The Black Mask — page 67: what you’re looking at

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

Jim Dickinson’s Head By Harold Ward IM Dickinson’s head, pickled in a | jar of alcohol, reposes in the dis- honored fastness of a dusty closet in Doctor Wright’s office. It has been all of a half century since I assisted the doctor’s father, old Doc. Wright, in separating it from its trunk that dark, stormy night out in the weed-grown potters’ field. Yet, last night, when I looked at the grisly relic, the face wore the same wolfish grin that it had borne in life, the fangs were skinned back fero- ciously like the tusks of an angry boar, and the one good eye—the other had been gouged out in a fight years before—glared malevolently, insolent- ly, leeringly, as if, even in death, the owner found a certain grim pleasure in cheating the law which had de- clared that head and body must re- main intact. Jim Dickinson’s body has, in the natural course of events, long been incorporated with the black earth slime from which it came. Over it, the loathsome worms have long since ceased to hold their ghoulish revelry. His filthy soul is without doubt in the hell it created for itself. As for his head—the head he lost to Doc. Wright in a poker game, and which the whisky-sodden old physic dis- penser claimed from the grave rather than brave the unspeakable wrath of the dead outlaw—that is another story. Doc. wanted the head because of the thickness of the skull which had withstood, without cracking, a tattoo from the butt end of a revolver in the hands of a frenzied man. And B, M.—Aug.—_5 Black Peter’s Dickinson wanted him to have it, be- cause it had been fairly won and the only point of honor he ever observed was the payment of his gambling debts. It is of Jim Dickinson’s mal- formed head;\and the black cat with the devil’s temper, and Creole May, the outcast, that this story is written. I WHERE Jim _ Dickinson was spawned, or whelped—or whatever the inception of an anomaly like him can be called—is a question. My personal opinion is that he was never born—that he was created from the slimy, green frog spit that gathers in a scum on stagnant muck—but the preachers will probably take issue with me on that point. At any rate, I know of my own knowledge that there were more maggots of deviltry squirming inside the black- ness of his skull than could ever exist in the same space in hell. Jim Dickinson made his first bid for our attention by appearing in saloon one. dark, stormy night—a big, hulking figure of a man with a broken, hooked nose and a black, tangled thatch of whis- kers. His huge, misshapen head stuck out, turtle-wise, on a _ thick, bull neck. His thin, cruel lips were drawn back in a snarl of vindictive hatred of the world in general, over yellowed fangs so large as to almost appear artificial. One socket was empty. ‘From the other blazed an orb, ‘so. © badly Eyres out of shape by 65