Way Of The Lawless

by Max Brand

Overview

Way Of The Lawless is a fictional novel written by Max Brand. Uncle Jasper has taught Andrew Lanning how to shoot in the same manner as the gunmen of the Old West, when the region was still a little more primitive and wilder. Andrew is perhaps a little too friendly and welcoming. Yet when challenged, he knocks down a man with a glancing punch. He flees, believing he has killed the man. Nevertheless, he kills the commander of the posse while he is being pursued by them and realizes they aren't being fair, starting his life as a desperado. Way Of The Lawless by Max Brand is a masterpiece that takes the reader through a roller-coaster of emotions and unlike other novels, makes no qualms in showing tragedy in its true color and sprit. By the end of the novel, readers will be overwhelmed with sea of emotions.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9789357485630
Publisher:	Double 9 Booksllp
Publication date:	01/03/2023
Pages:	202
Sales rank:	792,058
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.46(d)

About the Author

American author Frederick Schiller Faust (May 29, 1892 - May 12, 1944) is best known for his Western novels written under the pen name Max Brand. For a collection of pulp fiction stories, he (as Max Brand) also invented the well-known fictional character of young medical intern Dr. James Kildare. Over the next several decades, his Kildare character appeared in a variety of other media, including a number of American theatrical films by Paramount Pictures and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), a radio program, two television programs, and comic books. George Owen Baxter, Evan Evans, George Evans, Peter Dawson, David Manning, John Frederick, Peter Morland, George Challis, Peter Ward, Frederick Faust, and Frederick Frost are some of the other aliases used by Faust. For Argosy magazine, Faust wrote the "Tizzo the Firebrand" series under the pen name George Challis. Taking place in Renaissance Italy, the Tizzo saga was a collection of historical swashbuckler tales starring the title hero. When Faust, Frank Gruber, and coauthor Steve Fisher were at Warner Brothers at the beginning of 1944, they frequently engaged in idle talk in the afternoons with Colonel Nee, a technical advisor dispatched from Washington

Read an Excerpt

Chapter 1

Beside the rear window of the blacksmith shop Jasper Lanning held his withered arms folded against his chest. With the dispassionate eye and the aching heart of an artist he said to himself that his life work was a failure. That life work was the young fellow who swung the sledge at the forge, and truly it was a strange product for this seventy-year-old veteran with his slant Oriental eyes and his narrow beard of white. Andrew Lanning was not even his son, but it came about in this way that Andrew became the life work of Jasper.

Fifteen years before, the father of Andy died, and Jasper rode out of the mountain desert like a hawk dropping out of the pale-blue sky. He buried his brother without a tear, and then sat down and looked at the slender child who bore his name. Andy was a beautiful boy. He had the black hair and eyes, the well-made jaw, and the bone of the Lannings, and if his mouth was rather soft and girlish he laid the failing to the weakness of childhood. Jasper had no sympathy for tenderness in men. His own life was as littered with hard deeds as the side of a mountain with boulders. But the black, bright eyes and the well-made jaw of little Andy laid hold on him, and he said to himself: "I'm fifty-five. I'm about through with my saddle days. I'll settle down and turn out one piece of work that'll last after I'm gone, and last with my signature on it!"

That was fifteen years ago. And for fifteen years he had labored to make Andy a man according to a grim pattern which was known in the Lanning clan, and elsewhere in the mountain desert. His program was as simple as the curriculum of a Persian youth. On the whole, it was even simpler, for Jasperconcentrated on teaching the boy how to ride and shoot, and was not at all particular that he should learn to speak the truth. But on the first two and greatest articles of his creed, how Jasper labored!

For fifteen years he poured his heart without stint into his work! He taught Andy to know a horse from hock to teeth, and to ride anything that wore hair. He taught him to know a gun as if it were a sentient thing. He taught him all the draws of old and new pattern, and labored to give him both precision and speed. That was the work of fifteen years, and now at the end of this time the old man knew that his life work was a failure, for he had made the hand of Andrew Lanning cunning, had given his muscles strength, but the heart beneath was wrong.

It was hard to see Andy at the first glance. A film of smoke shifted and eddied through the shop, and Andy, working the bellows, was a black form against the square of the door, a square filled by the blinding white of the alkali dust in the road outside and the blinding white of the sun above. Andy turned from the forge, bearing in his tongs a great bar of iron black at the ends but white in the middle. The white place was surrounded by a sparkling radiance. Andy caught up an eight-pound hammer, and it rose and fell lightly in his hand. The sparks rushed against the leather apron of the hammer wielder, and as the blows fell rapid waves of light were thrown against the face of Andrew.

Looking at that face one wondered how the life work of Jasper was such a failure. For Andy was a handsome fellow with his blue-black hair and his black, rather slanting eyes, after the Lanning manner. Yet Jasper saw, and his heart was sick. The face was a little too full; the square bone of the chin was rounded with flesh; and, above all, the mouth had never changed. It was the mouth of the child, soft--too womanly soft. And Jasper blinked.

When he opened his eyes again the white place on the iron had become a dull red, and the face of the blacksmith was again in shadow. All Jasper could see was the body of Andy, and that was much better. Red light glinted on the sinewy arms and the swaying shoulders, and the hammer swayed and fell tirelessly. For fifteen years Jasper had consoled himself with the strength of the boy, smooth as silk and as durable; the light form which would not tire a horse, but swelled above the waist into those formidable shoulders.

Now the bar was lifted from the anvil and plunged, hissing, into the bucket beside the forge; above the bucket a cloud of steam rose and showed clearly against the brilliant square of the door, and the peculiar scent which came from the iron went sharply to the nostrils of Jasper. He got up as a horseman entered the shop. He came in a manner that pleased Jasper. There was a rush of hoofbeats, a form darting through the door, and in the midst of the shop the rider leaped out of the saddle and the horse came to a halt with braced legs.

"Hey, you!" called the rider as he tossed the reins over the head of his horse. "Here's a hoss that needs iron on his feet. Fix him up. And look here"--he lifted a forefoot and showed the scales on the frog and sole of the hoof--"last time you shoed this hoss you done a sloppy job, son. You left all this stuff hangin' on here. I want it trimmed off nice an' neat. You hear?"

The blacksmith shrugged his shoulders.

"Spoils the hoof to put the knife on the sole, Buck," said the smith. "That peels off natural."

"H'm," said Buck Heath. "How old are you, son?"

"Oh, old enough," answered Andy cheerily. "Old enough to know that this exfoliation is entirely natural."

The big word stuck in the craw of Buck Heath, who brought his thick eyebrows together. "I've rid horses off and on come twenty-five years," he declared, "and I've rid 'em long enough to know how I want 'em shod. This is my hoss, son, and you do it my way. That straight?"