2-Gun Western, February 1954 — page 24: what you’re looking at

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

24 had come home to die. No, Morgan had no kick about Mar- ty’s work. But by Morgan’s standards he wasn’t much of a man. Too moody, too sullen when things went wrong—and much much too patient, or he’d have divorced Sally. Morgan had asked her to divorce Marty and marry him, but Sally said she couldn’t go through that, so he'd been satisfied just to have her around. Besides, it was Marty who had grounds for divorce, not Sally. He heard the men ride out, proba- bly headed for Three Pines Mesa. They’d be shipping in a couple of weeks, Sally had told him the day before. Marty never told him any- thing now and it was just as well. Marty hated him, a hatred that had been steadily growing for three years. Well, Morgan couldn’t blame him. If it had been the other way around, Morgan would have killed Marty, but Marty had a good thing, so he'd put up with it. Sally was. still working in the kitchen. She’d be in any time, now that Marty had gone with the crew. Morgan closed his eyes. Funny at a time like this how a man got to think- ing about the hereafter. It was too late for that just as it was too late for a lot of things. HE PREACHER had come out a couple of weeks before to talk about Morgan’s immortal soul, and Morgan told him plain out how he felt. : “I’ve been a heller all my life,” Morgan said. “I’ve been mean and ornery, have always taken what I wanted because I was the kind of man — who could get what he wanted. Now what’s the Lord going to do about me?” 3 “The Lord’s forgiveness is beyond human understanding,” the preacher said. “I don’t give a damn about the Lord,’ Morgan snapped. “I know what I’d do if I was Him and some huckleberry who'd lived like me got religion on his death bed—I’d shove him right down into purgatory so fast it would make his head swim.” The preacher was shocked. “That's 2-GUN WESTERN sacrilege. No man has any right to compare himself to the Lord.” “All right, all right. I’ve lived my life the way I’ve wanted to and Ill die on my record.” Morgan didn’t want to talk about it. He had been thinking on this business ever since the clinic doctors had put him through all those tests, punched and gouged him from hell to breakfast, taken a lot of pictures, and then told him how it was. It was scary, thinking. about the hereafter, but he’d known men who’d had their fun and made a death-bed confession. Not John Morgan. It was too late for him. But the preacher hadn’t been will- ing to let it drop there. He cleared his throat and Morgan could see the sly look on him like a banker when he makes a man a loan, knowing all the time he’H close the fellow out the minute his luck goes sour and he can’t pay. “You'll be leaving a big estate,” the preacher said. “Perhaps you’ve made a will, but you could change it. You see, we have a mortgage on our church building in Shavano, and I thought it would be a fine thing if you'd leave us a gift, to pay...” “And buy myself a piece of Heav- en? The devil with you. Get out.” Morgan had had more strength then than now. He’d grabbed up a bronze paperweight off his bed stand and thrown it at the preacher's head. Didn’t miss by more than an inch, and the preacher decided it was the proper moment to leave. The preacher had given Morgan something else to think about, though—a will. But he kept putting it off because he had never found anything he couldn’t lick, and he kept thinking he was going to lick this thing and make liars out of every sawbones who'd looked at him. When a man got down to mak- ing a will he admitted he was whipped. But he’d gone downhill every day of these two weeks, so yesterday he got to the phone long enough to call up his lawyer in town. Sally would have had a fit, but she’d been out hanging up a COPMICLOOOKS (©)