At his horse, Runyon worked with the saddle. His canteen slipped and fell to the earth, but he ignored it. He stepped into the saddle. "You and your daughter," he said, "you come with us. We'll see you started on your way."

Dave Spanyer mounted the horse they brought for him. Lennie, her face very pale, was already in the saddle. She kept her eyes on the horizon, as if there was something out there that gripped her attention ... or as if she dared not trust herself to look anywhere else.

Spanyer glanced at Weedin and Murphy, both of them seasoned with dust and fighting and the ways of men and cattle. "They come just in time, those outlaws. Only just in time," he said.

"They done some shootin'," Weedin said.

The posse turned their horses and started down from High Lonesome. Runyon looked over at Weedin. "You got some tobacco, Ollie?"

"Sure haven't, Pete. Must've lost mine ... back there."

They rode away down the canyon and n.o.body wanted to look back. After a few minutes Lennie and Dave Spanyer caught up with them.

"Our bank was robbed," Murphy commented, to no one in particular, "but we've got nothing to be ashamed of."

No sound disturbed the clear air of afternoon. Wind stirred in the gra.s.s, ruffling the hair of a dead Apache.

Out from the brush against the rock wall crawled a tall, lean-waisted young man and he limped toward the steeldust that somehow had his bridle caught in the brush. There was blood on Considine's leg, and there was blood on his side, but he could walk, and he carried his rifle.

A gun belt with his six-shooters hung over the pommel of the steeldust's saddle. Considine found the canteen where it had been dropped, with the name on the side in black paint ... Pete. He saw the sack of tobacco, and retrieved it.

Once more in the saddle, he took the trail the Kiowa had used and rode up into the hills above High Lonesome.

Far off to the east, on the main trail, he saw a small dark spot, and a trailing dust clouduthe posse, returning home with the bodies of three dead outlaws.

On the hill's long crest he sat his horse, the sun in his eyes. There was a stubble of beard on his jaws. He was weak from loss of blood and very tired, but he scarcely glanced toward the south and the border. Castle Dome lifted its ma.s.sive shoulders above the desert mountains.

Shadows, faintly purple, were gathering along the mountains. Far off, the Sand Tanks were already growing darker. He started the steeldust down the hill toward the west, toward California.

There would be no riding with the wind out there, no wild dashes for safety and freedom. There would be hard, driving work, with something building and growing around him, and there would be a girl who had held herself still in his arms, looking up at him, waiting for something within him to respond, something he had forgotten was there.

He moved his wounded leg, easing the pad he had made over the wound, and walked his horse away.

Behind him the wind stirred the gra.s.s, and the hills that had waited so long in silence had already forgotten their brief moments of blood and battle. The echoes had disappeared into the canyons and lost themselves there, the smell of gunpowder was gone ... the gra.s.s remained.

The gray horse walked steadily, and the face of the man called Considine lost its strain. Down there on the flat, only a few miles west, an old man and a girl were waiting, as they had said they would wait.

Behind him the wind moved down from High Lonesome, but only the wind blew along the trails, south to the border, south to Mexico.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR.

"I think of myself in the oral traditionuof a troubadour, a village taleteller, the man in the shadows of the campfire. That's the way I'd like to be remembereduas a storyteller. A good storyteller."

It is doubtful that any author could be as at home in the world recreated 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, a.s.sessment miner, and officer on tank destroyers 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 100 books is in print; there are nearly 230 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 G.o.ds, The Walking Drum (his twelfth-century historical novel) Jubal Sackett, 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 ca.s.sette 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 tradition forward with new books written by the author during his lifetime to be published by Bantam well into the ninetiesuamong them, four Hopalong Ca.s.sidy novels: The Rustlers of West Fork, The Trail to Seven Pines, The Riders of High Rock, and Trouble Shooter.

[09 Jun 2002] Scanned by pandor.

[05 Dec 2002] (v1.0) proofed and formatted by NickL.

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