He had a rifle and when I turned I was lookin' right down the barrel. I just said to myself, Tell Sackett, you'll die like your pa done, lonesomelike and hunted down. But that .44 was a pretty good gun. She knew her piece and she spoke it, clear and sharp. I felt the whiff of his bullet.
He'd missed. The best of us do it, but a body hadn't better do so when the chips are down and you've laid out your hand on the table with no way but to win or die.
My bullet took him. It took him right where he lives, and the second one done the same like it wanted company.
He couldn't believe he could miss. Maybe he was too sure of it. I stood there, a long, tall man from the Tennessee hills with my pistol in my fist, and I watched him go.
He wanted to shoot again, but that first shot had done something to him, cut his spinal cord, maybe, for his hands kind of opened up and the rifle slided into the grass.
'Nativity Pettigrew,' I said, 'where did you bury pa?'
His voice was hoarse. 'There's a green hillside where a creek runs down at the base of Banded Mountain. You'll find him there at the foot of a rock, a finger that points at the sky, and if you look sharp you'll find his grave and the marker I carved with my hands.
'He had my gold and he had to die, but there's no gainsaying he tried ... I liked him, lad, but I shot him dead and buried him there where he fell.
'Beat as he was, and wounded bad, he crawled over the mountain to get me. It was him or me, there at the last, and I carry the lead he gave me.'
He lay there dying, his eyes open wide to the sun, and I hated him not. He'd played a rough game and, when the last cards were laid down, he lost. But it might have been me.
'When we get the gold out, I'll give some to your wife. She's a good woman,' I told him.
'Please,' he said.
He died there, and I'd bury him where he fell.
When I came up to the campfire, they were sitting around and waiting. Flagan was there, who'd come up from Shalako, riding a mouse-colored horse.
'You'll have to forget Hippo Swan,' Orrin said. 'He came hunting you to Shalako, and Flagan said you weren't the only Sackett, and they fought.'
'Sorry, Tell,' Flagan said, 'but he'd come wanting and I'd not see him go the same way. He fought well but his skin cut too easy, and now he's gone down the road feelin' bad.'
'We found the gold, too,' Orrin said. 'Remember what pa said about me always wanting the cream of things and about the distance to the old well and how many times ma scolded me for it.
'Well, I got to thinking. That word cream did it. Remember how we used the well to keep our milk cold? When I was a youngster I used to go out and skim the cream off. Ma was always after me about it. Well, this was the same kind of place--a hole in the rocks--about the same distance away as the well.
'He'd laid rocks back into the hole, threw dirt and such at it, I guess. Anyway, we pulled out the stones and there she was. More than enough to buy us land and cattle to match Tyrel's.'
I sat there, saying nothing, and they all looked at me. Then Orrin said, 'What happened to you?'
'It was Nativity Pertigrew,' I said. 'Not so crippled up as he made out. Pa followed him--maybe a mile out there, or more. He crawled up on him and they swapped shots. Pa got lead into him but pa was killed, and Nativity buried him yonder on the slope of Banded Mountain.'
'Kind of him,' Orrin said, and I agreed.
'We'll do the same for him,' I said. 'Where he lies we'll put him down. What was it pa used to say? 'Where the chips fall, there let them lie.' '
Nell Trelawney stood up. 'Are you going home now, Tell? It's time.'
'I reckon,' I said, and we went to our horses together.
About the Author
Louis L'Amour, born Louis Dearborn L'Amour, is of French-Irish descent. Although Mr. L'Amour claims his writing began as a 'spur-of-the-moment thing' prompted by friends who relished his verbal tales of the West, he comes by his talent honestly. A frontiersman by heritage (his grandfather was scalped by the Sioux), and a universal man by experience, Louis L'Amour lives the life of his fictional heroes. Since leaving his native Jamestown, North Dakota, at the age of fifteen, he's been a longshoreman, lumberjack, elephant handler, hay shocker, flume builder, fruit picker, and an officer on tank destroyers during World War II.
And he's written four hundred short stories and over fifty books (including a volume of poetry).
Mr. L'Amour has lectured widely, traveled the West thoroughly, studied archaeology, compiled biographies of over one thousand Western gunfighters, and read prodigiously (his library holds more than two thousand volumes). And he's watched thirty-one of his westerns as movies. He's circled the world on a freighter, mined in the West, sailed a dhow on the Red Sea, been shipwrecked in the West Indies, stranded in the Mojave Desert. He's won fifty-one of fifty-nine fights as a professional boxer and pinchhit for Dorothy Kilgallen when she was on vacation from her column. Since 1816, thirty-three members of his family have been writers. And, he says, 'I could sit in the middle of Sunset Boulevard and write with my typewriter on my knees; temperamental I am not.'
Mr. L'Amour is re-creating an 1865 Western town, christened Shalako, where the borders of Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado meet. Historically authentic from whistle to well, it will be a live, operating town, as well as a movie location and tourist attraction.
Mr. L'Amour now lives in Los Angeles with his wife Kathy, who helps with the enormous amount of research he does for his books. Soon, Mr. L'Amour hopes, the children (Beau and Angelique) will be helping too.
