Adventure Magazine Cover — page 168: what you’re looking at

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

Complete “Vi els Nove/ele Easy Lawkustlers Yy " WCTUTTLE oF W Lay wh i, hayp Hy we ¥, Vy Wh MY ) Wp : uh Se yy Fe iF a ogee Fi df Author of “The Devil's Dooryard,” “Sun-Dog Trails,” etc E AND “Hashknife” Hartley sets there on our broncs and spells out the old sign, just like it was the first time we ever The good Lord only knows why we're back at the old sign. Willer Crick don’t mean nothing to us. Glory Sillman lives, or did live, on Willer Crick, but her name ain’t never figured in any of our conversations since the day we fogged away from Willer. Crick. We kinda left that part of the range in a hurry that day; left a surprized bunch of folks watching our dust, while a couple of enterprising bad-men went home to get patched up and another bunch throwing lead at the wrong parties, just because said parties had a gray and a roan horse. No, Willer Crick has been a closed inci- dent to us. Not that we’re silent folks, *cause we ain’t. I can talk the bark off a greasewood, and Hashknife Hartley—man, he’s a conversationalist. It’s kinda funny that we never talked about the Willer Crick folks, ’cause they sure are worth talking about. Sol Vane, who does the lawin’ for the Crick, Jim Sillman, one of the Council of Three, old Ebenezer Godfrey— they’re one goshawful layout. Of course Ebenezer Godfrey is dead. Jim Albright and Pete Godfrey, his illegal heirs, are dead, we think, but there’s a plenty of that misguided tribe left. Ebe- nezer was killed by Pete and Jim, ’cause the old man wouldn’t die soon enough for one of them to get visible means of support, in seen it. order to marry Glory. The old man was hard-boiled enough to hang on to life until he could will everything he owned to me and Hashknife. Willer Crick, being a closed corporation, didn’t accept me and Hashknife to any great extent. They stole old Godfrey’s body in order to establish what Sol Vane called ‘“‘corpus delectable,” but we got it back, or rather hid it again. We buried some dynamite in the front yard and Sol, Pete and Jim dug into it, thinking we had planted the old man there. Sol lost all his hair and all we could find of Jim and Pete was a hat with the crown gone. Me and Hashknife weathered consider- able storm, but there wasn’t no use in defy- ing the lightning too much, so we got out by the skin of our teeth, with a Winchester rifle and a vest-pocket derringer. Me and Hashknife cut cards to see which of us would marry Glory Sillman, accept five hundred dollars in place of a wife and then leave the country. This was to save Jim Sillman from the law of the Crick, and would also allow Glory to go outside and get educated like a human being. Willer Crick had a peculiar law. It seems that they rules that a girl has to stay on the crick until she gets married. After she’s hooked up she can leave. Of course, they means to make her marry one of their own bunch, but their law don’t specify that. It also seems that the sins of one of the family is visited upon all the rest of that family. Jim Sillman explains that everything he 162 COPMICLOOOKS (E@)