Derelicts of the hills — Key Ideas to Explore

Voice and Vernacular as Characterization

The catalog lists "Western stories" and "Male friendship -- Fiction," but the excerpts show that friendship is expressed almost entirely through dialogue. Ike Harper's speech is a dense, comic dialect full of malapropisms and invented phrases: "scientific loco human," "plumb helpless with th' appellation," and the repeated use of "dog-gone" as punctuation. Magpie's voice, though less heard, is defined by his silent "trancin'" and his explosive reaction to the word "suspender buttons"—a detail the narrator deliberately needles him about. The narrator, Frederick Norwood, speaks in a contrasting formal English, calling attention to the gap between his world and the prospectors'. This linguistic divide is the story's engine, not plot.

The Stolen-Wife Plot as Comic Mechanism

When Gus Summers arrives with a shotgun, accusing Tellurium Woods of stealing his wife Minnie, the scene pivots on a single word: "Minnie." Magpie suddenly turns pale, kicks the burro around, and sends Summers on his way. The catalog subject "Man-woman relationships -- Fiction" is present only as a punchline—the wife is never seen, and her name triggers Magpie's guilty reaction. The comedy comes from the mismatch between Summers's melodramatic grief ("I aims to shoot his old hide into shoestrings") and Magpie's deflation. The shotgun is handed back and forth, and the threat dissolves into an offer of a drink. The plot is a setup for character revelation, not a romance.

Piperock as a Place of Derelicts and Digressions

The catalog lists "Piperock (Montana : Imaginary place) -- Fiction," but the excerpts show it as a landscape of abandoned mines and gopher holes, where men sit on logs staring at nothing. Ike describes himself and Magpie as "deerylicks uh th' hills"—a phrase that echoes the title's "derelicts." The setting is sketched in passing: mesquite-covered hills, a cabin with smoke from the stovepipe, a back trail. The story's structure is digressive—Ike's tale is interrupted by his own forgetfulness, by Magpie's trancing, by the arrival of Summers. Piperock is less a place than a state of suspended animation, where the only action is talk.

The Narrator as Straight Man and Audience

Frederick Norwood, the first-person narrator, is a city man who "saw a man sitting on a log" and describes him in mock-heroic terms: "six feet long and ten inches wide—sort of uh roan with sparsely settled whiskers." His role is to prompt Ike's stories with polite questions and to register comic disbelief. The catalog subject "Storytelling -- Fiction" is embodied in this frame: the entire story is Ike's oral performance, with Norwood as the stand-in for the reader. The tale ends with Ike inviting him to "taste beans cooked scientifically," a deflation that returns the narrative to the mundane. Norwood never becomes a participant; he remains an observer, which keeps the focus on the telling.

The catalog subjects for this story—male friendship, man-woman relationships, storytelling—are all present, but they function as comic scaffolding rather than themes. Readers should attend to the rhythm of Ike's speech, the way he circles back to forgotten details, and the precise physical comedy of the shotgun scene. The story is less about what happens than about how it is told, and the narrator's deadpan reactions are essential to the humor. Approach it as a performance piece in prose.

That rainy afternoon, I kept returning to Tuttle’s Piperock, where Derelicts of the Hills turned a shotgun feud into something almost tender about friendship. The way Magpie’s trancing blurred fact and fancy reminded me how story itself was the real currency. Later, drying off, I found the same strange honesty waiting in The best short stories of 1921, and the yearbook of the American short story — A Closer Reading, quiet as a porch light coming on.