“A Ticket Outside” by Robert Ormond Case (1895-1964) is a strange Northern in a slightly different way than the usual. It is not a tale of the supernatural but one of the weird. It would have fit nicely into an issue of any EC horror title or even the Warren magazines of the 1960s and 70s. It appeared in the December 1933 issue of Street & Smith’s Western Story Magazine. The Pulp was one of the top markets for Westerns but they also included Northerns occasionally too. Case wrote dozens. He also appeared in the slicks: The Saturday Evening Post, Colliers’, Liberty, and the top Pulps including Blue Book, Adventure, Far West, West and Star Western. I read this story in Tony Goodstone’s collection The Pulps (1970).
The story is about two partners, one a high-minded, easy going fellow named Joe and his skunk of partner, “Wild Pete” Judson. Over the many years the two were partners, Pete stole a whole poke full of gold right under Joe’s nose. He has his “ticket Outside”. He can leave the North and never shiver another day in the cold. Only Pete’s a rat through-and-through. He can’t leave until he laughs in Joe’s face. Joe has taken a job driving the stage. It is a rotten job, driving through storms and blizzards but it is all Joe can do because he never got lucky enough to strike it rich. Wild Pete drives his dogs to near-death to get to Porcupine Smith’s cabin that acts as trading post and inn. The stage passes the cabin and Pete plans to wait there.
When Joe and the stage show up, Pete goes outside to his good-natured partner. The driver nearly runs Pete down, a wide grin on his face. In the rush, Pete drops his poke full of gold, losing it until Spring. It is only later we learn that Joe froze to death sitting on that stage. He is beyond caring about the gold, Wild Pete or anything else. He found his own ticket Outside:
Pete studied Joe’s face. It was rigid, as though cast in stone. He knew it had been thus long before they had passed on the trail. Strangely enough, here was engraved no memory of cold, loneliness, weariness, or defeat. Joe’s smile, rather, was that of one who has fallen asleep on a sunlit beach, in a region where flowers bloom and and birds sing always, and storms never blew.
Porcupine Smith offers to share a drink with Wild Pete. “And we’ll all laugh together!”
The dark laughter of Case’s tale is cut from the same grim sense of humor Jack London used in his best stories like “A Relic of the Pleistocene” and “To Build a Fire”. The North was a harsh place to find fortune, good or bad.
