Argosy All-Story Weekly — page 153: what you’re looking at

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

By CHANDLER P. BARTON ROM the lone tree which adorned the highway from Encina to Trinidad hung four dead men, pendant like flying foxes or monstrous cocoons, to the gnarled dry branches. Grass, as sparse as a Tartar’s beard, vainly tried to cover the ground, and made a charred forest for big lazy ants; horned toads basked in the shade of skeletal shrubs, and a little way off a pinto pony impatiently pawed the sand. Beneath the tree, his hands propped behind him, lay a man. Over his buckskin chaps and glossy tall heeled boots, sprawled the grotesque shadows of the bandits. The man was brown and had gun-metal colored eyes which gazed out across the desert. It was gray, and rumpled as a great fallen tent, and cactus and yucca trees stuck through it like the hands and arms of giants caught in the wreckage. Along the base of the distant hills a freight train crawled, and then entered a tunnel, like a ~ 399 string of red ants. To the left, through a yellow haze, as of pollen dust, were faintly visible the squat misshapen buildings of a town, from which a road projected toward the oasis. Along this road advanced a khaki colored dust cloud. After a while through the blur a horse was visible, and the dim outlines of a wagon. Later the wagon was seen to be a buck- board, on the seat of which slumped a lone driver. When he drew up beside the tree the dust wake floated ahead and enveloped him, then slowly precipitated onto the road. The man on the ground shoved his gun back into its holster, then sat up and clasped his knees. There was no need for caution here: buck- board, horse, and driver were on a last feeble race to the scrap heap. With his sleeve the stranger smeared a streak of mud across his brow, and raised his eyes to the hanged men. GOMIGIOOKSECOM