15 Story Detective, April 1950 — page 98: what you’re looking at

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

¥8 tion people always well-stocked Windham County. | Sees than three hundred yards from the shack. Trigger Mike startled his first pheasant, a big gorgeous bird with green head, golden breast and radiant green tail. The slow and cumbersome flyer rose from a tumbled down stone wall, soared over a clumb of hazelnut bushes, heading for a thicket of white birches. There were no obstructing trees. It was a perfect target, just twenty yards away. His No. 6 shot would be evenly distributed over a 30-inch cirele. A teenage boy with his first shotgun shouldn't have missed. Trigger Mike saw the glistening metal] rag ring on one blue foot; it was a bird just released for the game season. Just as he was squeezing the trigger, his left foot slipped on a white flint pebble. The blast went off. The game- eock was safe in the birches with not a tail feather disturbed. “Shoot him on the rise, eh?” growled Trigger Mike, breaking into a string of sulphurous curses, He didn’t want to eat those hard pellets of Boston baked beans again. Shoot him on the rise! It sounded like that dried apple face, Leander Jones, who had been game warden ever since Mike himself had been in knee breaches. He had no use for Leander then, less later on when he had brought down a white- tailed doe a good mile from a cornfield she had allegedly been destroying. Leander had let him get away with that doe: it was just after the farmhouse had burned down and the folks needed that meat. But the old geezer always was lecturing. He was mighty curt because Mike failed to attend his own mother’s funeral. Mike hadn’t shown up for three years after that, hardly said “Howdy” to him last Autumn. To hell with him! But were thoughts of the old game warden interfering with his shooting? Mike tramped the woods for two hours but three more shots were all IS Story Detective misses. He climbed over the stone wall onto the dirt road and was returning for more of those beans when he spotted her. There could be no mistaking the hen partridge as she stood exposed in the leafless blueberry bushes just this side of the stone wall. She was a big fat bird, wonderful eating, but her plumage was drab and dull compared to the splender of a gamecock. She was just fifteen yards away, motionless. Except for the bright noonday sun, Trigger Mike would not have spotted her. He muttered a silent curse as he raised the blued steel barrel. Old Leander Bailey would have argued that he should rustle the bushes, seeing he didn’t have a retriever dog; that he should shoot him on the wing. This of course, was a her but no one would know the dif- ference once she was plucked. Trigger Mike fired. The succulent bird fluttered once and flopped over. The hunter snatched up the prize, clam- bered over the stone wall. He would re- turn to the shack by the back way so that he . wouldn’t encounter anyone along the dirt road. Leander Bailey lived just a piece up the pike; he might be rattling back from the postoffice and feed store in his flivver. Calmness returned to Trigger Mike. He was just rusty, a bit on edge this first day. Now that he had regained confidence in the shotgun, he would get plenty of gamecocks the rest of the week. Of course the blue legs of this hen weren’t tagged. She had survived the red foxes, lived through the hard. winter, mothered a brood and might have supplied more birds next season. Starting over a rocky knoll, Trigger Mike suddenly spotted that lanky fence rail of Leander Bailey moseying over to the shack. Of course he had heard the shooting, dropped in to be neighborly. At the foot of the banking there was an old skunk hole. Reluctantly, Trigger Mike stooped, shoved his hen partridge inside. EOPMICLOOO KS (El)