When Lottie arrived at the office, Epperman lighted a gas-lamp. She was a mighty fine-looking woman, but cold, Epperman thought. He had seen her kind before - the ones who handled men the best because they lacked passion themselves. They were always thinking while a man was merely feeling.
(from Flint, by Louis L'Amour)
"Every youngster wants to be grown-up," her father had said, "but the difference between a child and an adult is not years, rather it's a willingness to accept responsibility, to be responsible for one's own actions."
(from Flint, by Louis L'Amour)
"I take it you're hunting somebody, but with all that noise he's probably hidden so well you couldn't find him anyway. You act like a lot of brinless tenderfeet."
"That's hard talk, for a stranger."
"There's nothing strange about this shotgun. It can get almighty familiar."
(from Flint, by Louis L'Amour)
"You are going into a hard world. Remember this: honor is most important, that, and a good name. Keep your self-respect."
(from Flint, by Louis L'Amour)
He stood watching the red lights on the back of the train, which moved away, scarcely faster than a man could walk, until it rounded a curve and left no more than a humming of the rails to tell of its passing, and the long whistle of the locomotive echoing down the night sky.
The dry grass bent before the wind, and seed pods rattled in the brush along the right of way.
James T. Kettleman was ended, and the man who had borne that name, making it feared and respected, stood now where he had stood so many years before, without a name. He was now a man without a past as he had been a boy without one.
"Good-bye," he said, but there was nobody to say the word to, and nothing to remember.
(from Flint, by Louis L'Amour)
He made no attempt to find and follow the trail left by Lang Adams, for the trails of men in a western land are apt to be channeled by their needs. Food, water, and compaionship of their kind - these are the things that make trails converge.
(from Borden Chantry, by Louis L'Amour)
Most of you know of the famous outlaw leaders Butch Cassidy (Robert LeRoy Parker) and the Sundance Kid (Harry Longabaugh). Longabaugh's girlfriend was Etta Place. In the famous 1969 movie, Longabaugh and Place were portrayed by Robert Redford and Katharine Ross, two of Hollywood's prettiest faces. Very often, criminal types are over-cast in movies in typical Hollywood style. However, in the case of Longabaugh and Place, they may actually have been under-cast, as the real-life picture below shows. The outlaw pair made a strikingly attractive couple, and there actually was a certain amount of resemblance between Longabaugh and Redford.
"He was running when he came here, Kim, and he will always be running. He killed six men because he thought somebody was hunting him, and nobody was. Once you get the law on your trail, there's just no place to rest."
(from Borden Chantry, by Louis L'Amour)
He knew the man by sight, but had never known his name. But there was no question about the gun. It was a Colt .44, a weapon with considerable authority.
(from Borden Chantry, by Louis L'Amour)
"Had a puncher who worked for me one time, Lang. Folks said he was the slickest horse and cow thief around, and he'd robbed banks, too. Some eastern feller came out here and wrong a song about him. You know, Lang, that man worked for me because he was hungry and needed a place to eat and sleep. And he worked hard, too. He was right proud of that song, and of all the talk about him. But one time we got to talking and from one thing and another it deeloped that here he was closing in on sixty years old, and he'd no place to go and nobody much who wanted him."
"Could happen, I suppose."
"It did happen. But that wasn't the worst of it, Lang. This slick crook they were singing that ballad about, he was sixty years old and he'd spent forty years of that time in prison."
(from Borden Chantry, by Louis L'Amour)
"I've heard you're pretty good with a gun yourself."
"I don't advertise it. When I have to use a gun, I use it. But I'll never draw on any man if I can avoid it. A dead man makes a bad pillow for comfortable sleeping."
(from Borden Chantry, by Louis L'Amour)
"The trouble with crime is, you never know who's watching. You may see nobody, hear nobody. You may be sure nobody is anywhere around, but somebody can be and usually is. There's a bum sleeping in a dark doorway, somebody starting to draw the curtains at an unlighted window, the man who forgets something and comes back up the street. Maybe it's a cowboy who decides to catch himself a bit of sleep under a tree, a woman gathering flowers . . . you never know who's around."
(from Borden Chantry, by Louis L'Amour)
He hesitated a moment, some inner delicacy making him uncomfortable at this invading the privacy of another man's belongings. He was himself an essentially private man, friendly but reserved, standing a cool sentry before the doors of his personal life. He had equal respect for the privacy of others.
(from Borden Chantry, by Louis L'Amour)
When he got up from the table and reached for his hat, Bess turned around, a fork in her hand. "Borden, be careful."
He walked outside in the bright morning sun and looked toward the McCoy house. How could he be careful when he had no idea who had to be careful of?
Somebody in town wanted to kill him. Somebody in town was getting very, very worried. For somebody time was running out . . . somebody who had shot before, and would again, at any instant.
(from Borden Chantry, by Louis L'Amour)
Hyatt Johnson was a cool, hard-eyed man with a level gaze and less expression than a hard-boiled egg.
(from Borden Chantry, by Louis L'Amour)
"Good," Jerry said.
"Jerry! It's incredible," Pam said. "Good indeed. What does good mean?"
"Means it's good," Jerry said, and swallowed. He dipped his spoon. "Incidentally," he said,"good is an absolute term." He raised his full spoon. "Except to a copy writer," he said, and put the spoon to his lips. He swallowed. "Of course," he said, "you can always use a 'very' if you want to be extravagant."
(from Murder Is Served, by Richard and Frances Lockridge)
There they came, and Bill's eyes were not the only ones on the rather tall, slender girl who stood so easily and so confidently, with the dark man on her left and a little behind her. Peggy Mott knew that people looked at her, Pam thought. She had learned to know it, and not show she knew it.
(from Murder Is Served, by Richard and Frances Lockridge)
He listened again and said, "Right." He put the telephone back in its cradle. He returned to the papers on his desk, which were a monument - a monument still in the progress of growth - to the efficiency of the New York Police Department. They represented efficiency, tirelessnss; they also represented, Bill Weigand thought wearily, a certain ponderousness, and the momentum of ponderousness.
(from Murder Is Served, by Richard and Francs Lockridge)
She was not handcuffed, simply because Stein thought, as Weigand would have thought, that it was absurdly unnecessary. And Stein did not notice Carey, except as a figure in a shadow, braced against the wind, because in routine operations you did not plan against the preposterous. So Stein was quite unprepared for the preposterous when it occurred.
(from Murder Is Served, by Richard and Frances Lockridge)
One way to keep alive in the Pacific had been quite literally to act before you thought. You did not wait for opportunity to knock; you moved to seize before opportunity had time to lift a hand. You made mistakes, but you kept alive.
(from Murder Is Served, by Richard and Frances Lockridge)
The fingerprint men were at work there. There was plenty of work, but Bill Weigand doubted much would come of it. There would be prints enough - of Elaine Britton, or her maid, of any casual guests who might have come since the room was last polished by Agnes Connors. It was too bad, Bill thought, that there was so seldom a telltale glass, marked with lipstick, laden with revealing prints; so seldom a cigarette of peculiar brand. Murderers were inconsiderate.
(from Murder Is Served, by Richard and Frances Lockridge)
He had been an ordinary man; that had been the trouble. With all the money he had, with all that money gve him, with all his skill in money's use, he had still been an ordinary man, saying ordinary things, showing more than usual spite when he was annoyed. It was money made the spite effective, hurting, not any special quality in the man. He had not even been a first-rate heel, this Tony Mott of whom, now, everyone was making so much. He had had millions of dollars and used them irresponsibly. That was all you could say of him.
(from Murder Is Served, by Richard and Frances Lockridge)
"Maybe there'll be a break. Don't volunteer. The old rule. We'll make them find us. That's the first thing. If they do - when they do - none of this. You understand? You weren't there. You don't know anything." He looked at her, hard. "You'll do that?" he asked. "Dumb up? Most people talk themselves into holes. What you don't say won't hurt you."
(from Murder Is Served, by Richard and Frances Lockridge)
"About that one I want to know everything," Bill said. "Where she came from, what she does, who pays her rent, what her friends think of her, who she - "
"O. K., Loot," Mullins said. "I get it."
"Specifically," Bill told him, "where she was a little after noon today, and how long she stayed there. And whether she was going to be or thought she was going to be, the next Mrs. Tony Mott."
"O. K., Loot," Mullins said. "We'll turn her inside out." He considered this. "Which would be a pity," he added. "On account of her outside - "
"Right," Weigand said. "I noticed, Sergeant."
(from Murder Is Served, by Richard and Frances Lockridge)
"But," she said, "do you know that Mullins calls you Mr. Male Ox, Mr. Maillaux?"
Maillaux looked at her with round, puzzled eyes.
"Only," Pam said, and now she was speaking to Jerry rather than to the others, "isn't that a contradiction in terms, really? Because aren't oxen - "
"Yes, dear," Jerry said. I've always understood so."
(from Murder Is Served, by Richard and Frances Lockridge)
She had seen a rat do that once, in a place she was staying when she had an engagement in a summer theater, and the rat had seemed to have many holes and all of them had been blocked by the people who were chasing the rat. The rat had run by her in its flight and it had been squealing and she had covered her face and made a kind of moaning sound, but not because she was afraid of the rat, although she was. She had shared the rat's fear, had moaned with its fear. She moaned now; there was a kind of whimper in her mind.
(from Murder Is Served, by Richard and Frances Lockridge)
