The No-Gun Man E-Book

L. Ron Hubbard

• Herausgeber: WS
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Serie: Western Short Stories Collection
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Seitenzahl: 145

Beschreibung

As a young man Monte Calhoun thought the measure of a man was how hard he could drink and how straight he can shoot. But several years back East have changed him and he has become The No-Gun Man. Monte’s civilized now even if that means refusing to avenge the murder of his own father. But in a land of outlaws and ambushes, it’s only a question of how far Monte will be pushed before he pushes back ... with a vengeance. Blaze a bloody trail back to the American frontier as The No-Gun Man shows how wild the Wild West can make a man.

Leseprobe

SELECTED FICTION WORKSBY L. RON HUBBARD

FANTASY

The Case of the Friendly Corpse

Death’s Deputy

Fear

The Ghoul

The Indigestible Triton

Slaves of Sleep & The Masters of Sleep

Typewriter in the Sky

The Ultimate Adventure

SCIENCE FICTION

Battlefield Earth

The Conquest of Space

The End Is Not Yet

Final Blackout

The Kilkenny Cats

The Kingslayer

The Mission Earth Dekalogy*

Ole Doc Methuselah

To the Stars

ADVENTURE

The Hell Job series

WESTERN

Buckskin Brigades

Empty Saddles

Guns of Mark Jardine

Hot Lead Payoff

A full list of L. Ron Hubbard’snovellas and short stories is provided at the back.

*Dekalogy: a group of ten volumes

Published by Galaxy Press, LLC 7051 Hollywood Boulevard, Suite 200 Hollywood, CA 90028

© 2014 L. Ron Hubbard Library. All rights reserved.

Any unauthorized copying, translation, duplication, importation or distribution, in whole or in part, by any means, including electronic copying, storage or transmission, is a violation of applicable laws.

Mission Earth is a trademark owned by L. Ron Hubbard Library and is used with permission. Battlefield Earth is a trademark owned by Author Services, Inc. and is used with permission.

Horsemen illustration and Glossary Illustration from Western Story Magazine is © and ™ Condé Nast Publications and are used with their permission. Fantasy, Far-Flung Adventure and Science Fiction illustrations: Unknown and Astounding Science Fiction copyright © by Street & Smith Publications, Inc. Reprinted with permission of Penny Publications, LLC. “Man for Breakfast” story illustration © 1949 Better Publications, Inc. Reprinted with permission of Hachette Filipacchi Media.

ISBN 978-1-59212-598-2 EPUB versionISBN 978-1-59212-775-7 Kindle versionISBN 978-1-59212-325-4 print versionISBN 978-1-59212-383-4 audiobook version

Library of Congress Control Number: 2007903621

Contents

FOREWORD

THE NO-GUN MAN

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

MAN FOR BREAKFAST

STORY PREVIEW

TINHORN’S DAUGHTER

L. RON HUBBARD IN THEGOLDEN AGE OFPULP FICTION

THE STORIES FROM THEGOLDEN AGE

GLOSSARY

FOREWORD

Stories from Pulp Fiction’s Golden Age

AND it was a golden age.

The 1930s and 1940s were a vibrant, seminal time for a gigantic audience of eager readers, probably the largest per capita audience of readers in American history. The magazine racks were chock-full of publications with ragged trims, garish cover art, cheap brown pulp paper, low cover prices—and the most excitement you could hold in your hands.

“Pulp” magazines, named for their rough-cut, pulpwood paper, were a vehicle for more amazing tales than Scheherazade could have told in a million and one nights. Set apart from higher-class “slick” magazines, printed on fancy glossy paper with quality artwork and superior production values, the pulps were for the “rest of us,” adventure story after adventure story for people who liked to read. Pulp fiction authors were no-holds-barred entertainers—real storytellers. They were more interested in a thrilling plot twist, a horrific villain or a white-knuckle adventure than they were in lavish prose or convoluted metaphors.

The sheer volume of tales released during this wondrous golden age remains unmatched in any other period of literary history—hundreds of thousands of published stories in over nine hundred different magazines. Some titles lasted only an issue or two; many magazines succumbed to paper shortages during World War II, while others endured for decades yet. Pulp fiction remains as a treasure trove of stories you can read, stories you can love, stories you can remember. The stories were driven by plot and character, with grand heroes, terrible villains, beautiful damsels (often in distress), diabolical plots, amazing places, breathless romances. The readers wanted to be taken beyond the mundane, to live adventures far removed from their ordinary lives—and the pulps rarely failed to deliver.

In that regard, pulp fiction stands in the tradition of all memorable literature. For as history has shown, good stories are much more than fancy prose. William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Jules Verne, Alexandre Dumas—many of the greatest literary figures wrote their fiction for the readers, not simply literary colleagues and academic admirers. And writers for pulp magazines were no exception. These publications reached an audience that dwarfed the circulations of today’s short story magazines. Issues of the pulps were scooped up and read by over thirty million avid readers each month.

Because pulp fiction writers were often paid no more than a cent a word, they had to become prolific or starve. They also had to write aggressively. As Richard Kyle, publisher and editor of Argosy, the first and most long-lived of the pulps, so pointedly explained: “The pulp magazine writers, the best of them, worked for markets that did not write for critics or attempt to satisfy timid advertisers. Not having to answer to anyone other than their readers, they wrote about human beings on the edges of the unknown, in those new lands the future would explore. They wrote for what we would become, not for what we had already been.”

Some of the more lasting names that graced the pulps include H. P. Lovecraft, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert E. Howard, Max Brand, Louis L’Amour, Elmore Leonard, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Erle Stanley Gardner, John D. MacDonald, Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein—and, of course, L. Ron Hubbard.

In a word, he was among the most prolific and popular writers of the era. He was also the most enduring—hence this series—and certainly among the most legendary. It all began only months after he first tried his hand at fiction, with L. Ron Hubbard tales appearing in Thrilling Adventures,Argosy,Five-Novels Monthly,Detective Fiction Weekly,Top-Notch,Texas Ranger,War Birds,Western Stories, even Romantic Range. He could write on any subject, in any genre, from jungle explorers to deep-sea divers, from G-men and gangsters, cowboys and flying aces to mountain climbers, hard-boiled detectives and spies. But he really began to shine when he turned his talent to science fiction and fantasy of which he authored nearly fifty novels or novelettes to forever change the shape of those genres.

Following in the tradition of such famed authors as Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Jack London and Ernest Hemingway, Ron Hubbard actually lived adventures that his own characters would have admired—as an ethnologist among primitive tribes, as prospector and engineer in hostile climes, as a captain of vessels on four oceans. He even wrote a series of articles for Argosy, called “Hell Job,” in which he lived and told of the most dangerous professions a man could put his hand to.

Finally, and just for good measure, he was also an accomplished photographer, artist, filmmaker, musician and educator. But he was first and foremost a writer, and that’s the L. Ron Hubbard we come to know through the pages of this volume.

This library of Stories from the Golden Age presents the best of L. Ron Hubbard’s fiction from the heyday of storytelling, the Golden Age of the pulp magazines. In these eighty volumes, readers are treated to a full banquet of 153 stories, a kaleidoscope of tales representing every imaginable genre: science fiction, fantasy, western, mystery, thriller, horror, even romance—action of all kinds and in all places.

Because the pulps themselves were printed on such inexpensive paper with high acid content, issues were not meant to endure. As the years go by, the original issues of every pulp from Argosy through Zeppelin Stories continue crumbling into brittle, brown dust. This library preserves the L. Ron Hubbard tales from that era, presented with a distinctive look that brings back the nostalgic flavor of those times.

L. Ron Hubbard’s Stories from the Golden Age has something for every taste, every reader. These tales will return you to a time when fiction was good clean entertainment and the most fun a kid could have on a rainy afternoon or the best thing an adult could enjoy after a long day at work.

Pick up a volume, and remember what reading is supposed to be all about. Remember curling up with a great story.

—Kevin J. Anderson

KEVIN J. ANDERSON is the author of more than ninety critically acclaimed works of speculative fiction, including The Saga of Seven Suns, the continuation of the Dune Chronicles with Brian Herbert, and his New York Times bestselling novelization of L. Ron Hubbard’s Ai! Pedrito!

The No-Gun Man

CHAPTER ONE

Blood Feud

THE stage whirled across the dusty plain, leaving towers of yellow dust hanging from the intense sky. Flattened into a straight line by speed, the six horses tore through gullies and over knolls, past red pinnacles and around gray boulders. Across sagebrush flats and alkalisinks they raced, urged on by the curling, talking whip of the driver who seemed, with each pop of it, personally to throw the stage forward at a still greater speed than before.

The driver wasn’t bearing the news of holdup or rebellion. He was carrying the person of Monte Calhoun and in that act he seemed to find a savage exultation which expressed itself whenever he got a chance to glance back, with rheumy old eyes, over the coach top under which said Monte was riding.

Now and then the driver would let out a sound halfway between a railroad whistle and an ailing bull’s bellow, but which, if you gave it attention, would turn into a raucous song. It had something to do with somebody laying somebody else in his grave. The emphasis which the driver gave these words and the meaning he put into his glances back and down were obviously related.

In the coach, shaken up like a die in the hands of a losing gambler, rode Captain Terence O’Leary of the Seventh Cavalry, a young man and a proud man who was, for the first time, taking something like law and order into the Superstition country. Beside him sat Monte Calhoun, a much less resplendent but somehow stronger man.

“What the devil is he bellowing about up there?” complained O’Leary, desperately trying to keep a suitcase from falling on him and not fall himself into Calhoun’s lap.

“Jesse James,” said Monte. “That’s Old Darby up there. He never could sing.”

“I must say you seem to know everything and everybody,” said O’Leary. “But if you call that singing, you’ve got a lot to learn about music, my boy. How much longer will we be on this confounded ride?”

“Until we get there,” said Monte. “I sure don’t see why you are so anxious about it.”

“I am young,” said O’Leary, “and unless I break my neck riding this coach or get poisoned by the slop they’ve called food at these stations, I yet may rise to great heights.” He strenuously put the suitcase back in place for the hundredth time.

Monte was almost struck down by another piece of dislodged luggage, but in rescuing it, remembered what it contained and pulled out a bottle of wine. He extracted the cork with his teeth and passed the bottle to O’Leary.

They tried for the next three miles to take a drink of it, but the road, Old Darby and the state of the springs prohibited this until they pulled up sharply in the yard of the way station. They sighed as one and emptied the bottle.

There was a broken trace then and a delay and O’Leary got down to stretch his yellow-striped legs, leaving Monte the whole seat to lie across.

Old Darby was rinsing out his mouth with a tin cupful of traders’ whiskey, grandly oblivious of the swearing hostlers who wrestled with harness and team.

“I think,” said O’Leary, “that you must have missed some bumps back there. There are several areas of flesh on me which bear no slightest mark of a bruise.”

Old Darby looked thoughtfully at the captain, then grinned and winked hugely. “Well, can’t complain about a man trying to do what’s right and fittin’.”

“Why don’t you try to break your record some other time?”

“’Tain’t the record, Captain. It’s young Monte.” And Old Darby, having gargled the remaining whiskey, now began once more his song about laying people in their graves.

“Don’t,” said O’Leary. “I have a musical ear.”

“It’s Monte,” said the driver, doing a small dance and then hugging himself.

“My dear fellow,” said O’Leary, “this is the tenth time you’ve alluded to this. I am afraid I don’t understand. Calhoun seems a very nice fellow. I couldn’t possibly connect him with murder.”

Old Darby laughed gleefully. “Maybe not, Captain. Maybe not. But you just wait until we get to Superstition; you’ll whistle another tune. They up and done what they done and now they got to take their consequences. Yessirree. Take their consequences and get buried.”

“Who?” demanded O’Leary.

“Why, old Spiegel and his condemned boys, that’s who!”

O’Leary sighed. “And what does this Spiegel have to do with Monte Calhoun?”

“Why, they just killed his father, that’s all. Oh, you wait! There’ll be powder smoke until you can’t breathe for it! You just wait!”

“You mean somebody is going to try to kill Calhoun?”

“No, no! T’other way around. Monte, he’s a sly one. He ain’t lettin’ on.” And Darby slapped the captain’s back, did another dance step and jumped up to the box.

O’Leary got in and looked wonderingly at Monte. That person had now consigned himself to slumber and in sleep he looked very angelic and not at all murderous. The starting of the coach wakened him and he sat up so that O’Leary could sit down.

The captain was silent for some miles and then, in consideration of his official position, decided to brave it. He had taken a fancy to young Monte.

“Did you ever hear,” said O’Leary, “of a man named Spiegel?”

Monte looked at him, pushed back his hat with his thumb and cocked his head over on one side, questioningly. “He owns the Diamond Queen. Sure.”

The captain felt that he was on delicate ground. “Did you … er … have you … well, that is to say … Are you planning to kill him?”

Monte blinked. “Kill Spiegel?”

The captain shrugged. “Well, if you don’t want to confide in me …” He was disappointed. During this long ride from the East he had decided that Monte Calhoun was a friend he would like to have and keep. The young man’s unfailing humor, his calm presence and his good sense loomed large in the captain’s mind.

Monte pulled his hat back down. He was frowning in thought. Suddenly he snapped his fingers. “So that’s what Old Darby has been caterwauling about! Oh, my gosh!” He looked for a moment as if he would crawl out and up to the box and give Darby a piece of his mind and then relaxed. “So that’s what they’ve figured!”

O’Leary respected the pause, for he knew Monte would go on.

The young man settled himself and looked at the captain. “Terence, I’d forgotten that the territorial government had asked you to go to Superstition and declare war on the lawless. You’re interested and you’ve got an explanation coming, but if you think I am going to kill anybody, you’re wrong.”

The captain looked relieved but still a trifle doubtful.

“Terence, four years ago this might have been the case. But I hope that the time I spent studying mining engineering also taught me some sense. Last year my father was murdered by a person or persons unknown. I am afraid that this did not make a very deep impression on me.

“When I was very small, my mother and I were dragged West and hauled through various gold rushes and stampedes, one boomtown and then another, living on canned beans and drinking alkali water. The old man was a pretty tough fellow. He took what he wanted and he never showed anybody much mercy. Particularly my mother. He knew she was sick and yet he dragged her around with him until she finally died. I was just a little kid but I remember it well enough.

“He struck it rich the following year. Found the Deserter Lode on the east side of that range up ahead and sat himself down to gouge every nickel out of it that he could. Peón labor and bullets for anybody who would contest his desires. He was a tough man.

“I went to school and got out of it, learned to eat with a fork and travel a hundred yards without forking a horse. I found out there was something in life besides hating and grabbing.

“Last year my father was ambushed and murdered. Nobody ever identified the bushwhackers. The thing came to trial before Judge Talbot of the territorial government, and this man Spiegel and his three sons were freed of any suspicion. Nobody ever found who killed my father.

“I’ve got a kid brother, Dick, about sixteen or seventeen now. He’s been out here all this time, growing up like sagebrush. I’ve come out to sell the mine and take Dick back to civilization before he’s past salvaging.”

He fell silent and then, after a little, said, “So they think that’s why I’m coming back.”

“You must have enjoyed a reputation out here once for them to think that,” said O’Leary.

“Perhaps. Oh, sure. When I was a little younger I thought the thing to do was drink hard and shoot straight and beat yourself on the chest to the men who drank your whiskey. But you can forget about any trouble you might have with me, Terence. I’ve got no intention of opening the play on a man the law has already absolved from guilt.”