Valley of the Worm by Robert E. Howard

Author:Robert E. Howard [Howard, Robert E.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Literature & Fiction, Action & Adventure, Classics, Fantasy, Short Stories, Short Stories & Anthologies, Science Fiction & Fantasy, Epic, Sword & Sorcery, Single Authors
Amazon: B001QXC9VI
Publisher: Wildside Press
Published: 2009-01-28T00:00:00+00:00

OLD GARFIELD’S HEART

Weird Tales, December 1933

I was sitting on the porch when my grandfather hobbled out and sank down on his favorite chair with the cushioned seat, and began to stuff tobacco in his corn-cob pipe.

“I thought you’d be goin’ to the dance,” he said.

“I’m waiting for Doc Blaine,” I answered. “I’m going over to old man Garfield’s with him.”

My grandfather sucked at his pipe awhile before he spoke again.

“Old Jim purty bad off?”

“Doc says he hasn’t a chance.”

“Who’s takin’ care of him?”

“Joe Braxton—against Garfield’s wishes. But somebody had to stay with him.”

My grandfather sucked his pipe noisily, and watched the heat lightning playing away off up in the hills; then he said: “You think old Jim’s the biggest liar in this county, don’t you?”

“He tells some pretty tall tales,” I admitted. “Some of the things he claimed he took part in, must have happened before he was born.”

“I came from Tennesee to Texas in 1870,” my grandfather said abruptly. “I saw this town of Lost Knob grow up from nothin’. There wasn’t even a log-hut store here when I came. But old Jim Garfield was here, livin’ in the same place he lives now, only then it was a log cabin. He don’t look a day older now than he did the first time I saw him.”

“You never mentioned that before,” I said in some surprize.

“I knew you’d put it down to an old man’s maunderin’s,” he answered. “Old Jim was the first white man to settle in this country. He built his cabin a good fifty miles west of the frontier. God knows how he done it, for these hills swarmed with Comanches then.

“I remember the first time I ever saw him. Even then everybody called him ‘old Jim.’

“I remember him tellin’ me the same tales he’s told you—how he was at the battle of San Jacinto when he was a youngster, and how he’d rode with Ewen Cameron and Jack Hayes. Only I believe him, and you don’t.”

“That was so long ago—” I protested.

“The last Indian raid through this country was in 1874,” said my grandfather, engrossed in his own reminiscences. “I was in on that fight, and so was old Jim. I saw him knock old Yellow Tail off his mustang at seven hundred yards with a buffalo rifle.

“But before that I was with him in a fight up near the head of Locust Creek. A band of Comanches came down Mesquital, lootin’ and burnin’, rode through the hills and started back up Locust Creek, and a scout of us were hot on their heels. We ran onto them just at sundown in a mesquite flat. We killed seven of them, and the rest skinned out through the brush on foot. But three of our boys were killed, and Jim Garfield got a thrust in the breast with a lance.

“It was an awful wound. He lay there like a dead man, and it seemed sure nobody could live after a wound like that. But an old

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