Adventure, December 3, 1920 — page 115: what you’re looking at

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

wT ae Nee Pe ee) SEE TT MA oe <. ere re rr!) eee eee | _- seeowm + Author of “Gold of the Never Never,” etc. HIS is a story without heroes, to my way of thinking. As to the measure of villainy, you may weigh and con- clude for yourself. To me, they were just two common, every-day, mine-run, hit- or-miss, take-it-or-leave-it Americans of the sort that can be chummed up with or side- stepped any day down in Mexico. One of them, “Big Enough,” or the “Big One,” a blacksmith, was sometimes referred to as thick. In size he was almost a giant. You get a picture of him from those two words. All he asked of mankind was to be let alone in ce. ““M’lord”’ Jones, on the other hand, was more active in his associations. He was a mule- skinner and he swung a long and nasty black- snake whip. He could chp the fire off a cigaret nine times out of ten at twenty feet or so with the lash and never crumple the paper. Jones got his nickname the first morning he ever harnessed up a six-mule jerkline team in the Englishman’s. campyard at Santa Clara. The skinner had mounted to the saddle of the wheel-mule and was swinging the six around in the thicket of other ore-wagons when he chanced to get the noses of his lead animals close to the little open-air smithy of the Big One. At this instant the Vulcan, all uncon- scious of the mules, dragged a horseshoe from the forge, laid it on the anvil and struck the white-hot metal a tentative blow. Sparks from the soft iron flew out in a flaming circle. The nearer mule reared and jumped side- wise in a most mulish fashion, and there was something of a mix-up before Jones got their feet steady on the ground again, Then, sitting 7 a in his saddle, he bawled out to the Big ne: : “Hi, you! What kind of a joke is this you’re springin’ here so early of a morning?” “Go on!” protested Big Enough good- naturedly. ‘“‘What’s that?” Jones snarled. “Who you tellin’ to go on?” He gathered up his whip, ready to throw. But as if, being a stranger, he wished to give fair warning to every donkey-maid in the lot, he raised his voice so no man thereabouts could fail to hear: “Listen, you. There ain’t nobody gets ahead of me with their tricks, see? You can’t scare my mule and get away with it. Savvy?” The Big One stood poised like a statue, his left hand gripping tongs and hot horseshoe on the anvil, the right holding aloft his big hammer the while he grinned placatingly. A simple man this smith was, also. “T didn’t aim to do that,” he half-pleaded. “There ain’t never been anybody,” Jones went on in his hard voice, “man er brute, male er female, that got ahead o’ me.” He flung out the whip like a tongue of evil and wrapped the lash around the hammer- handle, jerked, and flung the hammer in a sweeping arc across the banked wagons and mules to the street a hundred and fifty feet away. “Man er brute, male er female, they don’t git ahead o’ me,” he spat. Now near to the blacksmith stood the lime- juicer who owned the yard, a big, calm, chesty man with burnsides. In the silence that settled down on the lot for a moment, like a muffling snow, this man, barely removing the short-stemmed pipe from his lips, spoke in a rumbling voice such softly scornful words that a faint-hearted man would have been cut through. 105 COPMICLOOKS (C@)