Gunman's Reckoning

Front Cover
Pocket Books, 1986 - Fiction - 246 pages
The fifty empty freights danced and rolled and rattled on the rough road bed andfilled Jericho Pass with thunder; the big engine was laboring and grunting at thegrade, but five cars back the noise of the locomotive was lost. Yet there is a way totalk above the noise of a freight train just as there is a way to whistle into the teethof a stiff wind. This freight-car talk is pitched just above the ordinary tone-it is anovertone of conversation, one might say-and it is distinctly nasal. The brakie couldtalk above the racket, and so, of course, could Lefty Joe. They sat about in thecenter of the train, on the forward end of one of the cars. No matter how the trainlurched and staggered over that fearful road bed, these two swayed in their placesas easily and as safely as birds on swinging perches. The brakie had touched LeftyJoe for two dollars; he had secured fifty cents; and since the vigor of Lefty's oathshad convinced him that this was all the money the tramp had, the two now satelbow to elbow and killed the distance with their talk."It's like old times to have you here," said the brakie. "You used to play this linewhen you jumped from coast to coast.""Sure," said Lefty Joe, and he scowled at the mountains on either side of the pass.The train was gathering speed, and the peaks lurched eastward in a confused, ragged procession. "And a durned hard ride it's been many a time.

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Contents

Section 1
1
Section 2
6
Section 3
11
Copyright

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About the author (1986)

Max Brand is the best-known pen name of Frederick Faust, who was born in Seattle, Washington in 1882, and orphaned early. Faust grew up in the rural San Joaquin Valley of California. At the University of California, Berkeley, he became a student rebel and a one-man literary movement, contributing to campus publications. He was denied his degree because of his unconventional conduct. He then traveled, ending up in New York City where he received simultaneous recognition as a serious poet and successful popular-prose writer. Later, he traveled further, making his home in New York, then in Florence, Italy, and finally Los Angeles. He much preferred Italy, where he lived from 1926 to 1938, and where much of his writing was done. Faust, who wrote under more than a dozen pseudonyms, was a prolific writer, not only of westerns, but also of hundreds of other novels and books, including the popular Dr. Kildare series. Faust's first novel The Untamed (1918) was a success and introduced a semimythical character, Whistlin' Dan Barry, who travels the West following the wild geese, accompanied by a black wolf. His characters, who often have a mythic quality, are memorable, and his books are always entertaining. Faust was also a screenwriter for several Hollywood studios, including MGM, Warner Brothers, and Columbia. Once the United States entered the Second World War, Faust abandoned his lucrative writing career and his work as a screenwriter to serve as a war correspondent with the infantry in Italy, despite his fifty-one years and a bad heart. Faust died in 1944, killed during a night attack on a hilltop village held by the German army. Even after his death, new books based on magazine serials, unpublished manuscripts, or restored versions continue to appear so that he has averaged a new book every four months for seventy-five years.

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