"What a wonderful story this was about Bob Howard and his dog Patch," Novalyne Price Ellis wrote in her memoir of Robert E. Howard, One Who Walked Alone. "I should make a story out of it."
As Howard's father, Dr. Isaac Howard, told her, "Wherever Bob went, Patch went. Patch even shared Bob's food at the table and was a real companion. . . But there was something about Dr. Howard's story that bothered me. As soon as the dog got sick and they knew it was going to die, Bob went to (the nearby town of ) Brownwood, so that he wouldn't see his dog in his last few days on earth. . . "
And Novalyne wondered how Bob Howard "could write about horrible deaths and dying, yet be so afraid of a dog's death he could not even stay near? It didn't make sense somehow. But if Bob made sense, I probably wouldn't like the big ox."
Perhaps it was through wrestling with such contradictions within himself that Howard wrote the subject of today's post.
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The Man on the Ground
by Robert E. Howard
Set in 19th century West Texas, this is the tale of a feud between Cal Reynolds and his deadly enemy, Esau Brill.
Reynolds is fast with fists and guns, with "instincts (that) rose sheer from the naked primitive," Howard wrote. "And from them crystallized an almost tangible abstraction -- a hate too strong for even death to destroy; a hate powerful enough to embody itself in itself, without the aid or the necessity of material substance."
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Driven by this hatred, Reynolds and Brill fire at each other almost simultaneously. Brill's bullet apparently misses Reynolds, who suffers a scalp would. After a momentary unconsciously passes, Reynolds realizes Brill's bullet must have ricocheted off a stone, striking him only a passing blow.
However, it was a strong enough blow to knock Reynolds from behind the rocks where he had taken cover, striking his rifle from his hands and leaving him in full view of Brill. As Reynolds leaps for his dropped gun, he is amazed that, instead of firing, Brill is walking directly toward him.
Reynolds doesn't stop to question either Brill's strange behavior or his own feelings.
"Men who live by their hands have little time for self-analysis," unlike Howard himself, whose story of is reminiscent of Ambrose Bierce's earlier tale of another near-death experience, An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.
I've never seen any mention of Bierce's influence on Howard, although the older Bierce's eerie stories would have resonated with Howard's own sensibility. Was that because Bierce had been a Union officer during the Civil War? Howard, whose parents, born in a former Confederate state in the aftermath of that war, would probably have been among those who considered "damn Yankee" a single word, as Novalyne wryly quoted one of her sources.
Consider reading both Howard's and Bierce's stories, and decide for yourself. And while you're reading at the Howard site, notice another features writer of the July 1933 issue of Weird Tales magazine in which The Man on the Ground appeared -- Jack Williamson. A contemporary of Howard, Howard lived to the age of 98, writing almost to the end and dying in 2006. By then, Howard had been dead for 70 years.
And what about Novalyne? Her memoir was the basis for a later movie, The Whole Wide World, (https://en.wikipedia.org), starring then screen newcomer Renee Zellweger.
