http://ebookstore.sony.com/ebook/loui...Tom Chantry has all his future father-in-law's money to buy cattle and ship back East by rail. But in Las Vegas, he backs down from drunken Dutch Akin, and refuses to wear a gun. He buys stock from French Williams, of questionable morality, and hires French to lead the herd, on a bet Tom can stay the distance to the railway station. But most consider Tom a coward who cannot last. The familiar L'Amour Western, loner hero fights nature and villains for sweetheart and success, always has new twists I have not tired of yet. Sparrow sells stock too, and secretly assigns Mobile Callahan to help, so I guessed his role in the threesome that killed Tom's sheriff father and caused the boy to be sent East. Tom has to predict how they will plan to take him out, but mastermind villain is a surprise out of nowhere, so is painful final fate. (view spoiler)[ Sarah is whodunit, left to die in desert. (hide spoiler)]
After reading North to the Rails, I now understand perfectly why Louis L’Amour is so beloved. His portrait of life in the West has such richness, filled with casual, familiar detail about the land---its rivers, stands of timber and scrub, how the cycles of seasons and weather change it. The people populating that land are just as vivid: hard and rough, loyal or treacherous, quick to kindness or cruelty, standing on principles of courage and determination. And the story that takes place in this West has a kind of grandeur. L’Amour doesn’t ignore the dangers, but his hero, Tom Chantry, meets them with spirit, and the obstacles Chantry encounters allow the reader to share his growing understanding of what a frontier, with all its attendant lawlessness, requires of a settler.
What do You think about North To The Rails (1982)?
A young man returns west to buy cattle and gets drawn into the Wild West lifestyle he dimly remembered from his childhood, when he was living on a ranch in what is now eastern Colorado. The men who killed his father seem to have some interest in him, maybe, but so do several strangers, and he must quickly abandon his original peaceful, gun-less stance and be the gunfighter his father once was. He is remarkably good at gunfighting and hand combat for a man who supposedly has had little use for violence out East for most of his life, but maybe fighting is in his blood? Still, this was a pretty decent story.
—Jamie Barringer (Ravenmount)
