Western Story Magazine, May 12, 1934 — page 85: what you’re looking at

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

Fugitive’s Return 83 the place that she had come to as a bride, and held to through the long and bitter years. It had seemed an easy thing to promise her, for Jade inherited her own obsessing love of soil. But with his mother dead a year, he’d started sitting in on the faro games Ab Ferris ran in the town of Little Pine, and got hope- lessly bogged down in debt. Ab had let things run a while, and then he’d threatened Jade to take away his property. In foolish. desperation, Jade had robbed the bank at Little Pine, and m a shooting fracas, after- ward, shot a man. He'd been a fugitive from the law for three long years. Yet even so, he'd managed to hang on, as he had said he would. When the Circle Dot went up for taxes, he’d hired a saddle bum he’d met with on the trail to bid it in, under the name of Freed—Jim _ Freed—the name he meant to claim it by. Jade had had to wait a long time, though, before he’d dared to come back home. “The - wounds, that he’d made to change once-handsome features into the strangely puckered mask he wore, had taken time to heal, and he had let a stubby mustache grow among the scars. And it had taken time to learn the new half-halting gait, so different from the easy swinging stride that once had been familiar to all this countryside. Not easy, either, to change, beyond all chance of recognition, the deeply pleasant rumble of his voice, and all the httle mannerisms and tricks of speech that might identify a man. But because he wanted, more than anything in all the world, to come back here to Windy Basin, and spend out his days on the soil where he was raised, and where his mother’s bones lay buried, he had accomplished it; and he was back, self-inflicted © at last—to find this grave confront- ing him. : He read the words from the wooden slab aloud, slowly, sibi- lantly: “Jade Holloway. Died August 6th, 1930. May he rest in peace.” A sudden clammy sweat broke out along Jade’s brow. It gave a man a funny feeling to read his own obituary. And August 6th—that was the very night he'd robbed the bank, and made his get-away. The thing was spooky. There must be some one planted here—some one who’d been identified as him. : Jade sat a long time, slouched across his saddle horn, staring at the wooden slab. At last he mut- tered: “Ugh—I wonder—could that be Lonnie Davis who helped me rustle what few cows the Cirele Dot was runnin’, time I went away? I remember, now, that when I bought that outfit of new duds, fig- urin’ my old clothes wauld be a give- away, if anybody spied me openin’ up that safe, I gave Lonnie all my old ones. He must have met some accident that sort of messed his fea- tures up; the clothes was recognized, and his earcass planted here for mine.” . “Jade Holloway. Died August 6th.” Jade read again and _ shiv- ered. “Mebbe it’s an omen,” he told the pricked ears of his tired cayuse. “Mebbe we better back- track out of here the way we come.” But then Jade had a_ sudden thought, and laughed. If there was any omen in it, it was luck, sheer luck. To all mtents and purposes, Jade Holloway was dead—and that was just exactly what he’d wanted folks to think. Here was the proof. No one would ever look in the live Jim Freed for a resemblance to a man they’d buried. Jade’s mind was encierdhencit,