2-Gun Western, February 1954 — page 66: what you’re looking at

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

A man had to die sometime and hanging was a small price to pay al RY | for ridding the country of Will by L. D. Geumlek Staley..... UGUST WAS hot as the hinges. A Sam had spent three days packing salt. He left the ranch at daylight and re- turned after sundown. With the thermometer at the high nineties in the thin mountain air, men and animals stayed out of the noon sun if they could. The first salt went to the more distant range, but on August 6 there was only one pack load to go, and that not far off. Sam took longer than usual at breakfast, then cleaned the kitchen. When Jane, his wife, was alive, the kitchen had been her pride, and Sam tried to keep it the way she would have wished, but when he got busy, things piled up. The sun had reached the quarter mark of mid-sky when Sam closed the kitchen door behind him. He was a square, stocky man, fifty years old, but he had looked the same age since he was thirty. The wind-burned lines-on his cheeks had merely deepened, and his shaggy eyebrows had grown dusty gray above his blue eyes. He felt no differ- ent physically, but there was a loneliness—he had always been a quiet, methodical man, but he felt the weight of days of utter silence. He saddled his bay gelding and loaded the cubes of stock salt on the dun pack mare. Leading her, he started across the bench until he came to the Cut and saw that the fence was broken. That could not be passed without an investigation. Sam and Jane had bought the ranch twenty years ago. It hadn’t been much of a place, but they had set doggedly about building it up. First they had put their house, square and solid, on the bench above the river. They had. chosen the site because Jane loved the view of the valley, and because spring-fed Deer Creek was handy. The one drawback was its nearness to the Cut. The ground dropped away from the bench in a long smooth sweep, except that on the south it was as if the earth’s crust had been split. The head of the Cut was narrow and . deep, the sides of red and gray strata were broken only by small ledges for nearly a hundred feet straight down. As the Cut widened, however, the sides were eroded and slanted, until at the mouth it was only a brush-choked gully. Sam had fenced the Cut before he’d brought even one head of beef on the place. Swinging out of the saddle and dropping the reins, he looked at the rail fence briefly. The logs. were old and rotting, but they had been splintered with vi- before, Calico had thrown the rider. EORMICLOO® Never having felt spurs. (E@)