Adventure Magazine Cover — page 173: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

= Rich Crooks though that in no way resembles his name, had in his younger days become involved, perhaps more or less innocently, in some profitable crooked work. Cornwall had stored the indubitable legal evidence of that in his little black box. Walsh knew much that was crooked, wicked, even dastardly, of Cornwall and longed to bring him to justice, to crush him, wipe him out; but to do so he would have to sacrifice his own career, for Cornwall would have retaliated by opening the little black box. o Cornwall, for his part, would have liked to exterminate Walsh, but if he attacked Walsh then the Governor would probably, in the midst of his own ruin, land Cornwall in prison, if not on to the scaffold—sup- posing that a multimillionaire can ever be hanged, which is doubtful in a country that - leaves justice in the hands of lawyers. So it was that they were like two power- ful giants, deadly in their enmity but aware that it would be mutually ruinous if they made an open fight. Let Walsh once get his hands on that black box, and Cornwall was doomed. Nor did I doubt at all that Cornwall hesitated at thoughts of assas- ination in trying to figure out how he could dispose of Walsh. The immediate concern of the Cornwall’s however, was not with Walsh. It was with Steve Ellis. The situation was made more peculiar and complicated by Ellis. Whereas Cornwall and Walsh were con- tinually bluffing each other, and neither wanted or dared to come actually to a crisis, Ellis was thought to be implacable in his hatred of Daniel Cornwall. The Cornwalls thought, as many people have, that I was a sort of cutthroat, for sale to a high bidder and with cunning enough to evade punishment. I have evaded pun- ishment largely because I never deserved it. Even the police, East and West, cer- tainly no friends of mine, were not without a kind of—hum—let me say a kind of gratitude for the way I had come out of corners into which I had occasionally been crowded. Law-abiding citizens, whom the police feel it their duty to protect and to avenge, do not shoot at people from the rear or from shadows, do not pick quarrels and lay traps. Moreover, I never bothered the police with complaints. The police and courts every- where more or less respect the ruling of - Western juries to the effect that the man * who draws last and shoots first is innocent. So those two old fellows, wholly unaware that I knew a great deal about the cause of their fears, with a kind of grotesque eager- ness, in which both became excited, tried to tell me the history of their haunting terrors. It was a long story and Daniel lied a great deal. I won’t repeat their story, for it was large- ly false and when I have said that Daniel claimed Steve Ellis’ hate was inspired over certain mining claims, I have told enough. That part may or may not have been true. I did not know. Anyway, perhaps money had originally been at the bottom of the trouble, but Ellis seemed to have been the sort of man who looked for, trouble. He had—so I heard—repeatedly said that he would kill me. He did not know my name: He knew merely the name I happened to be using at the time, and then he was in a position to make threats with impunity, for he was in the penitentiary. He believed, or pretended to believe, that my presence under the roof of his wife’s house was in- jurious to his honor, and, since he was in prison, he was dependent on the tales that other men carried to him. V IT chanced that some years before I had been in Utah, in various parts of Utah, and had not taken the trouble to introduce myself to anybody— that is, by the name which was perhaps known tosome of the people there, even then. I was patiently waiting until the police of San Francisco had—as they eventually did do—assured themselves that I had had nothing to do with a certain little affair in which numerous liars conspired together to get me out of the way, legaliy. There had been enough perjured witnesses to hang a saint. I may mention, though it has nothing to do with this story, that, at last impatient, I returned quietly to San Francisco, made a midnight call upon the ring-leader of the framé-up and impressed on him that I was weary of waiting for his conscience to get the better of his prejudice against me. I suggested that he confess the next morning. He did. So it was that during the time I had been in Utah under the name of Smith or some such nonentity, I had minded-my own business and got into trouble. 159 ‘comicbooks.