Free Bad Man's Gulch by Max Brand Page B

arms, speaking broken phrases like a child who has newly learned to talk.
    Afterward Tom McLane and his clan strode through the shadows and fronted them. “Two of you have come back,” he said, “an’ I shan’t ask where Henry McLane is now.”
    â€œYou are right,” said Purdue, “for I cannot tell you.”
    McLane removed his hat. “At least,” he said, “he fell by a real man’s hand.”
    â€œYou are wrong,” answered Lazy Purdue, “he fell by a surer hand than that of any man. And now, Tom McLane, I want to say what I have tried to say before and couldn’t. The feud between the McLanes and the Conovers is at an end.”
    â€œThat’s a lie,” said McLane with a slight return ofheat. “I’m tired of bloodshed, but this thing has got to be fought out sometime, and it might as well be fought out now. The McLanes and the Conovers will never rest in peace.”
    â€œThat’s where you’re wrong,” said Lazy Purdue, “for they’re linked together now with blood. There is a McLane that’s a Conover and a Conover that’s a McLane as far as the laws of God and man can make them. I’m the McLane that’s become a Conover.”
    â€œHow in the name o’ God are you a McLane?” breathed Tom.
    â€œDo you remember when Henry McLane, that was your brother, was driven out of the country for killing two Conovers away back years ago?”
    â€œI do.”
    â€œAn’ do ye remember that he took a wee bit of a son along with him when he left?”
    â€œBy God, an’ you’re the boy!” cried Tom McLane. He raised his hand to his lips and gave the long, owl-like cry that had been the rallying call of the McLanes for generations past. “Boys,” he shouted, “this here feud is ended! Here’s a McLane come home to us an’ became a Conover, an’ the feud has done run itself into the ground at last!”
    Late that night, a little before the dawn commenced, Lazy Purdue sat by the bed of Marion and told a long, long story. When he ended, he was astonished to see that she was laughing lightly up to him.
    â€œHoney,” she said, “I knew you was a McLane the minute I looked at you that first night when you stood there with the blood of poor George on your forehead an’ over your heart!”

B ILLY A NGEL ,
T ROUBLE L OVER
    By the 1920s Faust’s output was prodigious and would continue to be so through the 1930s. “Billy Angel, Trouble Lover” was one of twenty-three short novels and stories and thirteen serials to appear in 1924. It was published in the
Western Story Magazine
issue dated November 22 nd under the George Owen Baxter byline. What makes the short novel rather unusual is Faust’s use of the heroine, Sue Markham, as the point of view character. It is through her eyes that we meet Billy Angel, the rascally hero who finds refuge in Sue’s café when he is wounded.

I
S UE T O T HE R ESCUE
    On an October night, Sue Markham saw him first. October nights in the mountains are not the October nights of the plains. In the lowlands the air is crisp, but the frost is not yet in it; in the mountains winter has already come, and on this night the cold was given teeth by a howling wind.
    She preferred these windy, biting nights. For, when the trains reached that little station of Derby and paused to put on the extra engine that would tug them up the long grade and over the shoulder of Derby Mountain, the crews darted in for a piece of pie and a cup of hot coffee. For five minutes, she would be kept busy serving like lightning, and the cash drawer was constantly banging open and shut. Sometimes a passenger hurried in to swallow a morsel of food, listening with a haunted look in his eyes for the cry of “All aboard!” She had glimpses of ladies and gentlemen, in this way. She saw their fine clothes, their train-weary faces. And,