concentrating on one thing only: he had to get Ben Stowe.
He twisted around to look at Stowe. Ben’s face was bloody, and his shirt was dark with blood.
“You got me,” he gasped. “You always were shot with luck!” Even as he spoke, he brought his gun up with startling speed, and Mike shot into him again.
Then there was only silence, the hiss of steam from the engine, and, after a moment, a mutter of excited voices and a shuffling of feet.
Someone was kneeling over Shevlin. It was Doc Clagg. “Babcock,” Mike said, “he’s hurt bad, you—”
But he was keeping his eyes on Ben Stowe, clutching his empty gun and waiting for him to move. Only Ben did not move, and never would again.
“He said I was shot with luck,” Mike said slowly. “I wish that was all he had in those guns.”
“You’ll live,” Doc Clagg assured him grimly. “Your kind are too tough to die.”
THE CATTLE BUSINESS around Rafter never recovered, and after the mines played out Rafter became a ghost town. Mike and Laine Shevlin never did live there, for they moved to California when he was able to travel. Shevlin ran cattle there for quite a few years.
Thirty years ago they ripped up the long-unused tracks that had been the only excuse for Tappan Junction. The buildings were destroyed when a tourist dropped a cigarette from his car as it raced along the highway that had been built at the foot of the mountains.
Laine Shevlin lived to a fine old age until one of her grandsons became an ad man on Madison Avenue; after that there wasn’t much to live for. She just wasted away, and after Mike saw her buried he walked out of the cemetery and disappeared.
There was quite a lot of talk, and the newspapers dug up the fact that he had been a Texas Ranger and something of a gunfighter, reprinting some of the old stories, with some confusion as to names and dates.
The only one who could have offered a clue was the last of the old-timers. He had taken to sitting on a bench in the sun alongside a filling station on the new highway, and he was there when the car pulled up and the tall old man called over to him.
“Wasn’t there a place called Tappan Junction somewhere about here?”
The old-timer peered toward the driver. “Hey? Did you say Tappan Junction? She used to lie right out there on the flat.”
The sitter’s pipe had gone out and he fumbled in his pockets for a match. “Young folks, they ain’t never heard of Tappan.”
“What about Stone Cabin?” the man in the car asked.
“Stone Cabin?” Through the fog of years the words startled the old man. “Did you say Stone Cabin?”
WHEN OLD MIKE Shevlin turned up missing he was still a wealthy man, and there was quite a search for him. The highway police made inquiries, and at the filling station the old-timer was pointed out to them.
“Doubt if he can he’p you much,” the station attendant said. “He’s almost lost his sight, and that one arm, that’s been no good for years. Horse fell on it, I guess, a good many years back. Why, that old feller’s nigh to a hundred years old! Ninety-odd, anyway.”
They asked their questions after they found Mike Shevlin’s car abandoned in a cove at the foot of the mountains, but the old man did not pay much attention. Only after they had turned away did he mutter to himself as he sat there.
“Tappan Junction … Stone Cabin … that’s been a while. ‘You tell Doc Clagg,’ he said, ‘you tell Doc Clagg I ain’t as tough as I used to be.’ ”
“Stone Cabin?” the attendant repeated in answer to their query. “Never heard of it. I’ve lived around here more’n ten years, and I never heard the name.”
The officer looked at the high green hills, rolling back in somber magnificence, wild and lonely. They told him nothing.
“What’s back up there?” he asked.
“Nothin’. There ain’t no road. Ain’t been anybody back in there that I can remember. Folks don’t stop here for more’n gas and the time of day. They just breeze on through. We hereabouts, we got no time for lookin’ in the mountains.”
It was forty miles back to the highway police office, and they could just make it by quitting time.
As they were driving back the officer looked at his companion. “Didn’t you tell me your folks came from this part of the country?”
“My granddaddy did. But he never talked about it, or else I didn’t listen. Anyway, I don’t believe it was rough as they say. His name was the same as mine … Wilson Hoyt.”
They settled back and listened to the hum of the motor and the sound of the tires, and watched the windshield wiper, for it was beginning to rain.
It was raining, too, up at Stone Cabin, just as it had long ago.
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, and miner, and was 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 more than 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.
His hardcover bestsellers include The Lonesome Gods, The Walking Drum (his twelfth-century historical novel), Jubal Sackett, 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
ASK YOUR BOOKSELLER FOR THE BOOKS YOU HAVE MISSED.
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
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
Yondering
SACKETT TITLES
Sackett’s Land
To the Far Blue Mountains
The Warrior’s Path
Jubal Sackett
Ride the River
The Daybreakers
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 Rustlers of West Fork
The Trail to Seven Pines
The Riders of High Rock
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
COOL RECEPTION
YOU WERE LOOKING at Patterson’s grave,” said the man with the badge. “He was killed in a gun battle two years ago.”
Anger flared up in Mike Shevlin. “Who ever told you that,” he said roughly, “lied.”
“Then the coroner lied, Mason lied, and Gib Gentry lied.”
“Who killed him?”
“Gentry—in self-defense. Mason was a witness. Patterson still had a gun in his hand when the others came up.”
“No coroner’s jury in the old times would believe that story,” Shevlin said. “They knew Eli too well.”
“The old-timers are gone, or most of them,” the sheriff said. “Times have changed. Why don’t you ride on?”
“Why should I?”
There was irritation in the sheriff’s response to this. “Because you smell of trouble, and trouble is my business. You start anything and I’ll have to come against you.”
“Thanks,” Shevlin’s tone was dry, harsh. “You’ve warned me, now I’ll return the favor. Don’t make my trouble your business, and don’t come against me.”
THE HIGH GRADERS
A Bantam Book
PUBLISHING HISTORY
Bantam edition published January 1965
Bantam reissue / September 1995
Bantam reissue / October 2003
Published by
Bantam Dell
A Division of Random House, Inc.
New York, New York
All rights reserved.
Copyright © 1965 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 adddress:
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Published simultaneously in Canada
eISBN: 978-0-553-89921-4
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