King of the Gunmen
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They call him Suicide, Smoke or simply Sudden Death. His name is Kit Gordon, and from the banks of the Mississippi to the shores of the Pacific, he is King of the Gunmen. As tall and lean and tough as a young John Wayne, Kit’s about to discover that sometimes it takes more than a quick draw and a sure aim to stand up like a man.
Falsely accused of murder and one step ahead of a lynch mob, Kit escapes to the next county over—and a whole new identity. He changes his name and his whole outlook, teaming up with a lawman out to bring the rule of law to this untamed corner of Arizona.
But the two men are soon drawn into the middle of a bloody feud between cattle ranchers and sheepherders. Before it’s over, the battle will lead Kit to a moment of truth … or a lifetime of lies. He’ll have to take a stand and reveal that he’s a wanted man—or turn tail and run for his life, never looking back.
Born and raised in the twilight of the Old West—from Nebraska plain to the mountains of Montana—L. Ron Hubbard grew up in the company of real cowboys and rugged frontiersmen, even becoming a blood brother to a Blackfoot medicine man. His firsthand knowledge allowed him to instill a grit and authenticity into his stories that made him one of the leading writers of Westerns, publishing a total of 34 of them by the 1950s.
Also includes the western adventure “The No-Gun Gunhawk,” the story of a legendary gunslinger’s son who swears never to take up a gun—until he is forced to break his vow when it becomes a matter of life and death.
L. Ron Hubbard
With 19 New York Times bestsellers and more than 350 million copies of his works in circulation, L. Ron Hubbard is among the most enduring and widely read authors of our time. As a leading light of American Pulp Fiction through the 1930s and '40s, he is further among the most influential authors of the modern age. Indeed, from Ray Bradbury to Stephen King, there is scarcely a master of imaginative tales who has not paid tribute to L. Ron Hubbard. Then too, of course, there is all L. Ron Hubbard represents as the Founder of Dianetics and Scientology and thus the only major religion born in the 20th century.
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Book preview
King of the Gunmen - L. Ron Hubbard
SELECTED FICTION WORKS
BY 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’s
novellas and short stories is provided at the back.
*Dekalogy: a group of ten volumes
Illustration of the book cover.Published by
Galaxy Press, LLC
7051 Hollywood Boulevard, Suite 200
Hollywood, CA 90028
© 2013 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 are © 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.
ISBN 978-1-59212-580-7 ePub version
ISBN 978-1-59212-768-9 Kindle version
ISBN 978-1-59212-402-2 print version
ISBN 978-1-59212-348-3 audiobook version
Library of Congress Control Number: 2007903616
Contents
FOREWORD
KING OF THE GUNMEN
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
THE NO-GUN GUNHAWK
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
STORY PREVIEW:
THE NO-GUN MAN
L. RON HUBBARD IN THE
GOLDEN AGE OF
PULP FICTION
THE STORIES FROM THE
GOLDEN 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!
King of the
Gunmen
Chapter One
THE outlook of Kit Gordon was as bleak as the tawny desert which writhed in the heat below his cliff. Never in his thirty-one years had he sunk so far or faced death in such a variety of ways.
And that was saying a great deal, as men had variously dubbed the lean gunslinger Suicide,
Smoke
and Sudden Death.
From the Missouri to the Pacific, tales were told about the branding fires of the things Kit Gordon was supposed to have done—and sometimes he had done them and always, even if he had not, he was capable of the feats.
Few men could honestly swear that they had met him but his general appearance was very well known. He stood six feet one, hardly thick enough through the waist to cast a shadow were it not for his double guns, swelling out to broad and heavy shoulders which bore up a well-shaped head from