The Collected Short Stories of Louis L'Amour, Volume Four Read Free Page B

away, wheeled his mount and raced back at a dead run, drawing his rifle from its scabbard.
    “Norba comes,” Shambe said, “with many men.”
    Schwarzkopf dropped his jerry can and started for his rifle, but Anna’s gesture stopped him. “Finish refueling,” she said, and when he hesitated, “Doctor, put that gun down and get busy!”
    Kulan swung his pony alongside her as she mounted, and Shambe drew upon the other side. They sat together, awaiting the oncoming riders.
    Norba’s horse reared as he drew up, a hard pleasure in his eyes. “So…you are traitors. I shall kill you.”
    Anna Doone’s heart pounded heavily, yet she kept all emotion from her face. Her son’s life, as well as her own, was at stake.
    “These men are our friends. We help them on their way,” she said.
    “And I shall decide who is and is not a traitor,” Kulan added.
    From behind them the pilot said, “One more can does it.”
    Anna’s heart lifted. Behind her was the plane that could take her home, the rescue of which she had dreamed for fifteen years. The time was here, the time was now.
    The sky beckoned, and beyond the mountains lay India, the threshold to home.
    “Go with them, Mother.” Kulan’s eyes did not turn from Norba. “I cannot, for these are my people.”
    Her protest found no words. How often had she taught him that kingship was an obligation rather than a glory?
    Her eyes swung around the semicircle of savage faces, and then for one brief instant the dream remained, shimmering before her eyes: a warm quiet house, a hot bath, meals prepared from food from a market, life without fear of disease or crippling disfigurement, life without war.
    “Dr. Schwarzkopf,” she said, “you will leave your rifles and ammunition, they are in short supply here.”
    “If you are going,” Kulan said, “you must go now.”
    “If these are your people, Kulan, then they are my people also.”
    The winding caravan of Norba’s people appeared, heading north toward Tosun Nor. She should have remembered they would come this way.
    Dr. Schwarzkopf brought the weapons and the ammunition. “You will not come with us, then?”
    “I can’t. This is my son.”
    “You will die,” Norba said. His eyes flickered over the three he hated—the wife of Lok-sha, the leader of the Ku-ts’a, and the boy who stood between him and the kingship.
    Norba’s rifle started to lift, and Shambe’s started up with it, but Kulan put out a hand to stop the movement, then stepped his horse toward Norba and looked into his eyes.
    “I am
jyabo,
” he said. “I am your king.”
    For an instant Norba’s rifle held still, then slowly it lowered. With an oath, Norba whirled his horse and dashed away, followed by his men.
    Behind them the motors broke into a roar, and throwing up a vast cloud of dust, the plane rolled off, gathered speed, then soared up and away, toward India, toward home.
    “You should have let me kill him,” Shambe said.
    “No, Shambe,” Kulan replied, “many go to die, but those who remain will remember that I spoke truth.”
    Three abreast, they rode to the crest of the ridge and halted. The caravan of Norba’s followers moved north toward the great lake known as Tosun Nor, moved toward drought and death.
    Anna Doone, born in Montana, looked beyond them to a bright fleck that hung in the sky. Sunlight gleamed for an instant on a wingtip…then it winked out and was gone, leaving only a distant mutter of engines that echoed against the mountains.

May There Be a Road
    T ohkta looked at the bridge suspended across the gorge of the Yurung-kash. After four years, the bridge hung again, and now, at last, he could go to his betrothed, to Kushla.
    At this point the gorge was scarcely a hundred feet wide, but black cliffs towered into the clouds above it, even as they fell sheer away hundreds of yards below. Down those cliffs came the trails that approached the bridge on either side. From where the bridge came into view from above, it