Collected Short Stories of Louis L'Amour The Frontier Stories

No Man's Man CHAPTER I He came to a dirty cantina on a fading afternoon. He stood, looking around with a curious eye. And he saw me there in the corner, my back to the wall and a gun on the table, and my left hand pouring tequila into a glass. He crossed the room to my table, a man with a scholar's face and a quiet eye, but with lines of slender strength. "When I told them I wanted a man big enough and tough enough to tackle a grizzly," he said, "they sent me to you." "How much?" I said. "And where's the grizzly?" "His name is Henry Wetterling, and he's the boss of Battle Basin. And I'll give you a thousand dollars." "What do I do?" "There's a girl up there, and her name is Nana Maduro. She owns a ranch on Cherry Creek. Wetterling wants the girl, and he wants the ranch. I don't want him to have either." "You want him dead?" "I want him out of there. Use your own judgment. When I hire a man for a job, I don't tell him how to do it." This man with the scholar's face was more than a quiet man; he could be a hard man. "All right," I said. "One thing more"he smiled a little, quietly, as though enjoying what he was about to say"Wetterling is top dog and he walks a wide path, but he has two men to back him." He smiled again. "Their names are Clevenger and Mack." The bartender brought a lemon and salt, and I drank my tequila. "The answer is still the same," I told him, then, "but the price is higher. I want five thousand dollars." His expression did not change, but he reached in his pocket and drew out a wallet and counted green bills on the dirty table. He counted two thousand dollars. "I like a man who puts the proper estimate on a job," he said. "The rest when you're finished." He pushed back his chair and got up, and I looked at the green bills and thought of the long months of punching cows I'd have to put in to earn that muchif anybody, anywhere, would give me a job. "Where do you fit in?" I asked. "Do you want the girl or the ranch or Wetterling's hide?" "You're paid," he said pointedly, "for a job. Not for questions. . . ." THERE WAS SUNLIGHT on the trail, and cloud shadows on the hills, and there was a time of riding, and a time of resting, and an afternoon, hot and still like cyclone weather when I walked my big red horse down the dusty street of the town of Battle Basin. They looked at me, the men along the street, and well they could look. I weighed two hundred and forty pounds, but looked twenty-five pounds lighter. I was three inches over six feet, with black hair curling around my ears under a black flat-brimmed, flat-crowned hat, and the brim was dusty and the crown was torn. The shirt I wore was dark red, under a black horsehide vest, and there was a scar on my left cheek where a knife blade had bit to the bone. The man who had owned that knife left his bones in a pack rat's nest down Sonora way. My boots were run-down at the heels and my jeans were worn under the chaps stained almost black. And when I swung down, men gathered around to look at my horse. Big Red is seventeen hands high and weighs thirteen hundred poundsa blood bay with black mane, tail, and forelock. "That's a lot of horse," a man in a white apron said. "ItL'Amour, Louis is the author of 'Collected Short Stories of Louis L'Amour The Frontier Stories', published 2007 under ISBN 9780553805291 and ISBN 0553805290.