The Second Western Megapack. Zane Grey

neck, you scrawny devil! Ha, ha, ha!”

      “Another crack out of you and I’ll do it tonight,” Jake growled, and might have done just that if he hadn’t heard a soft step on the porch. He jerked his head up and saw the shad­owy form of a big man peering at him through the window of the door, and in another second James was in the room.

      Jake had never noticed before that James was as ugly as he looked tonight, particularly in the poor light. The shadows accentuated his busted, humped nose and his mean little eyes. Across his mouth was a wide red welt where Jake’s heavy belt buckle had hit him the night before. He had a .44 in his right hand and a bag full of something in his left.

      “So you was fool enough to stay here alone tonight,” he rasped, closing the door behind him.

      “Sometimes I think I’m a pretty big fool,” Jake answered.

      “You proved it tonight,” James said. “And I’m goin’ to teach you it ain’t nice to butt into my fights. I’ve wanted to blast that nosey head of yours open for a long time.”

      “You takin’ your lunch along so you won’t have to owlhoot with’ an empty stomach?” Jake said, indicating the sack.

      “That ain’t no lunch.” James grinned. “I took the trouble to jimmy my way into the bank and shoot that tin box open they got in there. There ain’t no one follerin’, so I mustn’t have been heard. That’s the money in that sack. Most of it’s your money.”

      “You’re welcome to it,” Jake said, but a lump clogged up his throat. When it got to brass tacks, he guessed he’d rather Mary got his money than Luke James. And as he stared at the little round hole in the end of the .44, he realized with a pang that he did not want to die just yet. He wanted to live a little longer, to make sure about that kiss. Just a little longer.

      He knew he’d have been dead in another second if it hadn’t been for Satan, who chose that moment to la­ment that he wanted to take his horse along to heaven.

      James’ trigger finger relaxed a trifle. “Let that crow out. He’s an­other nosey one, just, like you. And I want to blow his head off, too.”

      Jake’s eyes fired. “If anyone blows that crow’s head off, I’ll do it,” he snarled.

      James didn’t argue. He kicked the front off the reed cage, scaring Satan half to death, but the crow shortly re­covered and strutted out onto the floor, smoothing his ruffled feathers with his beak.

      Jake’s heart sank as James raised his gun to shoot Satan, but as he watched the bird, his heart began to rise again and beat very fast. Satan ignored the gun, but peered attentively at James’ face, cocking his head on one side in a meditative manner. Then he suddenly rose off his feet, beating his wings like a windmill, and dove straight for one of James’ gleaming eyes.

      The gunman tried to leap out of the way of the sharp beak, but lost a piece of his nose to Satan as he shot wildly in the air. The crow was on him again instantly, and James, curs­ing, beat madly at it with his hands. He dropped his gun and fell against the wall as a sizable piece of his lip disappeared.

      Jake grabbed the wheels of his chair and put all his strength into it as he ran his footrest into James’ shins—and the double onslaught was too much for the gunman. He col­lapsed howling to the floor, with Sa­tan still intent on his eye and Jake reaching for the Colt on the floor.

      Jake’s hand closed around the butt just as James regained his feet and jumped at him; he jerked it up and fired, and the gunman fell again, this time to remain, at the foot of his chair.

      Jake hardly had time to re­cover from the excitement before he heard more footsteps running to­ward the house. Quickly he grabbed the sack of money James had dropped and shoved it under the blanket that covered his legs; then he leaned back and closed his eyes.

      Mary and Bob Partridge burst into the house a moment later—and Mary in­stantly fell on Jake, threw her arms around his heck, and began to sob hysterically, “He’s dead; he’s dead!”

      Jake was getting drenched with tears. He partly opened one eye.

      “Oooooh—where am I?” he groaned. “W-what happened?”

      Instead of the tears stopping, they increased.

      “Oh, Uncle! You’re alive! Oh, thank Heaven!”

      “No, thank the devil,” Jake mut­tered.

      In a minute everyone was calm but Bob Partridge, who looked very worried.

      “I don’t know whether I ought to mention it or not after this first shock,” he said. “But they’ve discovered that the bank was robbed sometime this evening. The sheriff thought that either James or a cou­ple strangers who were in town this afternoon might have done it—but there isn’t any money on James. The other two are probably a long way from here by now. You may never see your money again.”

      “This is too much,” Jake said, clos­ing both eyes and appearing to pass away, but opening them immediately thereafter. “This leaves me without a cent. I’ll starve to death.”

      Bob Partridge fidgeted around in discomfort. “Oh, no you won’t,” he burst out suddenly. “I’m here to say that if Miss Mary Platt will have me, I’ll marry her and support you both!”

      Mary smiled through her tears. “Even if I didn’t love you,” she said, “I think I’d marry you anyway.”

      Jake was positively dumbfounded. He wanted to cuss good and loud, but held it back on account of the lady present. He looked at Satan, disconsolate and alone in a corner, staring at Luke James’ closed eyes.

      “Hand that infernal crow here,” he growled.

      “Please don’t hurt him, Uncle,” Mary said. “He uses bad language sometimes, but he’s really a very nice bird.”

      “I ain’t a-goin’ to hurt him,” Jake snapped. “I just want to tell’ him that if he still wants an eye, he can have one of mine!”

      BULLDOG CARNEY, by W. A. Fraser

      I’ve thought it over many ways and I’m going to tell this story as it happened, for I believe the reader will feel he is getting a true picture of things as they were but will not be again. A little padding up of the love interest, a little spilling of blood, would, perhaps, make it stronger technically, but would it lessen his faith that the curious thing happened? It’s beyond me to know—I write it as it was.

      To begin at the beginning, Cameron was peeved. He was rather a diffident chap, never merging harmoniously into the western atmosphere; what saved him from rude knocks was the fact that he was lean of speech. He stood on the board sidewalk in front of the Alberta Hotel and gazed dejectedly across a trench of black mud that represented the main street. He hated the sight of squalid, ramshackle Edmonton, but still more did he dislike the turmoil that was within the hotel.

      A lean-faced man, with small piercing gray eyes, had ridden his buckskin cayuse into the bar and was buying. Nagel’s furtrading men, topping off their spree in town before the long trip to Great Slave Lake, were enthusiastically, vociferously naming their tipple. A freighter, Billy the Piper, was playing the “Arkansaw Traveller” on a tin whistle.

      When the gray-eyed man on the buckskin pushed his way into the bar, the whistle had almost clattered to the floor from the piper’s hand; then he gasped, so low that no one heard him, “By cripes! Bulldog Carney!” There was apprehension trembling in his hushed voice. Well he knew that if he had clarioned the name something would have happened Billy the Piper. A quick furtive look darting over the faces of his companions told him that no one else had recognized the horseman.

      Outside, Cameron, irritated by the rasping tin whistle groaned, “My God! a land of bums!” Three days he had waited to pick up a man to replace a member of his gang down at Fort Victor who had taken a sudden chill through intercepting a plug of cold lead.

      Diagonally across the lane of ooze two men waded