The Hanging Stones by Manly Wade Wellman

The man dropped like a stone, and the jacket thudded to the floor. Manly slammed him across the side of the head with the blackjack. “The hell I will,” said the man as he lifted a sheepskin jacket hanging with other coats in an alcove. The police went into the back of the building where the gambling equipment was.Īfter a minute or so, one of the men in the front said, “I’m going to get my coat and get out of here.” One of the cops handed Manly a heavy blackjack and told him to hold the men there. Several men were caught in the reception area when the police burst in. One night Manly along on a raid on a roadhouse. Manly was husky and athletic–he’d been a scholarship football player at university–and was on good terms with the police, so he frequently accompanied them during operations. Inevitably, some of the cocaine and heroin stopped before it got further east.īesides drugs, Prohibition was still in force while Manly was in Wichita.

The city was a railroad hub and drugs, heading from Mexico to Chicago and New York, passed through it. Manly contributed poetry–well, verse–to both papers, much of it anonymous, but mostly he worked as a reporter and in Wichita then, crime made up quite a lot of the news. Manly’s job didn’t change, and he continued working directly under his brother. (What you see today with Fox News on one side and National Public Radio on the other was even more strongly and generally the case of rival newspapers in Manly’s day.) When a Republican bought the Beacon, the entire staff marched down the street and were hired by the Wichita Eagle, whose Republican staff passed them going in the other direction because Democrats now owned the Eagle. When Manly got out of college in the 1920s, Paul as editor of the Wichita Beacon gave Manly his first full-time job–as a reporter.Īt the time, newspapers were generally the voice of a particular political party. He was close to his (two years older) brother Paul for all of their mutual lives. In many respects, Manly was as much of a journalist as he was a fiction writer.

The Hanging Stones by Manly Wade Wellman