ERNEST HAYCOX “Dolorosa, Here I Come.” Collier’s, 28 February 1931. Collected in The Last Rodeo (Little, Brown & Co., hardcover, 1949; Pocket, paperback, 1956).

   FIFTEEN men came to a swirling halt in the shadows just outside Dolorosa town, and as they paused a deeper breathing ran among them and an accumulating excitement stirred them uneasily in the saddles. Behind, under the silver-crusted night sky, lay the Running W herd, eight hundred miles out of mothering Texas and more than a thousand miles short of that strange Wyoming whither they were bound. But of the weary distances gone and yet to go this group had no present thought, for directly ahead lay Dolorosa’s street, aglitter with light and emitting the melody and the discord of men in rough festival; a street beckoning to them with a spurious good will and a calculating hospitality.

   Danny Dale is the young trail boss of an outfit out of Texas, hard young men worn with the deprivations of the trail and anxious to let off some steam, and Dolorosa, like a fat hungry spider, sits before them offering shallow glitter, and cheap whiskey. Not surprisingly things go bad, when Bill, one of Dale’s boys, kills a crooked roulette dealer and in turn is killed by the local lawman, Lingersen (“The man is a remorseless killer. He has been here only a year but in that time he has been like the terror. He has bullied and beaten and destroyed. Everybody hates him; nobody dares cross him.”).

   But Danny sees it as a fair exchange, a life for a life and returns only to bury his friend and settle up any debts, and it is then he meets Gracie an independent young woman, who owns a small restaurant and hates what Dolorosa is.

   â€œDolorosa. Here I Come” first appeared in Collier’s in 1931, one of slicks (the high paying magazines printed on slick paper which most pulp writers aspired to crack) which Haycox cracked long before the story that made him one of the most admired Western writers of his age, “The Last Stage to Lordsburg,” famously a retelling of Guy de Maupassant’s “Boule de Souf”, that John Ford made into the film that gave birth to the modern adult Western, Stagecoach.

   In any Haycox Western the power and control of the writing is hard to miss. There is a lyricism to his words that captures not only the mythic and larger than life qualities of the West, but also the simplicity and purity of the classic form. It is little wonder that Haycox went on to be far more than a popular Western writer penning not only Westerns, but a handful of bestselling historical novels of the West like The Adventurers and Canyon Passage that were offered by major book clubs and optioned by Hollywood.

   Of the period he wrote in, Haycox was both one of the most popular and most respected writers to take up the Western, a rarity, in that he was recognized far beyond the confines of the pulps with probably only Luke Short (Fred Glidden) running him a close race in the high paying slicks of the era, yet he was also recognized as a master of action and drama.

   True to heavies from time immemorial Lingersen can’t leave good enough alone and braces Danny on his return to bury his friend:

    “Nine o’clock is our buryin’ hour around here. Attend to it, an’ get out by ten sharp or expect to answer to me without recourse, explanation or further warnin’.”

    “Does the warnin’ mean you’ll reach for the hardware at ten sharp without added talk?”

    Lingersen said: “I never warn twice and I never go back on my word.”

    “Just wanted to get it clear,” mused Danny Dale. “I’m a great hand for havin’ things straight.”

   Okay, I’ll grant you there are more dropped ‘g’s’ in this tale than all of Philo Vance and Peter Wimsey, but still it sounds and feels authentic and at the same time mythic, and that combination of the dusty sweaty hard real West with the mythic Technicolor wide-screen West of the big screen is one of the keys to why Haycox is remembered and still read.

   Haycox is too good a writer to spare us the promised showdown, and much too good to offer us a story in which that is all there is, the twist at the end an almost O Henryesque moment. Without giving it away, I’ll only say Haycox isn’t offering us simple villains and heroes and doesn’t pretend that any duel to the death is without its ironies.

   This last is just a scene as the boys ride out of town. You have read or seen it’s like in a thousand films and Western novels and stories, but listen to the simple lyric description of the following passage. “Dolorosa, Here I Come,” is a slight example of Haycox talent, but more a vivid reminder of why his name was legend in the genre and why he was envied by so many of his fellow writers of the purple sage:

   They galloped down the street, barely clearing the front of the saloon when a burst of buckshot rattled against it like hail. The town shivered with a slashing, explosive fire as the men of Dolorosa stood sheltered in the black maw of this or that alley and cross-ripped the main thoroughfare with their lead; purple muzzle lights weirdly flickered, powder smell tainted the night air.