PDF Ebook Kilrone, by Louis L'Amour
You can find the web link that we offer in website to download and install Kilrone, By Louis L'Amour By acquiring the economical price and also obtain finished downloading and install, you have completed to the first stage to get this Kilrone, By Louis L'Amour It will be nothing when having acquired this book and do nothing. Read it and expose it! Invest your couple of time to merely review some covers of web page of this book Kilrone, By Louis L'Amour to review. It is soft data and also simple to read any place you are. Enjoy your brand-new behavior.
Kilrone, by Louis L'Amour
PDF Ebook Kilrone, by Louis L'Amour
Exactly how a concept can be obtained? By looking at the celebrities? By seeing the sea and also checking out the sea interweaves? Or by reviewing a book Kilrone, By Louis L'Amour Everybody will have particular particular to obtain the motivation. For you that are dying of books and also still obtain the motivations from publications, it is really terrific to be here. We will certainly reveal you hundreds collections of guide Kilrone, By Louis L'Amour to read. If you such as this Kilrone, By Louis L'Amour, you can also take it as your own.
However, what's your issue not as well enjoyed reading Kilrone, By Louis L'Amour It is a great activity that will certainly always offer wonderful benefits. Why you come to be so weird of it? Several things can be practical why people do not want to read Kilrone, By Louis L'Amour It can be the boring activities, the book Kilrone, By Louis L'Amour compilations to check out, also careless to bring spaces anywhere. Now, for this Kilrone, By Louis L'Amour, you will start to enjoy reading. Why? Do you know why? Read this web page by finished.
Beginning with visiting this website, you have actually aimed to start caring checking out a book Kilrone, By Louis L'Amour This is specialized site that market hundreds collections of publications Kilrone, By Louis L'Amour from great deals sources. So, you will not be tired more to choose the book. Besides, if you additionally have no time to browse the book Kilrone, By Louis L'Amour, just rest when you're in workplace as well as open the browser. You can locate this Kilrone, By Louis L'Amour lodge this website by linking to the internet.
Get the link to download this Kilrone, By Louis L'Amour and begin downloading and install. You could want the download soft file of guide Kilrone, By Louis L'Amour by going through other tasks. Which's all done. Now, your resort to review a book is not consistently taking and lugging guide Kilrone, By Louis L'Amour almost everywhere you go. You could save the soft documents in your gizmo that will certainly never ever be far and review it as you such as. It is like reading story tale from your gadget after that. Currently, begin to love reading Kilrone, By Louis L'Amour as well as obtain your new life!
When Major Frank Paddock and Barnes Kilrone were dashing young officers in Paris, they both fell in love with the same woman. But now they are men in exile in one of the harshest territories of the American West. It is against this inhospitable backdrop, where survival itself is a day-to-day struggle, that Paddock makes a fateful decision that will plunge both men into a headlong battle for their lives and the lives they’re sworn to protect. As Paddock leads his company of soldiers in pursuit of a Bannock war party, Kilrone is left behind to guard the post’s women and children. And before the day is over, one of them, outnumbered and outgunned, will be trapped in a fight to the finish.…
From the Paperback edition.
- Sales Rank: #116479 in eBooks
- Published on: 2004-11-23
- Released on: 2004-11-23
- Format: Kindle eBook
From the Inside Flap
When Major Frank Paddock and Barnes Kilrone were dashing young officers in Paris, they had both fallen in love with the same woman. But now they are men in exile on one of the harshest territories of the American West, and Paddock has made a choice that will plunge both men into a battle for their lives and souls.
While Paddock leads his company of soldiers in pursuit of a Bannock war party that has massacred one of his patrols, Kilrone is left to guard a fortress full of women and children. And in a matter of hours Kilrone knows that Paddock's choice was wrong, fatally wrong. Fueled by a white man's greed, the Indians are aiming for the fort--and Kilrone's fight will be to the end--.
About the Author
Our foremost storyteller of the authentic West, Louis L’Amour has thrilled a nation by chronicling the adventures of the brave men and women who settled the American frontier. There are more than 300 million copies of his books in print around the world.
Excerpt. � Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter One
Betty Considine shaded her eyes when she saw the rider coming through the gate. Accustomed to the movements of horses and men, she noted the weary, shuffling trot of the pony as it crossed the baked clay of the compound toward the Headquarters building.
The rider was unshaven, and the dark hair curled around his ears and over the collar of his sun-bleached shirt. When he swung down she noted the gun hung low, the narrow hips, and the powerful shoulders. His hat brim was ragged, and there was a bullet hole through the crown.
When he was a few paces from her she could clearly see the line of an old scar on his cheekbone. His lean brown face was haggard, and in his eyes there was the daze of a dreadful weariness. On the collar and shoulder of his faded blue shirt was a dark stain of dried blood.
Pulling his hat from his head, he slapped it against his thigh in an ineffectual effort to free it of dust, and the attempt caused him to stagger, so that he half fell against the hitch rail.
She ran to him and put her hand on his shoulder. "Are you hurt?" she asked quickly. "What's the matter?"
The face he turned to her was etched with lines of exhaustion, and was gray under the tan. "I'll be all right. Thank you."
He smelled strongly of stale sweat, dust, and the horse, and he gathered himself with a visible effort. Even in his exhausted state there was a faint swagger in his bearing.
"Who's commanding?" he asked.
"The adjutant, Major Paddock."
He had started to turn away, but at the name his shoulders seemed to hunch as from a blow. He looked back at her, the glaze of weariness gone from his eyes. "You said Paddock. Not Frank Bell Paddock?"
"Yes. Do you know him?"
He stared at the compound as if seeing it for the first time. Squinting against the white-hot glare of the desert sun, he looked around the rectangle of shabby adobes that made up the tiny post. Officers' quarters, adjutant's office, sutler's store, the post bakery, commissary quartermaster stores, blacksmith shop, corrals, and stables.
Everywhere was heat, dust, and the glare of the pitiless sun. "My God!" he said softly. "Frank Bell Paddock!"
He opened the door of the Headquarters building and disappeared inside.
Betty Considine was Army. The only daughter of General Pat Considine, and a niece of Carter Hanlon, captain and army surgeon, she had grown up to Regulations. Having lived on a dozen army posts, after her father's death she had gone to live with her aunt and uncle. She was familiar with army gossip and she knew, as they all did, the story of Major Frank Bell Paddock.
If this stranger was shocked at the presence of Major Paddock at this remote post he must have known Paddock in the past, but not during the years immediately behind him. There had been a time when Paddock was considered one of the most promising young officers in the post-war Army, and one with an assured future.
Since that time his decline had been consistent, but the only other consistent thing about Paddock was his addiction to the bottle. Finally he had come here, only a year ago, to this new and temporary fort, one of the most isolated in the country.
Her curiosity aroused, Betty Considine paused in the shade of the overhang outside the sutler's store.
Uninterested in any man on the post or elsewhere, Betty was intrigued by this disreputable-looking stranger who had known Frank Bell Paddock in the days of his glory.
If this man had known Paddock, he must have known him back east, or in Europe, yet a more typical western man she had never seen. But he might have been Army . . . even if he did not look it now.
The life of Major Frank Bell Paddock was an open book up to a point, but Something had happened in Paris.
Captain Paddock had been a military attache at the American embassy in Paris, a handsome, athletic young officer, admired by his superiors. There he had met and married Denise de Caslou, a famous beauty, of the old nobility. She came of a family of little wealth but one known for the long line of soldiers and men of the sea, men of bravery and distinction.
Whatever it was that happened had occurred only a year after their marriage, and with it began the decline and fall of Frank Bell Paddock.
Suddenly relieved of duty in Paris, he had been returned to the States, and after several brief stays at various posts, he was sent to a remote fort in Dakota, and then to Montana.
Now, at the end of the long road down, Major Frank Bell Paddock was adjutant of a post with only four troops of cavalry, all of them under strength. Always mildly under the influence of alcohol, he was never trusted with a field command. Promotion was something for which he could no longer hope, and he was merely living out the years until he could retire on a pension. But those years stretched far ahead for Paddock, who was not yet forty.
This was the man Barney Kilrone faced as he stepped past the company clerk and into the office beyond. The once fine features of the officer he remembered had coarsened into heaviness, and there was a premature graying. Most of all, there was an air of resignation, of hopelessness about the man. When Paddock looked up, his expression hardened into anger as he recognized Kilrone.
"So—" It was almost a sigh. "It is you again."
"On business, Pad, very ugly business. I Troop is
gone . . . wiped out. The Bannocks hit them from ambush over on the Little Owyhee."
Major Paddock dropped his eyes to the now meaningless papers on the desk. Nineteen men . . . and the prisoners, if any, worse off than the dead. If any had gotten away they were now being hunted down like rats in a cornfield.
"Colonel Webb?"
"I wouldn't know him by sight, Pad, and identification would have been impossible anyway."
Paddock's brain, dulled by whiskey and long hours of paper work, refused to fit himself into the new picture. Something must be done. . . .
There were two problems here, one military and the other personal. The man who had wrecked his life was facing him now, his very presence proof that the years of expectancy had not been in vain. He had come at last, and when he left he would take with him all worthwhile in life that remained to the dashing young officer that had been Frank Bell Paddock.
"You've come for Denise?"
"Don't be a fool, Pad!" Impatience drove through his exhaustion. "She loves you. She always did. She's your wife."
"She has been loyal, I grant you, Barney. She has been . . . what is it the French say? Correct? But she's been in love with you."
He sat back in his chair. "She's more beautiful than ever, Barney; and now you've come to take her away, as I knew you would."
"Pad, for God's sake, forget it! I didn't even know you were in this part of the country until a girl outside told me just now. I've been moving, Pad. I haven't thought of Denise in years, and I am sure she hasn't thought of me."
The minutes ticked by; a fly buzzed against the window, struggling to escape the heavy air of the hot, close room. It was Barnes Kilrone who broke the silence. "Pad, you're in command. This is your problem . . . all of it."
"Command?" The word carried a shock that penetrated Paddock's cocoon of self-pity.
Command? What did one do with three troops? Three? . . .
"My God!" He came to his feet, his face drawn and bloodless. "M Troop . . . they were to rendezvous with I Troop on the North Fork!"
Barney Kilrone held himself up by the edge of the desk, and his brain struggled against fatigue, for he was all in. He thought of M Troop riding across country, a tired lot of men, riding to a meeting with a company of the vanquished, a company of the dead . . . and who would keep that rendezvous?
The Bannocks!
Discipline, the habit of soldiering, began to shape its pattern in the mind of Major Frank Paddock. His thoughts began to take formation. He had no plan, of course, to meet this eventuality, but he knew the things to be considered, the responsibilities that were his. M Troop must be warned . . . somehow.
Two troops remained on the post, two troops comprising just seventy-two effectives, and the whole Bannock operation might be directed toward a piecemeal destruction of the garrison at the post. The Bannocks, led by a shrewd and careful fighter, had ambushed I Troop before they could effect the meeting with M Troop.
With the first troop destroyed, Medicine Dog could now move to ambush the second. If he was aware the post had been warned he would expect a relief force to come . . . and trust him to know just how many soldiers remained of the post complement, and how many could be spared to leave the fort. And how pitifully few would remain.
"It's the post he wants," Paddock said aloud. "He wants the ammunition, the guns, the food, and the horses. If he could draw enough of us away from the post he could strike here. . . ."
He broke off, and his eyes turned to Kilrone. "Barney, how did you get here? Were you seen?"
"If I'd been seen I wouldn't be here. Unless they return to the scene of the fight and see my tracks around, they can't know."
"Unless they let you come on purpose to draw another troop away from the post." He sank back into his chair.
It was time for a decision, and Frank Paddock had no decision. He needed time . . . time. Everything would depend on what he decided. If the troop he sent to the relief of M Troop was caught before it could effect a meeting and was itself destroyed, then the post would be helpless before such an attack as the Bannocks could mount.
For the first time he became aware of the condition of the man across the desk. At once he was on his feet. "Come on, Barney—you're all in. Come to my quarters."
Kilrone held back. "Take me to the barracks. To the stables . . . not to your quarters."
"Now you're being the fool." Paddock took Kilrone's arm. In a way, he thought, it would be better to have it over. After all the years of waiting it would be a relief.
Betty Considine saw them come out the door, and she came up quickly. "Major Paddock, can I be of help?"
A fourth person might make it easier. . . . "All right," he said. "Glad to have you. I know he needs rest, and he seems to have been wounded."
At Paddock's quarters, it was Betty who opened the door, and she saw the expression on Denise Paddock's face when she glimpsed the stranger. She seemed to stiffen, then pale, but she was at once composed. "This way," she said.
She led the way to the spare bedroom and helped her husband draw off the brush-scratched, desert-worn boots. It was she who noted the blood-stained collar and located the wound. Betty, looking past Denise, saw the dressing on the wound. "He escaped from the Indians?" she asked.
Kilrone, who had kept on his feet until they entered the room, had collapsed at the bedside and now lay on the bed unconscious.
"Why do you ask that?"
"That's an Indian dressing. I've seen them before."
Paddock looked down at the man on the bed. No, he was not really unconscious, merely sleeping heavily. An Indian had dressed that wound . . . and he had denied being seen by the Bannocks.
Denise had removed the dressing, and Paddock stared at the puckering wound. "That's not fresh," he said.
"Three days," Betty guessed. "Maybe four." She had helped her uncle treat too many injured men in these past few years not to know.
An Indian dressing on a wound, and no friendly Indian within miles. A wound several days old, and he had come from the heart of Indian country.
Suppose—one had to suppose everything—suppose the man was a renegade? What better way to scatter the forces of a post and leave it helpless?
Paddock told himself he must forget all he had known of Captain Barnes Kilrone in the past. Nor must he think now of Denise. There was too little time. He had a decision to make.
Captain Mellett and the forty-seven men of M Troop would reach the North Fork by sundown tomorrow. It was doubtful if the Bannocks would attack before daylight the following morning. There was always the possibility that some survivor of the massacre of I Troop would get through to Mellett with a warning, but that was an outside chance. Mellett was a seasoned officer, sure to be careful, but even the best of men could be trapped.
Every minute of delay put Mellet closer to probable death by ambuscade. Between Mellett's troop and possible massacre stood only the judgment of Major Frank Paddock. And to send out a troop to relieve Mellett would leave the post vulnerable to attack, practically helpless.
His decision had to rest on the word of one man a man who perhaps could not be trusted . . . or could he?
Paddock stepped out into the heat and dust of the compound and closed the door behind him. If he could get another troop into position to hit the Bannocks as they attacked Mellett, he would have them between two fires and might wipe them out. It was a challenging thought. This could be enough to erase all his past failures.
But it involved a problem almost too difficult for him to come to grips with—a problem full of uncertainties. Could he get K Troop in position in time to help Mellett? Dare he accept the risk of leaving the post exposed to attack? Suppose the Bannocks had already foreseen that possibility, and even now might have the bulk of their men ready for an attack on the post and its few remaining soldiers? . . . Or K Troop might fail to reach Mellett in time, and be trapped themselves.
He went back to his desk and stared at the map on the wall. It was ninety miles to the North Fork, and K Troop would have no more than thirty-six hours in which to cover the distance, all of it rough, dangerous country where the enemy might be encountered at any moment.
Most helpful customer reviews
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Five Stars
By wes harrison
Good book.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Almost great
By Keith Vaglienti
Kilrone is a good, solid Western adventure in the Louis L'amour tradition. Or it would be were it not for the terribly rushed ending. L'amour does a wonderful job of pacing the story and building suspense up until the very end of the book at which point several major plot points occur suddenly with no explanation. For example, the cavalry commander who has been so set on tracking the renegade Indians down has a sudden, unexplained change of heart and returns to the beleaguered outpost just in time to save the day. One minute he's discussing with his scouts the best route to take to rendezvous with another cavalry troop. The next time we see him, he's returned to the outpost and there's no explanation for why he turned his troop around. Another example, there is foreshadowing throughout the book that a certain minor character is going to play a very pivotal role in things before the story is over. They do, in fact, play a pivotal role in events but we don't get to see it. We only learn about it after the fact from another character and even then we don't really learn any details. It's almost as if L'amour suddenly found himself up against a deadline and didn't have enough time to finish the story properly so he just tacked on a quick ending. It's very unsatisfying to have a great story, which is a very gripping read, build up to an ending that basically amounts to, "...and then the cavalry came back and saved the day, the renegade Indians disbanded and went their seperate ways, the villain got his just desserts, and the hero got the girl." Kilrone is an okay book but L'amour has written much better. If you want to read something in this vein I would suggest the classic "Hondo", also by L'amour, which is a far superior book.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Powerful pulp Western
By F. J. Harvey
Kilrone is an ex Army man who gave up a promising military career after a confrontation with an exploitative Indian agent and has spent his post military career as a drifter.He rides into an Army outpost to alert the commander to an Indian raid that has wiped out a cavalry patrol.The post commander is Paddock ,a once high flier whose career has been blighted by scandal and an old acquaintance of Kilrone whom he suspects to be in love with his wife.
Against the advice of Kilrone the commander sets out to warn the other patrol in Indian territory of possible attack Kilrone rightly feeling the attack was a ruse to get him to weaken the post defences so the tribes can take over the fort.
He stays behind to organise the defence of the post while Paddock takes the field to warn the other patrol.That is not all however for Kilrone's foprmer nemesis Iron Dave Sproul is a key man in the fort and has been selling guns to the Indians
L'amour cuts briskly between the siege and the troops in the field and action is vividly described and plentiful with something of the more explicit violence that emerged in the genre -celluloid and paper-during the mid sixties.The climactic fist fight is especially powerful and the seeker after action will not put down the book feeling short changed.
The climax fells rushed and the conflict between Kilrone and Paddock is not fleshed out enough ,while the women remain cyphers.This is all a little carping however and overall the book is a satisfying read for lovers of the genre.
Kilrone, by Louis L'Amour PDF
Kilrone, by Louis L'Amour EPub
Kilrone, by Louis L'Amour Doc
Kilrone, by Louis L'Amour iBooks
Kilrone, by Louis L'Amour rtf
Kilrone, by Louis L'Amour Mobipocket
Kilrone, by Louis L'Amour Kindle
Tidak ada komentar:
Posting Komentar