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Chancy: A Novel - Softcover

L'Amour, Louis

 
9780553280852: Chancy: A Novel
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0553280856 ISBN 13: 9780553280852
Verlag: Random House Publishing Group, 1984

Inhaltsangabe

He was an orphan from the hills of Tennessee and he hadn’t eaten in three days. With the front of his stomach making friends with the back, he was in no position to let an opportunity slip by unnoticed. And when Chancy defended his new herd of cattle with a shotgun, he didn’t miss. The dead man left a pistol on the ground. Chancy needed a spare and, after stowing it in his bedroll, forgot about it. He had a cattle drive to finish and a profit to make.

But the gun had a history. Another killing had taken place and Chancy would never know the truth until it was too late. Now, locked in a jail cell with an angry, drunken mob outside and time running out, he must somehow find a way to prove his innocence.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Our foremost storyteller of the American West, Louis L’Amour has thrilled a nation by chronicling the adventures of the brave men and woman who settled the frontier. There are more than three hundred million copies of his books in print around the world.

Von der hinteren Coverseite

Cattle drive in a deadly country...
Poor, orphaned at thirteen, Otis Chancy left the Tennessee mountains with nothing but a will to work, a drive to succeed, and the backbone for a fight. So when a fight comes his way, along with a chance to buy a herd of cattle and start his own spread, nineteen-year-old Chancy doesn't hesitate. He guns down a man who'd been using a sheriff's badge to justify cattle thieving. But when a mysterious woman betrays him, he will find himself stalked by a deadly gunman. Despite his youth, Chancy won't run--and when his past catches up to him in Cheyenne, he'll make his stand, whether his partner and cowhands back his play...or whether he fights alone.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chapter One


When I rode out of the timber I fell in with a cow outfit, and a sorry lot of rawhiders they were.
They had a fire going and coffee on, and the smell of the coffee and of bacon frying fairly set my stomach to asking questions of my face. I'd come a far piece with nothing to chew on but my thoughts.

When I came up to the fire not one of them upped to say aye, yes, or no. They just sat there looking beat. This was a played-out hand if ever I saw one.

"Howdy," I said. "You folks taking on any help?"

There was a thin, stooped-down man, with every bone showing through his thin cotton shirt, who looked around at me. If that man's cattle were as poor as he was, there'd not be fat enough on any one of them to grease a skillet.

"Was I to hire you, I couldn't pay. We're fresh out of everything a man needs most."

Well, I could have fetched him some ideas on that score, because I'd already seen the girl who stood with her back against the chuck wagon.

"Where you driving the herd?"

"We ain't. Not no more. We were headed for a valley out yonder where the grass stands high. Now it looks like we ain't a-goin' anywhere at all."

"What happened?"

"Sheriff in this town lays claim to a bunch of our cattle. Swears they're local brands."

"Ain't the cattle yours?"

"Rightly they are, but there's a point of question and the sheriff knows it. Cattle have been running on Texas grass since Spanish days, with nobody laying claim to hide nor hair of them. Folks branded a few of them, but the War between the States cut that short, so they just ran free and bred free. We made a gather of them, and started north.

"We had a few brands among them. Men died during the war, and then in the Injun fightin' an' such. These brands we have nobody laid claim to, and we honestly tried to run them all down. Now this man claims they're local cattle that drifted south."

"All the way to Texas?" I said. "Swimming those rivers and all? It ain't likely. Away out west it might happen, but there's too much good grass around here for cows to leave it. He's running a bluff on you."

"You et, son? I got no kind of job for you, but no man ever walked away from Noah Gates's fire without he'd et if he was a mind to."

All I owned was on my back or on my horse. That excepts a lay of ridge-country land back in Tennessee, and the offer of that meal sounded fresh and likely to me. So I out with my skinning knife and edged up to the fire, helping myself to beef and beans.

Nobody had much to say as they moved to the fire to partake. It looked to me as if this outfit was fresh out of hope and gumption, as well as other things. They were oldish men, most of them with families at home, likely, and wondering what their womenfolks would do if they didn't come back.
They weren't the frontier type of man. These were the second string, and good men often enough, but hard work and bad crops or bad luck had probably wiped out their efforts, and had taken away a good deal of their will to fight back.

Only a few weeks before I'd left the faraway hills of Tennessee to make myself a place in the world, and when I finally taken off there was nothing left in the cabin but a chunk of side meat off a razor-back hog and some fresh ground meal. I taken that grub and rattled my hocks out of there.
When I rode up to this cow outfit I was three days without eating except for some hazelnuts I'd found, but the longer I sat there listening to their talk the more it seemed to me that this sheriff, as he called himself, was running a blazer on Gates and his outfit. The worst of it was, he looked likely to make it stick. Now, I was just a riding-through stranger, but I'd set up to good grub for the first time in days, and I didn't like to think of some no-account running me away from the trough.

Back in my mountains, folks run long on fighting. A man may not have much, but he sets store by his pride as a free-born American citizen, and is ready to fight for what he believes, you choose the time and place.

Back in the hills when you'd hunted 'coon, drunk a little 'shine, and courted the girls, there wasn't much else to do but fight. Now, I never cared much for the jug, but I was a fair hand at courting.

But with me it was mostly the fighting. It was just fighting in good spirits, knuckle and skull, root-hog-or-die kind of fighting among us boys. And what these folks needed right now was the will to fight.

Only that honed no blades for me. Pa, he always said a man had to look spry for himself, because nobody would do it for him; your opportunities didn't come knocking around, you had to hunt them down and hogtie them. Maybe it was that idea I was considering, and maybe it was the beans in the pot, or it might have been that redhead girl standing over there casting eyes at me, time to time.

So I spoke free, and I told them were they my cows nobody would take them without they had a fight.

"Ain't much we can do," Gates said. "That sheriff's a mighty hard man, and it's a hard lot he has with him. Even if we got shut of this place, there's nothing but Injuns west, and trouble of every kind."
"What about that valley with the tall grass?" I asked.

"Maybe that was just a dream. Anyway, none of us ever saw it. A passing stranger told us of it—a roving man by the name of Sackett, far riding from the western lands."

"If a Sackett told you that valley was there, it was there," I said, me being kin of theirs, although distant.

Now, I was doing some contemplating. This here wasn't an organized state yet, so there weren't any county officials, and no sheriffs. Getting the herd together had taken the last bit of gumption these men had, and the long, hard trail drive had worn them down and whipped them. And I was betting that town outfit had seen that very thing.

"Mr. Gates, what brands were they about to take?"

"Circle Three, Ten Bar, Shamrock, and Slash Seven. That adds up to about half the herd."
Well, a man doesn't look on opportunity too often, and even though the deck was stacked against them, I felt like taking a hand. "Mr. Gates," I said, "you sell those brands to me. You sell them to me right now."

"Sell them? Son, you got that kind of money?"

"No, sir. I haven't got a cent, but I'll give you a handwrit note for one thousand dollars for those cows, all the brands you've named, sight unseen."

"You're talkin' foolish, boy."

"You want my note for a thousand dollars, or you want nothing? That's what they'll leave you. Looks to me as if you've got to fight or quit. Now I'm giving you something else. You sell those cows to me and the fight becomes mine."

"They'll ride rough-shod over you, boy."

"Sell to him." The speaker was a burly, sort of fat man with a stubble of beard over a weak chin. "What can we lose?"

Then we heard the sound of their horses, and it seemed to me Gates turned a shade sicker than he had been before. "I'll write a bill of sale," I said. "All you've got to do is sign it."

There were six men with that so-called sheriff. To me he was just a thief wearing a stolen badge, and those with him were a mean, shifty-looking lot, but hard men, every one of them.

"We've come to make our cut by daylight, Gates. You just stand aside and there'll be no trouble."

"The cattle belong to us," Gates said. "We gathered them down on the Trinity."

The sheriff just grinned, a taunting, ugly kind of a grin. Oh,...

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Verlag
Random House Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
1984
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0553280856
ISBN 13 
9780553280852
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
220
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
gpsr@libri.de
gpsr@libri.de

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