"TAGGART" - читать интересную книгу автора (L'Amour Louis)

The green line of the creek was weaving weirdly before him.
He had been in trouble before. Swante Taggart could remember few times when he had
not been in some kind of trouble. Born in a Conestoga wagon on the Sweetwater in
Wyoming, during a wagon-train fight with Cheyennes in 1848, he had lived the following
twelve years drifting with his parents from one boom mining camp in California to
another. When his father died his mother took him back to the Middle West, and they
arrived in Minnesota to live with relatives, just in time for his mother to be massacred
by Little Crow's warriors, along with several hundred others.
Young Swante had escaped by hiding under some roots at the edge of a river, and had
been found there by Lieutenant Ambrose Freeman when he led his company of Rangers
to the relief of Fort Abercrombie. A good hand with a rifle and already a man grown,
young Swante rode along.
After the massacre Swante Taggart rode west hunting the Sioux who had killed his
mother, for he had seen them all and knew he would remember them. There had been
four in that
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16 Louis L'AMOUR
particular group, although there were more outside and around, but it was those four
he wanted.
He killed one of them near the edge of a slough not far from Birch Coulee, and two
weeks later he found two of the others together near a bend of the Missouri. He killed
one and the other got a bullet into Swante and hung around two days while Swante
waited in a buffalo wallow.
When a troop of cavalry appeared, the Sioux tried to leave, but Swante's first bullet
dropped his horse and the second nailed the Indian as he got up from where he had
been thrown when his horse fell. A doctor with the Sibley command fixed Swante up,
and he returned to Fort Lincoln in an army ambulance.
In the years that followed he herded cattle, hunted buffalo, scouted for the Army,
and rode shotgun on a stage. While he was holding down this last job, a party of
Sioux approached the stage north of Hat Creek Station in Wyoming, and one of them
was the last of the four who had killed his mother. They knew each other, and Swante
told the others what he wanted. While the stage waited, Swante fought the warrior
with a knife and killed him, and then got back up on the box and the stage rolled
on to Deadwood.
In New Mexico he found a spring with a good flow and two meadows that lay below it.
He filed on the land and settled down to fight Apaches and live happily ever after.
The Apaches gave him no trouble, but after almost a year of peaceful living the Bennett
brothers drove six thousand head of cattle into the area and found the range they
wanted ... only Swante Taggart sat right in the middle of it by the biggest spring,
and with several hundred acres of sub-irrigated land. The three Bennetts and their
gunfighting
segundo rode over to suggest that Swante move, but Swante was not accepting suggestions.
Threats followed and Swante sat tight. He owned two hundred head of cattle and a
few horses, and he was contented. He asked only to be left alone.
Then there had been a "difficulty." Young Jim Bennett de
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TAGGART 17 cided the time to act was now, and with Rusty Bob Blazer, who had killed
three men in Texas, he rode over to move Taggart.
The shooting was sudden, offhand, and Jim Bennett and Rusty Bob lay dying on the
grass, and the only witnesses were Bennett riders.