Read Devil's Manhunt (Stories from the Golden Age) for Free Online Page A

raw and built a fire to roast it.
    Carefully, daintily, he cut the meat into small strips. He bit into it and felt the nourishment soaking into his body. He kept himself from eating too much, made himself put the meal away half finished.
    He stood up and rubbed his aching shoulder, where the bullet had creased him, turned to look out across the sunset where the dust devils ranged on the alkali flats. They had been so sure of themselves; he had known they would be. When darkness had come he had realized, in hunger’s brilliant thinking, that they were sure.
    While they had hunted for him on the flats he had put on the dead man’s shoes and cut off the burro’s front legs. He had come in for the canteens which he would need, had hidden the gold and punctured the canteens that he had left. Then he had laid his trap and it had worked. They had been so greedy and so sure—so eager to follow the false trail.
    He straightened and squared his shoulders. It was not pleasant to kill men so, with punctured canteens and thirst on the maddening alkali flats. Tim was too young to do it without a shudder, even though he had to, to save his own life.
    He went down to the creek, picked up the shovel, his shovel, and began to scoop away the mud from under the sluices and load it into the riffles. Presently, as the discolored water ran clear, gold began to gleam in the rocks beneath the sluice where he had dumped it the night before.
    On the bank he ranged up the sacks. From the mud he began to pull up shovels of the pure gold and dump them for cleaning in the sluice. They’d wanted it so hard, and here it was. But they were dead now, dead and mummies out there in the alkali. He shuddered again and addressed himself to his work.
    He shoveled on and on, and as he shoveled, he at length began to whistle. A blue jay mocked him and a squirrel chattered in the pine tree over his head. The woods were sweet and the water sang an accompaniment.
    As he whistled he began to dream of what his stepfather would have to say now.
    It was very quiet and very still as the sunset played its splendid hues on the slopes of the sleeping mountain.

Johnny,
the Town Tamer

Johnny,
the Town Tamer
    T HE toughest town on the railroad was Thorpeville. It had been named for a surveyor who had been jumped by Apaches here in ’71 and obliterated, and whose grave was now no less so on a knoll amongst the tin cans south of the tracks.
    At the moment in history when Johnny tackled Thorpeville, that squalid cluster of shacks and loading pens was the current end of the Texas trail, whence came tens of thousands of heads of beef to be shipped to Kansas City and tens of dozens of Texas punchers to be bilked, cheated, knocked out, poisoned, shot and mayhemed.
    Just now Thorpeville sat in the middle of a sea of prairie mud, the spring rains being late here, and waited for the first of the long, bawling herds which would come and make the citizenry, namely George Bart, solvent once more. Cattle buyers waited in boredom around the New York House, gamblers and their cohorts shuffled cards disconsolately, dance halls had the desolate and deceptive air of churches.
    George Bart was all ready for the brisk trade which would last the next many months. As sole agent for more things than any respectable man would want, Bart had caused his warehouse—the only warehouse—to be full of cases and bottles which gurgled, barrels which sloshed and kegs which purled, as well as more mundane articles such as canned corn, pineapple, peaches, tomatoes and peas, as well as bulging sacks of dried beans and casks of brined beef. George was what might have been called a monopolist; he ran the New York House, the New York Bar, the New York Restaurant and the Gilded Cage Dance Hall. He wholesaled anything he might have left over to the few smaller establishments and kept them from growing by the simple arithmetic of canceling out whatever owner seemed to challenge the main trade.
    A man of Bart’s