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

seeing her now. That her often drunk, ineffective coffeehouse bolshevik could never even imagine this, which made her cough out a hard, mean laugh from lips that were set in a snarl.
    “Come on, damn you.”
    From somewhere inside her there came a deep swell of emotion. Some of it was the loss of her father. Some of it was fear of this terrible man. Some of it was anger, finally not with herself, but with her no-good husband.
    But most of it was an emotion that had no name, something ancient and primal, the feeling that a tiny animal might have when, after being pursued to the end of its endurance, it turns and bares its teeth. Not only does it have to fight, but something inside it has changed…now it
wants
to fight.
             
    M ORNING FOUND Pete Kubelik painfully awake in his room at the San Esteban trade store. He had clumsily fallen off one of the deadfalls that Julie Marrat had skillfully negotiated in her escape the previous day. Kubelik had sprained his ankle, and now the swelling had become serious and excruciating. He took a swallow from a bottle of vodka he had half finished the night before and limped to the front door of the store. Throwing off the heavy bar, he stepped out into the gray and drizzling dawn.
    Today he and Rudy would have to finish up what that damn girl had started. Regardless of the pain that shot through him every time he took a step, regardless of the hangover pounding in his temples, he’d find Julie Marrat, and if he couldn’t make her come back with him, he’d kill her. He’d kill her anyway, but there’d be more pleasure for him if he brought her back alive.
    He surveyed the long beach and the high cliffs. Time to get moving. He shook his head, trying to clear it, but that movement made his vision blur with pain.
    Maybe he’d just kill her.
    An invisible club knocked Pete Kubelik’s bad leg out from under him. He went face-first into the sand, gasping in shock. He lurched around, trying to sit up even as the crack of the gunshot echoed back from the cliffs. Looking down, he saw blood welling from a hole dead center in his knee. He clawed for the pistol behind his hip.
    Down on the beach, less than one hundred yards from the door of his store, the dark sand moved and shook. Julie Marrat stood up from the place where she had lain, half buried, through the night, the sights of her father’s old carbine trained on Kubelik’s front door. She worked the bolt on the rifle, and when Rudy came charging out of the building, shotgun in hand, she shot him in the stomach. Then she started forward.
    Kubelik half raised the .45, but she spoke before he could bring it to bear.
    “Don’t! I won’t kill you if you throw it away.”
    He was tempted to try, but the barrel felt heavy, too heavy, and down in his leg the pain was starting to rise like a giant comber. He dropped the gun and began to curse, a long quiet stream of the foulest language Julie had ever heard.
    She picked the gun up. “I came back for my battery cable,” she said. “You shouldn’t have taken it…or stolen our boat.” She went up to the store and took the bolt from Kubelik’s rifle. Then, using a rock, she beat the hammers from the trader’s shotguns. The cable she eventually found lying on the deck of the schooner.
    She fired up the schooner’s auxiliary and threw off the lines. Several of the other inhabitants of the station had come down to the water and were watching her curiously. She called out to them.
    “I’ll leave this boat in the mouth of the San Tadeo River if you want it.” They looked at her as she turned and headed down the inlet and toward the gulf. The last time she looked back, they had walked over to where Pete Kubelik lay in the sand. They had all taken up sticks or rocks, but were not striking him. They were just standing there. Finally, they slipped out of sight as she rounded the headland and started down to the sea.

Meeting at Falmouth
    N ight, and the storm…howling engines of