2 Gun Western, May 1957 — page 61: what you’re looking at

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

by LEE FLOREN > selves ... IKE FINK was a giant— roaring and ‘red-headed and wild. One of Ashley’s orig- inal trappers, he was known in the Wilderness as a dead shot—at ren- dezvous after rendezvous he dem- onstrated his uncanny accuracy with pistol or long-gun, winning shoot- ing match after match. Nothing stopped him—not hail, not storm, not bullets. He had only one friend in life, and this was another trapper as wild and reckless as he, and this man was named Carpenter. Just plain “Carpenter.” Maybe somewhere and at some time Carpenter had had a given name, but history records him as just plain Carpenter—but not an ordinary man, this Carpenter, any more than his partner, Mike Fink, Was an ordinary man. Ashley organized his trappers in St. Louis in 1822, and Mike Fink and Carpenter were among the first to enlist to head north and west into the Missouri River wilderness. They fought and they caroused and they gambled, these two—and what one lacked in wiliness and strength and ferocity, the other sup- plemented, Both came out of Ken- tucky, and the wilderness was their dish—there were squaws to be won and furs to be trapped and rendez- vous to attend. There was whiskey to be sent tumbling down a man’s gullet and there were shooting matches to be won. The world was their oyster and they were opening it with wild abandon. There came to this partnership at this time a third member, a mighty little man named Talbeau, whose given name seems also to have been No pack of wo e s or humans was too tough for them to meet and defeat, and this savage wilder- ness trio truly had nothing to fear but them- lost in the shuffle of Time and Fate. - A man of strong appetites, this Frenchman; a man who could use his fists, who grinned when the blood ran down his face. He recog- nized these two as fellow savages, as wild as the prairie wolves they trapped, and he joined them, using his influence to maintain peace when trouble threatened between Fink and Carpenter. So they traveled and trapped the | wilderness, these three and no river was too wide or violent to cross, no pack of wolves or humans too tough to meet and defeat, and no barrel of whiskey too vile to throw down their throats. “The rough three,” a trapper said. “Actin’ like brothers is supposed to act. You whip one an’ you gotta whip them all,” “An’ all good shots,” another said, watching Fink and Carpenter and Talbeau shooting cans off each other’s heads at the Green River Rendezvous. They stood about fifty feet apart and each had a_ can placed on his head. With each shoot- ing, cans flew in all directions, the men under them escaping untouched by the singing pistol bullets, “No-sir, they never miss,” another grizzled mountain man marveled. But there did come a time when Mike Fink missed. At one rendez- vous Mike Fink fell in love. And when Mike fell in love he fell in boots and torso and shoulders and head. He always did things in a big, big way. : The falling in love, of course, was inevitable, for Mike was strong and healthy of body. And this was not an COMmicloooks.com