Adventure Magazine Cover — page 174: what you’re looking at

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

168 building and around the corner, with me on his heels. The folks are grouped in kind of a half-circle around the doorway. Glory - and the old man are on the steps, with the kid between ‘em. On the left side of the doorway is Jim Sillman. Standing at the rear of the half-circle, looking like a turkey gobbler in a flock of turkeys, stands Sol Vane, craning his long, dirty neck and chewing a mouthful of tobacco that stretches his face all out of shape. They turns and looks at us. “Yuh might use up that one look right now,” says Hashknife. The bunch kinda sway away from each other. One cinch, there’s never any chance for pot-shooting on Willer Crick. I sees Sol Vane swaller real hard and the bulge is gone from his skinny cheeks. The rest of the bunch just seem to stare at us. Hashknife has got his eyes on that big- talker, who is just about in the center of the crowd. He’s sort of round-shouldered, fish-eyed and looks like he ain’t been curried for a year. His eyes are flat, if you know what I mean. They’re like the eyes they put in mounted animals. He’s got a big gun hanging on his hip, but he ain’t made a move toward it yet. “You, I’m talkin’ to,” says Hashknife. “You dirty centipede. Set your eyes on me feller. I’m the sombre you spoke about. Reach for your gun, you cross between a polecat and buzzard. Make good, can’t yuh?” I never seen Hashknife like that before. This is once that he ain’t laughing. Maybe he knows that one shot will spill the whole works, and the odds are all against us. 2, | THE feller licks his lips but don’: speak. His face looks kinda funny— like he was scared to breathe. Hash- knife walks up to him, slow, but this feller don’t move. The rest of the crowd seems hypnotized, but I wasn’t taking no chances. I sets the butt of my .45 against my hip and waits for the break to come. Hashknife takes this feller’s gun out of its holster and tries to make him take it in his hand, but all this feller does is look like a dog that has been caught doing wrong. Hashknife takes the feller’s belt off, takes him by the shoulder and turns him around. ‘““Go home,” says Hashknife kinda hoarse- like. ‘Go home_and be glad you're alive.”’ I never seen anything like it. That e Adventure feller walked away, kinda slouching, and Hashknife turned back to face the bunch. It was Hashknife’s face and eyes that froze that bad hombre. He was hypnotized, but the minute Hashknife turned his back this feller came to. He swung sideways, grabbed his vest and flashed another gun. I was looking for just that. He was about fifty feet from me, but I took a chance and shot twice. Man, I was just in time. His bullet cut the dirt at Hashknife’s feet. He looks down at his pistol and then kinda tosses it away from him, like he was all through with it, and then turned as though he was going away—but he didn’t. I glances at the bunch and then at Hashknife, who was facing them with a gun in his hand. “Hashknife,”’ says I, “you do take the worst chances. These Willer Crick rat- tlers has more than one set of fangs. Little more and that Alaska trip would ’a’ been all off.” ‘You're the little snake-hunter, Sleepy,” he grins. ‘‘Much obliged.” | Then he faces the bunch and they’re sure one uneasy crowd. Me downin’ that feller don’t mean nothin’ to them—much. Hashknife glances from face to face, and finally looks straight at Sillman. “Eph Sillman was your son, wasn’t he?” Silliman don’t speak: just shifts his feet. “That dead woman in there was your daughter-in-law, Sillman. You folks de- nied her a doctor and then yuh killed her husband when he was man enough to try and get medicine for her. We seen that killin’. Bassett and three other men saw it; now yuh tried to throw the deadwood on me and Stevens.”’ “You fellers try your dangest to stir up trouble, don’t yuh?” wails Sol Vane. “I didn’t think you’d ever come back here, I didn’t.” “T came back to see if your hair growed out, Sol,” says Hashknife. “If yuh want another hair cut, I'll bury the dynamite.” Nobody had a word to say, but finally Sol Vane spoke—‘‘The feller you gunned up over there is Lem Sellers. He’s a brother to Sim Sellers.” “T don’t care if he’s his own uncle and brother-in-law,’ says MHashknife. “Who is Sim Sellers?” “‘Head of the council,” says Sol, like he’d sprung something on us. “‘Sim’s the head man of Willer Crick.” | Comuichbook (E@)