TY  - BOOK
AU  - Leinster,Murray
TI  - The hand of God
T2  - Produced from the July 25, 1930 issue of Short Stories magazine
AV  - PS 
PY  - 2026///
CY  - Salt Lake City, UT
PB  - Project Gutenberg
KW  - Short stories
KW  - Western stories
KW  - Murder -- Fiction
KW  - Sheriffs -- Fiction
N1  - Release date is 2026-03-02; Prepared by volunteers at BookCove (bookcove.net); Originally published; New York: Doubleday, Doran & Company, Inc., 1930
N2  - The hand of God by Murray Leinster is a crime-mystery short story written in the early 20th century. It centers on a small-town sheriff confronting a lynch mob while sifting clues to uncover the true killer, probing the tension between mob justice, lawful procedure, and what people call “the hand of God.”

On a sweltering night, a mob gathers to hang Sam Blake for shooting Kittinger outside a country store, where “open-and-shut” evidence seems to damn him: he’s found unconscious in a nearby blacksmith shop with a recently fired rifle and a clear motive. Determined to uphold the law, the sheriff stalls the crowd and notices a crucial inconsistency—there are two spent shells tied to a single heard shot. Inviting only two men inside, he catches Pete Brown, Kittinger’s nephew, in a lie about seeing the victim from a blocked vantage point, proving Pete watched from the actual murder site and had framed the drunken Sam earlier by firing Sam’s gun and planting him. After a brief struggle the sheriff arrests Pete, faces down the mob by laying out the facts, and disperses it, with the supposed “hand of God” revealed as a small human oversight exposed by stubborn, level-headed policing. (This is an automatically generated summary.)
UR  - https://s3.us-west-1.wasabisys.com/luminist/PU/SHST_1930_07_25.pdf
UR  - https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78088
ER  -