Free The Collected Short Stories of Louis L'Amour, Volume Four by Louis L’Amour Page A

heavy shoes, and seven pounds of rifle carried her to the muddy bottom. Her ears popped and she pushed off, hitting the surface and gulping air. She saw a vague shape to her left and grabbed out, her hand scraping along the side of Kubelik’s schooner. Her eyes cleared, and looking past the bow, she saw Kubelik stalking along the rail of the ketch, rifle in hand.
    Julie Marrat took a deep breath and sank away from the boat. A couple of strokes and she felt the bottom again, and then the dirt and roots making up the side of the backwater. A submerged branch hit her in the face, and she grabbed at it, pulling herself up and along a fallen log to the shore. She stumbled up and water poured from her clothes in a rush.
    There was a whip of air by her body and then the slam of a rifle shot. Pete Kubelik jacked another round into the chamber of his rifle, the spent case bouncing off the deck of the ketch. On the schooner, Rudy came running forward, shotgun in hand. She fell, rather than ran, into a dark space between the trees.
    “You come back here!” Kubelik roared. “You come back or I’ll kill you!”
    Now it was the air that was a freezing fist closing on her lungs. Her sopping clothes clung to her as she slogged, almost knee deep in moss, deeper into the forest. Even as she ran she was sobbing with fear. Soon she slowed, realizing that she was leaving a trail even a blind man could follow, and found a deadfall like Cuyu had used. She worked her way deeper and deeper into the immense stand of beeches, and finally, shivering, collapsed from exhaustion.
    Her breath came in shuddering gasps, but as she slowly caught her wind she became aware of the silence. There was no noise of pursuit…there was almost no noise at all. For the moment she was safe.
    Except the cold would kill her. It was still in the mid-forties, but her wet clothes would rapidly give her hypothermia, and in the night the temperature would drop another ten or fifteen degrees. She tried to hold herself still and quiet her chattering teeth. There were still no sounds of pursuit. She crawled around behind a fallen log and pulled off some chunks of bark, but they seemed too damp to burn. A long crack in the fallen tree, however, gave her access to the inside of the trunk, hollowed out by heart-rot, and from there she used the knife to scrape out some light, dry, strips of wood.
    Using a box of safety matches that she had taken from the shack in San Esteban, she struck match after match with no answering flame; they had become too wet. Finally, she tried holding the match head against the striking area with the ball of her thumb as she rasped it along. The match flared but the pain in her hand made her drop it in the moss, where it went out. Blowing on her burned thumb, she was not surprised to find herself cursing in a manner befitting a sailor or dockhand. Gritting her teeth, she struck another match. There was the smell of burning sulfur, and even as she pulled her thumb away she knew she’d blistered it again; however, she lit her tiny fire and slowly fed the flames. Then she stripped the achingly cold clothes off, wrung them out, and laid them out across the log near the fire.
    Shuddering, half frozen, and naked, she huddled by the log and prayed for her clothes to dry. In the dark and silent wood, exposed in every way, Julie was sure that this was when Kubelik would find her. He would follow her tracks, even where she had tried to make it hard for him. He would smell her fire. He would find her and…
    She turned and, fumbling with the cartridges, loaded the gun. She put a round in the chamber and set the safety. “Damn you,” she whispered. “Damn you, if you come here, I’ll kill you!”
    Then she laughed.
    She laughed at the picture of herself, stark naked and freezing in a primitive forest, clutching a rifle and daring a man like Pete Kubelik to come and get her. What made it funny was the thought of her husband, champion of the working class,