Jerome Bixby 34 min read

Buck Tarrant could outdraw every bad man in the old West, his secret being that he didn't even have to reach for his weapon, as cowhand Joe Doolin discovers the day he rides through the Pass.

Jerome Bixby's 1954 story is a clever psi-powers Western with an SF twist. Sharp, atmospheric golden-age SF. Read it for a genial frontier tale where a young man's impossible gun-hand turns out to owe nothing to speed and everything to a stranger power, in a fresh blend of the Old West and the paranormal.

In its time

Published in 1954, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

34 min read (a novelette, room for a turn or two).

Illustrated by

William Ashman