In fifteen graphic
words and in one sentence Little Sure Shot croaked him, and then
with bated breath you moved on to the next paragraph, sure of
finding in it yet more attractive casualties snappily narrated.
No, sir! In the nickul librury the author did not waste his time
and yours telling you that an individual on becoming a corpse would
simultaneously become powerless and senseless. He credited your
intelligence for something. For contrast, take the immortal work
entitled Deadwood Dick of Deadwood; or, The Picked Party; by Edward
L. Wheeler, a copy of which has just come to my attention again
nearly thirty years after the time of my first reading of it.
Consider the opening paragraph:
The sun was just kissing the mountain tops that frowned down
upon Billy-Goat Gulch, and in the aforesaid mighty seam in the
face of mighty Nature the shadows of a Warm June night were
gathering rapidly.
The birds had mostly hushed their songs and flown to their
nests in the dismal lonely pines, and only the tuneful twang
of a well-played banjo aroused the brooding quiet, save it be
the shrill, croaking screams of a crow, perched upon the top
of a dead pine, which rose from the nearly perpendicular
mountain side that retreated in the ascending from the gulch
bottom.
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