Novel 1963 - Fallon (v5.0) (17 page)

He pulled away from her, fell against the door jamb, and stared stupidly into the street. The dirt of the road seemed to come alive with tiny spurts of dust, and three men lay sprawled there, dead…Bellows men.

He felt his knees weakening and he let go the rifle to get a better grip on the door jamb, but his fingers lacked the strength and he slid to the floor. Somebody was crying and somebody else was shooting, and far off he could hear the pound of racing hoofs. They kept pounding until their racing seemed to be inside his skull.

And then he was dead…or he felt like it. Never having been dead, he might have been mistaken.

E
VIDENTLY HE WAS mistaken, for the sunshine across his bed was pleasant, and his eyes were open, looking at it. A curtain was blowing slightly with a faint breeze—but he had never had a curtain at his window.

He lay very still, afraid the curtain would go away, because he liked it and liked the feeling of lying here with nothing to worry about…

No, he had plenty to worry about. He had to get out of here. He had sold a claim to Pollock and the man would soon know there was no gold there, and never had been.

He turned his head slowly and saw that the room was empty. It was his room, all right, but it did not look the same. Somebody had put a rag rug on the floor, and there were curtains at all the windows, and another chair—a rocker—had been moved into the room.

He put his fingers up to feel of his eye, and then he was really worried. The swelling was gone.

If the swelling was gone he must have been lying here for days. He tried to move, but his body felt stiff. He felt of his midsection and found it was wrapped tightly in bandages. His leg, too, was bandaged.

How badly hurt was he? Could he stand the ride it would take to get out of here?

He moved himself tentatively. He was stiff, all right, but he could move. He glanced toward the door where he had left his travel gear. It was gone…and then he saw it, all there, even his rifle, standing just inside the closet door.

He heard a wagon in the street, the heavy rocking, rolling sound of a loaded wagon, and he listened. He heard voices…and down below in the saloon, somebody laughed. He had not considered the saloon. There was a way out the back, however, and he could use that.

The question was: how much time did he have?

He heard footsteps, the quick rap of light, hard heels…a woman walking.

Quickly, he closed his eyes, allowing one hand to lie helplessly on the blanket that covered him.

She came quickly into the room and looked down at him, then placed a hand upon his brow. It was a cool, pleasant hand. It rested for a few minutes upon his forehead, then whoever it was went to straightening the bed, which had never needed it less.

And then she seated herself in the rocker and he heard the creak of a basket, the faint click of knitting needles. After a moment, she began to sing very softly, and not at all badly. Somewhere along there, he fell asleep.

When he awakened, it was dark within the room. No…not quite. There was a light across the room, shielded from his eyes.

Someone spoke…Brennan. “How is he?”

“He's alive.” That was Ginia. Of course it would be Ginia. She was not the kind to let well enough alone. “How much alive it's hard to say.” Now, that had a sarcastic tinge that his ear was delicate enough to catch.

“Pollock was asking about him. He wants to talk to him as soon as he's conscious.”

Well, that was no surprise. He had ten thousand dollars of Pollock's money.

“Do you think he really intended to leave us?” Brennan asked.

“Of course. That is exactly what he would do. You saw his things…he was all packed to go.”

“Well, he won't get away now, I'll lay a bet on that. There are some things a man never escapes. This is one of them.”

“He's perfectly free.”

“For how long? I tell you, he hasn't a chance, and you know it. In fact, nobody knows it better than you.”

“I'm afraid you are mistaken.” Her voice was stiff. “I don't know what you mean, Mr. Brennan.”

“He's trapped…trapped, I say.” Brennan did not sound too upset about it, however—and it was Brennan he had counted as a friend.

After Brennan was gone he lay perfectly still, waiting for her to go. And when she went, he would get out of here. With luck, he could be twenty miles away before daybreak…perhaps thirty.

Suddenly Ginia got to her feet. She put her things in the basket and closed it, then she opened a cabinet and took out a bottle. He knew the sound, all right, but it startled him and he opened his eyes.

Her back was half toward him. She had a brandy glass, and she was pouring a little from the bottle.

He closed his eyes quickly as she turned around and came toward him. “You'd better drink this,” she said coolly. “You're going to need it.”

He opened his eyes. “I never saw the time when I needed a drink,” he said, “but I'll take it.”

“You'd better,” Ginia said grimly. “They'll be coming any minute now.”

“‘They'?”

Her face was expressionless. “Mr. Pollock, Mr. Brennan, Joshua—all of them.”

“Coming here? What for?”

“They had to make it official,” she replied. And then she added, “Reverend Tattersall is coming, too.”

“Reverend? In this town?”

“He's the pastor of our church. We have a church now.”

He looked at her suspiciously. “How long have I been here?”

“About eight days…almost nine. You'd be surprised how much has happened.”

He was afraid to ask what had happened. Instead he said, “How'd we come out in the fight?”

“We lost two men, and three wounded, besides you. Mr. Hamilton was killed, and Jim Karns—he was one of the new ones.

“The Bellows gang…they were hit pretty hard, everybody seems to think. You killed Lute Semple, Tandy Herren, and another man—we found him on the balcony—and six others were killed, most of them when you emptied the saloon.”

“You mean when they busted out of the door?”

“When you started shooting and drove them out.” She smiled suddenly. “They're all talking about how perfectly you had planned for them. There were four men at the mine aside from Mr. Pollock, and when those men burst out of the door they ran right into the open in front of their guns. Until then, it looked as if we'd lost the fight.”

“I didn't get Bellows?”

“You wounded him. They had the trial the next day, and they tried him and another man who would never tell us his name.”

“What happened?”

“They were guilty, and they were hanged. Justice is very prompt here, Mr. Fallon.” And then she added slyly, “Wiley Pollock was the prosecuting attorney.”

They had acted promptly then. He lay quietly thinking about it, and then he heard the boots on the steps.

“Look”—he sat up quickly, so quickly he felt a dart of pain in his side—“my horse is right down in the stable. Stall them…say anything…let me get out of here. After all,” he pleaded, “I never did you any harm.”

“I never let you,” she said, “or you might have. After all, you did try to seduce me.”

“I
what?
”

“Didn't you try to win me over with flattering words? Didn't you tell me I was too lovely for this sort of life?”

“Well, look…I didn't mean to…”

“And weren't we in a dark cellar under the hotel? How does that sound?”

Suddenly he was angry. “Look, I don't know what you're trying to do, but—”

“Oh, shut up!” she said primly. “Here they are.”

John Brennan was in the lead, and behind him were Blane, Teel, Budge, Devol, Pollock, and a dozen others, some of whom he did not know.

“That claim you sold me,” Pollock said, grinning, “was no damned good.”

“I'm sorry about that,” Fallon said. “I can return the money.”

“You don't have any money,” Ginia interrupted. “I used it.”

“You
what?
”

“She gave it to me,” Pollock said, “to develop the claim up on the mountain…the claim you found when you had that brush with the Utes.”

“You talked when you were delirious,” Ginia said maliciously, “but the claim sounded good. So I went to Mr. Pollock and suggested he go with Mr. Teel…he's a very good tracker, you know…and back-track you to where you found the gold. It took them five days to find it, but they did.”

He lay perfectly still, his eyes staring out of the window. It was night out there now, and if he'd been left to himself he would be out there…running.

So they had located the claim
he'd
found, and she had returned
his
money to Pollock to develop the claim.

“You took the money out of my pockets? That's stealing!”

“I doubt if anybody would know more about that than you, Mr. Fallon, but time was passing and you were very ill…and of course, every wife has a right—”

“Every
who?
”

“Every wife. Of course, I am not your wife yet, but I told them all how you proposed to me under the hotel that time, and the things you said to me, and how we planned to be married, so Mr. Pollock and I drew up the papers for the Red Horse Mining & Development Company.”

“I threw in my claim,” Pollock said cheerfully, “the one you sold me.”

“And we contributed ours,” Ginia said, and the light in her eyes was no longer quite so malicious, “and the money you got from Mr. Pollock. You are president of the company, Mr. Pollock is vice president and superintendent of development, and I'm the treasurer.”

“And we had an election,” Blane interrupted, “and you were elected mayor. I voted against you,” he added.

“You're the only sane one in the crowd,” Fallon said irritably. “This has turned into a madhouse.”

“And this,” Ginia said, indicating a man standing near her, “is the Reverend Mr. Tattersall.”

The door opened just then and Joshua Teel's wife came in with a cake, followed by Ruth Damon, in her prettiest dress.

“What's that for?” Fallon asked.

“That's the wedding cake, Mr. Fallon,” Ginia replied, “and Ruth is my bridesmaid.”

“This has gone far enough!” Fallon protested. “A joke is a joke. I never proposed to you—never!”

“Not in so many words,” Ginia agreed.

“How many do?” Mrs. Teel asked. “In so many words? Josh didn't.”

“Neither did pa,” Mrs. Blane said, “not in so many words.”

The Reverend Mr. Tattersall came up beside the bed. He cleared his throat.

“We wouldn't like to have it said,” Riordan commented, “that one of our girls was slighted. Why, I've seen men hung for less.”

The Reverend Mr. Tattersall cleared his throat again, more emphatically. “We are gathered here…”

Macon Fallon was no stranger to the town of Red Horse, and the fact that he was a man with a fast horse wasn't going to do him a damned bit of good.

*Certain Maxims of Hafiz, by Rudyard Kipling.
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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.”

I
T 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 best-selling 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),
Fallon, 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.