Novel 1959 - The First Fast Draw (v5.0) by Louis L’Amour Read Free Book Online Page A

caught a low-hanging limb. Taking a good grip I pulled myself up out of the water.
    The air was cold after the water and my teeth chattered. From limb to limb I climbed until there was a place on some twisted limbs where I could make a nest for myself. Removing my belt I belted myself around a branch of the tree and lay there in the darkness, teeth rattling with cold, mosquitoes swarming around.
    The last thing I recalled was the lights along the shore line and then I must have slept or become unconscious for when I opened my eyes again the sky was gray in the east, and their campfires were large on the shore, waiting for daylight and serious search.
    Something was wrong with one of my eyes and when I felt of it with careful fingers I found it swollen enormously, and fast shut. There was a great welt above one ear, and a wide cut on my scalp. Every muscle was stiff and sore, and my head throbbed with a dull pound. The flesh of my left arm was badly torn by the hobnails of a boot, and only the fact that it had been cushioned from beneath by grass and soft earth had saved it from breaking. No matter how I felt, I could wait no longer, for this place while good enough at night, would never survive a search by day.
    Peering about, turning my head awkwardly because of the one eye I could use, I searched for some escape. And then I glimpsed a huge old log half concealed by vines. It was afloat, but hung up on a root of the very cypress where I was hiding.
    There was movement around the fires and their voices carried to me as I climbed down the tree, every move painful, and my head feeling like a keg half-full of water, sloshing around and hard to manage.
    By bending branches I got the log loose. By the sound of the voices I knew the searchers were drinking, which would make it worse for me if caught. Then pushing the log free with a broken branch for a pole, I started to move. The swamp was one of the arms of Lake Caddo, which nobody knew much about, and my guess was that a hundred years from now, folks still would not know all its tortuous sloughs and the hyacinth-clogged bayous of sluggish brown water. Yet around this lake with its bayous and sloughs, and the swamps along the Sulphur I’d spent most of my boyhood, and I figured to know this swamp country in both Louisiana and Texas as well as anybody.
    Keeping that clump of cypress between the shore and me, I poled steadily, every bruised muscle aching, pushing deeper and deeper into the swamp. Where I was going now they would not follow me even if they knew of it, and I was mighty sure they didn’t. I was going to the island.
    No more than a half-dozen men knew of that island before the war, and probably nobody had learned of it since unless taken there by one of those who knew. Hidden from sight in a wilderness of moss-hung cypress, the approaches seemingly clogged by hyacinth or lily pads, the island was a quarter of a mile long, and at its widest no more than a hundred yards. The highest point was about six feet above the water, but without a guide who knew the area the island simply could not be found. From a dozen yards away it was invisible in the jungle of trees, moss and vines. The Caddo Indians had known of it, and a few of the mixed-blood Caddo-Negroes who lived in the swamp knew of it.
    There were several of these islands, although the others were smaller and, but for one other, more exposed. Yet it was likely that none of them were known to these fellows who mostly had ridden down from Boston, Texas.
    A heron flew up and spread wide wings…poling on along the bayou, my head throbbing, muscles aching, finding a way through the lilies that would close after me.
    How far had I come? A mile? Two miles? Moving as though in a trance, thinking only of putting distance between myself and the searchers who must now be looking for me. If they caught up with me before I reached the island I would be caught with nothing but the derringer to protect me, and it was useless at a