Yondering: Stories Read online

  AN UNEASY ALLIANCE

  HE HAD IT coming if ever a man did, and I could have killed him then and nobody the wiser. If he had been man enough, we could have gone off on the dock and slugged it out, and everything would have been settled either way the cat jumped. There’s nothing like a sock on the chin to sort of clean things up. It saves hard feelings and time wasted in argument. But Duggs was the chief mate, and he wasn’t man enough to whip me and knew it.

  Bilge water, they say, is thicker than blood, and once men have been shipmates, no matter how much they hate each other’s guts, they stand together against the world. That’s the way it is supposed to be, but it certainly wasn’t going to be that way with Duggs and me. I decided that in a hurry.

  From the hour I shipped on that freighter, Duggs made it tough for me, but it wasn’t only me but the whole crew. You don’t mind so much if a really tough guy makes you like it, but when a two-by-twice scenery bum like Duggs rubs it into you just because he has the authority, it just naturally hurts.

  If we’d gone off on the dock where it was man to man, I’d have lowered the boom on his chin and left him for the gulls to pick over. But we were aboard ship, and if you sock an officer aboard ship, it’s your neck.

  —From “Thicker Than Blood”

  Yondering is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1980, 1989 by Louis & Katherine L’Amour Trust

  Postscript by Beau L’Amour © 2018 by Beau L’Amour

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Bantam Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  BANTAM and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  The July 6, 1939, Tulsa Tribune column “The Rambler,” by Roger Devlin, is reprinted by permission of BH Media Group Inc.

  Originally published in the United States by Bantam Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, in 1954.

  ISBN 9780525621102

  Ebook ISBN 9780525621119

  randomhousebooks.com

  Cover art: © Steve Assel

  v5.4

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  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Introduction

  Epigraph

  Death, Westbound

  Dead-End Drift

  Old Doc Yak

  It’s Your Move

  And Proudly Die

  Survival

  Show Me the Way to Go Home

  Thicker Than Blood

  The Admiral

  The Man Who Stole Shakespeare

  Shanghai, Not Without Gestures

  Off the Mangrove Coast

  The Dancing Kate

  Glorious! Glorious!

  By the Ruins of El Walarieh

  Where There’s Fighting

  The Cross and the Candle

  A Friend of the General

  Author’s Tea

  Let Me Forget….

  What Is Louis L’Amour’s Lost Treasures?

  Postscript

  Dedication

  Bantam Books by Louis L’Amour

  About Louis L’Amour

  INTRODUCTION

  IN THE BEGINNING there was a dream, a young boy’s dream, a dream of far lands to see, of oceans to cross, and somewhere at the trail’s end, a girl. The girl.

  More than all else I wanted to tell stories, stories that people could read or hear, stories to love and remember. I had no desire to write to please those who make it their business to comment but for the people who do the work of the world, who live on the land or love the land, people who make and bake and struggle to make ends meet, for the people who invent, who design, who build, for the people who do. And if somewhere down the line a man or woman can put a finger on a line and say, “Yes, that is the way it was. I was there,” then I would be amply repaid.

  I have never scoffed at sentiment. Cynicism is ever the outward face of emptiness.

  What, after all, is romance? It is the music of those who make the world turn, the people who make things happen. Romance is the story of dreams that could come true and so often do.

  Why do men ride the range? Go to sea? Explore the polar ice caps? Why do they ride rockets to unknown worlds? It is because of romance, because of the stories they have read and the stories they have dreamed.

  Some have said this is the age of the nonhero, that the day of the hero is gone. That’s nonsense. When the hero is gone, man himself will be gone, for the hero is our future, our destiny.

  These are some of the stories of a writer trying to find his way, trying to find the truth of what he has seen, to understand the people, to learn a little more about telling a story.

  The people whom I have met and with whom I worked in those earlier years were not always nice people, but each in his own way was strong, or he could not survive. Of course, there were some who did not, some who could not survive. For one reason or another, nature weeded them out and cast them aside, just as happened on our frontier during the westward movement.

  Some of these stories are from my own life; some are from the lives of people I met along the way.

  Somewhere my love lay sleeping

  Behind the lights of a far-off town;

  So I gave my heart to a bend in the road,

  And off I went, a-yondering.

  DEATH, WESTBOUND

  In those days there was a large drifting population of itinerant workers, and they were absolutely essential to the welfare of the country. They had to have men to work the harvest, for example, and some fellows would start harvesting wheat in Texas and they’d work all the way up state by state ’til they got into Canada. By the time they finished that, they had quite a stake. Some would go on to college then, some would go back to bumming, and some would look for jobs in other places. But there was a large body of itinerant workers around; they were necessary to the economy.

  The Depression hadn’t come yet but it was about to and all the things that brought it about were happening. People who were hoboing or itinerant workers of one kind or another knew it was going to happen before they did on Wall Street. The whole situation began to tighten up. People who had jobs didn’t quit, they held on to them.

  IT WAS NEARLY dark when the westbound freight pulled out of the yards, and two ’boes, hurrying from behind a long line of empties, scrambled into one of the open doors of a boxcar about halfway between the caboose and the locomotive.

  There were two more men in the car when they crawled in after their bundles. One of these was sitting at one side of the door where he could see without being seen, a precaution against any shack that might drift along or be standing beside the track. Joe had had experience with shacks, and much worse, with railroad dicks; he knew their kind. Sometimes the shacks were pretty good guys, but a railroad dick is always a louse.

  The other occupant of the car lay in the shadow, apparently sleeping.

  The newcomers, two hard-faced young fellows carrying bundles, looked around.

  Joe’s curiosity got the better of him. “Westbound, fellas?”

  “Yeah—you?”

  “Uh-uh. L.A., if we can make it.”

  “We?”
>
  “Yeah, me an’ the kid over there.”

  “Chee, I never even see ’im. S’matter, ’s he asleep?”

  “Naw, he’s sick I guess. We been on this train t’ree nights now, an’ he’s been sick all the while. I don’t know what’s the matter. He coughs a lot—maybe he’s a lunger.”

  “Chee, that’s kinda tough, ain’t it? Sick as a goddam drag when the bulls is all gettin’ tough.”

  “The Santy Fe is the toughest line of ’em all. ’Member hearin’ ’bout Yermo Red?”

  “Aw hell, Yermo was on the U.P. I made it thru there once on the bum with a coupla Polacks. He was plenty tough, that guy.”

  “Naw, he just t’ought he was tough. Them guys is mostly yellow when there is a showdown.”

  Joe walked over to look at the kid. The boy’s face was damp with perspiration and he looked bad. One of the others, a flat-nosed young fellow with heavy shoulders, walked over.

  “Cheesus, he looks bad, don’t he? ’At kid should oughta have a doctor!”

  “Yeah.”

  The other young fellow walked over. “S’matter, Heavy? Is he bad off?” Then seeing the kid’s face, he murmured: “Gawah!”

  All three returned to a spot near the door. A heavy silence had descended upon the group. Joe rolled a cigarette and complied in silence to the others’ dumb request for the makin’s.

  Heavy looked glumly out at the night. “Cheesus, that’s a helluva place to get sick in! Wonder if he’ll croak.”

  The slight youngster with the pale face who answered to the name of Slim grunted: “Naw, he’ll pull t’ru. A guy that has to live like this is too tough to die like anybody else.”

  Heavy looked at Joe and with a jerk of his head toward the kid: “Known him long?”

  “Two weeks I guess. He had a coupla bucks and split ’em with me when I was bad off. He’s a good kid. We been hunting jobs ever since, but this Depression finished the work. Seems like they ain’t nothing left to do anymore.”

  “Wait’ll we get a new president. What’s Hoover care for us laborin’ stiffs?”

  Slim snorted derisively: “The next one won’t be a bit better. One way or the other we get it in the neck!”

  Heavy moved into a corner of the car and, carefully arranging a roll of newspapers to form a place to lie, he lay down and drew his coat over his head to sleep. A few minutes later his snores gave ample proof of his success.

  Slim jerked his head toward the sleeper: “Will he bother the kid, d’ye think?”

  Joe shook his head: “Naw, the kid’s out of his head; I guess he’s about all in. When this train stops I’ll try and find somebody to give him some dope or somethin’.”

  They lapsed into silence broken only by the steady pound and rattle of the swiftly moving freight train and the snores of the sleeper. At intervals the kid would move and talk indistinctly for a minute or so and then once more fall into silence. Outside the car the night was quite moonlit and they could see the fields flickering by in monotonous rotation. The countless cracks in the old car made it cold and dismal. Slim dozed off against the door, knees drawn up to his chin. Joe sat silent, watching the fields outside and thinking.

  It had been over a year since he had worked more than a few hours at a time, over a year of living in boxcars, cheap flophouses, and any dump he could find to crawl into. But after all, what had it been before? Just a round of jobs, a few months and then a long drunk, or maybe a short one, if he got himself rolled in some bawdy house. The kid here, he’d been the only pal he’d ever had that played square, an’ now he was sicker’n hell. Life didn’t mean much to a guy when he was just a workin’ stiff. Sure, he’d boozed a lot, but what th’ hell? Didn’t he have a right to have a little fun? Well, maybe it wasn’t fun, but at least a guy wasn’t thinkin’ about the next shift or how much ore he had to get out.

  Joe dozed off, but came to with a start as a red light flashed by and the freight began to slow for a station.

  Slim and Heavy both woke up with the awareness that a hobo acquires when traveling.

  “What kind of a burg is this we’re comin’ into, Joe? Looks like a damned jerkwater!”

  “Yeah—I know the place. Just a water tank and a general store. Better keep outta sight from now on—there’s a bad bull in this next town if I remember right!”

  The long drag slowly pulled to a bumping, groaning stop, and Slim, watching his chance when the shack was at the other end, dropped off.

  Up ahead they could hear the shouts of the train crew as they worked about the engine, and once a shack went by, his lantern bobbing along beside the train. He just casually flashed it into the door as he passed, and as all three were out of sight, they were passed unnoticed.

  A whistle up forward, more groaning and bumping and jarring, and the train slowly gathered momentum.

  Heavy’s forehead wrinkled anxiously: “Wonder what’s become o’ Slim? He should’ve made it by now!”

  And a minute later, as the train gathered speed in the shadow of several oil tanks, he did make it, swinging into the car with a dark object in his hand.

  “Whatcha got, Slim?” Heavy leaned forward curiously.

  “Aw, pull in your neck, Hefty, I just grabbed the kid a cuppa java an’ a orange at that lunch counter!”

  “But Cheesus, Slim, you only had a nickel!”

  “Sure, I got the guy to gimme a cuppa java for the nickel and I swiped the orange when the lunch-counter girl wasn’t lookin’. If he wants his cup back he’ll have to pick it up in the next town!”

  Joe rolled the kid over on his back and slowly raised him to a sitting position: “Here, kid, it’s a cuppa coffee. Try an’ get it down, it’ll do you good.”

  The kid tried to drink, but ended in a coughing spell that left flecks of blood on his lips. Joe laid him back on the floor and returned to the others near the door.

  Slim looked helplessly at the orange: “Cheesus, guess he couldn’t tackle this. He seems pretty far gone.” He raised his hand as if to throw the orange away and then on second thought shoved it into his coat pocket.

  Once more the train bumped along. The moon had gone down now and the night was black outside the door. Heavy was once more asleep, and Slim, chin resting on his knees, was dozing off. Joe still sat looking out into the night, his face grimy from cinders and dust, his beard graying in spots. At last he too dozed off into a half-sleep.

  The freight was slowing for the next town when a swiftly bobbing flashlight awakened them. Joe was the first to comprehend.

  “Cheesus, guys, we’re sunk—it’s that railroad dick!”

  Heavy cursed and jumped for the door to swing out when a harsh voice broke in: “All right, ’bo, stay where y’are or I’ll shoot yer guts out! Come on, you—all of ya! Get ’em up in the air!

  “All right, pile out on the ground an’ less look you guys over. Keep ’em up, now!” The railroad dick’s voice was harsh and his face ugly in the half-light. His companion, a weasel-faced fellow, glided up and started frisking them with the question: “Got anythin’ on ya bigger’n a forty-five?”

  Slim spoke aggrievedly: “Aw, why don’t you guys leave us alone? We’re just huntin’ a place to work. What would we be doin’ packin’ rods!”

  The big fellow stepped forward belligerently: “Shut up, bum. I’ll do the talkin’ an’ you’ll answer when yer spoken to, get me?”

  Slim said nothing. The weasel-faced man pulled their personal effects from their pockets, smirking over the few odds and ends a man carries about. A couple of jackknives, a piece of soiled string, a dirty handkerchief or two, a pocketbook containing a pair of poll tax receipts, a card for a hod carriers union two years old, a few letters. The weasel-faced man read the letters with an occasional glance at Slim’s angry face. Finally from one of them he extracted a picture of a girl, which he held out for the big man to see
with an insulting remark.

  Slim’s eyes swiftly calculated the distance. He jumped and struck viciously, his fist striking Weasel-face on the point of the chin, knocking him flat. The big man sidestepped and struck with the gun barrel, felling Slim to the ground. Then stepping toward Heavy and Joe, he snapped: “Got tough, did he? Well, suppose you guys try it. I killed a couple of guys fer tryin’ to get tough with me!”

  Joe’s tired voice spoke slowly: “Uh-uh, I heard ’bout that—both of ’em unarmed. You said they got tough; some people said they had thirty bucks on ’em.”

  “What was that?” The big man whirled toward Joe. “What d’you say?”

  “Me? I didn’t say nothin’, just clearin’ my throat.”

  “Well, ya better be careful, get me? Or I’ll slam you like I did him!” He waved his hand toward Slim’s fallen figure.

  He called to Weasel-face: “Look in that damned car—maybe they left some junk in there worth lookin’ over!”

  “Okay, boss!”

  Weasel-face scrambled into the car. Then: “Hey, boss, here’s another bum in here sleepin’!”

  “D’hell there is! Well, roll the bastard out an’ less look him over.”

  Voice from the car: “Come on, you, crawl outta that! Hey, what’s the matter? Get up or I’ll boot the hell outta ya!”

  A moment later, Weasel-face dragged the kid to the door and dumped him out to the ground.

  “Here he is, boss, playin’ sleepy on us!”

  The boss walked up determinedly and kicked the kid forcibly in the ribs. Joe’s shout halted him, a frown on his face.

  “Hey, skipper, watch yerself, the kid’s sick; he’s got the consumption or somethin’!”