The Annual Lingamish Love Letter on Valentine’s Day

What could be better on this day devoted to love than to quote an author whose very name means love? While the gals might wish their man was more like that sissy James Blunt crooning “You’re beautiful,” the truth is that most of us learned the art of wooing a woman from the cowboy novels of Louis L’Amour. That’s why when I first saw my future wife strolling across the campus on a summer day, I knew that though she was pretty as a pistol, she could also shoot that pistol straight from the saddle and would take no sass from a lesser man.

Here’s a classic passage that you no doubt love as much as I do:

My eyes closed. Almost at once they were open and I felt fear go through me like a shaft of steel, cold and bitter.

To sleep might be to die. More than that, I would leave her whom…I hesitated at what I suddenly thought…whom I loved.

There…the thought was complete. But was it so? Did I love Abigail Tempany? And if so, why? A lovely girl, gentle enough yet with courage and more strength than one would suspect. A lady, but a bright one-she was intelligent, with a good measure of common sense, and the two are not always one.

Now I was awake. For the moment at least my weariness disappeared in contemplation of this new thought. I was in love. Yet why should Abigail Tempany, of all people, love me?

Not that she did, of course. There was no reason for it. Why should anybody love me? I was a somewhat ordinary man with ordinary impulses, and some measure of ambition, but I had little, I was less.

Yet I would be something…that I knew.

I loved a lady, a fair lady. I wished she were mine in one breath and was glad she was not in a second, for where could I take such a lady? To a cottage in the fens? Abigail? Even if she would consider it, I would not. Would I have her offer to slop to pigs and bake eels?

From Sackett’s Land by Louis L’Amour

Isn’t love grand? This post is dedicated to all the L’Amour gals out there and the strong silent men who love them.

Happy Valentine’s Day