Leonard Cline and John Wilstach's ROPE NECKTIES

In my previous post, I noted that Leonard Cline and John Wilstach certainly knew each other by April 1928. The reason is that Cline sent a letter to Wilstach about his serial "Rope Neckties" that had appeared in three consecutive issues of Argosy All-Story Weekly, 21 April, 28 April, and 5 May 1928. We know this because when the novel was printed in book form, as Rope Neckties in 1939, Wilstach published a letter in Writer's Digest for September 1939, part of which reads:

Recently one of my old Argosy western series was published in book form by McBride, called Rope Neckties, with the nom de plume of John Van Buren. While it was serialized I received a letter from the late Leonard Cline, poet, critic, and novelist of note, praising part of the yarn and saying that pages 88-89 was a prose poem worthy of a French master. Reading it over in mag form I thought he was kidding. Now, rereading the same in book form, darned if I don't think he is right. Anyway, the dress has a lot to do with it all. 

The imprint on the 1939 volume is the Dodge Publishing Company, which was owned by the Robert M. McBride Company. The text to which Cline and Wilstach referred is as follows: 

If you have ever rode herd at night you’ll recollect that the cattle 'll move and stir about uneasy during the long hours from midnight on. There is always some sound. The sharp yelp of the coyote or the snorting and neighing of a pony half asleep on his feet, and wanting to go the rest of the way.

Sudden, just as you are about half dead in the saddle, hunched over, an’ a cigarette tastes bitter’n dust; when all you long fer is curl up on the ground and sleep, there comes a solemn pause that seems to say: “Hush, little doggies, be still.” There is quiet along the prairie—even the wind dies down—and, unconscious, you seen to be waiting for something beautiful to happen.

And dog-gone it, partner, something does. At that moment you is offered heaven on a silver platter. A gray veil pushes back those golden stars, there is a feeling of peace everywhere, and the sun, gentle like, lifts out of the east like a welcome.

Calling it "a prose poem worthy of a French master" does seem to be stretching it, but it is a nicely poetic scene in miniature. Rope Neckties was reprinted in 1948, back under Wilstach's own name, as a digest-sized paperback of the Hillman imprint "Novel Selections, Inc." It was no. 4 of the "Fighting Western Novel" series. See the cover, above right.

For assistance on this subject, I am grateful to John Locke, and to the late Denny Lien.