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Brand, Max, 1892-1944

"The Seventh Man"

Pete Glass had been;
Pete Glass was not.
Next he knew that something had to be done, but what it was he could not
tell, for he sat in the sheriff's office and in that room he was accustomed
to stop thinking and receive orders. He went back to his own little
cubby-hole, and sat down behind the typewriter; at once his mind cleared,
thoughts came, and linked themselves into ideas, pictures, plans.
The murderer must be taken, dead or alive, and those fifteen men had ridden
out to do the necessary thing. They had seemed irresistible, as they
departed; indeed, no living thing they met could withstand them, human or
otherwise, as Billy very well knew. Yet he recalled a saying of the
sheriff, a thing he had insisted upon: "No man on no hoss will ever ride
down Whistlin' Dan Barry. It's been tried before and it's never worked.
I've looked up his history and it can't be done. If he's goin' to be ran
down it's got to be done with relays, like you was runnin' down a wild
hoss." Billy rubbed his bald head and thought and thought.
With that orderliness which had become his habit of mind, from work with
reports and papers, sorting and filing away, Billy went back to the
beginning.


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