Crazy Rhythm

By Max Brand

After 8 years in prison for murder, Jimmy Geary returns to his town Yellow Creek, and his past, and an ambush. Jimmy was very happy to see town again. But there are three men who aren’t happy to see Jimmy Geary return, and they conspire to make his stay this time very short... Neatly plotted and briskly told, it illustrates Max Brand’s remarkable gift for storytelling. One of the greatest western authors of all time, Frederick Faust wrote under sixteen different pseudonyms, including the best known being „Max Brand”. Although he wrote under many genres, westerns were his forte. Max Brand leads the reader on a very authentic tale of the old west the way it was.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ktoczyta.pl
• Release date: Nov 26, 2019
• ISBN: 9788382008906

Max Brand

Max Brand® (1892–1944) is the best-known pen name of widely acclaimed author Frederick Faust, creator of Destry, Dr. Kildare, and other beloved fictional characters. Orphaned at an early age, he studied at the University of California, Berkeley. He became one of the most prolific writers of our time but abandoned writing at age fifty-one to become a war correspondent in World War II, where he was killed while serving in Italy.

Book preview

Max Brand

Crazy Rhythm

Warsaw 2019

Contents

I. BACK FROM PRISON

II. THE AMBUSH

I. BACK FROM PRISON

WHEN Jimmy Geary came in sight of Yellow Creek again, he sat down on a pine log beside the road and stared at his hometown, from the old mill at one end to the house of the Bentons on the hill, with its thin wooden spires pointing up above the trees. Best of all, he could mark the roof of Graham’s Tavern beyond the rest of the houses. It was still painted red, but the wave of climbing vines had thrown a spray of green across the shingles since he had last sat in the cool of the bar room and smelled the pungencies of whiskey and the pleasant sour of beer.

Behind him, following taller than the mountains, around him thicker than the trees, before him more obscuring than the morning mist, he felt his eight years of prison. Eight years out of twenty-six is a long time. Prison monotony had made everything about those years dim except their length; the distinct moments of his life, so clear that he felt he could mark them in every day of his past, continued to that moment when he had seen the card come out of Tony Spargo’s sleeve. Of course, he knew that there were card cheats, but it had seemed impossible that big, beautiful Tony Spargo, so rich in eye and color and song, could actually be doing dirt for the sake of a fifteen-dollar pot. Gus Warren, at the same table, too magnificent of brow and manner, or the Mexican with the wide face of a Chinese idol, might have been suspected, but never Tony.

He had shouted in a voice that tore his throat and cast a redness over his eyes, then he had grabbed the Colt that Tony had flashed and pulled his own gun. The weight of two bullets jarred Tony Spargo in his chair like two blows of a fist. But they were all in cahoots, the three of them. Oñate came in with a knife; Gus Warren’s