BookCove › Off the Trail
Stories we liked too much to leave out
Most of BookCove is arranged by author or by subject. These stories belong to neither. They come from ten writers and nine magazines, and they range from a city club on a wet night in 1918 to an open boat on a windless sea in 1930. Some are funny, some are sad, and one is told by the ocean itself. Each one is here because someone on the BookCove team enjoyed it and wanted to hand it to a friend.
Stories are listed in order of publication. Each year is the date of the magazine issue transcribed. All are short stories except the one marked nv (novelette).
Morley Smith, clubman, nearly fifty, goes out on a drizzly night looking for adventure as if it were a dinner he could order. Behind a door picked at random he finds a girl of sixteen in tears and a bare room. He is mistaken for someone he decides to pretend to be. Butler is remembered as a humorist; this shows what else he could do.
A sheepdog with wolf in him guards a flock by moonlight while every instinct pulls the other way. Told almost entirely from the dog’s side, with no talking animals and no sentiment, and tense from the first page.
A dying man alone in his cabin as the Alaskan cold sets in, and the two travelers, an old-timer and a newcomer, who stop there on the trail with winter coming on. Short, spare, and the kind of ending that stays with you.
At radio station WMQZ, the girl who sorts the fan mail takes an interest in a young hopeful who doesn’t look like a musician. A light romance from the days when radio was new.
The lodgers of Wistaria Lodge argue over the radio at dinner, until one of their own turns out to have a voice. A warm, funny boarding-house comedy, and a good companion to Applause Mail.
An old shipwright on the beach believes the sea talks to him. One night Neptune tells him what happened to the last ship he built, lost with all hands. Barely two thousand words, and the strangest story here.
Officer James Emmet Corcoran, six feet three of Irish authority, holds up a whole intersection four times a day for one red-haired driver in a roadster. Then a cow gets loose in the city. Pure fun.
At fifty below on the old Yukon trail, an old sourdough tells a newspaperman about the night a girl stood on a Dawson bar and auctioned herself off. A campfire story, and not everyone listening is hearing it for the first time.
A schoolmaster boarding on a Panhandle ranch can hardly bear the silent widow and her children, until a stranger arrives from Oregon after twelve years away. From McCall’s, and one of the saddest and best stories we have transcribed.
In a Texas town where a killing is legal if you can justify it, a young man who can’t outdraw the local killer finds a better weapon: talk. Short, dry, and very satisfying.
Two men and a woman adrift, a gentleman and a sailor who distrust each other, and water rationed by the clock. A small, hard story about character under pressure.