Pulp Fiction, 1946 · page 31 of 84
10-Story Detective Magazine, April 1946 — page 31: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
# Page Analysis This is story prose from a pulp magazine, printed in two columns on page 29 of a work titled "Stars Die at Dawn" (visible in the header). The text depicts a tense confrontation between characters named Turrentine, Emily, and Johnny Cook. The narrator describes a dramatic sequence involving gunshots fired in a barn or stable area, with horses panicking. After hiding in hay during the shooting, the narrator discovers Johnny Cook's dead wife (Emily Hayden) in his office, shot through the head. The passage emphasizes the violence and shock of this discovery, with Turrentine's angry response to the narrator's involvement in the events that led to this tragedy. The writing style and content are consistent with hardboiled crime or Western pulp fiction from the early-to-mid 20th century.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
Turrentine’s hard black eyea would he clashing with KEmily’s cold grey ones down there. “Whadda you mean?” Turrentine’s deep anarl came back. Kear keyed Emily’s voice a notch higher. “You broke into that garden. She wags swimming and you broke in, You killed her!” “What's the matter with you, you crazy little wren?” Turrentine roared. “Are you reefer happy?” Ié took plenty to crack Emily, but Tur- rentine in an Injun temper did it. She hegan to wabble hysterically. “I saw you! I waa upstairs in my office and looking out! I saw you—” “Shut up!’ “You did! First you laid your cigarett on the wall and reached over the gate and pulled the bax off, Then you tied your horse and—” f shuffled my feet aud coughed. [ coughed good and loud. Emily stopped. — “Who's up there in that loft?” Tur- rentine wanted to know. She didn’t an- awer, “¥ don’t know what kind of a frame thia is, sister,” he said in a voice like a steel file wetting in a few licks on saw. “I don’t weé this talk of me killing Vanessa. But I do know you're not going to blackmail me, You or your eaves- drepping pal up there, either. “T rode up to the wall, yes. I went in- side, Sure I did. Then I rode away the way IL came. That's all, and you can go to hell t’ LONG silence followed, I thought they might say something more, so i waited. I waited too long. It took me a while te tumble to the fact that the show was over and they were gone, It took me some more time to make my way down the creaky length of the hay loft. By then, the old .38 that lay among the grain and feed bills on Johnny’s office desk wasn’t there any more, Ol’ Brer Mark’s pulses pounded away like sixty. The rotten planks of the hay loft floor made him walk like treading on ereshells. A loose shingle in the roof let in a big yellow shaft of morning sunlight, full of dust motes. Just as I stepped across : STARS DIE AT DAWN f 29 the beam of sunlight I heard hay rustle at the edge of the loft, fifteen feet away. Something black poked up over the edge of the floor from the manger below. I never knew there’d be so much smoke in smokeless powder. The thunderclap of the first shot jetted a hatful of blue smoke into the shaft of sunlight. That first slug breezed past so close if burned my cheek. I le& my knees go and fell sideways as the second shot crashed more smoke. It missed. I burrowed frantically into the hay te hide from the third ome. As if hay would stop a slug. The third shot never came. Every muscle in my body was braced for if, but if never came, I sat up. Horses acreamed in fright down there and kicked the sides out of their stalls. That .88 would be back on Johnny's desk in about forty seconds. It would take that long for anybody to run out the side door and down the length of - a ne the stable on the blind side, next te the . trees, There was a shorter way to Johnny's office, but it meant running the gantlet of fear-crazed hoofs lashing out between two rows of stalls. I remember scrambling down the lad- der to the stall floor. The rest of it’s a blur of those steel-shod hoofs kicking at me, and halter chains rattling. Ol’ Brer Mark got there first. My clothes stuck to me with icy sweat, [ stank of fear. I shook so hard I had te shut my eyes and lean against the door of Johnny’s office. But I got there first. When I opened my eyes, Johnny Cook and Emily Hayden and Turrentine stood in front of me. “What the hell goes on here?” Turrentine growled savagely. “Nothing. Only somebody took a couple of cracks at me with a .38.” They stared. “See if your gun’s still on the desk, Johnny,” I suggested. We went into the sunny, whitewashed tack room where Johnny Cook’s old roll- top desk stood in one corner. He pawed around in a litter of feed bills. “Tis gone,” he told us, puzzled. “Johnny,” I said, “your wife’s dead.” It was a guess. It was also brutal. The red blood drained out of Johnny Cook’s rawboned, weathered face, “Look,” Turrentine snapped. “What's _ the matter with you people? A minute ComicoookKs (©