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The Whistler. The Whistler was created by E.B. Mann and appeared in seven short stories in Dime Western Magazine and three novels and short story collections from 1933 to 1953, beginning with “The Death Whistler” (Dime Western Magazine, Apr. 1933).

The Whistler is a Killer Vigilante. U.S. Marshall Jim Sinclair (sometimes “Jim Bonnet,” and sometimes “range detective for the Cattleman’s Association”) is “The Whistler,” a mysterious vigilante of justice of whom many stories are told--but few by living witnesses: "death to the stranger who wears two guns--and whistles the Devil's requiem for those he kills." The Whistler is active on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border as well as farther north. He has handsome features and a “sense of latent power even in his unstudied ease.” He whistles: “It was eerie music, that whistling. Keen and shrill above the minor music of the brook, it was so high and thin that sometimes it seemed to climb above the limits of the human ear and become a ghostly thing, not heard but felt. It had no tune, no actual melody; yet there was rhythm in it and a wild, half-mournful sweetness like the half-heard piping of high flying birds.”

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