A L'Amour book about the thirstiest cowboy

Dude ain't even trying to hide it, damn

There are about 783 books with this title, because it’s a popular Biblical phrase with poetic overtones. There was also a 1995 movie with Gene Hackman, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Sharon Stone, but it has literally nothing to do with this 1986 novel by Louis L’Amour.

One of the very very few but semi-valid complaints about L’Amour’s work is that a lot of it runs together and feels repetitive. You can forgive that once you realize just how often he published and how much he wrote. It was a constant daily thing, and since he started to make his bread-and-butter with westerns, he wrote more and more of those.

So it was that when I saw this on Libby, I thought “Hey, I haven’t read that one, but I’ve heard of it,” so I grabbed it. Then I listened to it for about ten minutes, frowned, and realized I had read it before. But it was really good so I kept going.

L’Amour’s westerns are based on the facts of the time. He takes those facts and wraps them up in characters so that you, the reader, can learn what that era was like, and what people had to deal with.

In this case we get the McKaskel family, including Duncan and Susanna, and their ten year-old son Tom. They’re wealthy East Coast stock, moving west to the mountains. They’ve got a stupid heavy wagon because of all the furniture they want to bring. One night some bandits steal their horses, and the story starts there.

They wake up to see the horses gone, and a cowboy comes and joins their camp. His name is Con Vallian, which is kinda in-your-face, because it’s just a bad spelling of “Villain.” He means to leave you wondering whether you should trust him or not.

He’s a classic gray man in the story, more good than bad, but comfortable in the shadows. He tells Duncan who took his horses and how to get them back, but that he might die doing so. He also promises Duncan right out the gate that if he does die, Con will totally take care of his hot wife.

(He says this within earshot of the hot wife.)

Con spends the rest of the book reminding Susanna that she is, in fact, hot, despite the fact the she is a nerd’s wife. Eventually she starts to appreciate him recognizing her hotness even though she reminds him that she’s married to Duncan. Duncan tries to be a gentleman about it, but Duncan is Will Turner and Con is Jack Sparrow, so Susanna is definitely just a little hot for Duncan.

Anyway, Duncan gets the horses back but he pisses off a bunch of bad guys in the process, and they end up having to flee into Indian country. They make well with some local Arapahos, they find a cabin, they start farming, and the bad guys are still after them.

I’m not going to tell what happens in the rest of it, it doesn’t really matter. It’s a short book and a very good one, and I like reading L’Amour because of how reliably entertaining he is. You’re getting facts in a fictional narrative so you learn as you read.

If you’ve never read him before, this is a great entry point. It came out in 1973, so he had decades of writing experience behind him to make it good.