Adam Dumphy
A “modern western” for men, this novel is set in 1943 and describes a little known off shoot of WW1I. In a partly true scenario it involves an attempt of Japanese Intelligence to establish a radio receiving station high in the mountains of Sonora, Mexico.
A Marine newly returned from Guadalcanal and seeking only the quiet necessary to heal his wounded body and mind encounters the tense situation of Mexican/Americans vs. Anglos in a small New Mexican valley.
And he meets two Mexican/American women who behind their attractive faces seem to have dark shadows.
Being asked to locate the receiving station results in a shoot out between a marine-trained marksman with his Garand and the traditional Winchesters of the old west.
Adam Dumphy has been reading “Westerns” since the early editions of Clarence E. Mulford. His western heroes have been many and varied from Hopalong to The Virginian to Jim Chee. But his favorite books are generally similar. They are those in which the author demonstrates his love of desert, mountain or plain by taking the space in his book needed to describe them.
This he feels is important for it brings to the indoorsman a breath of the peace and joy that only our American countryside can afford.
He usually writes humor but wanted just once to express his serious appreciation of the western genre by writing a modern one.
The reason the Jeep was so cheap was the shrapnel holes all through it. “Only $250.00” the handwritten sign said.
“It’s plenty cheap all right because of all those holes.”
The very tall, blonde, young man walked all around it and observed it carefully from every side.
“I almost said shrapnel wounds.” He thought as they were one inch sized holes on the driver’s side, at the site of entry, and had expanded to three or four inch sized holes on exit through the hood and shallow body, besides the fabric top was shredded.
The impact had given the body a definite tilt, lifting the driver’s side and tilting the frame down and to the right.
“It caught it good somewhere, sometime.” He mused.
He walked around it again. Only three and a half years old it was a 1939 Willys.
Another sign said, “Runs good.”
How it had gotten here on the back lot of a third rate used car dealer, “Manny’s Motors”, in the South Bay section of San Diego he couldn’t think. Equipment was so scarce in these wartime days; the services were all so sorely stressed just now that there were hardly ever surplus sales. Every truck, tank and gun was recovered and repaired or supposed to be.
“Probably smuggled in from Mexico after being sold as junk by some enterprising CB to a freighter off some South Pacific Island.” He thought.
Suddenly he decided he liked it. Wanted it, coveted it actually. And in a manner totally characteristic of himself he looked into his mind to try to discover why.
Counting on his fingers, he enumerated:
1. He had always wanted a Jeep.
2. He needed transportation.
3. He was intending to head for the roughest and most desolate country he could find.
4. An errant thought came. He resented it, rejected it, but it returned and persisted. Wasn’t it just possible he felt a certain empathy, a comradeship, with this battered old wreck?
