“Dear Mr. Howard: I am returning ‘The Frost Giant’s Daughter’ in a separate envelope, as I do not much care for it. But ‘The Phoenix of [sic] the Sword’ has points of real excellence. I hope you will see your way clear to touch it up and resubmit it. It is the first two chapters that do not click. The story opens rather uninterestingly, it seems to me, and the reader has difficulty in orienting himself. The first chapter ends well, and the second chapter begins superbly; but after King Conan’s personality is well established, the chapter sags from too much writing. I think the very last page of the whole story might be re-written with advantage; because it seems a little weak after the stupendous events that precede it.”

"Frost-Giant" was reworked for another mag, "Bowl" was stashed, and "Phoenix" would receive heavy edits. Patrice Louinet says that Howard cut huge chunks of the story out to condense the opening to "The Nemedian Chronicles" bit we always see. Conan very quickly became the man we all know him, though starting at the end of his career and then jumping back toward the beginning in "Tower." I always wonder how that felt to back-fill a character's history like that. Howard wrote to his friend HP Lovecraft the following month:

“I’ve been working on a new character, providing him with a new epoch—the Hyborian Age, which men have forgotten, but which remains in classical names, and distorted myths. Wright rejected most of the series, but I did sell him one—‘The Phoenix on the Sword’ which deals with the adventures of King Conan the Cimmerian, in the kingdom of Aquilonia.”

"Yes, yes!" cried Publius, who was a man of plans rather than action. "We must bind his wounds. Send for every leech of the court! Oh, my lord, what a black shame on the city! Are you entirely slain?"

Then as he stood, a stealthy sound in the corridor outside brought him to life, and without stopping to investigate, he began to don his armor; again he was the barbarian, suspicious and alert as a gray wolf at bay.

"Ring? Ring?" Thoth had underestimated the man's utter egoism. Dion had not even been listening to the slave's words, so completely engrossed was he in his own thoughts, but the final word stirred a ripple in his self- centeredness.
​
"Ring?" he repeated. "That makes me remember—my ring of good fortune. I had it from a Shemitish thief who swore he stole it from a wizard far to the south, and that it would bring me luck. I paid him enough, Mitra knows. By the gods, I need all the luck I can have, what with Volmana and Ascalante dragging me into their bloody plots—I'll see to the ring."

What do I know of cultured ways, the gilt, the craft and the lie?
I, who was born in a naked land and bred in the open sky.
The subtle tongue, the sophist guile, they fail when the broadswords sing;
Rush in and die, dogs—I was a man before I was a king.
--The Road Of Kings

"In preparing this manuscript for publication, I edited and rewrote it somewhat drastically, condensing it by more than fifteen per cent and adding a number of interpolations to tie the story in with King Numedides, Thoth-Amon, and the subsequent revolution in Aquilonia, to fit the story snugly into the saga."

Unlike many Conan works which we can point to a two- or three-week period in which Robert E. Howard penned it, we have nothing that exact for "The Black Stranger." Most Howard scholars agree that he wrote it after Weird Tales accepted The Hour of the Dragon for publication, perhaps in the last months of 1934 or the early parts of 1935. ​We know at least that Howard had written to HP Lovecraft about the possibility of a follow-up to "Beyond the Black River," saying: "Some day I’m going to try my hand at a longer yarn of the same style, a serial of four or five parts."

Apart from the names of the protagonists this story is almost identical with the Vulmea story "Swords of the Red Brotherhood". The manuscripts of both stories were found in Robert E. Howard's papers after his death. The order in which he wrote them is disputed. In his essay "The Trail Of Tranicos" (1967) L. Sprague de Camp wrote: "There is reason to believe that the pirate version came before the Conan one." On the other hand, Karl Edward Wagner, in his introduction to "The Black Stranger" in Echoes of Valour, claimed: "I have the photocopy of Howard's original manuscript of 'The Black Stranger', which clearly shows Howard's efforts to change the story from the Conan to the Black Vulmea version."

I'm not sure who to believe. It seems odd that Howard would have turned in a Conan story that Farnsworth Wright was such a dud when he was on a streak of serious winners (and this one's a serious winner too!), but if a photocopy exits that shows Howard making Conanly edits to the pirate version, it's hard to argue with that. ​The pirate version of the story, titled "Swords of the Red Brotherhood," would eventually see publication in 1976. The Conanized version wouldn't make it public until 1987, which is an incredibly long gap of fifty-two years between writing and publication. That also makes it technically Howard's final bow on Conan. ​I'm glad we have it. ★★★★★

"'What do you mean "plucked"?' said Arno with indignation. 'The land was bought from them, piece by piece, by legal treaties bearing royal seals.'

Conan snorted: 'I know those treaties, signed by some Pictish drunken ne'er-do-well who knew not what he placed his mark upon. I love not Picts, but I can understand the fury that drives them now.'"

"​I've seen all the great cities of the Hyborians, the Shemites, the Stygians, and the Hyrkanians. I've roamed in the unknown countries south of the black kingdoms of Kush, and east of the Sea of Vilayet. I've been a mercenary captain, a corsair, a kozak, a penniless vagabond, a general—hell, I've been everything except a king of a civilized country, and I may be that, before I die." Conan is about to become king of a "civilized" country very soon. "Beyond the Black River" is his first step in Aquilonia toward that eventual kingship. Like usual, Conan will gain people's trust and admiration quickly, and he starts very simply as a scout for the kingdom. According to "A Probable Outline of Conan's Career," Conan is likely in his late 30s, about 39 years old.

"Conan as a scout in Conajohara, fighting against the Pictish wizard, Zogar Sag. This is very shortly before he seized the throne; he may be 39."

"​My latest sales have been a 23,000 word Oriental adventure yarn to Top- Notch, and a two-part Conan serial to Weird Tales; no sex in the latter. I wanted to see if I could write an interesting Conan yarn without sex interest."

"My latest sales to Weird Tales have been a two-part Conan serial: 'Beyond the Black River' — a frontier story... In the Conan story I’ve attempted a new style and setting entirely—abandoned the exotic settings of lost cities, decaying civilizations, golden domes, marble palaces, silk-clad dancing girls, etc., and thrown my story against a back-ground of forests and rivers, log cabins, frontier outposts, buckskin-clad settlers, and painted tribesmen."

Howard’s life in Texas was shaped by Texan history, while at the same time, he fantasized about distant lands. But his interest in western history — its influence on the American imagination — was never far from his mind.

"'But I'm not going to do that!' Conan roared. 'Not because I have any love for you dogs, but because a white man doesn't leave white men, even his enemies, to be butchered by Picts.'"

"​Some day they'll try to sweep the settlers out of Conajohara. And they may succeed—probably will succeed. This colonization business is mad, anyway. There's plenty of good land east of the Bossonian marches. If the Aquilonians would cut up some of the big estates of their barons, and plant wheat where now only deer are hunted, they wouldn't have to cross the border and take the land of the Picts away from them."

"​Evidently Conan had spent much time among civilized men, though that contact had obviously not softened him, nor weakened any of his primitive instincts. Balthus' apprehension turned to admiration as he marked the easy catlike stride, the effortless silence with which the Cimmerian moved along the trail. The oiled links of his armor did not clink, and Balthus knew Conan could glide through the deepest thicket or most tangled copse as noiselessly as any naked Pict that ever lived."

...an uncluttered intellect, unsullied with the political cravings, irrational desires, or other distractions a civilized man suffers.

"​The barbarian's eyes were smoldering with fires that never lit the eyes of men bred to the ideas of civilization. In that instant he was all wild, and had forgotten the man at his side. In his burning gaze Balthus glimpsed and vaguely recognized pristine images and half-embodied memories, shadows from Life's dawn, forgotten and repudiated by sophisticated races—ancient, primeval fantasms unnamed and nameless."

"The shadows were thickening. A darkening blue mist blurred the outlines of the foliage. The forest deepened in the twilight, became a blue haunt of mystery sheltering unguessed things."

"They stared at him seriously, making no outcry. The woman took the horse's halter and set out up the road. She still gripped her ax and Balthus knew that if cornered she would fight with the desperate courage of a she-panther."

"But the old woman, a stern old veteran of the frontier, quieted them harshly; she helped Balthus get out the two horses that were stabled in a pen behind the cabin and put the children on them. Balthus urged that she herself mount with them, but she shook her head and made one of the younger women ride.

'She's with child,' grunted the old woman. 'I can walk—and fight, too, if it comes to that.'"

"The forester stared at him, comparing him with the men about them, the men who had died along the lost river, comparing him with those other wild men over that river. Conan did not seem aware of his gaze.

'Barbarism is the natural state of mankind,' the borderer said, still staring somberly at the Cimmerian. 'Civilization is unnatural. It is a whim of circumstance. And barbarism must always ultimately triumph.'"

“God, what a story you could write after such an exploration! . . . Anything seemed possible in that monstrous twilight underworld, seven hundred and fifty feet below the earth. If some animate monster had risen horrifically from among the dimness of the columns and spread his taloned anthropomorphic hands above the throng, I do not believe that anyone would have been particularly surprized.”

"Conan the Cimmerian, late of the Baracha Isles, of the Black Coast, and of many other climes where life ran wild, had come to the kingdom of Keshan following the lure of a fabled treasure that outshone the hoard of the Turanian kings."

I'm grouping this one kind of like I did with "The Lair of the Ice Worm" and "The Blood-Stained God" in that it's clearly after the meat of that portion of Conan's life, but I don't really have anywhere better to put it. While he's not a Barachan pirate at the moment- in fact, he's quite inland- I don't really have another grouping to put it in yet. Here's what "A Probable Outline of Conan's Career" says of these stories:

   12.   Red Nails    (WT, July 36):    The end of Conan's buccaneer days, and the story of his trek to the south with Valeria, to Xuchotl and its dragons, and other parts unknown.

       J.    Somewhere Conan loses Valeria.    Hearing of the fabulous Teeth of Gwahlur, legendary jewels hidden somewhere in the black kingdom of Keshan, he signs up as a trainer for Keshan's armies.   Losing the jewels, he goes over to the neighboring kingdom of Punt to see how much he can make at simple swindling, from there to the trade-centers of Zembabwe, and via various caravans northward into Turan and the Hyborian realms.

       13.    Jewels of Gwahlur   (WT, Mar 35):   The adventure in Keshan.    Conan may be a little over 38 at the this stage in his career.

"These stories are cool and exciting and wonderful. You don't have to worry about continuity: everywhere Conan goes, something exciting and amazing is going to happen, and the longer you read, the more you appreciate all these different places and these different eras of the character and all this cool stuff... but you don't need to know that to start. That's what makes me happy is you can just dive into any story and read them and enjoy them."

"'But because I am a queen, I must consider my kingdom...' 'Would you make me your king?' he asked sardonically. 'Well, there are customs---' she stammered, and he interrupted her with a hard laugh. 'Yes, civilized customs that won't let you do as you wish. You'll marry some withered old king of the plains, and I can go my way with only the memory of a few kisses snatched from your lips. Ha!' 'But I must return to my kingdom!' she repeated helplessly. 'Why?' he demanded angrily. 'To chafe your rump on gold thrones, and listen to the plaudits of smirking, velvet-skirted fools? Where is the gain?'" "Red Nails" is thus far the clearest example of all of those anti-civilization values put to the page. ​

Conan and Valeria fighting the "dragon." Painting by Manuel Perez Clemente

"This exhibition of primordial fury chilled the blood in Valeria's veins, but Conan was too close to the primitive himself to feel anything but a comprehending interest. To the barbarian, no such gulf existed between himself and other men, and the animals, as existed in the conception of Valeria. The monster below them, to Conan, was merely a form of life differing from himself mainly in physical shape. He attributed to it characteristics similar to his own, and saw in its wrath a counterpart of his rages, in its roars and bellowings merely reptilian equivalents to the curses he had bestowed upon it. Feeling a kinship with all wild things, even dragons, it was impossible for him to experience the sick horror which assailed Valeria at the sight of the brute's ferocity."

"You will find Lincoln now just as it was when Murphy and McSween and Billy the Kid knew it. The village is an anachronism, a sort of mummy town...

If there is a haunted spot on this hemisphere, then Lincoln is haunted. I felt that if I slept the night there, the ghosts of the slain would stalk through my dreams. The town itself seemed like a bleached, grinning skull. There was a feel of skeletons in the earth underfoot."

"Xuchotl is the epitome of a decayed civilization as Howard conceived it. It is the place where, as he had it, 'the abnormal becomes normal.'"

"​'Five red nails for five Xotalanca lives!' exulted Techotl, and the horrible exultation in the faces of the listeners made them inhuman."

“'The stalemate war' generally consists of two sides locked in a violent, hatred-fueled conflict. At the beginning of the story, the original cause of the conflict is often obscured by the passage of time and has been forgotten by both sides; therefore, the war has become interminable, even absurd. The original injustice cannot be rationally judged and righted because, sadly, no one really understands it or cares about it. Raw thirst for blood now defines the unending conflict. Each sides’ victory conditions have become amorphous, dangerously ill-defined; if they are expressed, victory consists, quite simply, in the complete destruction of the enemy. The war has become one of mutual extermination because reconciliation between the two sides is no longer possible; the conflict has festered to the extent that both sides have completely dehumanized the other side and they have dehumanized themselves as well. A key feature of the trope is that the lives of the combatants have become a kind of strange, ahistorical purgatory, where nothing happens except violent death after violent death. History doesn’t proceed amidst this never ending, bloody melee."

"Suppose with their aid we destroy Xotalanc," he said. "What then, Xatmec?"

"Why," returned Xatmec, "we will drive red nails for them all. The captives we will burn and flay and quarter."

"But afterward?" pursued the other. "After we have slain them all? Will it not seem strange, to have no foes to fight? All my life I have fought and hated the Xotalancas. With the feud ended, what is left?"
​
Xatmec shrugged his shoulders. His thoughts had never gone beyond the destruction of their foes. They could not go beyond that.

"Girl, I’m working on a yarn like that now—a Conan yarn. Listen to me. When you have a dying civilization, the normal, accepted life style ain’t strong enough to satisfy the damned insatiable appetites of the courtesans and, finally, of all the people. They turn to Lesbianism and things like that to satisfy their desires. . . . I am going to call it ‘The Red Flame of Passion.'"

She came down from her dais, playing with a thin gold-hilted dagger. Her eyes burned like nothing on the hither side of hell. She paused beside the altar and spoke in the tense stillness.

"Your life shall make me young, white woman!" she said. "I shall lean upon your bosom and place my lips over yours, and slowly—ah, slowly!—sink this blade through your heart, so that your life, fleeing your stiffening body, shall enter mine, making me bloom again with youth and with life everlasting!"

Slowly, like a serpent arching toward its victim, she bent down through the writhing smoke, closer and closer over the now motionless woman who stared up into her glowing dark eyes—eyes that grew larger and deeper, blazing like black moons in the swirling smoke.
​
The kneeling people gripped their hands and held their breath, tense for the bloody climax, and the only sound was Conan's fierce panting as he strove to tear his leg from the trap.

"​I have been dissatisfied with my handling of decaying races in stories, for the reason that degeneracy is so prevalent in such races that even in fiction it can not be ignored as a motive and as a fact if the fiction is to have any claim to realism. I have ignored it in all other stories, as one of the taboos, but I did not ignore it in this story. When, or if, you ever read it, I’d like to know how you like my handling of the subject of lesbianism."

​"Is there anything you haven't done?" inquired the girl, half in derision and half in fascination.

"I've never been king of an Hyborean kingdom," he grinned, taking an enormous mouthful of cactus. "But I've dreamed of being even that. I may be too, some day. Why shouldn't I?"

“Hither came Conan, the Cimmerian, black-haired, sullen-eyed, sword in hand, a thief, a reaver, a slayer, with gigantic melancholies and ​gigantic mirth, to tread the jeweled thrones of the Earth under his sandaled feet.”

"​His mates began to rely upon him. He did not quarrel with them, and they were careful not to quarrel with him. He gambled with them, putting up his girdle and sheath for a stake, won their money and weapons, and gave them back with a laugh. The crew instinctively looked toward him as the leader of the forecastle. He vouchsafed no information as to what had caused him to flee the Barachas, but the knowledge that he was capable of a deed bloody enough to have exiled him from that wild band increased the respect felt toward him by the fierce Freebooters. Toward Zaporavo and the mates he was imperturbably courteous, never insolent or servile."