Borden Chantry (19 page)

Lang's tongue touched his lips. His right hand was on the very edge of the table. “How about money, Bord? I'm not holding much, but I could stake you. And when the store is sold, there'll be some coming from that…Nobody needs to know you ever found me.”

“Lang, if I took money from you I'd be a worse man than Boone Silva. In his own way, you know, he was an honest man, and he tried to do what you paid him for.”

“What happened?”

Borden gestured casually. “Like I said, fast is relative. He led with a six and I played an ace. It was a showdown and he just didn't have any more cards.”

Lang's tongue touched the lips. His eyes were very bright, and there was almost a taunt on his lips and he leaned forward just a little.

“What was it, Lang? How'd it happen with Sackett?”

Lang shrugged. “I managed to be in the kitchen when the coffee was poured. I slipped him a mickey. Then when he left, I followed him. Lucy Marie tried to get him to come back and sleep there, and she worried me there for a bit. But he wanted to go on to the hotel.

“By the time he got back of the Corral, he was ready to fall, and I was coming up behind him. Just then, some drunken miner in front of the Mex café started to fire off his pistol, so I shot Sackett.

“I picked him up and took his buckskin coat which he'd been carrying over his arm, and took him into the old Simmons barn. I'd just finished swapping shirts with him when he started to come out of it and I had to shoot him again. Then I got his coat on, and put on his shirt…it was too small for me, though…and went on home.”

“Why did you do it?”

“Why? Are you crazy? He was hunting me. He was hunting me for that shooting down below when I killed old Cunningham.”

For once Borden Chantry was pleased with what he had to do. “No, Lang,” he said quietly, “Sackett wasn't looking for you. Nobody was. Cunningham did not die, and his daughter talked him out of preferring charges.

“Lang, you were the damn fool. You killed all those people for nothing. You were running scared and nobody was chasing you.”

“You're a liar!”

“No, Lang. I am not a liar. That is the way it was. George Riggin figured it out, and he was going to tell Blossom to stay away from you. Then you killed him.

“You made every mistake in the book. When you cut that brand away, I knew it had to mean something. But what you didn't guess was that people in a western town notice brands. I just had to keep prying until I found someone who had seen that one.”

Both of Lang's hands were above the table edge, and he was smiling—that brilliant, boyish, friendly smile that people liked so well, and that he knew they liked.

“Well, Bord, I guess this is good-bye, isn't it? I'm sorry you had the long ride for nothing.”

His left hand dropped suddenly, grabbing Borden Chantry's right wrist while his own right hand went for his gun.

Borden did not struggle. He looked right into Lang's eyes until the gun muzzle was coming over the edge of the table, and then he shot him.

The Winchester muzzle was within inches of Lang's belly when the shot squeezed off, and instantly Chantry lunged to his feet, shoving the table hard against Lang Adams. And as the bigger man fell back, Borden Chantry worked the lever on his Winchester and stood looking down at Lang.

With a casual boot, he kicked the gun from Lang's hand.

Several men came into the door, watching. Lang stared up at him. “Damn you, Bord! You were always a damn fool! You were never smart! You could have…Why, I'd have given you five hundred dollars just to ride home! You damn fool, you—!”

His hand went to his belt. “Look, damn you, I've got—”

Borden Chantry felt only pity then. “Lang…you've got nothing. Nothing at all. Not even time.”

There was a moment then, when he seemed to know. “Bord!” he begged. “Please, I—”

Borden Chantry stepped back and looked at the men in the doorway. “I am sorry, gentlemen. As I said, it was a personal matter.”

Over the back of Lang's chair had been hanging a pair of saddlebags. Chantry picked them up. On the bag was burned with a branding-iron
ED G
—Ed Galey.

Lang's last theft…the little money he knew Blossom kept in the house.

In the saddlebag was the small leather sack with several gold pieces. Sackett's gold.

“There's money on him,” Chantry said. “Quite a lot, I think. Take it, bury him decent, and split it among you.”

“What name shall we use?” It was the stocky outlaw he had talked to out front.

“Ford Mason…Lang Adams…Whatever you will. Names meant nothing to him when he was alive, and they mean nothing to him now.”

He was five miles up the trail toward home when he realized that he was broke, his horse was tired, and he hadn't even eaten.

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),
Borden Chantry, 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

BORDEN CHANTRY

A Bantam Book / November 2004

PUBLISHING HISTORY

Bantam edition published October 1977

Bantam reissue / July 1995

Bantam reissue / August 2003

All rights reserved.

Copyright © 1977 by Louis & Katherine L'Amour Trust

Excerpt from
Law of the Desert Born
Text copyright © 2013 by Beau L'Amour; Illustrations copyright © 2013 by Louis L'Amour Enterprises, Inc.

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: Bantam Books New York, New York.

Bantam Books and the rooster colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Please visit our website at
www.bantamdell.com

eISBN: 978-0-553-89892-7

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