Chancy: A Novel [Paperback]

He was an orphan from the hills of Tennessee and he hadn’t eaten in three days. With the front of his stomach making friends with the back, he was in no position to let an opportunity slip by unnoticed. And when Chancy defended his new herd of cattle with a shotgun, he didn’t miss. The dead man left a pistol on the ground. Chancy needed a spare and, after stowing it in his bedroll, forgot about it. He had a cattle drive to finish and a profit to make.

But the gun had a history. Another killing had taken place and Chancy would never know the truth until it was too late. Now, locked in a jail cell with an angry, drunken mob outside and time running out, he must somehow find a way to prove his innocence.Our foremost storyteller of the American West,Louis L’Amourhas thrilled a nation by chronicling the adventures of the brave men and woman who settled the frontier. There are more than three hundred million copies of his books in print around the world.Chapter One


When I rode out of the timber I fell in with a cow outfit, and a sorry lot of rawhiders they were.
They had a fire going and coffee on, and the smell of the coffee and of bacon frying fairly set my stomach to asking questions of my face. I'd come a far piece with nothing to chew on but my thoughts.

When I came up to the fire not one of them upped to say aye, yes, or no. They just sat there looking beat. This was a played-out hand if ever I saw one.

"Howdy," I said. "You folks taking on any help?"

There was a thin, stooped-down man, with every bone showing through his thin cotton shirt, who looked around at me. If that man's cattle were as poor as he was, there'd not be fat enough on any one of them to grease a skillet.

"Was I to hire you, I couldn't pay. We're fresh out of everything a man needs most."

Well, I could have fetched him some ideas on that score, because I'd already seen the lC=