High Noon in Furnace City

For a change of pace, I'm not going to summarize or criticize some pulp story in this space. Instead, for the heck of it, I'm going to share with you a complete short story from the June 1955 issue of Western Short Stories, with the emphasis on short. The FictionMags Index describes Dick Baird's "High Noon in Furnace City" as a vignette; in a slick magazine it'd be called a "short short story." The Index offers no description at all for Baird, under whose name -- most likely a pseudonym -- appeared just two stories, both for Martin Goodman's Stadium outfit in 1955. It's reminiscent in length and format of the sort of two-page pieces that would have appeared in Goodman's Atlas comics in this period. The story is a simple set-up for a twist ending, but you may end up wondering whether what happens at high noon in Furnace City actually makes sense. Judge for yourselves, for here it is, straight from the twilight days of western pulp.