After slogging through Fightin' Fool, by Max Brand--a western writer famous for the sheer quantity of his output--for several weeks, and finally finishing it, I decided to leave this book on the train I was riding at the time.
To be honest, despite enjoying selections from Brand's oeuvre in the past, I found this book somewhat slow-going--despite a few bits at the beginning that hinted it might take a course somewhat different from the western fare I'm used to:
Jingo was pleased. He liked what he had heard, and he liked the set of the stranger's shoulders, and the towering height of him. He hurried to catch up with him.and later:
Jake Rankin licked his lips and ran his hungry eyes over the lithe body of Jingo. He was a judge of men, was Jake, and he could appreciate the way the parts of Jingo were fitted together. He handled him with his eyes the way a horse dealer handles a horse, judging bone and sinew, and the quality of the long muscles that make for speed, or the bulging muscles that make lifting strength. The muscles of Jingo were all long and cunningly worked together. He looked as capable of speed, say, as a well-braided whiplash of new leather. Jake Rankin missed not a single point.But the remainder of the tale was fairly conventional for the genre.
Hopefully, at least, it may brighten someone else's commute a bit.
