Mountain killers

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Mountain killers by Thomas Barclay Thomson is a short pulp crime story written in the late 1920s. It centers on frontier vengeance in the mountains, where a planned ambush collides with chance, fear, and a lurking cougar.

Olaf Swensen lies in wait above a trail to kill Sim Satterlee, recently acquitted of murdering Olaf’s brother. As Sim approaches with his pack mules, a cougar crouches unseen above Olaf. Olaf holds Sim at gunpoint but, at the last moment, cannot bring himself to shoot. The cougar springs; Sim fires and wounds it, and the dying beast crashes onto him, fatally mauling him. When Olaf rushes down, Sim reveals with a dying boast that he had aimed his last shot at Olaf, not the cougar. The story closes on stark irony: Olaf’s mercy is met by treachery, and fate delivers the final judgment.