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The trouble is that Author Brown, noted for a good World War II novel, A Walk in the Sun, seems to have lost faith in his audience. Lest the reader miss the parallels, he tells his tale in the pidgin poetry of the conventional translator. What he has set out to do, says the author, is tell of "a yellow Sunday in the last days of a good spring, while . . . pale threads, drawn out from dark hidden places, began to be wound inexorably together . . . until there had been wrought, out of such tenuous white and fleeting things, a taut tripwire for the souls of men, destined, before its mindless work was done, to bring many tall sure riders down to earth, and below.'' Burdened with such prose, the skeleton of a good shoot-em-up also comes rattling to earth—and below.