Adventure Magazine, April 10, 1924 — page 83: what you’re looking at

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

The Longstriker 81 Any of the rest of us would have inter- fered if we had known how, but he didn’t seem to hear what we said, and the only way to get him loose was to knock him cold or kill him, and some way everybody waited for the other fellow and nobody went for a club. And then a wool-buyer by the name of Reynolds suddenly shouldered his way through the crowd. ““Owen!”’ he yelled. ‘Owen, have you forgotten Mamie York—-Mamie York.” For a second it seemed that the words, whatever they might mean, had failed to sink into Owen’s brain; then his fingers slowly began to relax, and Chris Jensen’s blackened face began to get some color as his respiratory organs again began to func- tion. The insane look on Owen’s face began to pass away like fog lifting slowly from a hill-top. He got to his feet and rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand. Then he reached out sort of impulsively and shook hands with Reynolds, and started toward our tent. “One minute,” Buell says. ‘‘Look at the ragged edges of. this cut where I’ve wiped the blood away. It never was done with no machine. If I ain’t a liar it was done with a pair of old-fashioned blade shears.” We all saw Pete Jensen turn pale, an’ there was a rush toward the chute where the sheared sheep were turned loose. Shoved down between a couple of boards was a pair o’ blade shears with the blood on ’em still sticky. It was all plain enough. After Owen’s pen of woolies were turned out Pete had caught one and maimed it so that Owen would get the blame. Buell made a sign toward his office an’ the Sanpete bunch trailed over to git their time. After what had: happened they was gittin’ off easy, and they didn’t even chirp when Bueil announced that they’d lost their bet to Owen. There was nothin’ to keep Owen from goin’ in an’ shearin’ if he felt like it, an? after I’d bandaged that bleeding arm of his he went-in an’ knocked out seventy head that afternoon. It was lucky that he did, for a few weeks later we learned that he had won that prize by havin’ just fifteen more fleeces than the next best shearer of the season, a fellow by the name of Thompson whom we’d only seen once or twice. And the next mornin’ that arm was swelled to twice its natural size, an’ he couldn’t raise it. What he suffered with it that afternoon nobody knows. Naturally everybody was crazy to know what Reynolds had meant by his reference to Mamie York. To do the woel-buyer credit he wouldn’t say a word until Owen give him permission. We learned at the same time that Reynolds was the man who was keeping an eye on the shearin’ contest because he was a friend of the sheepman who was puttin’ up the prize money, an’ because his business took him to every corral in the country. . “Mamie York,” says Reynolds, ‘“‘is the widow of a man who Owen Davis killed with his two hands after York had pulled agunonhim. The fellow had it coming to him and Owen was acquitted on the grounds of self-defense. I happened to be at the trial and I remembered today how all broke up Owen was every time he’d look at the widow an’ her three kids. I had a hunch.” But it was a long time later before I knew why Owen needed that five thousand dollars so bad. I got the explanation in a letter which Owen wrote me sayin’ he was done shearin’ for life. “There’s toe many chances to quarrel, and I go plumb crazy. The jury said I had a right to kill York, but I know a —— sight better. If it hadn’t been for that fool temper of mine I could have licked him and let it go at that. The man had a family Jeft without a provider, and worse than that they owed five thousand dollars on their home that they had to pay by the first of August or lose, and the widow couldn’t make it. Wasn’t it up to me, I ask you that?” COMIGDOOKSEEO