2 Gun Western, May 1957 — page 71: what you’re looking at

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

SEVEN RODE OUT by Joseph Chadwick HE APACHES had long ago learned that by cutting down a few telegraph poles here and there, they could cripple the Army’s best means of communication—and so bog down pursuit. But General Miles, who replace@ Crook, was as, wily as the Indians. He borrowed a British device, the heliostat, and soon a system of giant mirrors was flash- ing orders and reports over hundreds of miles of desert and mountains. B Troop, out of Camp Grant, picked up word of Orfano’s marauding band from the heliostat, and promptly headed for the Pinals. B Troop, under Captain Phil Ham- mond’s command, had no Signal Corps personnel assigned to it, but Trooper Alec Small could read the Give a treacherous Apache implements and seeds, they told Alec 1Smail, and he'll trade them for guns; but Alec didn't savvy that bran | of hate talk... | sx «6TIME-HONORED WESTERN CLASSIC ¥ Vopyright 1949, Interstate Publishing Corp code flashes. Trooper Small was new to B Troop, and until now his cam- paigning had been done behind a headquarters desk. That career had ended when Grant’s commanding of- ficer wearied of his orderly’s con- stant imbibing, and demanded, “Why ‘ : / yg ig $ a 8 ff ase aS t Ae HMO Ad ty + D, " Ly 4 Sed i yt i 4 F Ai h fod ; i Ys wi > nf ser * fy GZ i} se ‘ ‘ he ie ee aes 7 (ee! PSY a . = | he d Le Ia Gow ‘~s af “fer s ’ 2 c + La S a = : 4, a. fy 7 ée Pay 4 f ' t — J in thunderation must every clerk in the Army be a whiskey-swiller?” “Sir, if it wasn’t for whiskey,” Alec small had replied, “there'd be no clerks in the Army.” The next day, in reward for his hu- mor, he had been given a chance to raise a crop of saddle corns.... OW AND then, such a man could be found in the ranks. A misfit unsuited for barracks life or field duty. Since the Army was no antidote for the poisonous failures and trou- bles of civilian life, it was a mystery why the type joined up. However, Alec Small’s past was no secret. He had come west as a young man, taken a schoolteaching job at the Red Rock Agency of the Ute Reservation in Colorado. After ten years among the more or less peaceful Utes, Alec had written a book, Our Red Brethren,. which had been published in the East and given its author something of a reputation. In Washington, the In- dian Bureau had sat up and taken COMmcoooKxSs.Cconn