“Gents on the Lynch”
by Robert E. Howard
***
It’s tempting to speculate that if only Robert E. Howard hadn't had such an interfering mother, and if only he'd married that
pretty young schoolteacher Novalyne Price (later Price Ellis) when she sashayed
into his life in the small Texas town of Cross Plains, he might have led a long
and happy life. Not to mention – he might have written a lot more stories!
Personally, I have my doubts that Howard would have ever
married, even if his mother hadn’t been alarmingly possessive of her only son.
That’s pure speculation, of course, although it’s interesting to note that his
friendship with Price Ellis, despite its apparent emotional intimacy, never
caught fire. Neither was there any real sexual feeling between his male
protagonists and the women who sometimes wandered through his stories, women,
it seems, added more to appeal to his male readers than to Howard himself.
Although there’s something to be said for Hannah Sprague, derringer-toting
belle of the gold mining town of Blue Lizard, as Howard relates in one of the
last of his Western stories, “Gents on the Lynch.”
“(The editor) at Argosy
is asking for more westerns,” Price Ellis reports Howard saying in her memoir, One Who Walked Alone. “. . . but, damn,
I can’t get anything written anymore. Damn it to hell, my time is so goddamn
taken up with housework and caring for my mother, I can’t write. I don’t have
time to write.”
Despite his worries, even his deepening depression, Howard
finally found time to write one of his most humorous and enchanting Westerns,
“Gents on the Lynch,” featuring Pike Bearfield, a brawler with a heart of gold.
Pike is, in fact, an alter ego of fighting sailor Steve Costigan of Howard’s
boxing stories.
“I ain’t one of these here fellers which wastes their time
trying to figger out why things is like they is, and why people does things
like they does,” Pike declares. “I got better employment for my spare time,
sech as sleeping.”
In some respects, Pike is a near contemporary of Lennie
Small, the mentally-limited giant of John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, published in 1937. (“Gents on the Lynch” was first
published in the October 17, 1936, issue of Argosy
magazine – four months after Howard’s death.)
But unlike Lenny, Pike, despite losing first his boots and
then his pack mule trying to help a fast-talking stranger -- and nearly getting
lynched in the process by a posse of vigilantes -- always comes out on top.
Almost always, at least, thanks as much to the “holy fool” quality of his
innocence and the aid of his pugnacious horse Satanta (named for a great Kiowa
war chief) as to his own fighting abilities.
When told by the purported beau of the lovely Hannah that
her father will give her hand in marriage to the man who can guard his gold,
Pike offers himself as guardian. No sooner has the strangely jubilant beau
relinquished the chore than another stranger offers his aid (and a plentiful
supply of whisky) to help Pike with his duty. None of these, of course, has the
welfare of Pike in mind, although with the male chauvinism typical of the
period, he will proclaim himself the victim only of “female perfidy.”
I found this story in Grim
Lands: The Best of Robert E. Howard. But you can read it free online at
Project Gutenberg . . . and drop a tear at the realization that if
Howard had lived to a ripe old age, this might still be protected by copyright.
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