Kiowa Trail (1964) by Louis L'amour

luggage for ammunition, and then we went outside. Felicia saw us and followed along. At the back of the house I asked for bottles and received several from the cook. One of these I suspended by a string from the branch of a tree. We walked back twenty paces and, turning suddenly, I drew and fired, smashing the bottle.
    Without waiting for any comment, I tossed another bottle into the air, drew, fired from the hip, and smashed the bottle, and then smashed the largest fragment as it fell. "May I try?" Sir Richard asked. He placed a bottle thirty paces off, took careful aim, and broke it.
    He glanced at the pistol. "It does have a very light pull, doesn't it?"
    Suddenly he smiled. "You are an excellent shot, my boy," he said. "I would never try anything like that. And had I not seen you fire from the hip, I should not have believed it could be done with accuracy." We walked back to the house, and for the first time since I had known her, Felicia was silent. I thought she was a bit awed. At least, I preferred to think that was how she felt, for I had had little enough luck at impressing her, and I had wanted to, very much.
    Alone in Sir Richard's study, we talked for a while and then he glanced at me suddenly. "You spoke of my son's killers being punished. What was their sentence?"
    "There was no sentence, sir, because there was no judge, no jury. There is no law in that region, sir, and very little in the region to which they fled."
    "Then what happened?"
    For an instant, I hesitated, wanting to avoid telling him, but I could not lie to this man. "I killed them, sir."
    "Youkilled them?"
    "Yes, sir, Jim Sotherton was my friend - the only friend I had, in fact - and they used him rather badly."
    "I see." After a minute he said, "We will say nothing of this to anyone else - they would be shocked."
    "And you, sir?"
    He smiled at me. "Conn, I followed a Pathan tribesman for three weeks once, before I got a shot at him. He had killed a brother officer of mine."
    He filled his pipe. "It is rather a different life on the frontier, isn't it, boy?"
    Sir Richard had given me one more thing before I returned to my own country. He had given me an unforgettable year of travel on the Continent.
    "My sister," he told me, "willed her money to James, and James left it to go to Felicia, but to be used as I saw fit, as a protection for us in the event we came upon hard times. So I want you to take money enough from that estate to see Europe."
    He denied my protests, and said quietly, "You owe it to yourself, boy. Someday you may have a family of your own, and you will want to contribute to their education. Also, you owe it to James. He would have wished it so."
    My protests were not very strong in the beginning, and that quieted them forever, so I accepted money and a drawing account, and spent the next year in traveling - without ever forgetting the West.
    The only thing I did not like about it, Sir Richard insisted I leave my gun with him until I returned to England.
    By the time I returned to the States I was nineteen years old; the year was 1858.

Chapter 6
    That year, for a short while I was not sure whether I wished to remain in the West, but that uncertainty lasted about as long as it took me to get a saddle on a horse, mount up, and feel the wind on my face and see the long grass bending under it
    Now, riding back to the camp on the knoll, I tried to recall a Frank Shalett from those years before my trip to Europe, but I could not remember the name. So he must be someone I had known later, or the relative of someone I'd known.
    In the camp there was much speculation on who McDonald and Shalett would have coming on the train.
    "He'll round up some of those Bald Knobbefs," Harvey Nugent suggested. "There's aplenty of boys back in the Missouri hills who'd fight for wages."
    Kate Lundy was waiting for me by her ambulance, face to the wind, a few strands of hair blowing. No getting around it, she was a handsome woman. Even among beautiful women