Strange suicide

     The old man was tipped back in his chair, and he let the chair legs down hard when Duvarney came in. Welt Spicer merely gave Tap a satisfied look, and Lawton Bean stretched.

    "Two of them are walking to Refugio," Duvarney said. "It will cool them off a bit."

    "Pinto?" the old man asked quickly.

    "Pinto's out there. Will you take care of him, amigo? We'll take those horses, too," he added. "I think we're going to need them, the way the weather is."

    "You killed Pinto Hart?" The old man could not find it in himself to believe it could happen that way.

    "He killed himself," Duvarney said. "He made an error in judgment."

(from Matagorda, by Louis L'Amour)

Tough, but not tough enough

 They turned with great care and, stiff-backed, walked away as Duvarney followed them. He glanced once at the body of Pinto Hart. A tough, reckless man, and a game one. It was a pity, but he had thought of himself as a good man with a gun, and that kind of belief can get a man killed. A reputation for being tough can give a man some standing with his fellows, but there always comes a time when a man has to back it up, and the same men who praised your skill will sneer at it by comparison with the man who shoots you.

(from Matagorda, by Louis L'Amour)

Don't shoot until chow is finished

 He was a talkative man, as men who live alone are inclined to be when company shows up. He moved about, dishing up beans from a big crock, getting out some homemade bread, and putting on the frying pan. "You boys just set still an' don't go to pullin' leather. I'll roust you up some grub."

(from Matagorda, by Louis L'Amour)

Her man

     "Hold that man, Welt. I want to talk to him." He walked his horse slowly through the water, keeping to the side where it was not more than stirrup-deep, and rode to where Jessica stood. Her face was very pale, her eyes unnaturally large.

    "You came to a rough country, Jessica," he said.

    She looked up at him, holding up her skirt in one hand. "My man was here," she said simply.

(from Matagorda, by Louis L'Amour)

Not fighters

 He saw the tallest Munson drop, heard the whiff of a bullet by his face, and saw the second weaving in his saddle. Even as he shot, he saw that these men were not fighters; they were killers, and altogether different thing. It is one thing to shoot a man from ambush, or when outnumbering the enemy; it is quite another thing to stand up face to face with a man who also holds a gun, and will shoot.

(from Matagorda, by Louis L'Amour)

Too easy

 There had been no trouble. It was all too easy; and to Tap Duvarney, to whom few things had come easy, it only served to worry him still more. Something had to be wrong, or to go wrong. Things simply didn't happen this say.

(from Matagorda, by Louis L'Amour)

Ode to a Cow

 There is no creature on the face of the earth more contrary than the common cow. Not so difficult as a mule, not so mean or vicious as a camel, the cow beast can nevertheless exhaust the patience of a Job.

(from Matagorda, by Louis L'Amour)

A hard trip

     Long after Helena went below, Jean remained on deck. He walked forward to where Boyar stood lookout on the bow. "You have crossed Siberia, Boyar? How long would it require?

    "Who can say? Three months? Or three years? It is a long trip, nearly six thousand miles, and the roads are bad, the troikas miserable, the people indifferent or criminal."

(from Sitka, by Louis L'Amour)

Fiction is fiction, of course, and it does not have to be true, and indeed cannot be true, and that is the fun of it. However, sometimes L'Amour stretches the limits of credibility, and this is one of those cases. Even the trips from Independence, Missouri to Oregon in a wagon (less than 2000 miles) would seem like a cakewalk compared to the one described by L'Amour in this book. Six thousand miles in a contrivance similar to a sled or a sleigh or a cart. A troika was a vehicle drawn by three horses abreast.

    

Not enough a tyrant

     He, Rotcheff, thought too much of the other man's point of view; he could always see both sides of an argument. That would not do in a world where there were Zinnovys.

    Yet Zinnovy was a Russin and they talked loudest when they faced weakness. We are basically, he thought, a race of tyrants and poets, and his own fault was in being too much the poet, too little the tyrant.

(from Sitka, by Louis L'Amour)

Hopeless

 Far behind him there was a girl with green eyes and dark hair, a tall and regal girl who had walked beside him briefly, a girl who was not his and could never be his, yet a girl who held his heart now and would hold it always.

(from Sitka, by Louis L'Amour)

Hard-nosed negotiator

 He was a stocky man in a store-bought suit and a cigar clamped in his hard mouth. His face was wide, his hair sparse and rumpled. He rolled his dead cigar in his jaws and spat into a brass spittoon. "I'll sell," he said flatly, "for cash."

(from Sitka, by Louis L'Amour)

Wait your turn

     The man in the dark suit turned on them. "You two stay in town until we decide what to do about this, you hear?"    

    LaBarge got to his feet. "Listen to me, mister. You said before this wasn't your fight, so don't make it yours. Those men were trailing us to rob us, and if any of you want to keep us here, you just stand out in the street. In ten minutes we'll be riding out with our rifles across our saddlebows."

    He paused, letting it sink in. "And mister, if you feel lucky, you just try stopping us."

(from Sitka, by Louis L'Amour)

Hunting coyotes

     After a moment he saw that two men stood in the shadows near a darkened warehouse about a block away. "He's not wasting his time looking at sunsets. He's got something else on his mind."

    "They's left us alone so far."

    Jean walked back to the center of the room and drew his pistol, checking the loads. "If they start trouble, Cap, I'm taking it to them. We've been lucky so far, but if they start it - "

    "That's quite an order, son."

    "Coyotes run yellow in the pack. I've hunted them before."

(from Sitka, by Louis L'Amour)

Wandering in the swamp at night

 The forest grew darker and darker. Twice Rob fell, and once off to their right, something fell into a stagnant pool with a dull plop and both boys jumped. It was cooler now; the trees began to take on weird shapes and landmarks lost their identity as night made all things anonymous.

(from Sitka, by Louis L'Amour)

"All things anonymous." At night things tend to lose their identity, which is one reason that we are afraid at night.

Tickle

 In Edmund Gilligan's novel, The Gaunt Woman, we find the term "tickle" used several times, obviously referring to some sort of geographical feature. We find that "in Newfoundland English it means a short, narrow strait," such as the Baccalieu Tickle pictured below.

"Patrick shut his eyes and listened to the sea, loud in the narrow tickle, louder off-shore."

The captain's role

 He kept his own mouth shut when he was ashore, simply trusting in those men whose bounden duty it was to wage the war. At sea, it was a different matter. Here, on this vessel, he was President, law-giver, and, if the chance came, he was war-wager, too. He hated the invader of these fruitful pastures of the sea, hated him not only for ships shot down and dories gunned, but also - perhaps even more - for the cruel wastefulness of good men's work.

(from The Gaunt Woman, by Edmund Gilligan)

Verbal jousting

     "That's right - laugh! Listen. You think you can play the fool with a man as much as you please - hold him off with a raised eyebrow when he becomes too pressing - keep him under control with a laugh - "

    "Why, this is eloquence! The boy orator!"

    "Oh, you may sneer, but you know in your heart you're afraid."

    Sally stiffened. The smile faded from her lips. She froze. "Afraid? You flatter yourself."

    "I may not be your match at fencing," said Bill, "but the bludgeon is quite as handy a weapon as the rapier."

    "From the insight you have given me into your character, I should have thought your favorite weapon would have been the blackjack."

(from Doctor Sally, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

A ghastly golfing outfit

    Bill's first emotion was one of excusable wrath at the spectacle. Here was the only girl he had ever really loved, and he had no sooner left her than she started holding hands with a man of advanced years in a suit of plus-fours of the kind that makes horses shy.

(from Doctor Sally, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

Difficulty expressing himself

 Bill became animated again. "You mean there's nobody else?"

"Nobody."

Bill's animation approached the fever point. "Then do you think - do you suppose - might it happen - would it be - er - putting it another way, it is possible - "

"Crisper, crisper, and simpler. What you're trying to suggest now is that perhaps I might one day love you? Am I right?"

"You take the words out of my mouth."

"I had to, or they would never have emerged at all."

(from Doctor Sally, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

Not Higginbotham

     "Tell me all," he said.

    "All what?"

    "All about yourself. who was the recent Higginbotham?"

    "Oh, a man. Very rich. From up North. I met him when I was in 'Follow the Girl.' I went back to the stage after you and I parted brass-rags. He passed on last July."

    "Marry again?"

    "Ass! If I had, would my name still be Higginbotham?"

    "Something in that," agreed his lordship.

    "I mean, a girl doesn't call herself Higginbotham unless she has to."

(from Doctor Sally, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

Gamboge

 I learn things when I read. In the Wodehouse novel, Doctor Sally, he makes reference to "that curious faint gamboge light which passes for sunshine in England." Never having been in England and not being either an artist nor an interior decorator, I did not know what that was. So, in the spirit of curiosity and self-improvement, I looked it up. Gamboge is a deep-yellow pigment derived from a species of tree that primarily grows in Cambodia. (That sounds like a good crossword puzzle entry, doesn't it?) Pictured below is a garcinia tree, which is the source of gamboge. (Honestly, folks, I am not making this up.)

A large trap

 He had been at Bingley only two days, and so had played this hole only six times, but he knew that if he played it for the rest of his life he would never get a two on it, as this unseen expert was so obviously able to do. Four was Sir Hugo Drake's best - his worst twenty-seven, on the occasion when he overran the green and got imbedded in a sort of Sahara which lay beyond it.

(from Doctor Sally, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

You can run, but you can't hide

Any hunter from one of the rancherias might have come upon those tracks, or any squaw out gathering herbs or firewood could have seen them. In a country where a white man could scarcely turn over in bed without an Apache knowing it, it was absurd to believe they would not be aware of all that had happened.

(from The Burning Hills, by Louis L'Amour) 

Figuratively or literally

     Jack Sutton waited while a man might have counted a slow twenty, then he walked by Hindeman and out the door. Something about Ben was too much for him. He had looked Jack right in the eye and never missed chewing his tobacco. He looked just the same when he watched a branding or bought a barrel of flour.

    "Forget it, Ben, Only she gets under my skin."

    Hindeman looked at the knife Maria Cristina gripped. "Yeah," he said dryly, "I can see where she might."

(from The Burning Hills, by Louis L'Amour)

The brutal effects of youth

 Sullenly he returned to his eating and when he had finished his meal he got to his feet and went outside. He paused by the window and Maris Cristina looked at him, a tall young man, too thin, in worn and shabby clothes. She felt a sharp pang; it was not right, Vicente had no youth. No bright time of riding, no colorful clothes and the courting of girls. He had grown up a frightened and lonely boy in a land of strangers. It was no wonder he had become a frightened young man.

(from The Burning Hills, by Louis L'Amour)

Toltecs

 In Louis L'Amour's novel, The Burning Hills, the hero speculates as to the bloodline of the heroine, who is of Indian/Mexican derivation of some sort.

"What could her blood line be? The Conquistadores? Or that even older lineage, of the Toltec kings?"

The Toltec civilization reached its apex from 950 to 1150 A.D. There are lists of their rulers, but they do not appear to be reliable and are therefore considered largely legendary. The Aztecs reportedly claimed descent from them. Pictured below are Toltec warrior columns.

He is in bad shape!

 His head throbbed heavily. His mouth was dry, his lips parched and broken. He had a fever - he could feel it. His wound would be dirty and he could feel the gnawing agony of it constantly. His hands felt unnaturally large and his head was heavy and awkward.

(from The Burning Hills, by Louis L'Amour)

Corncrake

     In his novel, A Damsel in Distress, P. G. Wodehouse makes mention of "the cry of a corncrake, its harsh note softened by distance." Not being familiar with this animal, we thought we would do some research on the subject.

    Corncrakes are sometimes called landrails. They breed in Europe and Asia and migrate to Africa for the winter. They locate in grasslands, with hayfields being a favorite habitat.