JERRY STRANN
The wrath of the Lord seems less terrible when it
is localised, and the world at large gave thanks daily
that the range of Jerry Strann was limited to the
Three B’s. As everyone in the mountain-desert
knows, the Three B’s are Bender, Buckskin, and
Brownsville; they make the points of a loose triangle
that is cut with canyons and tumbled with mountains,
and that triangle was the chosen stamping ground of
Jerry Strann. Jerry was not born in the region
of the Three B’s and why it should have been
chosen specially by him was matter which the inhabitants
could not puzzle out; but they felt that for their
sins the Lord had probably put his wrath among them
in the form of Jerry Strann.
He was only twenty-four, this Jerry, but he was already
grown into a proverb. Men of the Three B’s
reckoned their conversational dates by the visits
of the youth; if a storm hung over the mountains someone
might remark: “It looks like Jerry Strann
is coming,” and such a remark was always received
in gloomy silence; mothers had been known to hush their
children by chanting: “Jerry Strann will
get you if you don’t watch out.”
Yet he was not an ogre with a red knife between his
teeth. He stood at exactly the perfect romantic
height; he was just six feet tall; he was as graceful
as a young cotton-wood in a windstorm and he was as
strong and tough as the roots of the mesquite.
He was one of those rare men who are beautiful without
being unmanly. His face was modelled with the
care a Praxiteles would lavish on a Phoebus. His
brown hair was thick and dark and every touch of wind
stirred it, and his hazel eyes were brilliant with
an enduring light—the inextinguishable joy
of life.
Consider that there was no malice in Jerry Strann.
But he loved strife as the young Apollo loved strife—or
a pure-blooded bull terrier. He fought with distinction
and grace and abandon and was perfectly willing to
use fists or knives or guns at the pleasure of the
other contracting party. In another age, with
armour and a golden chain and spurs, Jerry Strann
would have been—but why think of that?
Swords are not forty-fives, and the Twentieth Century
is not the Thirteenth. He was, in fact, born
just six hundred years too late. From his childhood
he had thirsted for battle as other children thirst
for milk: and now he rode anything on hoofs and
threw a knife like a Mexican—with either
hand—and at short range he did snap shooting
with two revolvers that made rifle experts sick at
heart.
However, the men of the Three B’s, as everyone
understands, are not gentle or long-enduring, and
you will wonder why this young destroyer was allowed
to range at large so long. There was a vital reason.
Up in the mountains lived Mac Strann, the hermit-trapper,
who hated everything in the wide world except his
young brother, the beautiful, wild, and sunny Jerry
Strann. And Mac Strann loved his brother as much
