Novel 1966 - The Broken Gun (v5.0) (16 page)

I’d never been a day out of shape in my life, and I was glad of it now. I shook my head to clear it, and when he swung a kick at me I caught his foot with mine and swung it high and across, then dove at him while he was poised on one leg. He went down and I landed with my knee in his solar plexus, then smashed it up into his chin.

He threw me off and came up, wiping blood from his face.

He lunged to his feet and I kicked my toe into the nerve centers of his upper thigh. He almost fell, started to step forward, and the leg moved clumsily, still numb from the blow. Moving around him, I feinted, then smashed a right to his chin as he came in.

There was a taste of blood in my mouth, and my brain was foggy from the blows I had taken on the head and chin. He was slow now, but so was I. Sweat trickled into my eyes. He lunged at me suddenly and I sprang back. As I did so, Colin shoved an upended chair behind me and I toppled over it to the floor.

Jimbo jumped in the air as I grabbed the chair, planning to come down on me with his heels in my stomach. He came down all right, right into the legs of the chair that I smashed upward at him. The chair caught him in the groin.

He screamed and fell to his knees. Picking up the chair, I broke it over his head and shoulders, and he slid down on the floor and lay there, still.

Tom Riley and two highway policemen stood in the doorway. Apparently they had been standing there for some time, enjoying the fight.

“I hope you didn’t kill him,” Riley said mildly.

“He’s tough,” I said, and dropped down on the sofa among the debris.

“Mr. Wells,” Riley said, “we’d like you to come into town and answer some questions.”

After a moment I got to my feet and went outside. I went to the shower room off the pool and splashed water on my face. It was stiff and sore, and it hurt to the touch. There was a welt under my eye that had turned black, my lip was split, my ear swollen out of shape and there was a lump on my jaw and another over my eye. How my body looked I didn’t know. I only knew how it felt. I must have caught a lot of punches I didn’t even remember.

“Dan?” It was Belle Dawson.

“I thought I sent you into town.”

“I came back. I had to. I couldn’t stand having you out here, not knowing what was happening. So when we met the police car a few miles up the road, I decided to return with them.”

“Come on,” I said, “we’ve got something to do.”

Pio fell in beside us. “I put the guns down,” he said. “The officers know me, and they might misunderstand.” He grinned at me. “This is the first time I have done nothing wrong. It is a good feeling.”

We picked up the electric lantern Dad Styles had carried and I led the way into the old fort.

Inside, I pushed an old box aside and counted the stones from the back wall. At the third stone I stopped. The stone was about a foot square. With a pick that Pio brought in from outside, I hacked away at the mortar and lifted out the stone. Under it, in the earth under the old fort, was a stone-walled compartment, and in it a rusted iron box.

We broke the box open with the pick. Inside, wrapped in a torn oilskin slicker, were two squares of tanned buckskin. On one was Indian picture-writing; on the other a legal document in Spanish, signed and sealed.

“John Toomey was a careful man,” I said. “He bought the land from the Apaches, and got them to designate the boundaries with care and to describe in their own picture-writing the land sold to him. Then he looked up the man who was the last heir to the Spanish grant and brought him out. Now it’s all yours, Belle, or will be when the legal arrangements are completed.”

“And where will you be then?”

“I’ll likely be a witness, and that will keep me around for a while, but if you have any further ideas on the subject we might cut up a steak some evening and discuss them.”

We stood together under the stars then, and I was thinking of the last words that John Toomey had written.

The directions had been there, of course, telling where to find the papers recording the sale of the ranch property to John and Clyde Toomey.

But there was more, the last words written by John Toomey before he stuffed the papers into the gun barrel.

“It is my request that whoever will come upon these pages will seek out those who have done this crime and show their guilt that the evil may not profit from evil, and that my sons and grandsons may grow tall upon the land I came so far to find.”

I’ll say one thing for John Toomey: When he loaded that Bisley Colt for the last time, it was really loaded.

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),
The Broken Gun, 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

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

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 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

THE BROKEN GUN

A Bantam Book / November 2004

PUBLISHING HISTORY

Bantam edition / January 1966

New Bantam edition / March 1971

Bantam reissue / August 1995

Bantam reissue / November 2002

All rights reserved.

Copyright © 1966 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:

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Please visit our website at
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eISBN: 978-0-553-89894-1

v3.0