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Concealing himself from his father’s wrath, behind the barn with wick turned low and his face two inches from the rough sawtooth page, Young Crawford had read of these atrocities in Beadle’s Dime Library and fantasized about “calling out” the brutal old man who had sired him, “throwing down” on him with the “hogleg” he wore high on his hip, and blasting him into hell; after which he would go “on the scout,” separating high-interest banks and arrogant railroad barons from their soiled coin and distributing it among their victims, or failing that into his own pockets and saddle pouches and living the “high Life” in saloons and “dance halls” where beautiful women in brief costumes admired his straight legs and square jaw and told him of the men who had “ruined” them (he knew not just how, only that the act was disgraceful and its effects permanent), whereupon he sought the blackguards out and deprived them of their lives. There was usually profit involved; invariably the men were thieves who lived in close proximity to their “ill-gotten booty,” and didn’t it say somewhere in Scripture that robbing a thief was no sin? If it didn’t, it should have.
