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

distance. Moreover, I needed rest and a chance to gather my strength after the brutal beating I’d taken. My only chance was on that island where I was almighty sure Bob Lee, Longley and maybe Bickerstaff would be.
    The sun was hot, and the water dead and still. Occasionally there were wide pools to cross, but mostly it was a matter of finding a way through the fields of lilies and hyacinth that choked many wide areas. If Ol’ Joe had been around he certainly wasn’t making himself known to me.
    Every move of the pole was an effort now. Sometimes I could touch no bottom for some distance, nor could I always pole off the hyacinth although in most places there was enough thick growth to give a man some purchase. When I reached those places where I touched no bottom I just had to float, or paddle a bit with my hands to keep moving.
    The sun was terribly hot and I needed water. The swamp water could be drunk if a man needed it bad enough, but folks got fever from it, I’d heard, and I was in trouble enough.
    And I was still poling along, half-delirious when the log run aground. Several times I tried to force it on, and then looked up through a haze of pain and saw the bank of the island rising before me. But it was not a part of it that I remembered. Clumsily, I scrambled up the bank and fell flat, lying in the warm sunshine, letting the tired muscles relax. My brain was foggy and I seemed to have a hard time getting to my feet, but I knew that I must keep moving. The swamp has a way of destroying anything that becomes helpless, and to keep moving was my only salvation.
    The earth was damp and in deep shadow once I left the shore, except where here and there the foliage overhead thinned out allowing enough sunlight to dapple the earth with light and shadow. Once, so weak that if it had been closer I could not have avoided it, I passed a huge diamond-back rattler coiled on a log.
    Once, staggering, I fell to my knees and doubted whether I could get up—somehow I did. Vaguely then, my surroundings grew familiar. So on I went, although my strength seemed gone. Stumbling, falling, often entangled in brush, twice wading almost neck-deep in water, I kept going until struggling through the last forest of cattails I crawled up on a grassy shore near the camp. And there Bill Longley found me.
    There were three days then of which I remember nothing. Then, slowly, the cuts and abrasions healed, and my head stopped its throbbing. The fierce anger faded, but left behind a sullen hatred. And there was deperation also, for it seemed a door was closing behind me, and that whatever I had come back for was slipping away, and would be lost.
    Loafing about the island camp, I tried to think things out. This must not stop me. True it was that I had been set upon and beaten, yet if ever I was to be anything but what I was, I must make myself a man of substance, of property. And my only chance for that was to return to the land, to plant my crops, to buy my stallion and brood mares, and to win the fight on my own terms.
    My immediate reaction was to get a gun and hunt them down, one by one, saving Chance for the last, and kill each man of them who had set upon me.
    Yet there had been enough of killing, and, at the end, where would I be? An outlaw and a hunted man, without friends, without a place in the world. It would be too easy to be whipped, to sit back and admit that I’d been defeated. Down inside I knew they’d made me eat dirt, but it had been the dirt of my own field, and I could find it not unappetizing.
    There were a dozen men on the island now. Bob Lee was there, so was Bill Longley and Bickerstaff, who was a good man and a hard one. All of these men were only a generation removed from those who fought at the Alamo and San Jacinto.
    Listening to their desultory conversation I kept to my own thoughts with half my mind. There was that land Pa owned down on Big Cypress Bayou, the place called Fairlea. It was situated in an out-of-the-way