Louis LAmour - The Broken Gun

Contents

To Alan Ladd
and Bill Bendix...
together again.

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 LAmour Trust

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eISBN: 978-0-553-89894-1

v3.0

M ARKED TO D IE

N OW THEY HAD me, and they meant to kill me. And worst of all, they had Belle. For some reason they wanted her out of the way, too.

The two riders came moving in slowly. Reese was on the slope above, so I had five men against me now, five men and a woman who, I was sure, was as deadly as any of them.

Lying still on the hot slope, I calculated my chances. Right now it seemed a thousand to one that they would kill me within the hour. But no man dies willingly, and there was in me a fierce desire to liveand not only to live, but to win!

About Louis LAmour

I think of myself in the oral tradition

as a troubadour, a village tale-teller, the man

in the shadows of the campfire. Thats the way

Id 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 LAmour. 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. LAmour 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. LAmour 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 familys 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. LAmour 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. LAmour 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. LAmour 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 LAmour stories are available on cassette tapes from Bantam Audio publishing.

The recipient of many great honors and awards, in 1983 Mr. LAmour became the first novelist ever to be awarded the Congressional Gold Medal by the United States Congress in honor of his lifes work. In 1984 he was also awarded the Medal of Freedom by President Reagan.

Louis LAmour died on June 10, 1988. His wife, Kathy, and their two children, Beau and Angelique, carry the LAmour publishing tradition forward.

Chapter 1

H E LAY SPRAWLED upon the concrete pavement of the alley in the darkening stain of his own blood, a man I had never seen before, a man with the face of an Apache warrior, struck down from behind and stabbed repeatedly in the back as he lay there.

Two police cars with flashing lights stood nearby, and a dozen shirt-sleeved or uniformed men stood about, waiting for the ambulance to come. But it was much too late for an ambulance.

Sorry to get you out of bed at this time of night, Mr. Sheridan.

Detective Sergeant Tom Riley had introduced himself at the door of my motel room a few minutes before. He spoke politely, but I had a feeling he could not have cared less about awakening me. He was a man doing a hard, unpleasant job in the best way he knew how, and my own hunch was that he was pretty good at it.

We thought you might know something about him.

Riley showed me the newspaper clipping and I recognized it as one that had appeared in the local paper the previous morning. It mentioned the fact that I, Dan Sheridan, author of a dozen volumes of western fiction and history, was in the city doing research.

What it neglected to mention was the slip Id made during a moment of exuberance on a television interview when I said, Among other things I want to find out what happened to the Toomey brothers.

The interviewer, with less alertness than usual with his kind, ignored the remark and went on to other things.

As a matter of fact, I had planned to keep the mystery of the vanishing Toomeys as my own private story, to be developed by me in my own good time.

The Toomeys had left Texas for Arizona some ninety years before, and up to a point their drive could be documented; beyond that point there was a complete void. Four thousand head of cattle and twenty-seven men had stepped right off into nothingnessor so it seemed.

I cant be of much help, Sergeant, I said. I never saw the man before.

It was an outside chance. Riley was still looking at the body. Can you think of any reason why he might have wanted to contact you?

Sure. I hear from all sorts of people. Some of them just want to talk about a story Ive written, but most of them want help with a book theyre writing themselves. Once in a blue moon somebody comes up with something I can use in a story.

The name Alvarez means nothing to you?

No, it doesnt. Sorry.

That should have been the end of it, and all I could think of was getting back into bed. Id had a busy day and a long flight, and I was tired.

Only it was not that simple. As I walked past the window of the motel office the clerk tapped on the glass and I went in. Some calls for you, Mr. Sheridan. I didnt see you come in earlier.