No Traveller Returns (Lost Treasures) Read online

  No Traveller Returns 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 © 2018 by Louis L’Amour and 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 BOOKS and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: L’Amour, Louis, 1908–1988, author. | L’Amour, Beau, contributor.

  Title: No traveller returns : a novel / Louis L’Amour with Beau L’Amour.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Bantam Books, [2018] | Series: Louis L’Amour’s lost treasures

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018018973 (print) | LCCN 2018019262 (ebook) | ISBN 9780425284902 (Ebook) | ISBN 9780425284445 (hardback : acid-free paper)

  Subjects: LCSH: World War, 1939–1945—Naval operations, American—Fiction. | World War, 1939–1945—Campaigns--Pacific Area—Fiction. | Sea stories. | Historical fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Action & Adventure. | FICTION / Sea Stories. | FICTION / Historical.

  Classification: LCC PS3523.A446 (ebook) | LCC PS3523.A446 N6 2018 (print) | DDC 813/.52—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2018018973

  Ebook ISBN 9780425284902

  randomhousebooks.com

  Book design by Caroline Cunningham, adapted for ebook

  Tanker silhouette illustration by David Lindroth Inc.

  Cover design: Scott Biel

  Cover art: Robert Hunt

  v5.4

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Lichenfield

  What Is Louis L’Amour’s Lost Treasures?

  Preface

  A Simple Explanation of Ship’s Personnel

  San Pedro

  SS Lichenfield

  The Private Log of John Harlan, Second Mate

  Pete Brouwer

  The Private Log of John Harlan, Second Mate

  Tex Worden

  The Private Log of John Harlan, Second Mate

  David Jones

  The Private Log of John Harlan, Second Mate

  Fritz Schumann

  The Private Log of John Harlan, Second Mate

  Connor O’Brien

  The Private Log of John Harlan, Second Mate

  Shorty Conrad

  The Private Log of John Harlan, Second Mate

  George Wesley

  The Private Log of John Harlan, Second Mate

  Sam Harrell

  The Private Log of John Harlan, Second Mate

  Slug Jacobs

  The Private Log of John Harlan, Second Mate

  Patrick Mahoney

  The Private Log of John Harlan, Second Mate

  Augusto Donato

  The Private Log of John Harlan, Second Mate

  Dennis McGuire

  Afterword

  Glossary

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Bantam Books by Louis L’Amour

  About the Authors

  Fate is a ship. A steel gray lovely barque—or a tanker, westbound.

  Lichenfield

  Lichenfield

  WHAT IS LOUIS L’AMOUR’S LOST TREASURES?

  Louis L’Amour’s Lost Treasures is a project created to release some of the author’s more unconventional manuscripts from the family archives.

  Currently included in the series are Louis L’Amour’s Lost Treasures: Volume 1, published in the fall of 2017, and Volume 2, due out in 2019. These books contain both finished and unfinished short stories, unfinished novels, literary and motion picture treatments, notes, and outlines. They are a wide selection of the many works Louis was never able to publish during his lifetime.

  No Traveller Returns, L’Amour’s never-before-seen first novel, was written between 1938 and 1942. In the future, there may be a selection of even more L’Amour titles.

  Additionally, many notes and alternate drafts to Louis’s well-known and previously published novels and short stories will now be included as “bonus feature” postscripts within the books that they relate to. For example, the Lost Treasures postscript to Last of the Breed will contain early notes on the story, the short story that was discovered to be a missing piece of the novel, the history of the novel’s inspiration and creation, and information about unproduced motion picture and comic book versions.

  An even more complete description of the Lost Treasures project, along with a number of examples of what is in the books, can be found at louislamourslosttreasures.com. The website also contains a good deal of exclusive material, such as even more pieces of unknown stories that were too short or too incomplete to include in the Lost Treasures books, plus personal photos, and scans of original documents.

  All of the works that contain Lost Treasures project materials will display the Louis L’Amour’s Lost Treasures banner and logo.

  PREFACE

  By Beau L’Amour

  Over the years I have come to realize that it is impossible to comprehend my father’s life without understanding the brief time he spent as a merchant sailor. Though he was born in North Dakota, and wrote this novel while living on a small farm in Oklahoma, his adulthood was formed and his character was determined by the sea—an environment that must have been exciting, threatening, and wonderful to a kid from the upper Midwest.

  The sea gave him access to the world. It allowed him to visit England, Japan, China, Malaysia, Indonesia, Arabia, Egypt, and Panama…all at a time when few people from the United States ever made it to either Mexico or Canada. He traveled in the roughest of conditions and with the roughest of men, yet their world was quite a cosmopolitan place, full of different races, religions, languages, philosophies, histories, and governments. It was a far cry from the narrow confines of the small-town America where Louis grew up. The least educated of his siblings, the sea and the places it took him became his university.

  By the 1930s, having settled in a spot that was about as far as one could get from any ocean or foreign country, he began to write of the times, people, and places he had once known. Many of these stories are included in the collection Yondering. Some of them, like “Thicker Than Blood,” were lifted directly from Louis’s life and experience. Others, like “Glorious! Glorious!,” are, almost certainly, pure fiction, but they captured the times in a more realistic manner than the “high adventure” style of his pulp stories.

  Beyond simply attempting to entertain and connect a reader to the life he had once known, No Traveller Returns might also have been my father’s way of dealing with certain issues that had been on his mind in the few years prior to beginning this manuscript.

  First and foremost, No Traveller Returns is, in a sense, an homage to a time gone by, and perhaps a wistful acceptance that he was no longer the young man who had gone to sea a decade before. He had considered going back. After he had helped his parents move to Oklahoma, Louis discussed returning to the sea full-time, and seriously considered the possibility of becoming a ship’s off
icer. He fantasized about being like Joseph Conrad, a ship’s mate and a writer at the same time. However, he put off making a choice, and as he connected more and more with life in Oklahoma, it became less of a possibility. But the sea still called to him; you can feel it in many parts of this story.

  There was also another, darker question on his mind…a question about a moment when the fickle finger of fate passed him over, touching him lightly before moving on.

  The story goes like this: While waiting to ship out in the mid-1920s, Louis got a job working standby on a large, modern freighter in the port of San Pedro. A “standby seaman” does routine jobs like chipping rust and rough painting on a ship while it is in port. In Dad’s case it was a desperately needed job, and one he hoped would turn into something more permanent: a position with the crew on the ship’s next voyage, possibly even a career on what seemed like a good ship…a career that could have supported him for years. To his dismay, he did not get the job and the ship sailed without him.

  It was never heard from again.

  According to Louis, only one life ring was eventually discovered. The ship had vanished, almost without a trace.

  As with many aspects of my father’s life, there are several versions of that story. In some, the ship is poetically named The Eclipse. In others, the mate, who could have hired Louis, seems struck by a premonition of some sort, and mysteriously dismisses him in an abrupt and callous manner, possibly saving his life. The oddest variation is one where Louis sees a strange man, almost a ghost or apparition, in the ship’s galley, and takes this presence as a warning not to sail with the crew.

  I can’t say I completely believe any of these tales, but I definitely get the feeling from this manuscript that Dad was dealing with something personal that had to do with the dangers that could be found at sea. As history tells us, it wasn’t too many years after he started this book that the merchant marine, by then part of the war effort, became the service with the highest rate of casualties in America’s contribution to World War II.

  No Traveller Returns has the distinction of being the first novel-length work by Louis L’Amour. There are vague suggestions of other, earlier projects, but there is no way to know if they were completed or what became of them. Whether these were references to “magazine novels,” or novellas, which were essentially just long short stories, is unclear, and what eventually happened to them is a complete mystery. In the days before Xerox machines and in the career of a writer for whom return postage and carbon paper to make duplicates were a financial challenge, the only copy of a manuscript could go missing very easily.

  The first indication that Dad was working on this book is in a journal entry from June 9, 1938. He mentions that he intends to “finish ‘No Traveller Returns’ tomorrow.” Though typically optimistic, he almost certainly was not talking about actually finishing the entire novel; more likely, he meant he was wrapping up the first several chapters to submit to publishers in hopes of getting an advance. Those chapters were quickly rejected by several different companies, but he continued to make more progress, documenting that he had completed further chapters as the months wore on. He continued to juggle his time between this novel and other short story projects, projects which might earn him money much more quickly.

  It was a time when several different aspects of Louis’s professional and creative life were colliding. He was writing the semiautobiographical Yondering-style stories, of which No Traveller Returns is one, and he was promoting himself as a character similar to the protagonists found within those pages: a self-educated yet blue-collar adventurer and world traveller. He was making a name for himself on the Oklahoma poetry scene and in other local literary circles. And, much more important, he had just begun selling material to the pulps—high adventure and crime stories—that were more visceral and melodramatic than his other work.

  The important word here, however, is “selling.” The personal adventures and slice-of-life stories earned him little or nothing. Though a number of them received critical acclaim, they were published in literary periodicals with a very limited audience. A few of these periodicals might generously be called prestigious; most, however, just wanted to seem that way.

  The pulp sales made Louis actual money, a rare thing in Depression-era Oklahoma, but there were also the issues of pride and self-identity. They might have had lax editorial standards, but pulps were popular and had massive circulation. Louis was thirty years old. He was living with his parents in a house owned by his eldest brother, a successful newspaperman. If he was going to call himself a writer and be taken seriously by the people who were putting a roof over his head, he was going to have to stop talking about it and actually earn some money.

  So pride, cash, and the pleasure of finally being valued by well-known editors and magazines drove him to write more and more for the pulps, even though he was hoping they would be only a temporary stop on the road to becoming a respected novelist. He rationed his time between one style and another, hoping that both would take off.

  Louis had a vision for his Yondering material similar to the one he had for his later Sackett, Talon, and Chantry series. He intended to create a cycle of stories documenting the life he had witnessed in different cities around the world: San Pedro in the 1920s (“Old Doc Yak,” “It’s Your Move,” “And Proudly Die,” “Survival,” “Show Me the Way to Go Home”); Shanghai in the 1930s (“The Admiral,” “The Man Who Stole Shakespeare,” “Shanghai, Not Without Gestures”), and Paris in the 1940s (“The Cross and the Candle,” “A Friend of the General”). Other stories (“Death Westbound,” “Thicker Than Blood,” No Traveller Returns) would examine the ships and crews, the roads and rails that connected these locations. Through these and other stories he had planned, Louis intended to loosely chronicle an era that was vanishing, even as he was experiencing it: a different sort of frontier, one where a man could travel without a passport and see a world that had yet to close its last borders or map its final unexplored places.

  That era’s hoboes, itinerant workers, and ship’s crewmen lived lives that were, in many ways, clandestine. They were beneath the notice of those who remained at home and struggled to hold down regular jobs, beneath the notice of both captains of industry and labor leaders. Then, as now, many who did hard and dangerously physical work lived what was nearly an outlaw existence. They had their own rules, and their own language, one which I have endeavored to decipher as clearly as possible in the glossary at the end of this book. This jargon of sailors and railroad men and soldiers, cowboys and miners is a vocabulary I grew up with, but it is a version of English certainly not taught in any college classroom.

  Louis did not visit this underworld as a dilettante to gain life experience or to discover subjects for his writing (though that was ultimately the result); he was there because of a lack of skills and education, and because he had no family that could support him. He was a participant in, as one of the young protagonists of this book will observe, “a world where men without money lived, searched for work, and traveled by night,” a member of the secret society of poet Robert Service’s “Men That Don’t Fit In.”

  Typical of a young writer, No Traveller Returns attempts to be more ambitious, complex, and intellectual than a great deal of Louis’s later work. Such ambition, complexity, and intellectualism are not always the easiest of mixtures. But those elements, and the book’s emotional connection to its characters, are what set this work apart, making it unique in nearly every way.

  It is worth mentioning that the Yondering-style stories, different as they were, had a direct bearing on Louis’s later writing style. In December of 1938 he noted in his journal:

  The consensus of editorial opinion at present seems to be that my stories are weak on plot. The atmosphere, characterization, and writing are receiving constant compliments, and most of my rejects are on the basis of weak plot.

  Dad quickly corrected this ove
rsight in his pulp writings. However, he also continued on for a few more years, working to try and improve his original quiet and insightful style, hoping that it would lead him to a more “literary” career.

  If the war hadn’t interrupted Louis’s development of this book and then dropped him into even more extreme financial straits once it was over, he might have finished perfecting No Traveller Returns and found a publisher. At the time, it was indeed likely that any small success outside the realm of short stories would have altered his career considerably. Later in his life, Dad often wondered if such circumstances might have turned him into an entirely different sort of writer. One can hardly believe he would have been more popular, but who he would have become, and where his talent would have taken him, is something we can never know.

  A SIMPLE EXPLANATION OF SHIP’S PERSONNEL

  DECK CREW

  ORDINARY SEAMAN (OS): the lowest rank on the deck crew. After one has put in a certain amount of time and passed a series of examinations, he can attain the rank of “able,” or Able-bodied Seaman (AB). Responsibilities include standing watch at the wheel and on lookout, handling lines while mooring the ship, stowing or unloading cargo, and general maintenance, including rust removal, painting, and the repair and servicing of the cargo loading gear.

  FIRST MATE: The first, or “chief,” mate is head of the deck crew and generally in charge of the ship’s operations. Like all of the mates, he also supervises two four-hour work periods, or “watches,” a day, one in the A.M. and one in the P.M.