After he left I got out my tallybook and ticked off the men Dirty Jake had killed: One Eye Jack Sundstrom, Fat Charlie Ticknor, Pilander Quantrell, Lobo Stephens, Alec the Frenchman Dubois, some jackass Texan nobody even knew and the rest, all men whose brains had telegraphed a special signal to Jake’s gun before it reached their own right hand. Well, there was a new pistolero in town.
A month and a half later I was craned around, trying to lance a boil of my own, when out of the corner of my eye I saw Dirty Jake go by under my window. He’d dug that hat with the ostrich plume out from under the rocks, his hand was healed, he was swinging his umbrella and he didn’t so much as look up. He was headed for the Owl Hoot Palace. I decided the boil’d wait.
Less than five minutes later I heard the shots, two of them. A second later Jubal Bean, swamper at the Owl Hoot, came pounding up the boardwalk and hollered in the door: “Doc, better come quick. Dirty Jake just took a couple slugs in the chest and he never even got to draw!”
I took my time. “It was just a matter of odds,” I said. “Who got him?”
“The new one,” Jubal said, “the man they call Lefty.”
Well, a couple more weeks to bleach, a little wiring, and I’ll be heading East. Look for the billboards:
MR. BONES
The Fastest Draw in the West
“Faster than Billy the Kid and Twice as Dead”
presented by
HIRAM PERTWEE, M.D.
All I’ve got to do is figure how to keep getting mad at Jake.
ALL THE TEA IN CHINA
by R. Bretnor
I was suitably startled to learn last year that a recent conference of the Modern Language Association had included a seminar on science fiction — but my sense of shock was in no way due to the realization that s-f has exerted its influence on our language, as it had on our literature. What surprised me was that official cognizance of this self-evident phenomenon should have been taken, so readily, by a learned body of academicians.
Actually, publishers of science fantasy have known for some time that the colleges and universities provide some of their best markets! but s-f reading was something almost everybody did, and practically nobody talked about. I wonder how much of this emergence of science fiction from the academic kitchen to its parlor is due to the change in media (so much easier to discuss a story from Atlantic or even the Post, than one from Thrilling Wonder), and how much to the persistent subversive efforts of a few literary guerrillas who have been sniping steadily from positions of irreproachable intellectual eminence at the guardians of literary snobbery. The more celebrated of these have included Anthony Boucher, Clifton Fadiman, and the late Fletcher Pratt; but none have been more staunchly effective than Reg Bretnor.
Linguist, Orientalist, lecturer, critic, and author, Bretnor’s last two books have been a translation of Moncrif’s Les Chats (Golden Cockerel Press; 400 copies; morocco, $40; cloth, $20); and a paperback collection of vignette-length extended s-f puns. In the past he has served as adviser on Asian affairs to the U.S. Government; taught writing at San Quentin; edited one of the earliest and best volumes of s-f criticism (Modern Science Fiction, Coward-McCann, 1953). His short stories appear, ordinarily, either in literary quarterlies or in s-f magazines.
It was mighty lucky for me that my Grandma Whitford caught on in time. If she hadn’t, chances are I would’ve grown up just like her Great-uncle Jonas Hackett, and come to the same sort of end, shaking hands with the Devil himself before breakfast, and with not even a Christian tombstone over me at the last for folks to come look at.
I was down in an empty stall at the barn, making a trade with Jim Bledsoe. Jim was sniveling and crying and begging me not to make him go through with the trade, which he’d already agreed to, and I wasn’t giving an inch.
He picked up his 12-gauge Iver-Johnson, and his two Belgian hares, and his skates, and fondled them kind of, and put them back down with the rest of his stuff; and he said, maybe for the twentieth time, “Aw, B-Bill, you — you can have all the rest. But p-p-please lemme keep my old shotgun, p-please.”
And I said, “Not for all the tea in China, I won’t. No sirree bob!”
It was right then Grandma showed up, her little eyes crackling and sparkling, and her lips set as tight as when she was mad at some fresh city peddler. Small as she was, she grabbed my left ear and twisted real hard.
“Ow!” I said.
She twisted again. “All the tea in China, indeed!” she snapped. “I’ll all-the-tea-in-China you, boy. Now you give those things back to Jimmy — this instant! And Jimmy, you take ‘em and skeddaddle on home.”
“Aw, Gran’ma,” I grumbled, “we’re only making a trade. There’s nothing wrong with just— Yow!”
“Don’t lie to me, boy. You were chiseling him out of his eyeteeth. That whole big pile for a one-bladed jack-knife and a busted war sword! It’s that bad Hackett blood in you, I do declare. You’re getting to be as wicked and sinful as Great-uncle Jonas.” She looked at Jimmy again, who was fiddling around, still scared to pick up his things. “Go ahead, take ‘em,” she told him. “The sheriff won’t ever hear how you burned down his outhouse — that’s a promise. When I get through with Bill here, he won’t say a word.” She twisted my ear harder than ever. “No sirree bob — not for all the tea in China, he won’t!”
And as soon as Jimmy had beat it, she marched me out of the barn, and straight past the house while the hired-hand snickered, and around the big corn-patch and right up the east slope of Hackett’s Hill. She didn’t slow down or let go of my ear till we got clean to the top; and even though Hackett’s Hill isn’t more than a couple hundred feet high, I was just about out of breath.
She told me to sit. “Wonder why I brought you up here?”
Hackett’s Hill wasn’t worth climbing. It was sort of lumpy and brown, with nothing but scrubby dry weeds growing on it. All you could see from the top was the Post Road winding around it before straightening out down the valley, and our house, and Smathers’. So I nodded.
“I brought you,” she said, “because it was right about here that Jonas Hackett’s place was before he was took by the Devil, and because I can see his spirit’s strong in you, and because I aim to drive it clean out.”
She stared at me till it seemed that a cold little wind blew across Hackett’s Hill and into my spine. “Boy,” she asked, “what do you want to be when you’ grown?”
I looked down at my shoes. “I want to be rich,” I told her defiantly. “I want to move down to Boston, and have a big house, and a carriage, and a gold watch and chain, and tell folks what to do.”
“I thought so,” she said. “Well, that’s all right for some, whose natures are honest and can stand off temptation — but it isn’t for you. You’re going to Harvard College instead, and let ‘em make you a doctor.”
“No, ma’am,” I answered right back. “I wouldn’t do that. No, siree bob. Not for—” Then I remembered my ear and shut up.
“Not for all the tea in China,” she finished up for me. “No siree bob. And that’s just what Great-uncle Jonas answered them back when they wanted him to go down to Harvard. Now you sit real still, and don’t interrupt, and I’ll tell you the story. Only don’t go telling anyone else, because it’s nothing we’re proud of, and it’s best kept in the family.”