To break up the monotony of the paperback science fiction novels I’ve been reading (most recently Halo: The Fall of Reach), I picked up a paperback Western instead. Although this book is actually a paperback that’s been upgraded to the library binding (as it was in the library of Nixa High School in the early 1980s, with intermittent checkout stamps until 1988 which means while I was reading adult crime fiction from the volunteer library and Agatha Christie books from my school library, someone my age was already reading Westerns in high school). Someone else acquired this book and later donated it to the Friends of the Christian County Library book sale, where I bought it and other Westerns last June.
So: This is not one of L’Amour’s best.
In it, an Irish immigrant from the County Cork is heading west to work on the railroad; he has a disagreement with the conductor, he falls asleep on a layover and awakens to find the stationmaster missing (and later finds him wounded) as former Confederate soldiers hope to kidnap General Sherman from the train–but they end up with a colonel instead. The lovely daughter of the colonel wants to go looking for him, so the immigrant goes with her and has to learn the ways of the west as he goes.
So the book has many different foci: The kidnapping, the search, it turns into a boxing book in the middle as the immigrant gets a chance to box the conductor for money, then it’s back to a search and rescue and a big battle in the end and a brief one-on-one, and finis!
So a serviceable throwaway book, but not one heavy on the philosophy to quote in A Trail of Memories, although it had a few one-liners about proper manliness and self-reliance. So something to read if you’re looking for a Western, but not something to really pull you into appreciating the genre at its best if you’re not already a fan.
