Ace High Western Magazine, March 1941 — page 15: what you’re looking at

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

SIXGUN SAVIOR OF DOOMED RANGE “Jeanie!” It was a hoarse cry that the night swallowed. “Jeanie!” Bill ran stumblingly around the wagon. There at the foot of the bank, partly under - the wagon, he knelt beside her. There was a ponderous half-ton to be moved before he could free her leg. With a broken sin- gle-tree he managed it. The leg, when he had laid her on the pebbly sand, canted sharply above the ankle, and Bill knew that it was broken. ° So passively she lay that a frenzy of panic took -hold of Bill. He called to her ; frantically he rubbed her hands. A minute drummed past and she had not moved. Bill bent to place his ear against her breast. Relief made his knees weak. He could hear a thready murmur over the slogging of his own pulse. . It was when he tried to move her that he learned why she had not awakened. Blood matted the golden hair at the back of her head, where a rock had struck. Terror.grew in Bill’s mind. Fracture... concussion. ... Sweat covered his blood- smeared face. All at once he knew he had to get her back to Kingbolt. -Red, his sorrel gelding, stood nearby. The crash had torn him free gf the har- ness. Bill thanked God he had not broken ~a leg. The horse stood shivering while he caught the broken lines. Bill strapped crude splints about Jeanie’s broken leg. Before mounting he went over and put a bullet through the injured Salty’s head. Then he was starting back along the road his carelessness had made a trail of tragedy. He rode slowly. The smallest jolt might mean Jeanie’s life. ILL BRONC wanted all this to be a malignant dream. He wanted to wake up and find himself in his ’dobe shack in Devil’s Canyon. He wanted to hear his horses whinnying in the corrals. He want- ed the feel of yellow sunlight on his face, telling him it was daylight and there was work to do. 13 He wanted to know Jeanie was down in the valley; that she was all right. But his arms ached with the weight of her, lying there broken and still, and he knew it was a dream from which he would not wakeup. Most of that ride Bill didn’t think at all. Even regret couldn’t cling to a mind struck blank by terror. In the room where Bill Bronc’s hopes lived, all the candles had gone out. And Bill’s numbed brain sat there shivering in the darkness. Yet the sharp goad of self-preservation made itself felt once. There would be a riot when Kingbolt learned what had happened. A lynching; or Scotty Hallett would be given precedence with his guns. Bill reached the hogsback where the road humped over into the valley. King- bolt lay a splatter of phosphorescence in the flats between the shelving mesas and the river. A mile across the river, in a scope of shade trees, lay Scotty Hallett’s fortress. Hatred of the intolerant cattle king swept like a corroding flux across Bill’s mind, leaving little pits filled with gall. On Hallett’s narrow-mindedness and bigotry, Bill blamed what had happened to Jeanie. From his almost constant searching of the girl’s features, Bill looked up to see the town before him. At a walk, he turned the horse down Main Street. Jeanie hadn’t ' moved in the hour and a half it had taken them to come. It was nearly ten o'clock. Until Bill came abreast of the saloon, no one noticed them. Then a man who came through the batwings saw and gave a start. Bill recognized Paso Anson, Scotty’s foreman. The lean, veteran puncher stepped down in the thick dust to stare. “Boy, howdy!” Anson exclaimed. “Hoss kick you in the face, squatter?’ Bill remembered the blows on his face. His nose was broken and dried blood covered his face, his hands, his shirt. Pain flashed through his COPMICLOOOKS (E©@)