It always did make me mad to git hit over the head with a hot skillet; the grease always gits down the back of yore neck. So I grabbed the cook and went to the floor with him jest in time to duck the charge of buckshot old Jabez blazed at me with the waiter’s shotgun from behind the counter. I then riz up and throwed the cook at him and they both crashed into the wall so hard they brung down all the shelves on it and the cans of beans and milk and corn and stuff fell down on top of Jabez till all I could see was his boots sticking out and his howls was arful to hear.
I was jest on the p’int of throwing the kitchen stove on top of the pile, because I was gitting mad by this time, when a feller hit the porch outside on the run, and stuck his head and a shotgun into the door and hollered, “Halt, in the name of the law!”
“Who the devil air you?” I demanded, rising up amidst a rooin of busted chairs, tables, canned goods and unconscious Watsons.
“I’m the sheriff,” says he. “For the Lord’s sake what’s goin’ on here? You must be one of John McCoy’s men!”
“I’m Pike Bearfield of Wolf Mountain,” I says, and he says, “Well, anyway, yo’re under arrest!”
“If you was a fair-minded officer,” I says, grinding my teeth slightly, “I wouldn’t think of resistin’ arrest. But I can see right off that yo’re in league with the Watsons! This here’s a plot to keep me from aidin’ my pore misguided uncle. I see now why these scoundrels come in here and picked a fight with me. But I’ll foil you, by gum! A Bearfield couldn’t git jestice in yore jailhouse, and I ain’t goin’!”
“You air, too!” he hollered, swinging up his shotgun. But I clapped my hand over the lock between the nipples and the hammers before he could pull the triggers, and I then taken hold of the barrels with my other hand and bent ’em at right angles.
“Now lemme see you try to shoot me with that gun,” I says. “It’ll explode and blow yore fool head off!”
He wept with rage.
“I’ll git even with you, you cussed outlaw!” he promised. “Yore derned uncle has run off and j’ined John McCoy’s bandits, and yo’re one of his spies, I bet! You’ve defied the law and rooint my new shotgun, and I’ll have revenge if I have to sue you in the county court!”
“Gah!” I retorted in disgust, and stalked out in gloomy grandeur, emerging onto the street so sudden-like that the crowd which had gathered outside stampeded in all directions howling bloody murder. I never seen sech skittish folks. You’d of thunk I was a tribe of Comanches.
I headed for the wagon yard, and it was a good thing I got there when I did, because Sinclair’s Defeat had got to fighting with Tom Hanson the yard owner’s saddle pony, and when Tom come out with a pitchfork he bit a chunk outa him and run him into a stall where they was a yoke of oxen. The oxes hooked Tom and every time he crawled out Sinclair’s Defeat kicked him back in again and the oxes taken another swipe at him. You oughta heard him holler.
Well, Sinclair’s Defeat was feeling so brash he thought he could lick me, too, so I give him a good punch on the nose and ontangled Tom from amongst the oxes. He bellyached plumb disgusting about gitting mulebit, so to shet him up I give him my last ten dollar bill. He also wanted me to pay for his britches which the oxes had hooked the seat out of, but I refused profanely and as soon as Sinclair’s Defeat come to, I clumb onto him and headed out along the Choctaw Bayou road.
I hadn’t more’n got outa town when I met a old coot legging it up the road on foot, with his whiskers flying in the wind. As soon as he seen me he hollered, “Whar’s the sheriff ? I got work for him!”
“What kind of work?” I ast, hit by a sudden suspicion.
“Larceny, kidnapin’ and a salt and batter,” says he, stopping to git his breath whilst he fanned hisself with his old broad-brimmed straw hat. “Golly, I’m winded! My farm’s three mile back in the piney woods and I’ve run every step of the way! You know what? While ago I heered a arful racket out to my pigpen and I run out and who should I see but old Joab Hudkins tryin’ to rassle my prize Chester boar, Gen’ral Braddock, over the fence! I sung out: ‘Drap that defenseless animal, you cussed outlaw!’ and I’d no more’n got the words outa my mouth when old Joab up and hit me with a wagon spoke. . . . Looka here!” he displayed a knot on his head about the size of a hen aig. “When I come to,” he says, “Joab was gone and so was Gen’ral Braddock. Sech outrages ain’t to be endured by American citerzens! I’m goin’ after the sheriff!”
“Now wait,” I says. “I dunno what’s the matter with Uncle Joab, but le’s see if we cain’t straighten this out without draggin’ in the law—”
“Don’t speak to me if yo’re kin of his’n!” squalled he, stooping for a rock. “Git outa my way! I’ll have jestice if it’s my last ack!”
“Aw, heck,” I says. “I’ve knowed men to make less fuss over losin’ a thousand head of steers than yo’re makin’ over one measly pig. I’ll see that yo’re paid for yore fool swine.”
He hesitated.
“Show me the dough!” he demanded covetously.
“Well,” I said, “I ain’t got no money right now, but—”
“T’ain’t the money, it’s the principle of the thing!” he asserted. “I ain’t to be tromped on! Stand aside! I’m goin’ for the sheriff.”
“Over my dead carcass!” I roared, losing patience. “Dang yore stubborn old hide! Yo’re comin’ with me till we find Uncle Joab and straighten this thing out—”
I leant down from my saddle and grabbed for him, and he give a squall and hit me in the head with his rock and turnt to run, but he stumped his toe and fell down, and that’s when Sinclair’s Defeat bit him in the seat of the britches. He’s a liar when he says I told Sinclair’s Defeat to bite him; it jest come natural for a mule. I reached down and grabbed him by the galluses—the old coot I mean, and not the mule—and heaved him up acrost the saddle horn in front of me, and he hollered, “Halp! Murder! The McCoy gang got me in the toils!”
Somebody echoed his howl, and I looked around and seen a barefooted kid with a fishing pole in his hand jest coming out of the footpath. His eyes was popping right out of his head.
“Run for the sheriff, boy!” squalled my captive. “Git a posse!”
So the kid scooted for town, howling, “Halp! Halp! A outlaw is kidnapin’ old Ash Buckley!”
Well, I had a suspicion things would be a mite warm around there purty soon, so I kicked Sinclair’s Defeat in the ribs and he done a smart piece of skedaddling up that road. I run for maybe four miles till Ash Buckley’s howls got onbearable. I never seen a human which was harder to please than that old buzzard.
“Set me down and lemme die easy!” he gasped. “This cussed horn has pierced my vitals in front and I have got a mortal wound behind!”
“Aw,” I said, “the mule jest bit off a little piece of hide, not any bigger’n yore hand. You ain’t hurt.”
“I’m dyin’,” he maintained fiercely. “I’ll git even, you big monkey! I’ll come back and ha’nt you, that’s what I’ll do—hey!”
I also give a startled yell, because out of the bresh ambled the most pecooliar looking critter I ever seen in my life. I reached for my pistol, but old Ash give a yowl like he’d been stabbed.
“It’s Gen’ral Braddock!” he shrieked. “They’ve shaved him!”
Then I seen that the critter was a hawg which had wunst been white, but now he was as naked as a newborn babe! They warn’t a bristle onto him; it was plumb ondecent. I was so surprised I let old Ash fall onto the ground, and he jumped up and started for Gen’ral Braddock, saying, “Sooey! Sooey! Come here, boy—”
But Gen’ral Braddock give a squeal and curled his tail and lit a shuck through the bresh.
I jest sat my mule and looked. I couldn’t move.
“He’s plumb upsot,” says old Ash, kinda stunned-like. “Whoever heard of sech doins?” Then he says, “Make room for me on that mule! I aim to find Joab if it takes the rest of my life! Shavin’ a hawg is the craziest thing I ever heard of, and I won’t rest easy till I know why he done it!”
I helped him on behind the saddle, and I says, “Where’ll we look for him? No use tryin’ to backtrack that pig. Neither hoss nor man could git through that thicket he come out of.”
“I figger he’s hidin’ out somewheres over on the Choctaw,” says Ash. “When he tried to steal the Watson hawgs I figgered he’d gone wild and j’ined the outlaws that hang out in the swamps over east of here, and was stealin’ pigs for the McCoys. But he must be jest plain crazy.”
“We’ll head for Uncle Esau Hawkins,” I says, “and round up all the kinfolks and start combin’ the woods. By the way, who is these McCoys?”
“A gang of thieves and cutthroats which used to hang around here,” says he. “They ain’t been seen recent, and I figgers they’ve skipped over into Louisiana. They had a hang-out somewhere in the piney woods and nobody never could find it. They ambushed three or four posses which went in after ’em—What you stoppin’ for?”
We was jest passing a path which crossed the road, and I seen hawg tracks going up it, and a man’s tracks right behind, wide apart.
“Somebody chased a pig up that path right recent,” I says, and turned up it at a lope.
We hadn’t went more’n a mile till we heard a pig squealing. So I slipped off of Sinclair’s Defeat and snuck through the bresh on foot till I come to a little clearing, and there was a white hawg tied up and laying on its side, and there was Uncle Joab Hudkins honing a butcher knife on his boot. A tub of soap suds stood nigh at hand.
“Uncle Joab, air you crazy?” I demanded.
Uncle Joab give a startled yell and fell over backwards into the tub. Sech langwidge you never heard as I hauled him out with soap bubbles in his eyes and ears and mouth. Ash run up jest then.
“That’s Jake Peters’ sow!” he hollered, dancing with excitement. “I tell you, he’s as crazy as a mudhen! You better tie him up!”
“You ontie the hawg,” I says. “I’ll take keer of Uncle Joab.”
“Don’t you ontie that hawg!” howled Uncle Joab. “Gol-dern it, cain’t a man tend to his own business without a passel of idjits buttin’ in?”
“Be calm, Uncle Joab,” I soothed. “I don’t think this’ll be permanent. Yore dad was wunst took like this, they say, and voted agen Sam Houston. But he recovered his sanity before the next election, and you probably will too. Jest when was you first seized with a urge to shave pigs?”
At this Uncle Joab begun to display symptoms of vi’lence, even to the extent of trying to stab me with his butcher knife. But I ignored his rudeness, also his biting me viciously in the hind laig whilst I was setting on him and twisting the knife outa his hand. I was as gentle as I could be with him, but he didn’t have no gratitude, and his langwidge was plumb scandalous to hear.
“I’ve heered a lick on the head will often kyore insanity,” says Ash Buckley. “ ’Twon’t hurt to try, anyhow. You hold him whilst I bust him over the dome with a rock.”
“Don’t you tech me with no rock!” yelled Uncle Joab. “I ain’t crazy, gosh-hang you! I got a good reason for shavin’ them hawgs!”
“Well, why?” I demanded.
“None of yore business,” he sulked.
“All right,” I says with a sigh. “All I see to do is to tie you up and take you over to Uncle Esau Hawkins. He can git a doctor for you, or maybe send you to Austin for observation.”
At that he give a convulsive heave and nearly got loose, but I sot on him and told Ash to go git my lariat off of my saddle.
“Hold on!” says Uncle Joab. “I know when I’m licked. I wanted all the loot for myself, but if you’ll git off of me, I’ll tell you everything.”
“What loot?” I ast.
“The loot Cullen Baker’s gang hid in Choctaw Bayou,” says he.
Old Ash pricked up his ears at that.
“You mean to say yo’re on the trail of that?” he demanded.
“I am!” asserted Uncle Joab. “Listen! We all know that a few months before Baker was kilt, he robbed a train jest over the Louisiana line. He then come over here and hid the gold—a hundred thousand dollars’ wuth!—somewhar on Choctaw. Nobody knows whar, because right after that him and all the men which was with him when he hid it, got kilt over night. Jefferson, in 1869. They paid ten thousand dollars for his head in Little Rock.
“Well, I been lookin’ for that plunder off and on for years, like everybody else around here, especially old Jeppard Wilkinson, which used to hold a grudge agen me account of me skinnin’ him in a mule swap. But I got a letter from him the other day, from New Orleans, and he said he’d had a change of heart. He said before he left here he found where Baker’s treasure was hid! But he was afeared to take it out, account of the McCoy gang which was huntin’ it too, and always follerin’ him around and spyin’ on him, so he drawed a map of the place and was waitin’ a chance to go back and git the loot, when he got run out of the country—you know, Ash, on account of the trouble he had with the Clantons—and now he says he wasn’t never comin’ back, so if I could find the map the loot would be mine. And he said he tattooed the map on a white hawg! He said he reckon it run off into the woods after he left the country.”
“Well, whyn’t you tell us all this in the first place?” yelled old Ash. “What air we waitin’ on? Pike, you hold this critter whilst me and Joab scrapes the bristles off. This may be the very hawg.”
Well, I felt plumb silly helping shave a pig, but them old coots was serious. They like to have fit right in the middle of the job when they got to argying how they’d divide the plunder. I told ’em they better wait till they found it before they divided it.
Well, they shaved that critter from stem to stern, but not one mark did they find that looked like a map. But they warn’t discouraged.
“I’ve shaved six already,” says Uncle Joab. “I aim to find that map if I have to shave every white hawg in the county. They ain’t none been butchered since old Jeppard tattooed that’n, so it’s bound to be somewheres in these woods. Listen: I been livin’ in the old Sorley cabin over on the Choctaw. You all go over there with me, and we’ll take up our camp there and work out from it. They ain’t no settlements within a long ways of it, and all the pigs in the county comes over there to that oak grove about a mile from it to eat acorns. Won’t be nobody to interfere with us, and we’ll stay there and comb the woods till we finds the right hawg.”
So we pulled out, taking turns riding and walking.
We went through mighty wild, tangled, uninhabited country to git to that there cabin, which stood a few hundred yards from the bank of the Choctaw. Mostly we follered pig trails through the thickets. On the way Uncle Joab told us the McCoys used to hang out in them parts, and he bet they’d show up again sometime when Louisiana got too hot for ’em, and start burning cabins and stealing and shooting folks from the bresh again. And Ash Buckley said he bet the sheriff of Sabineville wouldn’t never catch ’em, and they got to talking about all the crimes them McCoys had committed, and I was plumb surprised to hear white men could ack like that. They was wuss’n Apaches. They shore wouldn’t of lasted long on Wolf Mountain.
Well, we slept at the cabin that night and early next morning we scattered through the pine flats and cypress swamps looking for white hawgs. Uncle Joab told me not to git lost nor et up by a alligator. Shucks, you could lose a timber wolf as easy as a Bearfield, even in the piney woods, and the muskeeters worrit me more’n the alligators.
I didn’t have no luck looking for white pigs. All I found was plain razorbacks. I finally got disgusted pulling through them swamps and thickets on foot, so about noontime I headed back for the cabin. And when I come out in the clearing I seen a man in the rail pen behind the cabin trying to rope Sinclair’s Defeat. I hollered at him and he ducked and pulled a pistol out of his boot and taken a shot at me, and then ran off into the bresh.
Well, I instantly knowed it was one of them dern Watsons trying to run off our stock and set us afoot so they could snipe us off at their leisure, so I taken in after him. They must of tracked us from Sabineville.
He knowed the country better’n I did, and he stayed ahead of me for three miles, heading south, but he couldn’t shake me off, because us Bearfields learnt tracking from the Yaquis. I gained on him and warn’t but a few yards behind him when he come into a clearing in the middle of the dangedest thicket I ever seen. A path had been cut through it with axes, but if I hadn’t been follering his tracks I probably wouldn’t never have found it, the mouth was so well hid, and not even a razorback could git through anywheres else.
I taken a shot at him as he broke cover and legged it for a cabin in the clearing, and then I started after him; but three or four men opened up on me from the door with Winchesters, so I jumped back into the bresh. He ducked inside and they slammed the door.
It was a hundred yards from the bresh to the cabin, and no cover for a man to crawl up clost. They’d riddle him if he tried it. There warn’t no winders, jest loopholes to shoot through, and the door looked arful thick. Leastways when I tried to shoot through it with my pistol the men inside hollered jeeringly and shot at me through the loopholes. The cabin was built up agen a big rock, the first of its size I’d saw in that country, so they warn’t no chance of storming ’em from the rear. It looked like they jest warn’t no way of coming to grips with them devils.
Then I seen smoke coming out of the top of the rock, and I knowed they had a fireplace built into the rock which formed the back wall of the cabin, and had tunneled out a chimney in the rock. I thought by golly, I bet if I was to climb up onto that rock from behind and drop a polecat down that chimney I could shoot all them Watsons as they run out.
So I fired a few shots at the door, and then ducked low and snuck off. I figgered they’d stay denned up till dark at least, thinking I was still laying for ’em outside, and by that time I could find me a skunk and git back with it. I was depending a lot on it. I notice the average man would rather run the risk of gitting shot than to stay denned up in a winderless cabin with a irritated polecat.
But I looked and looked, and didn’t find none, and it begun to git late, and all at once I thought by golly, I bet a alligator would have the same effect. The nearest way to the bayou was back by our cabin, so I headed that way.
The cabin was empty when I went past it. Uncle Joab and Ash Buckley was still out looking for the tattooed hawg. I went on to the Bayou where I’d heard a big bull beller the night before, and waded out in the water to find him, which I presently did by him grabbing me by the hind laig. So I waded to shore with him, him being too stubborn to let go, and suffering from the illusion that he could pull me out into deep water.
Ain’t it funny what fools some animals is? It’s ideas like that proves their undoing.
When he realized his error we was already in the shallers, so I pried him loose and got him under my arm and started for the bank with him. He then started swinging his tail up and hitting me in the back of the head with it, and it was wuss’n being kicked by a mule. He knocked me down three times before I got out of the water, and nearly wiggled away from me each time, to say nothing of biting me severely in various places. They is nothing more stubborn than a old bull alligator.
Finally I got so disgusted with him I hauled off with my fist and busted him betwixt the eyes, and whilst he was stunned I broke some vines and tied his laigs, and then I could carry him better. I called him Jedge Peabody because he looked so much like a jedge back in my country which would of fined me for shooting Jack Rackston wunst, only I wouldn’t stand for no sech interference with my personal liberty.
Well, I couldn’t figger out no way to tie Jedge Peabody’s tail, and he come to purty soon and started beating me in the neck with it again. It was gitting arful late by now, and I was afeared the Watsons would come out of their cabin and find me gone. So I decided to stop off at our cabin and then ride back instead of going afoot. I figgered to have some trouble with Sinclair’s Defeat when I put Jedge Peabody on his back, but I ’lowed I could persuade him.
So I taken Jedge Peabody up to our cabin and laid him on my bunk to keep him safe till I saddled up. The sun was already outa sight behind the pines and the long shadders was streaming acrost the clearing. It was purty dark in the cabin and you could hardly see Jedge Peabody at all.
Well, I went to the hoss pen and grabbed my saddle, but before I could throw it on, I seen Uncle Joab cross the clearing from the east and go into the cabin. I started to call to him, but the next instant he give a arful screech and come busting out of there so fast he tripped and slid on his nose for about three yards.
“Halp! Murder! The Devil hisself ’s in that cabin!” he screamed, and bounced up and streaked for the tall timber.
“Uncle Joab, come back!” I yelled, jumping the pen fence and lighting out after him. “That ain’t nobody but Jedge Peabody!”
But he jest yelled that much louder and put on more speed. I reckon Jedge Peabody did look kind of uncanny to come onto him unexpected in that dark corner where you couldn’t see much but his big red eyes. Uncle Joab didn’t even look back, and when he heard me crashing through the bresh right behind him, he evidently thought the devil was chasing him, because he let out some more arful screams and jest went a-kiting.
It was dark under the trees, and I reckon that’s why he didn’t see that gully in front of him, anyway, he suddenly vanished from sight with a crash and a howl. Then they busted out an arful squealing and out of the gully come the biggest white hawg I ever seen in my life. And Uncle Joab was astraddle of him, having evidently fell on him.
“Stop him!” howled Uncle Joab, hanging on for his life, afeared to let go and afeared to hold on. That hawg was headed back the way we’d come, and he went past me like a bullet. I grabbed for him, but all I done was tear off Uncle Joab’s shirt. That hawg went through the bresh like a quarter hoss, and the way Uncle Joab hollered was a caution when the limbs scratched him and slapped him in the face.
Well, a Bearfield ain’t to be outdid by man nor beast, so I sot myself to run down that fool hawg on foot. And I was gaining on him, too, when we reached the cabin. But as we busted into the clearing I heard a most amazing racket in the cabin and seen Ash Buckley perched in a tree, plumb wildeyed.
I was so astonished I didn’t look where I was going and tripped over a root and nearly busted my brains out, and when I got up, Uncle Joab and the hawg was clean out of sight.
“What the devil?” I demanded profanely.
“I dunno!” hollered old Ash. “Jest as I come up awhile ago I seen a gang of men sneakin’ into the cabin, so I hid and watched. They shet the door and I heard one of ’em holler: ‘That must be him layin’ on that bunk over there. Grab him!’ Then that racket started. It’s been goin’ on for fifteen minutes. What’s that?”
It sounded like a mule kicking slats out of a shed wall, but I knowed it was Jedge Peabody hitting the Watsons in the head with his tail. Them scoundrels had evidently come to raid our cabin, and Jedge Peabody had busted loose when they grabbed him, thinking he was me.
I run over to the door jest as it was busted down from inside, and a gang of men come piling out. I hit each one on the jaw as he come out, and throwed him to one side till I had seven men laying there, out cold. The last one to come out had Jedge Peabody hanging onto the seat of his britches, and when old Ash seen Jedge Peabody he give a shriek and fell outa the tree and would probably of broke his neck if his galluses hadn’t catched on a limb.
The last Watson I knocked stiff had a scarred face and was about the meanest-looking cuss I ever seen. He was tough, too. I had to hit him twice. I was expecting a tussle with Jedge Peabody, too, but as soon as he seen me he let go of his victim’s pants and scuttled for the creek as fast as he could go. I never seen a ’gator run like him.
Ash was yelling for me to help him down, but they was more important work to do, so I run and got my lariat and tied them Watsons up before they could come to and rolled ’em into the cabin. Then I started towards the tree to git Ash loose, when somebody says, “Hands up!” and whirled around and faced the sheriff and fifty men, all of which was aiming shotguns at me.
“Don’t move!” says the sheriff, which was weighted down with hand-cuffs and laig-irons and chains till he couldn’t hardly walk. “We got you kivered, Bearfield! Them guns is all loaded with buckshot and railroad spikes! We got you cold! Where’s Ash Buckley?”
“Right up over yore fool heads,” says Ash fiercely, which startled the posse so bad they nigh jumped outa their skins and four or five of ’em shot at him before they seen who it was. “Stop that, you nitwits!” he screamed. “Lemme down before I has a rush of blood to the head!”
“Warn’t you kidnaped?” ast the sheriff, dumbfounded, and Ash snarled, “No, I warn’t! Me and Pike and Joab come out here on private business!”
The sheriff cussed something fierce, but the posse started helping Ash down, when we heard somebody hollering for help off to the west, and they dropped Ash on his head and grabbed their guns and says, “Who’s that?”
“It’s Uncle Joab!” I bellered, and made a break for the bresh, with Ash right behind me. Some of ’em shot at me, but they missed, and jest then I heard one of ’em yell, “Sheriff, come here quick! The cabin’s full of men tied hand and foot!”
Every second I expected to hear ’em pursuing us, but we didn’t hear ’em, and purty soon we almost fell over Uncle Joab in the dusk. He was trying to rassle the white hawg over on its side, whilst squalling, “It’s the one! I can see the tattoo marks through the bristles!”
Well, so could we, in spite of the dusk, and old Ash like to collapsed with excitement.
“Grab that hawg, Pike!” he screamed, lugging out a handful of matches. “Cullen Baker’s loot is right in our meat hooks!”
So I helt the hawg and Uncle Joab made a swipe with his butcher knife, and panted, “Strike a match quick, Ash! ’Tain’t a map—it’s writin’, but I cain’t read it by this light! Strike a light!”
Ash struck a match and helt it clost whilst we jammed our three heads together to read what was tattooed on that hawg’s hide. And then Ash and Uncle Joab give a howl that jolted the cones outa the pines. The words tattooed on that hawg was, “April fule! The joaks on you, you old jackass. jeppard wilkinson.”
I let go of the hawg and it went kiting and squealing off into the bresh, and we sot there in bitter silence for a long time.
This silence was busted by the sheriff suddenly sticking his head through the bushes, and saying, “What the devil air you all doin’?”
“Well, I ain’t bein’ arrested,” I says vengefully, gitting to my feet and drawing my pistol. “I’ll pay you for yore shotgun, but—”
“Then I got no charge,” says he. “Bein’ as you didn’t kidnap Ash there, and as for the Watsons—”
“That reminds me,” I interrupted. “I got seven of them skunks tied up back at the cabin. They tried to steal my mule and murder me in my sleep, but I won’t make no charges agen ’em if they’ll drop that pig stealin’ case.”
“Why, heck!” says he. “They’ve already dropped that charge! When old Jabez come to he ’lowed all he wanted with yore clan was peace, and plenty of it! He says they can lick the Hudkinses any day, but when they rings in a Bearfield on ’em, they got more’n enough! Them fellers you got tied up back there—and which the boys is now loadin’ with the irons I brung for you—they ain’t Watsons!”
“Well, who is they, then?”
“Oh,” says he, taking a chaw of plug tobaccer, “nobody but John McCoy and his gang which recent come back from Louisiana! Son, you can have anything in this county! Hey, where you goin’?”
“Home,” I says in disgust, “where a man can depend on a feud bein’ fought to a finish, and one side don’t back out jest because a few of ’em gits their heads busted!”
Gents On The Lynch
Table of Contents
Blue Lizard, Colorado,
September 1, 1879.
Mister Washington Bearfield, Antioch, Colorado.
Dear Brother Wash:
Well, Wash, I reckon you think you air smart persuading me to quit my job with the Seven Prong Pitchfork outfit and come way up here in the mountains to hunt gold. I knowed from the start I warn’t no prospector, but you talked so much you got me addled and believing what you said, and the first thing I knowed I had quit my job and withdrawed from the race for sheriff of Antioch and was on my way. Now I think about it, it is a dern funny thing you got so anxious for me to go prospecting jest as elections was coming up. You never before showed no anxiety for me to git rich finding gold or no other way. I am going to hunt me a quiet spot and set down and study this over for a few hours, and if I decide you had some personal reason for wanting me out of Antioch, I aim to make you hard to ketch.
All my humiliating experiences in Blue Lizard is yore fault, and the more I think about it, the madder I git. And yet it all come from my generous nature which cain’t endure to see a feller critter in distress onless I got him that way myself.
Well, about four days after I left Antioch I hove into the Blue Lizard country one forenoon, riding Satanta and leading my pack mule, and I was passing through a canyon about three mile from the camp when I heard dawgs baying. The next minute I seen three of them setting around a big oak tree barking fit to bust yore ear-drums. I rode up to see what they’d treed and I’m a Injun if it warn’t a human being! It was a tall man without no hat nor gun in his scabbard, and he was cussing them dawgs so vigorous he didn’t hear me till I rode up and says: “Hey, what you doin’ up there?”
He like to fell out of the crotch he was setting in, and then he looked down at me very sharp for a instant, and said: “I taken refuge from them vicious beasts. I was goin’ along mindin’ my own business when they taken in after me. I think they got hyderphoby. I’ll give you five bucks if you’ll shoot ’em. I lost my gun.”
“I don’t want no five bucks,” I says. “But I ain’t goin’ to shoot ’em. They’re pecooliar lookin’ critters, and they may be valurebul. I notice the funnier-lookin’ a animal is, the more money they’re generally wuth. I’ll shoo ’em off.”
So I got down and says: “Git!” and they immejitly laid holt of my laigs, which was very irritating because I didn’t have no other boots but them. So I fotched each one of them fool critters a hearty kick in the rear, and they give a yowl and scooted for the tall timber.
“You can come down now,” I says. “Dern it, them varmints has rooint my boots.”
“Take mine!” says he, sliding down and yanking off his boots.
“Aw, I don’t want to do that,” I says, but he says: “I insists! It’s all I can do for you. Witherington T. Jones always pays his debts, even in adversity! You behold in me a lone critter buffeted on the winds of chance, penniless and friendless, but grateful! Take my boots, kind stranger, do!”
Well, I was embarrassed and sorry for him, so I said all right, and taken his boots and give him mine. They was too big for him, but he seemed mighty pleased when he hauled ’em on. His’n was very handsome, all fancy stitching. He shaken my hand and said I’d made him very happy, but all to once he bust into tears and sobbed: “Pore Joe!”
“Pore who?” I ast.
“Joe!” says he, wiping his eyes on my bandanner. “My partner, up on our claim in the hills. I warned him agen drinkin’ a gallon of corn juice to inoculate hisself agen snake- bite—before the snake bit him—but he wouldn’t listen, so now he’s writhin’ in the throes of delirium tremens. It would bust yore heart to hear the way he shrieks for me to shoot the polka-dotted rhinocerhosses which he thinks is gnawin’ his toes. I left him tied hand and foot and howlin’ that a striped elephant was squattin’ on his bosom, and I went to Blue Lizard for medicine. I got it, but them cussed dawgs scairt my hoss and he got away from me, and it’ll take me till midnight to git back to our claim afoot. Pore Joe’ll be a ravin’ corpse by then.”
Well, I never heard of a corpse raving, but I couldn’t stand the idee of a man dying from the d.t.’s, so I shucked my pack offa my mule, and said: “Here, take this mule and skeet for yore claim. He’ll be better’n walkin’. I’d lend you Satanta only he won’t let nobody but me ride him.”
Mister Witherington T. Jones was plumb overcome by emotion. He shaken my hand again and said: “My noble friend, I’ll never forgit this!” And then he jumped on the mule and lit out, and from the way he was kicking the critter’s ribs I reckoned he’d pull into his claim before noon, if it was anywheres within a hundred miles of there. He sure warn’t wasting no time. I could see that.
I hung his boots onto my saddle horn and I had started gathering up my plunder when I heard men yelling and then a whole gang with Winchesters come busting through the trees, and they seen me and hollered: “Where is he?”
“We heard the dawgs bayin’ over here,” says a little short one. “I don’t hear ’em now. But they must of had him treed somewheres clost by.”
“Oh, Mr. Jones,” I said. “Well, don’t worry about him. He’s all right. I druv the dawgs off and and lent him my mule to git back to his claim.”
At this they let forth loud frenzied yells. It was plumb amazing. Here I’d jest rescued a feller human from a pack of ferocious animals, and these hombres acted like I’d did a crime or something.
“He helped him git awayl” they hollered. “Le’s lynch him, the derned outlaw!”
“Who you callin’ a outlaw?” I demanded. “I’m a stranger in these parts. I’m headin’ for Blue Lizard to work me a claim.”
“You jest helped a criminal to escape!” gnashed they, notably a big black-bearded galoot with a sawed-off shotgun. “This feller Jones as you call him tried to rob a stage coach over on Cochise Mountain less’n a hour ago. The guard shot his pistol out of his hand, and his hoss got hit too, so he broke away on foot. We sot the dawgs on his trail, and we’d of had him by now, if you hadn’t butted in! Now the dawgs cain’t track him no more.”
“Call ’em back and set ’em on the mule’s trail,” sejests a squint-eyed cuss. “As for you, you cussed Texas hill-billy, you keep on travelin’. We don’t want no man like you in Blue Lizard.”
“Go to the devil, you flat-nosed buzzard,” I retort with typical Southern courtesy. “This here’s a free country. I come up here to hunt gold and I aim to hunt it if I have to lick every prospector in Lizard Cañon! You cain’t ride me jest because I made a honest mistake that anybody could of made. Anyway, I’m the loser, ’cause he got off with my mule.”
“Aw, come on and le’s find the dawgs,” says a bow-legged gun-toter with warts. So they went off up the cañon, breathing threats and vengeance, and I taken my plunder on my shoulder and went on down the cañon, leading Satanta. I put on Mister Jones’s boots first, and they was too small for me, of course, but I could wear ’em in a pinch. (That there is a joke, Wash, but I don’t suppose you got sense enough to see the p’int.)
I soon come to the aidge of the camp, which was spread all over the place where the canyon widened out and shallowed, and the first man I seen was old Polk Williams. You remember him, Wash, we knowed him over to Trinidad when we first come to Colorado with the Seven Prong Pitchfork outfit. I hailed him and ast him where I could find a good claim, and he said all the good ones had been took. So I said, well, I’d strike out up in the hills and hunt me one, and he says: “What you know about prospectin’? I advises you to git a job of workin’ some other man’s claim at day wages till they’s a new strike up in the hills somewheres. They’s bound to be one any day, because the mountains is full of prospectors which got here too late to git in on this’n. Plenty of jobs here at big wages, because nobody wants to work. They all wants to wade creeks till they stub their fool toe on a pocket of nuggets.”
“All right,” I said. “I’ll pitch my camp down on the creek.”
“You better not,” says he. “These mountains is full of hyderphoby skunks. They crawls in yore blankets at night and bites you, and you foam at the mouth and go bite yore best friends. Now, it jest happens I got a spare cabin which I ain’t usin’. The feller who had it rented ain’t with us this mornin’ account of a extry ace in a poker game last night. I’ll rent it to you dirt cheap—ten dollars a day. You’ll be safe from them cussed skunks there.”
So I said: “All right. I don’t want to git hyderphoby.”
So I give him ten dollars in advance and put my plunder in the cabin which was on a slope west of the camp, and hobbled Satanta to graze. He said I better look out or somebody would steal Satanta. He said Mustang Stirling and his outlaws was hiding in the hills clost by and terrorizing the camp which didn’t even have a sheriff yet, because folks hadn’t had time to elect one, but they was gittin so sick of being robbed all the time they probably would soon, and maybe organize a Vigilante Committee, too. But I warn’t scairt of anybody stealing Satanta. A stranger had better take a cougar by the whiskers than to monkey with Satanta. That hoss has got a disposition like a sore-tailed rattlesnake.
Well, while we was talking I seen a gal come out from amongst the cluster of stores and saloons and things, and head up the canyon with a bucket in her hand. She was so purty my heart skipped a beat and my corns begun to throb. That’s a sure sign of love at first sight.
“Who’s that gal?” I ast.
“Hannah Sprague,” says Polk. “The belle of Blue Lizard. But you needn’t start castin’ sheep’s eyes at her. They’s a dozen young bucks sparkin’ her already. I think Blaze Wellington’s the favorite to put his brand onto her, though. She wouldn’t look twicet at a hill-billy like you.”
“I might remove the compertition,” I sejested.
“You better not try no Wolf Mountain rough stuff in Blue Lizard,” warned he. “The folks is so worked up over all these robberies and killin’s they’re jest in a mood to lynch somebody, especially a stranger.”
But I give no heed. Folks is always wanting to lynch me, and quite a few has tried, as numerous tombstones on the boundless prairies testifies.
“Where’s she goin’ with that bucket?” I ast him, and he said: “She’s takin’ beer to her old man which is workin’ a claim up the creek.”
“Well, listen,” I says. “You git over there behind that thicket and when she comes past you make a noise like a Injun.”
“What kind of damfoolishness is this?” he demanded. “You want to stampede the hull camp?”
“Don’t make a loud whoop,” I says. “Jest make it loud enough for her to hear it.”
“Air you crazy?” says he.
“No, dern it!” I said fiercely, because she was tripping along purty fast. “Git in there and do like I say. I’ll rush up from the other side and pertend to rescue her from the Injuns, and that’ll make her like me.”
“I mistrusts you’re a blasted fool,” he grumbled. “But I’ll do it jest this oncet.”
He snuck into the thicket which she’d have to pass on the other side, and I circled around so she couldn’t see me till I was ready to rush out and save her from being sculped. Well, I warn’t hardly in place when I heard a kind of mild war-whoop and it sounded jest like a Blackfoot, only not so loud. But immejitly there come the crack of a pistol and another yell which warn’t subdued like the first. It was lusty and energetic.
I run towards the thicket, but before I could git into the open trail old Polk come b’ilin’ out of the back side of the clump with his hands to the seat of his britches.
“You planned this a-purpose, you snake in the grass!” he squalled. “Git outa my way!”
“Why, Polk!” I says. “What happened?”
“I bet you knowed she had a derringer in her stocking,” he howled as he run past me with his pants smoking. “It’s all yore fault! When I whooped she pulled it and shot into the bresh! Don’t speak to me! I’m lucky that I warn’t hit in a vital spot. I’ll git even with you for this if it takes a hundred years!”
He headed on into the deep bresh, and I run around the thicket and seen Hannah Sprague peering into it with her gun smoking in her hand. She looked up as I come onto the trail, and I taken off my hat and said perlite: “Howdy, Miss. Can I be of no assistance to you?”
“I jest shot a Injun,” says she. “I heard him holler. You might go in there and git the sculp, if you don’t mind. I’d like to have it for a soovenear.”
“I’ll be glad to, Miss,” I says gallantly. “I’ll likewise kyore and tan it for you myself.”
“Oh, thank you, sir!” she says, dimpling. “It’s a pleasure to meet a real gent like you!”
“The pleasure’s all mine,” I assured her, and went into the bresh and stomped around a little, and then come out and says: “I’m arful sorry, Miss, but the varmint ain’t nowheres to be found. You must of jest winged him. If you want me to, I’ll take his trail and run him down.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t think of puttin’ you to sech trouble,” she says, much to my relief, because I was jest thinking that if she did demand a sculp, the only thing I could do would be to ketch old Polk and sculp him, and I’d hate to have to do that. I bet it would of made him arful mad.
But she looked me over admiringly and says: “I’m Hannah Sprague. Who’re you?
“I knowed you the minute I seen you,” I says. “The fame of yore beauty has reached clean to Wolf Mountain, Texas. I’m Pike Bearfield.”
“Glad to meetcha, Mister Bearfield,” says she. “They must grow big men in Texas. Well, I got to go now. Pap gits arful tetchy if he don’t git his beer along with his dinner.”
“I’d admire powerful to call on you this evenin’,” I says, and she says, “Well, I dunno. Mister Blaze Wellington was goin’ to call—”
“He cain’t come,” I says.
“Why, how do you know?” she ast surprised. “He said—”
“A unforeseen circumstance,” I says gently. “It ain’t happened to him yet, but it’s goin’ to right away.”
“Well,” she says, kind of confused, “I reckon in that case you can come on, if you want. We live in that cabin down yonder by that big fir. But when you git within hearin’ holler and tell us who you be, if it’s after dark. Pap is arful nervous account of all these outlaws which is robbin’ people.”
So I said I would, and she went on, and I headed for the camp. People give me some suspicious looks, and I heard a lot of folks talking about this here Mustang Stirling and his gang. Seems like them critters hid in the hills and robbed somebody nearly every day and night, and nobody could hardly git their gold out of camp without gittin’ stuck up. But I didn’t have no gold yet, and wouldn’t of been scairt of Mustang Stirling if I had, so I went on to the biggest saloon, which they called the Belle of New York. I taken a dram and ast the bartender if he knowed Blaze Wellington. He said sure he did, and I ast him where Blaze Wellington was, and he p’inted out a young buck which was setting at a table with his head down on his hands like he was trying to study out something. So I went over and sot down opposite him, and he looked up and seen me, and fell out of his chair backwards hollering: “Don’t shoot!”
“Why, how did you know?” I ast, surprised.
“By yore evil face,” he gibbered. “Go ahead! Do yore wust!”
“They ain’t no use to git highsterical,” I says. “If you’ll be reasonable nobody won’t git hurt.”
“I won’t tell you whar it’s hid!” he defied, gitting onto his feet and looking like a cornered wharf-rat.
“Where what’s hid?” I ast in amazement.
At this he looked kind of dumfounded.
“Say,” says he cautiously, “ain’t you one of Mustang Stirling’s spies, after the gold?”
“Naw, I ain’t,” I says angrily. “I jest come here to ast you like a gent not to call on Hannah Sprague tonight.”
“What the devil?” says he, looking kind of perplexed and relieved and mad all at the same time. “What you mean, not call on Hannah?”
“Because I am,” I says, hitching my guns for’ard.
“Who the devil air you?” he demanded, convulsively picking up a beer mug like he aimed to throw it at me.
“Pike Bearfield of Wolf Mountain,” I says, and he says: “Oh!” and after a minute he puts the beer mug down and stood there studying a while.
Then he says: “Why, Bearfield, they warn’t no use in you threatenin’ me. I bet you think I’m in love with Hannah Sprague! Well, I ain’t. I’m a friend of her old man, that’s all. I been keepin’ his gold over to my shack, guardin’ it for him, so Mustang Stirling’s outlaws wouldn’t git it, and the old man is so grateful he wants me to marry the gal. But I don’t keer nothin’ about her.
“To tell you the truth, if it warn’t that I like the old man, I’d throw up the job, it’s so dangerous. Mustang Stirling has got spies in the camp, and they dogs me night and day. I thought you was one of ’em when I seen yore arful face. . . . Well, I’m glad the old man’s goin’ to send it out on the stage tomorrer. It’s been an arful strain on me and my partner, which is over at the shack now. Somebody’s got to stay there on guard all the time, or them cussed outlaws would come right in and tear the shack apart and find where I got it hid. Tonight’ll be the wust. They’ll make a desprut effort to git it before mornin’.”
“You mean old man Sprague wants you to marry Hannah because yo’re guardin’ his gold?” I ast, and he says yes, but the responsibility was aging him prematurely. I says: “Looky here! Lemme take this job off ’n yore hands! Lemme guard the gold tonight! I hates to see a promisin’ young man like you wore down to a nubbin by care and worry.”
“I hate to do that,” he demurred, but I said: “Come on, be a good feller! I’ll do as much for you, some time.”
He thought it over a while, shaking his head, whilst I was on needles and pins, and then he stuck out his hand and said: “I’ll do it! Shake! But don’t tell nobody. I wouldn’t do it for nobody but you. . . . What’s that noise?”
Because we heard a lot of men running up the street and yelling: “Git yore guns ready, boys! We’re right on his trail!”
Somebody hollered “Who?” And somebody else yelled: “Jones! The hounds picked up his foot-tracks whilst we was tryin’ to git ’em after the mule’s! He musta jumped offa the mule and doubled back afoot! We’ve trailed him right down Main Street!”
Then somebody else whooped: “They’re goin’ into the Belle of New York! We got him cornered! Don’t let him git away!”
The next minute here come them three fool bloodhounds b’ilin’ in at the front door and grabbed me by the hind laig again. It was most ann’ying. I dunno when I was ever so sick of a pack of hounds in my life. But I controlled my temper and merely jerked ’em loose from my laig and throwed ’em out the winder, and they run off. Then a crowd of faces jammed in the door and looked at me wildly and said: “You again!”
I recognized Black-Beard and Squint-Eye and Shorty and Warts and the rest of the men which was in the posse chasing Mister Jones, and I said fretfully: “Gol-dern it, whyn’t you all lemme alone?”
But they ignored my remark, and Squint-Eye said: “I thought we told you not to stop in Blue Lizard!”
Before I could think of anything insulting enough to say in response, Warts give a yelp and p’inted at my laigs.
“Look there!” he howled. “He’s got on Jones’s boots! I was on the stage coach when Jones tried to hold it up, and he had on a mask, but I remember them boots! Don’t you remember—this hill-billy didn’t have on no boots when we seen him before! He traded boots with Jones to fool the dawgs! No wonder they wouldn’t foller the mule! He’s a derned outlaw! He knowed what Jones’s name was! He’s one of Stirling’s spies! Git him!”
I started to tell Blaze to tell ’em I was all right, but at this moment Shorty was so overcome by excitement that he throwed a cuspidor at me. I ducked and it hit Blaze betwixt the eyes and he curled up under the table with a holler gasp.
“Now look what you done!” I says wrathfully, but all Shorty says is to holler: “Grab him, boys! Here’s where we starts cleaning up this camp right now! Let the hangin’s commence!”
If he hadn’t made that last remark, I probably wouldn’t of broke his arm when he tried to stab me with his bowie, but I’m kind of sensitive about being hung. I would of avoided vi’lence if I could of, but sech remarks convinced me that them idjits was liable to do me bodily harm, especially when some of ’em grabbed me around the laigs and five or six more tried to twist my arms around behind my back. So I give a heave and slung them loose from me which was hanging onto my arms, and then I ast the others ca’mly and with dignity to let go of me before I injured ’em fatally, but they replied profanely that I was a dadgasted outlaw and they was going to hang me if it was the last thing any of ’em done. They also tried to rassle me off my feet and Black-Beard hit me over the head with a beer bottle.
This made me mad, so I walked over to the bar with nine or ten of ’em hanging onto me and bracing their feet in a futile effort to stop me, and I stooped and tore up a ten-foot section of brass rail, and at the first swipe I laid out Black-Beard and Squint-Eye and Warts, and at the second I laid out four more gents which was perfect strangers to me, and when I heaved her up for the third swipe they warn’t nobody in the saloon but me and them on the floor. It is remarkable the number of men you can fotch at one lick with a ten-foot section of brass railing. The way the survivors stampeded out the front door yelling blue murder you’d of thought it was the first time anybody had ever used a brass rail on ’em.
Blaze was beginning to come to, so I hauled him out from under the table, and lugged him out onto the street with me. Some fellers on the other side of the street immejitly started shooting at me, so I drawed my pistols and shot back at ’em, and they broke and run every which a way. So I got Blaze onto my back and started up the street with him, and after I’d went a few hundred yards he could walk hisself, though he weaved considerable, and he taken the lead and led me to his cabin which was back of some stores and clost to the bank of the creek. They warn’t nobody in sight but a loafer setting under a tree on the bank fishing, with his slouch hat pulled down to shade his eyes. The door was shet, so Blaze hollered, still kind of dizzy: “It’s me, Branner; open up!”
So another young feller opened the door and looked out cautious with a double-barreled shotgun, and Blaze says to me: “Wait here whilst I go in and git the gold.”
So I did and after a while he come out lugging a good- sized buckskin poke which I jedged from the weight they must be several thousand dollars worth of nuggets in there.
“I’ll never forget this,” I said warmly. “You go tell Hannah I cain’t come to see her tonight because I’m guardin’ her old man’s gold. I’ll see her tomorrer after the stage coach has left with it.”
“I’ll tell her, pal,” says he with emotion, shaking my hand, so I headed for my cabin, feeling I had easily won the first battle in the campaign for Hannah Sprague’s hand. Imagine that pore sap Blaze throwing away a chance like that! I felt plumb sorry for him for being so addle-headed.
The sun was down by the time I got back to my cabin, and oncet I thought somebody was follering me, and I looked around, but it warn’t nobody but the feller I’d seen fishing, trudging along about a hundred yards behind me with his pole onto his shoulder.
Well, when I arriv’ at my cabin, I seen a furtive figger duck out the back way. It looked like old Polk, so I called to him, but he scooted off amongst the trees. I decided I must of been mistook, because likely old Polk was still off somewheres sulking on account of gitting shot in the britches. He was a onreasonable old cuss.
I went in and throwed the buckskin poke on the table and lit a candle, and jest then I heard a noise at the winder and wheeled quick jest in time to see somebody jerk his face away from the winder. I run to the door, and seen somebody sprinting off through the trees, and was jest fixing to take a shot at him when I recognized that old slouch hat. I wondered what that fool fisherman had follered me and looked in at my winder for, and I wondered why he run off so fast, but I’d already found out that Blue Lizard was full of idjits, so I give the matter no more thought. I ain’t one of these here fellers which wastes their time trying to figger out why things is like they is, and why people does things like they does. I got better employment for my spare time, sech as sleeping.
Satanta come up to the door and nickered, and I give him some oats, and then I built a fire in the fireplace and cooked some bacon and made some coffee, and I’d jest got through eating and cleaned up the pot and skillet when somebody hailed me outside.
I quick blowed out the candle and stepped to the door with a gun in each hand. I could see a tall figger standing in the starlight, so I ast who the devil he was and what he wanted.
“A friend of Old Man Sprague’s,” says he. “Huddleston is the name, my enormous young friend, Carius Z. Huddleston. Mister Sprague sent me over to help you guard his gold tonight.”
That didn’t set well with me, because it looked like Old Man Sprague didn’t think I was capable of taking care of it by myself, and I said so right out.
“Not at all,” says Mister Huddleston. “He’s so grateful to you for assumin’ the responsibility that he said he couldn’t endure it if you come to any harm on account of it, so he sent me to help you.”
Well, that was all right. It looked like Old Man Sprague had took a fancy to me already, even before he’d saw me, and I felt that I was nigh as good as married to Hannah already. So I told Mr. Huddleston to come in, and I lit the candle and shet the door. He was a tall man with the biggest black mustache I ever seen, and he had on a frock tail coat and a broad- brim hat. I seen two ivory-handled six-shooters under his coattails. His eyes kind of bulged in the candlelight when he seen the big poke on the table and he ast me was that the gold and I said yes. So he hauled out a bottle of whiskey and said: “Well, my gigantic young friend, le’s drink to Old Man Sprague’s gold, may it arrive at its proper destination.”
So we had a drink and I sot down on the bench and he sot on a rawhide bottomed chair, and he got to telling me stories, and he knowed more things about more people than I ever seen. He told me about a feller named Paul Revere which thrived during the Revolution when we licked the Britishers, and I got all het up hearing about him. He said the Britishers was going to sneak out of a town named Boston which I jedge must of been a right sizable cowtown or mining camp or something, and was going to fall on the people unawares and confiscate their stills and weppins and steers and things, but one of Paul’s friends signaled him what was going on by swinging a lantern, and Paul forked his cayuse and fogged it down the trail to warn the folks.
When he was telling about Paul’s friend signaling him Mister Huddleston got so excited he grabbed the candle and went over to the west winder and waved the candle back and forth three times to show me how it was done. It was a grand story, Wash, and I got goose bumps on me jest listening to it.
Well, it was gitting late by now, and Mister Huddleston ast me if I warn’t sleepy. I said no, and he said: “Go ahead and lay down and sleep. I’ll stand guard the rest of the night.”
“Shucks,” I said. “I ain’t sleepy. You git some rest.”
“We’ll throw dice to see who sleeps first,” says he, hauling out a pair, but I says: “No, sir! It’s my job. I’m settin’ up with the gold. You go on and lay down on that bunk over there if you wanta.”
Well, for a minute Mister Huddleston got a most pecooliar expression onto his face, or it might of been the way the candlelight shined on it, because for a minute he looked jest like I’ve seen men look who was ready to pull out their pistol on me. Then he says: “All right. I believe I will take a snooze. You might as well kill the rest of that whisky. I got all I want.”
So he went over to the bunk which was in a corner where the light didn’t shine into very good, and he sot down on it to take off his boots. But he’d no sooner sot than he give a arful yell and bounded convulsively out into the middle of the room, clutching at his rear, and I seen a b’ar trap hanging onto the seat of his britches! I instantly knowed old Polk had sot it in the bunk for me, the revengeful old polecat.
From the way Mr. Huddleston was hollering I knowed it warn’t only pants which was nipped betwixt the jaws; they was quite a chunk of Mister Huddleston betwixt ’em too. He went prancing around the cabin like one of them whirling derfishes and his langwidge was plumb terrible.
“Git it off, blast you!” he howled, but he was circling the room at sech speed I couldn’t ketch him, so I grabbed the chain which dangled from the trap and give a heave and tore it loose from him by main strength. The seat of his pants and several freckles come with it, and the howls he’d let out previous warn’t a circumstance to the one which he emitted now, also bounding about seven foot in the air besides.
“You—!” screamed he, and I likewise give a beller of amazement because his mustash had come off and revealed a familiar face!
“Witherington T. Jones!” I roared, dumfounded. “What the devil you doin’ here in disguise?”
“Now!” says he, pulling a gun. “Hands up, curse you, or—”
I knocked the gun out of his hand before he could pull the trigger, and I was so overcome with resentment that I taken him by the neck and shaken him till his spurs flew off.
“Is this any way to treat a man as risked his repertation to rescue you from bloodhounds?” I inquired with passion. “Where’s my mule, you ornery polecat?”
I had forgot about his other gun, but he hadn’t. But I was shaking him so energetic that somehow he missed me even when he had the muzzle almost agen my belly. The bullet tore the hide over my ribs and the powder burnt me so severe that I lost my temper.
“So you tries to murder me after obtainin’ my mule under false pretenses!” I bellered, taking the gun away from him and impulsively slinging him acrost the cabin. “You ain’t no friend of Old Man Sprague’s.”
At this moment he got hold of a butcher knife I used to slice bacon with and come at me, yelling: “Slim! Mike! Arizona! Jackson! Where’n hell air you?”
I taken the blade in my arm-muscles and then grabbed him and we was rassling all over the place when six men come storming through the door with guns in their hands. One of them yelled: “I thought you said you’d wait till he was asleep or drunk before you signaled us!”
“He wouldn’t go to sleep!” howled Mister Jones, spitting out a piece of my ear he’d bit off. “Dammit, do somethin’! Don’t you see he’s klllin’ me?”
But we was so tangled up they couldn’t shoot me without hitting him, so they clubbed their pistols and come for me, so I swung Mister Jones off his feet and throwed him at ’em. They was all in a bunch and he hit ’em broadside and knocked ’em all over and they crashed into the table and upsot it and the candle went out. The next minute they was a arful commotion going on as they started fighting each other in the dark, each one thinking it was me he had holt of.
I was feeling for ’em when the back door busted open and I had a brief glimpse of a tall figger darting out, and it was carrying something on its shoulder. Then I remembered that the poke had been on that table. Mister Jones had got holt of the gold and was skedaddling with it!
I run out of the back door after him jest as a mob of men come whooping and yelling up to the front door with torches and guns and ropes. I heard one of ’em yell: “Somebody’s fightin’ in there! Listen at ’em!”
Somebody else yelled: “Maybe the whole gang’s in there with the hill-billy! Git ’em!” So they went smashing into the cabin jest as I run in amongst the trees after Mister Jones.
And there I was stumped. I couldn’t see where he went and it was too dark to find his trail. Then all to oncet I heard Satanta squeal and a man yelled for help, and they come a crash like a man makes when a hoss bucks him off into a blackjack thicket. I run in the direction of the noise and by the starlight I seen Satanta grazing and a pair of human laigs sticking out of the bresh. Mister Jones had tried to git away on Satanta.
“I told you he wouldn’t let nobody but me ride him,” I says as I hauled him out, but his langwidge ain’t fit to be repeated. The poke was lying clost by, busted open. When I picked it up, it didn’t look right. I struck a match and looked.
That there poke was full of nothing but scrap iron!
I was so stunned I didn’t hardly know what I was doing when I taken the poke in one hand and Mister Jones’ neck in the other’n, and lugged ’em back to the cabin. The mob had Mister Jones’s six men outside tied up, and was wiping the blood off ’em, and I seen Shorty and Black-Beard and Squint-Eye and the others, and about a hundred more.
“They’re Stirling’s men all right,” says Warts. “But where’s Mustang, and that hill- billy? Anyway, le’s string these up right here.”
“You ain’t,” says Black-Beard. “You all elected me sheriff before we come up here, and I aims to uphold the law. . . . Who’s that?”
“It’s Old Man Sprague,” says somebody, as a bald-headed old coot come prancing through the crowd waving a shotgun.
“What you want?” says Black-Beard. “Don’t you see we’re busy?”
“I demands jestice!” howled Old Man Sprague. “I been abused!”
At this moment I shouldered through the crowd with a heavy heart, and slang the poke of scrap iron down in front of him.
“There it is,” I says, “and I’ll swear it ain’t been monkeyed with since Blaze Wellington gave it to me!”
“Who’s that?’ howled Sprague.
“The hill-billy!” howled the mob. “Grab him!”
“No, you don’t!” I roared, drawing a gun. “I’ve took enough offa you Blue Lizard jackasses! I’m a honest man, and I’ve brung back Mister Jones to prove it.”
I then flang him down in front of them, and Warts give a howl and pounced on him. “Jones, nothing!” he yelled. “That’s Mustang Stirling!”
“I confesses,” says Mustang groggily. “Lock me up where I can be safe from that hill-billy! The critter ain’t human.”
“Somebody listen to me!” howled Old Man Sprague, jumping up and down. “I demands to be heard!”
“I done the best I could!” I roared, plumb out of patience. “When Blaze Wellington give me yore gold to guard—”
“What the devil air you talkin’ about?” he squalled. “That wuthless scoundrel never had no gold of mine.”
“What!” I hollered, going slightly crazy. Jest then I seen a feller in the crowd I recognized. I made a jump and grabbed him.
“Branner!” I roared. “You was at Wellington’s shack when he give me that poke! You tell me quick what this is all about, or—”
“Leggo!” he gasped. “It warn’t Sprague’s gold we hid. It was our’n. We couldn’t git it outa camp because we knowed Stirling’s spies was watchin’ us all the time. When you jumped Blaze in the Belle of New York, he seen a chance to git ’em off our necks. He filled that poke with scrap iron and give it to you where the spy could see it and hear what was said. The spy didn’t know whether it was our gold or Sprague’s, but we knowed if he thought you had it, Stirling would go after you and let us alone. He did, too, and that give Blaze a chance to sneak out early tonight with it.”
“And that ain’t all!” bellered Old Man Sprague. “He taken Hannah with him! They’ve eloped!”
My yell of mortal agony drownded out his demands for the sheriff to pursue ’em. Hannah! Eloped! It was too much for a critter to endure!
“Aw, don’t you keer, partner,” says Shorty, slapping me on the back with the arm I hadn’t busted. “You been vindicated as a honest citizen! You’re the hero of the hour!”
“Spare yore praise,” I says bitterly. “I’m the victim of female perfidy. I have lost my faith in my feller man and my honest heart is busted all to perdition! Leave me to my sorrer!”
So they gathered up their prisoners and went away in awed silence. I am a rooint man. All I want to do is to become a hermit and forgit my aching heart in the untrodden wilderness.
Your pore brother,
Pike
P.S.—The Next Morning. I have jest learnt that after I withdrawed from the campaign and left Antioch, you come out for sheriff and got elected. So that’s why you persuaded me to come up here. I am heading for Antioch and when I git there I am going to whup you within a inch of yore wuthless life, I don’t care if you air sheriff of Antioch. I am going to kick the seat of yore britches up around yore neck and sweep the streets with you till you don’t know whether yo’re setting or standing. Hoping this finds you in good health and spirits, I am,
Yore affectionate brother,
P. Bearfield Esquire
The Riot Of Bucksnort
Table of Contents
THE SAN SIMEON BRANDING IRON
April 6, 1885
EDITORIAL
It has lately been brought to our notice by some of the less fastidious of our citizens who, presumably, have been amusing themselves by a slumming tour which naturally included a visit to our neighboring city of Bucksnort, that a campaign for sheriff is now raging in that aforesaid Hellhole of Iniquity. The candidates, as they were informed by such of Bucksnort’s citizens as were out of jail and sober enough to talk lucidly, are the present Sheriff of Papago County, John Donaldson, and the City Marshal of Bucksnort, Cheyenne Campbell, whose term of office evidently expires about election time. Not, however, that the undemocratic spectacle of a man holding one office and simultaneously running for another would create any impression on the stunted sensibilities of the denizens of that Miners’ Bedlam, that Blot on the Desert, that reeking Cesspool of Infamy, Bucksnort!
Each of the candidates seems to be straining nerve and sinew (we had almost said brain!) to distinguish himself in some spectacular manner which will catch the alcohol-soaked fancy of the citizenry. While we would no more descend to mingle into Bucksnort’s politics than we would dip our hands in any other mud puddle, we humbly suggest to whichever candidate may be elected, that he devote less time to persecuting innocent citizens of San Simeon, whom misfortune catches in Bucksnort, and more to the pursuit of that notorious scourge of the Border, Raphael Garcia, or El Lobo, the bandit, whose depredations are a thorn in the flesh of all honest men, and who, incidentally, seems to be reaping the larger proceeds of the mines of which Bucksnort is so proud. Within the last few months his robberies of stagecoaches, ore-trains, and company offices have cost the mine owners several hundred thousand dollars. This is of no consequence to San Simeon, the fair queen-city of the cow country, but doubtless is to the muckgrubbers of Bucksnort.
We close this column with the remark that if anyone in the alleged town of Bucksnort wishes to physically resent any of the just statements here above made, that the editor of The Branding Iron is at his desk every day, hot or cold, rain or shine, drunk or sober, that the editor’s benchlegged English bulldog is always on the job, and that the editorial shotgun is loaded with turkey shot and ten-penny nails. Liberty, Law, Order and Democracy!
* * * * *
THE BUCKSNORT CHRONICLE
April 9, 1885
EDITORIAL NOTE
We notice that our esteemed contemporary, the editor of that filthy rag, The San Simeon Branding Iron, has emerged from his habitual state of drunken stupor long enough to direct at our beautiful city an unprovoked blast which sounds much like the well-known braying of that individual’s not- too-distant ancestor. We scorn to bend to his level by replying. The accompanying notice is Bucksnort’s official retort to the cow-chasing scum of San Simeon and all Hualpai County! Loyal citizens please peruse.
NOTICE!
(Personal Insertion)
There has been a lot of loose talk going on over to San Simeon about the way the campaign for Sheriff of Papago County is being ran. It is none of their blasted business and we do not want none of their company. Bucksnort is the leading mining town of the Territory and is sufficient unto herself. We have took enough off of the bat-legged cowpokes which infest San Simeon. As marshal of our thriving city I have placed a sign at the edge of town reading as per follows, “Horse thieves, cow rustlers, Injuns and other varmints, particularly including folks from San Simeon, stay out of Bucksnort!” I aim to enforce that edict. That ought to settle their hash, and when you, the citizens of this desert metropolis, go to the polls to exercise your inalienable privilege as American citizens, please remember that it is because of the zeal and patriotism of your favorite candidate that you are not now harassed with vermin from San Simeon! Yours for better government, law, order and personal liberty.
Cheyenne Campbell,
City Marshal
* * * * *
Bucksnort, Arizona,
1 p. m., April 9, 1885.
Mr. Sam Abercrombie,
c/o Hualpai County Jail,
San Simeon, Arizona
Dear Sam:
Campbell has put over a fast one by ordering San Simeonites to stay out of Bucksnort. Ever since the editor of the Branding Iron wrote that editorial about Bucksnort last week, the folks over here froth at the sight of a man from San Simeon. Campbell’s order made a big hit with them. Why the devil didn’t we think of it first? You’re a fine campaign manager. You better think up something in a hurry. You know the mine owners are sore at me anyway, because I haven’t been able to catch El Lobo. A big help you be. What you want to punch old judge Clanton’s nose for in his own court? You might of knowed he was just itching for a excuse to throw you into the calaboose for contempt of court. You just would go over into Hualpai County to defend a horse thief just when the campaign was at its hottest. It we don’t do something to match Campbell’s latest move, we’re as good as licked. But whatever you do, be careful. Jack Harrigan, one of Campbell’s campaign managers, is snooping around over in San Simeon. I hope one of them cowpunchers shoots him. Do you want some of the boys to come over and bust you out of jail?
Yours in haste,
John Donaldson, Sheriff
* * * * *
San Simeon, Arizona,
County Jail, 6 p. m., April 9, 1885.
Dear John:
Don’t send the boys. The jailer and I have been playing draw poker and I can’t leave till I win back my pants at least. Anyway, a great legal mind can work as good in jail as anywhere else. The associations are congenial, if you get what I mean. I’ve already solved your problem, my boy. A Texas man by the name of Pike Bearfield is due here tomorrow to pay a fine for one of the Triple Arrow cow punchers, who’s in jail for the minor offense of shooting the city marshal in the leg.
Bearfield’s got the reputation of being a fire-eater, and no more brains than the law allows. I’ll engage him in conversation and get him all worked up about Bucksnort ordering San Simeon people to keep away. All the cowpunchers in Hualpai County consider themselves citizens of San Simeon, and their civic pride is ardent and homicidal. I’ll prod him about San Simeon being afraid of Bucksnort, and if he’s like all the other Texans I’ve ever seen, he’ll fork his horse and come fogging over there, just to show the world that Bucksnort can’t give orders to a San Simeon warrior. From what I’ve heard of Bearfield, Campbell’s warning will be like waving a red flag at a bull. Now you be on the watch and grab him as soon as he shows up. Be smart this time and don’t let Cheyenne get ahead of you and arrest him first. Station one of your deputies at the edge of town to watch for him and give you warning as he comes into town.
I’m sending this letter by the same fellow who brought yours. You’ll get it by midnight, at the latest. That will give you plenty of time to get ready for Bearfield. He’ll probably come to the jail early tomorrow morning, and if my silver tongue has lost none of its charm, he’ll be fogging it for Bucksnort pronto thereafter.
When you get him in the calaboose, tell the editor of the Chronicle to play it up big. He will if you’ll slip him a ten- spot. Play it up as the arrest of a dangerous outlaw from Texas, come to shoot up the town! Let it look like Campbell wasn’t big enough to handle him and had to call in the county officers. Better try to get Campbell out of town on some fake call or other before Bearfield gets there. Anyway, don’t let Campbell be the one to arrest him! This is our chance to put you over big with the voters.
Yours for honest politics,
Samuel Trueheart Abercrombie,
Attorney.
* * * * *
TELEGRAM
san simeon arizona
9 am
april 10 1885
cheyenne campbell
bucksnort arizona
they are fixing to put one over stop a horse thief who just got out of jail told me he heard sam abercrombie priming a texas gunfighter named bearfield to come over and clean out bucksnort stop donaldson aims to arrest him stop this will make you look bad stop be on the job and grab him before donaldson does stop
jack harrigan
* * * * *
TELEGRAM
bucksnort arizona
11 15 am
april 10 1885
commanding officer
ft crook arizona
for gosh sake rush all the soldiers you got over here stop a maniac from texas named bearfield is tearing the town apart stop hustle stop
ephraim l whittaker mayor
* * * * *
PHYSICIAN’S MEMORANDUM
Afternoon of April 10, 1885
D.V. Richards, M.D.
Treatment administered at the Golconda Gold Mining Company’s Emergency Hospital, as follows:
Bullets removed and treated for gunshot wounds: Sheriff John Donaldson, City Marshal Cheyenne Campbell, Deputies Gonzales, Keene, Wilkinson, McDonald and Jones; J. G. Smithson, County Clerk; Thomas Corbett, Tax Collector; Harrison, Jeppart, Wiltshaw and O’Toole, miners; Joe O’Brien, teamster.
Knife wounds: Ace Tremayne, gambler; nineteen stitches.
Iron beer keg hoops removed from neck of Michael Grogan, bartender, with aid of hacksaw.
The following were treated for contusions resulting from being struck with some blunt instrument such as the butt of a Sharps’ buffalo rifle: Sergeant O’Hara, fractured skull; Brogart, Olson, DeBose, Williams, Watson, Jackson, Emerson, miners. Six unidentified men now being revived.
Miscellaneous: Big Jud Pritchard, blacksmith—set broken arm and wired up fractured jaw, impossible to replace ear. Seventeen other men treated for minor lacerations and abrasions, apparently resulting from having been stepped on by a large horse.
* * * * *
Bucksnort, Arizona,
April 14, 1885.
Honorable Governor of Arizona,
Phoenix, Arizona
Honorable Sir:
I am writing to you to ast you to please see that jestice is did and stop an innercent man from being hounded by his enemies before he loses his patience and injures some of them fatally. I am referring to my pore persecuted brother, Pike Bearfield, of Wolf Mountain, Texas, now a fugitive from jestice and subsisting on prickly pears and horned toads somewheres in the Guadalupe Mountains. That ain’t no fitten diet for a white man, Yore Honor.
You have maybe saw the pack of lies which was writ about him in that dang newspaper The Bucksnort Chronicle which the only reason I ain’t shot the editor is because I am a peaceful and law-abiding man same as all us Bearfields, especially Pike. But let him beware! The editor, I mean. Truth is mighty and will prevail!
In that article about Pike, which was writ as soon as the editor sobered up on the morning of the 11th (he claims he was knocked cold by Pike the day before but it’s my opinion he was jest drunk) he claims Pike come out of his way jest to make trouble in Bucksnort. That’s a lie. Pike had been to San Simeon to pay a fine for a friend of his’n and was on his way back to the Triple Arrer ranch where we’ve both worked ever since we come out from Texas. He went by Bucksnort on his way to the ranch. Maybe you will say what the devil was he going by Bucksnort for, that is in the oppersite direction from the ranch, but Pike is very sociable and will go a long way out of his way jest to visit a town and meet folks and buy them drinks. As for that story about him storming out of San Simeon on the morning of April 10th spurring like a Comanche and waving his guns and announcing that he’d show them Bucksnort illegitimates whether they could keep San Simeon folks out of their dad-blasted town well, shucks, maybe he did holler and shoot off his pistols a little as he rode out, but that was jest high spirits. You know how us cowboys is, always full of fun and frolic.
His enemies has tried to make something out of the fack that he made the ride from San Simeon to Bucksnort in about a hour when it ordinarily takes a man about four hours to ride it. They say why was he splitting the road like that if he warn’t coming with war-like intention. But they don’t know Pike’s hoss, Satanta, which Pike ketched wild out of a Kiowa hoss herd and broke hisself, at the risk of his life. Satanta can outrun any critter in the Territory and he generally goes at a high lope. He ain’t careful about stepping around anything which happens to git in his way, neither, and probably Pike was shooting to warn them folks which he met to git out of his way, so they wouldn’t git tromped on. Pike has got a arful soft heart that way and don’t want to see nobody git hurt. They warn’t no use for them to take to the bresh and later accuse him of trying to murder them. If he’d been trying to hit them he would of, instead of jest knocking their hats off.
As for what actually happened at Bucksnort when he got there, they has been so many lies told about it that it plumb discourages a honest man. But this here is a plain, unvarnished account which I hope you will forgit all them yarns which Pike’s enemies has been telling, they air all prejudiced and anyway some of them air still addled in the brains and not responsible. Well, this is the way it was:
They is, or was, a very insulting sign at the aidge of Bucksnort which warned folks from San Simeon to keep out of the derned town. It now appears that it was shot all to pieces on the morning of the 10th, and folks air accusing Pike of doing it as he rode into town. Well, maybe he did kind of empty his pistol into the sagebrush, but they ain’t no use in abusing him because their derned sign happened to be where he was shooting. He didn’t put it there. Us cowboys frequently shoots into the air as we comes into town. It’s a kind of salute to the town, and a mark of respeck. As for that there deperty who got his hat shot off account of Pike seeing it sticking up in the sagebresh, why, that was jest a friendly joke. Pike was jest trying to be sociable. It hurt Pike’s feelings when the deperty ran off hollering halp murder and that’s why he shot the feller’s suspender buttons off—if the deperty didn’t bust them off hisself running through the sagebresh. He didn’t have no business hiding out there in the first place.
Pike then went on into town and tied his hoss, as quiet and peaceable as you please, and went into the Miners’ Delight Saloon. How do I know why the folks in the saloon all left by way of the back door as he come in at the front? Maybe they had to go home to dinner or something. The bartender was one of these hot-tempered, overbearing cusses which don’t deserve no sympathy. It appears they was some shots fired by somebody which cracked the mirror behind the bar and busted all the ceiling lamps, and the bartender seems to have blamed it on Pike. But he had no business making a play at Pike with a sawed-off shotgun. I reckon a man has a right to pertect hisself, which is why Pike kind of tapped him with a beer kag to shake his aim. I cain’t see as it was Pike’s fault that the bartender’s head went through the kag.
It now appears that the sheriff and the marshal was both expecting Pike, and it looks to me like they is something crooked about that. You cain’t trust these Bucksnort coyotes. Anyway, the deperty Pike met at the aidge of town was supposed to let the sheriff know the minute Pike hit town, and the marshal had bribed the deperty to tell him before he told the sheriff. Anyway, they was both depending onto that deperty to let ’em know when Pike come, but he run off into the desert when Pike shot at him, so the first thing they knowed about it was when they heard the shooting in the Miners’ Delight. The sheriff started for there on the run, and the marshal come up from the other direction.
But before they got there Pike had left. They warn’t nobody left in the Miners’ Delight but the bartender and he was unconscious, and Pike is that sociable he likes crowds of people around him. So he went acrost the street to the Bear Claw Saloon and Gambling Hall, and imejitly all them miners started picking on him. They ain’t no use in them trying to pertend that he started it. They say he was war-like and boastful, and try to prove this lie by bearing down on the fack of him announcing that he was a woolly wolf from the Hard Water Fork of Bitter Creek as he come through the door. But that warn’t no brag. It was jest a plain statement of fack, as anybody knows who is acquainted with Pike.
As for that roulette wheel, it ought to have been shot apart long ago. Pike probably knowed it was crooked, and jest couldn’t endure to see the men losing their hard-earned dough on it. He is arful soft- hearted. But that gambler, Ace Tremayne, he couldn’t take a joke, and mild-mannered as Pike is, he aint the man to endure being shot at with .41 caliber derringers at a distance of four foot. Ace somehow got cut right severe whilst him and Pike was rassling around on the floor. I reckon Pike’s bowie must of fell out of his boot and Ace rolled on it or something.
But several of them overbearing Bucksnort bullies taken the matter to heart, notably Jud Pritchard the blacksmith, and he ought to of knowed better’n to lay holt of Pike like he done. I reckon a man has got a right to defend hisself. Jud thinks he is a whole lot of man because he is six and a half foot tall and has licked most of them miners, but when you stack him up agen Pike he don’t look so big neither in size nor in fighting capacity. Pike allus fights a man like the man wants to fight, so he waded into Jud bar’-handed and Jud begun to holler halp murder the cow puncher is killing me. So several miners jumped in and taken a hand and Pike was dealing with them when the sheriff and marshal come running up.
They met on the street outside of the Bear Claw and the marshal said to the sheriff, “Where the devil do you think yo’re goin’?”
And the sheriff said to the marshal, “I’m goin’ in there to arrest a desperate criminal from Texas!”
And the marshal said, “How do you know he’s from Texas? I’m onto you, but you cain’t cut it! So git outa the way. This here’s my job! You tend to the county jobs and let city doins alone.”
“Air you tryin’ to tell me where to head in?” says the sheriff. “Pull in yore horns before I clip ’em! I’m runnin’ Papago County!”
“And I’m runnin’ Bucksnort!” says the marshal, and they slapped leather simultaneous, and both of ’em kissed the board sidewalk with lead in various parts of their carcasses.
Their deperties was jest fixing to carry on the war, when Pike come out to see what the shooting was about and a number of folks come out ahead of him. It was them which stampeded over the sheriff and the marshal as they laid in front of the Bear Claw. They later claimed Pike was making so much noise inside they didn’t hear the shooting which was going on outside, and they further claimed they was trying to escape from Pike when they stampeded out the front door. But they air sech liars I hope you won’t pay no attention to them, Yore Honor.
Anyway, it appears that the mayor had got severely trompled in the rush, and he hollered to the deperty sheriffs and deperty marshals and said, “Stop fightin’ each other, you jack-eared illegitimates and git this maneyack before he wrecks the town!”
That was a purty way for a mayor to talk about a pore, friendless stranger in their midst. They needn’t to never brag about Bucksnort hospitality no more. It’d serve them right if Pike never went there again.
Anyway, the deperties was jest as narrer-minded as the mayor, so they all started shooting at Pike, and he retreated into the French Queen Dancing Hall with a Sharps’ Buffalo rifle he’d taken away from one of the deperties, being afeared the deperty’d hurt somebody with his wild shooting. It appears the deperty’s cartridge belt come off in the scuffle, so Pike had it when he come into the Dance Hall.
By this time they was a mob milling in the street and talking about hanging Pike—that jest shows how lawless them Bucksnort devils is!—and sech deperties as warn’t unconscious and a lot of miners was shooting at him from every direction from behind signboards and hoss troughs and out of houses, so Pike begun shooting into the air to scare ’em off. But you know how bullets glance, and it appears that nine or ten men got hit. But it’s plumb unjest to blame Pike because his bullets glanced.
But the mayor lost his head and sent for soldiers, and a whole company rode out from the fort. By the time they got there somebody had sot the dance hall on fire, and Pike was about out of cartridges and his boots was burnt clean off of him account of him trying to stomp out the fire. I dunno what would of happened to him, but when Satanta, which was tied over beside the Miners’ Delight, seen the soldiers’ hosses, he bust loose and come charging over to fight them. He is the fightingest hoss you ever seen.
He galloped up to the front of the hall, right behind the soldiers which was fixing to bust down the front door, and Pike seen him. So Pike made a break and busted through the crowd, gently shoving Sergeant O’Hara out of his way, and I cain’t imagine how the sergeant got his skull fractured from a little push like that. But men is sech softies then days. Anyway, Pike got to Satanta and got onto him, meaning to ride quietly out of town, but Satanta got the bit in his teeth or something and bolted right through the crowd knocking down sixteen or seventeen, men and trompling them. Some more men tried to ketch holt of his bridle, but Pike was scairt they’d git stepped on and hurt like the others, so he kind of pushed them away with the butt of the Sharps. They ought to be grateful to him, instead of bellyaching about their noses and teeth and things.
He rode on out of town and was swinging back towards the San Simeon road, because he was beginning to get the idee that he warn’t welcome in Bucksnort, when jedge his surprise when he seen the whole company of soldiers coming lickety-split after him! Well, he didn’t have no cartridges left so he headed for the mountains south of there, and purty soon Satanta stumbled and the girth broke, account of somebody having slashed it nearly in two with a knife as they went through the crowd.
Pike was throwed over Satanta’s head and would probably of broke a laig if it hadn’t been for a big rock which he hit on headfirst and kind of cushioned his fall so’s he didn’t injure none of his limbs. The soldiers were crowding him so clost he didn’t have time to ketch Satanta, so he jumped up and taken to the hills afoot, and you may not believe it, Yore Honor, but them soldiers pursued him like he was a coyote or something, and shot at him so dern reckless it looked like they didn’t have a bit of regard for his safety. But they didn’t hit him except in a few unimportant places and he taken to country so rough they couldn’t foller on horseback, and finally he got away from them and taken refuge in the mountains. He’s hiding up there right now, barefooted, hongry, without no knife nor cartridges, and soldiers and posses is combing the country for him, and he cain’t git away in any direction except south without getting ketched. And the only thing south of him is Old Mexico. He don’t want to go there Yore Honor, it would make him look like he was a outlaw or something.
As soon as I heard about this business I come down from the Triple Arrer and as soon as I got to Bucksnort they throwed me in jail jest because I am a Bearfield, so I ain’t been able to look for Pike and help him. But he sent me a letter by a Mex sheepherder and explained how things was and told me his side of everything. So will you please make the soldiers quit persecuting him, he is as innercent as a newborn baby.
Please do something about this, he is powerful hongry and scairt to even eat with the sheepherder which slipped his letter in to me, for fear the Mex will pizen him for the reward they air offering.
Very trooly yoren,
Kirby Bearfield, Esquire
* * * * *
Gaudalupe Mountains, Arizony,
April 17, 1885.
Dear Kirby:
I am gitting purty dang tired of this business. The cactus hurts my feet and I have et jackrabbits and lizards till I feel like a Piute Injun. Tonight I am heading for Old Mexico by the way of Wolf Pass to git me some boots. It is a terrible note when a honest, respectable, law-abiding citerzen gits run out of the country by the soldiers which is supposed to perteck him, and has to take refuge in a furrin land. For three cents I’d stay in Old Mexico and leave the country flat. They is a limit to everything. The Mex will slip this note to you through the jail winder when they ain’t nobody looking.
Yore persecuted brother,
Pike
* * * * *
El Lobo:
I send this note by a swift and trusted messenger. Now is the time to make one big raid on Bucksnort. All the officers are still in the hospital and the soldiers still hunt the fool Tejano, Bearfield, through the mountains. I have contrived to send them to the northwest on a wild goose chase, by telling them he was seen in that direction. They do not guess that Esteban, the handsome monte dealer, is El Lobo’s spy! Now is the time to make a clean sweep, in force, to take all the gold on hand and burn the town, as you have long desired. Come swiftly tonight, with all your men, by way of Wolf Pass!
Esteban
* * * * *
THE BUCKSNORT CHRONICLE
April 18, 1885
el lobo captured
raid failed by heroic texan
a misjudged hero vindicated
Last night will be long remembered in the history of this glorious if rugged, Territory, for it marked the elimination of a menace which has long hovered like a black cloud in the mountains of the South. For longer than honest men like to remember, the bloody bandit El Lobo has from time to time swooped down on isolated mining camps or on travelers, leaving death and desolation in his wake, and evading retribution by retiring across the Border. An Ishmael of the Border, with his crimson hand against all men, he further proved himself an implacable enemy of culture and progress by threatening, on more than one occasion, to forcibly detach the ears of the Chronicle’s editor, because of unfavorable comment in these columns.
Last night, taking advantage of the recent unsettled conditions, he crossed the Border with a force estimated at a hundred men, and headed toward Bucksnort intending to crown his infamous career by an exploit of blood and destruction too sweeping to be regarded with anything but horror. In short he determined to wipe out the city of Bucksnort, and he had good reason to feel confident of success, as most of the soldiers from Fort Crook were away in the northwest corner of the county, and the natural defenders of the town, the officers of the law, had not yet recovered from a vulgar brawl which reflected little credit upon any of them. But he reckoned without Pike Bearfield, himself a fugitive from a misguided justice!
Mr. Bearfield, formerly of Wolf Mountain, Texas, but now claimed by Bucksnort as an honored son, will be remembered by citizens as a visitor in Bucksnort on the tenth of this month, at which date we understand some slight confusion arose as a result of a trivial misunderstanding between him and some of the officers.
Mr. Bearfield, who had been residing temporarily in the mountains just this side of the Border, due to the unfortunate misunderstanding above mentioned, evidently heard of the proposed raid, and with a heroism rare even in this Territory, went to meet the invaders single-handed. We have not been able to interview the hero, but from the accounts of the prisoners, we are able to reconstruct the scene as follows:
Arriving at Wolf Pass, on foot, at about midnight, our hero found the raiders already filing through the narrow gorge. Being without weapons he resorted to a breath-taking strategy. Turning aside, he climbed the almost sheer wall of the left-hand cliff, and concealed himself on a jutting ledge of rock. Then when the head of the column was passing directly under him, he hurled himself, barehanded, like a thunderbolt, down on the back of El Lobo himself!
Horse and man went to the earth under that impact, and El Lobo was knocked senseless. Instantly all was confusion, for in the darkness of the pass, the raiders could not see just what had happened, and evidently thought themselves ambushed by a large force. This illusion was heightened by Mr. Bearfield’s action, for seizing the ivory-handled revolvers of the senseless bandit, he leaped back against the shadowed cliff where, invisible himself to his enemies, he poured a two-handed hail of lead at the figures on horseback etched dimly against the starlit sky.
This completed the rout. Their leader down, they themselves unnerved and panicked by the unexpected attack, they fired wildly in all directions, hitting nobody but their own companions, and then broke in ignominious flight, leaving five or six corpses behind them, and El Lobo.
A posse which, we are pained to say, was combing the canyons in search of Mr. Bearfield, a few miles to the east, heard the shooting and hurrying to the pass, found the senseless bandit chief and the bodies of his villainous followers. They also sighted Mr. Bearfield, who was just about to remove El Lobo’s boots, but the modest hero hurried away without waiting for their congratulations.
His brother Kirby, an honored guest of the city, has been delegated to find Mr. Bearfield and bring him in to receive the grateful plaudits of an admiring citizenry. We hope he will prove as generous as he is valiant, and forget—as we have forgotten—the unfortunate affair of April 10th. If we have, at any time, seemed to criticize Mr. Bearfield in the columns of this paper, we sincerely apologize.
Mr. Bearfield’s efforts in defense of Bucksnort shine more brightly than ever in contrast with the recent actions of the two candidates for the sheriff’s office, whose political greed and ambition led them into a sordid brawl which incapacitated them at a time when the city most needed them. Let the citizens of Bucksnort consider that!
* * * * *
Bucksnort, Arizona,
April 18, 1885.
Dear Pike:
Come on in. Everything is hotsy-totsy and they air fixing a banquet in yore honor. Only jest don’t let anybody know that you was tryin to git away into Old Mexico when you met El Lobo and his gang, and thought they was a posse after you, and was trying to git away by climbing the cliffs when you lost your holt and fell on El Lobo.
Yore brother,
Kirby
P.S.—They have jest now held a popular meeting and elected you sheriff of Papago County. I am sending yore badge by the Mex, also a pair of boots and a fried steak. You takes office jest as soon as they can git the governor to take the price off of yore head.
THE END
The 'Buckner Jeopardy Grimes' Saga
Table of Contents
A Man-Eating Jeopard
Table of Contents
I’M a peaceable man, as law-abiding as I can be without straining myself, and it always irritates me for a stranger to bob up from behind a rock and holler, “Stop where you be before I blow your fool head off !”
This having happened to me I sat still on my brother Bill’s horse, because that’s the best thing you can do when a feller is p’inting a cocked .45 at your wishbone. This feller was a mean-looking hombre in a sweaty hickory shirt with brass rivets in his leather hat band, and he needed a shave. He said, “Who are you? Where you from? Where you goin’? What you aimin’ to do when you get there?”
I says, “I’m Buckner J. Grimes of Knife River, Texas, and I’m headin’ for Californy.”
“Well, what you turnin’ south for?” he asked.
“Ain’t this here the trail to Piute?” I inquired.
“Naw, ’tain’t,” he answered. “Piute’s due west of here.”
All at once he stopped and seemed to ponder, though his gun muzzle didn’t waver none. I was watching it like a hawk.
Pretty soon he give a kinda forced leer which I reckon he aimed for a smile, and said, “I’m sorry, stranger. I took you for somebody else. Just an honest mistake. This here trail leadin’ off to the west goes to Piute. T’other’n goes south to my claim. I took you for one of them blame claim jumpers.” He lowered his gun but didn’t put it back in the holster, I noticed.
“I didn’t know they was any claims in Arizona,” I says.
“Oh, yes,” says he, “the desert is plumb full of ’em. For instance,” says he, “I got a chunk of quartz in my pocket right now which is just bustin’ with pure ore. Light,” says he, fumbling in his pocket, “and I’ll show you.”
Well, I was anxious to see some ore, because Pap had told me that I was just likely to hit it rich in Californy; he said an idiot was a natural fool for luck, and I wanted to know what ore looked like when I seen some. So I clumb down off of brother Bill’s horse, and the stranger hauled something out of his pocket, but as he poked it out toward me, it slipped off his palm and fell to the ground.
Naturally I leaned over to pick it up, and when I done so, something went bam! and I seen a million stars. At first I thought a cliff had fell on me, but almost simultaneous I realized the stranger had lammed me over the head with his pistol barrel.
The lick staggered me, but I didn’t have to fall like I done. I done that instinctive hit on my side and tumbled over on my back and laid still, with my eyes so near shut he couldn’t tell that I was watching him through the slits. The instant he’d hit me he lifted his gun quick to shoot me if I didn’t drop, but my flop fooled him.
He looked down at me scornful, too proud of his smartness to notice that my limp hand was laying folded over a rock about the size of a muskmelon, and he says aloud to hisself, he says, “Another idiot from Texas! Huh! Think I’m goin’ to let you go on to Piute and tell ’em about bein’ turned back from the south trail, and mebbe give them devils an idee of what’s cookin’ up? Not much, I ain’t. I ain’t goin’ to waste no lead on you, neither. I reckon I’ll just naturally cut your throat with my bowie.”
So saying, he shoved his gun back in its holster and drawed his knife out of his boot, and stooped over and started fumbling with my neck cloth, so I belted him free and hearty over the conk with my rock. I then pushed his limp carcass off me and rose.
“If you’d been raised in Texas like I was,” I says to his senseless hulk more in sorrer than in anger, “you’d know just because a man falls it don’t necessarily mean he’s got his’n.”
He didn’t say nothing because he was out cold; the blood was oozing from his split scalp, and I knowed it would be hours before he come to hisself, and maybe days before he’d remember his own name.
* * * * *
I mounted brother Bill’s horse, which I’d rode all the way from Texas because it was better’n mine, and I paused and ruminated. Right there a narrer trail split off from the main road and turned south through a deep cleft in the cliffs, and the stranger had been lurking there at the turn.
Well, thinks I, something shady is going on down that there trail, else why should he hold me up when he thought I was going down it? I warn’t taking the south trail. I’d just stopped to rest my brother Bill’s horse in the shadder of the cliffs, and this ambushed gent just thought I was going to turn off. That there indicates a guilty conscience. Then, when he was convinced I wasn’t going south, he was going to cut my throat just so’s I couldn’t tell the folks at Piute about him stopping me. And he was lying about a claim. He didn’t have no hunk of quartz; that thing he’d taken out of his pocket was a brass button.
Well, I very naturally turned off down the south trail to see why he didn’t want me to. I went very cautious, with my gun in my right hand, because I didn’t aim to get catched off guard again. The thought occurred to me that maybe he was being hunted by a sheriff’s posse. Well, that wasn’t none of my business, but Pap always said my curiosity would be the ruin of me.
I rode on for about a mile, till I come to a place where the trail went up over a saddleback with dense thickets on each side. I left the trail and pushed through the thickets to see what was on the other side of the ridge; around Knife River they was generally somebody waiting to shoot somebody else.
I looked down into a big holler, and in the middle they was a big cluster of boulders, bigger’n a house. I seen some horses sticking out from behind them boulders, and a horse tied under a tree a little piece away. He was a very bright-colored pinto with a silver-mounted bridle and saddle. I seen the sun flash on the trappings on ’em.
I knowed the men must be on the other side of them rocks, and I counted nineteen horses. Well, nineteen men was more’n I wanted to tackle, in case they proved hostile to strangers, which I had plenty of reason to believe they probably would. So I decided to backtrack.
Anyway, them men was probably just changing brands on somebody else’s cows, or talking over the details of a stagecoach holdup, or some other private enterprise like that which wasn’t nobody’s business but their’n. So I turned around and went back up the trail to the forks again.
When I passed the stranger I had hit with the rock he was still out, and I kinda wondered if he’d ever come to. But that wasn’t none of my business neither, so I just dragged him under bushes where he’d be in the shade in case he did, and rode on down the west trail. I figgered it couldn’t be more’n a few miles to Piute, and I was getting thirsty.
And sure enough, after a few miles I come upon the aforesaid town baking in the sun on a flat with hills on all sides—just a cluster of dobe huts with Mexican women and kids littered all over the place—and dogs, and a store and a little restaurant and a big saloon. It wasn’t much past noon and hotter’n hell.
I tied brother Bill’s horse to the hitching rack alongside the other horses already tied there, in the shade of the saloon, and I went into the saloon myself. They was a good-sized bar and men drinking at it, others playing poker at tables.
* * * * *
Well, I judged it wasn’t very usual that a stranger come to Piute, because when I come in everybody laid down their whisky glass or their hand of cards and stared at me without no expression on their faces, and I got fidgety and drunk five or six fingers of red licker to cover my embarrassment.
They was a kind of restless shuffling of boots on the floor, and spitting into the sawdust, and men tugging at their mustaches, and I wondered am I going to have to shoot my way out of this joint; what kind of a country is this anyway.
Just then a man lumbered up to the bar and the men drinking at the bar kinda surged around me and him, and some of them playing poker rose up from their tables and drifted over behind me, or would have, if I hadn’t quick put my back against the bar. This feller was nigh as tall as me, and a lot heavier. He had a big mustache like a walrus.
“Who be you?” he inquired suspiciously.
“I’m Buckner J. Grimes,” I said patiently. “I’m from Texas, and I’m just passin’ through. I’m headin’ for Californy.”
“What’s the ‘J’ for?” he asked.
“Jeopardy,” I said.
“What’s that mean?” he next demanded.
“I dunno,” I confessed. “It come out of a book. I reckon it means somethin’ pertainin’ to a jeopard.”
“Well, what’s a jeopard?” he asked.
“It’s a spotted critter like a panther,” said one of the men. “I seen one in a circus once in Santa Fe.”
The big feller studied over this for a while, and then he said have a drink, so we all drunk.
“Do you know Swag McBride?” he asked at last.
“I never heard tell of him,” I said. Everybody was watching me when he asked me, and some of them had their hands on their guns. But when I said I didn’t know him they kinda relaxed and went back to playing poker and drinking licker. I reckon they believed me; Pap always said I had a honest face; he said anybody could tell I didn’t have sense enough to think up a lie.
“Set down,” said the big man, easing his bulk ponderously into a chair and sinking his mustaches into a tub of beer. “I’m Navajo Beldon. I’m boss of Piute and all the surroundin’ country, and don’t let nobody tell you no different. Either a man is for me or he’s against me, and if he’s against me he’s for Swag McBride and don’t belong in this town at all.”
“Who’s Swag McBride?” I asked.
“A cross between a rattlesnake and a skunk,” said Beldon, gulping his beer. “But don’t say ‘skunk’ around him les’n you want to get killed. When the vigilantes run him outa Nevada they sent him down the trail with a dead polecat tied around his neck as a token of affection and respect. Skunks has been a sore spot with him ever since. If anybody even mentions one in his hearin’ he takes it as a personal insult and acts accordingly. He’s lightnin’ with a gun, and when souls was handed out, Nature plumb forgot to give him one. He run this town till I decided to take it over.”
He wiped his mustaches with the back of his hand, and said, “We had a showdown last week, and decreases in the population was sudden and generous. But we run them rats into the hills where they’ve been skulkin’ ever since, if they ain’t left the country entirely.”
* * * * *
I thought about them fellers I seen up in the hills, but I didn’t say nothing. I was raised in a country where keeping your mouth shut is an art practiced by everybody which wants to live to a ripe old age.
“This here country has to have a boss of some kind,” says “Navajo,” pouring me a drink. “Ain’t no law here, and somebody’s got to kinda run things. I ain’t no saint, but I’m a lot better man than Swag McBride. If you don’t believe it, go ask the citizens of Piute. Man’s life is safe here with me runnin’ things, long’s he keeps his nose outa my business, and a woman can walk down the street without bein’ insulted by some tough. Honest to gosh, if I was to tell you some of the things McBride and his devils has pulled—”
“Things looks peaceful enough now,” I admitted.
“They are, while I’m in the saddle,” says Beldon. “Say, how would you like to work for me?”
“Doin’ what?” I ask.
“Well,” he says, “I got considerable cattle, besides my interests in Piute. These men you see here ain’t all the boys I got workin’ for me, of course. They’s a bunch now down near Eagle River, drivin’ a herd up from the border, which ain’t so terrible far from you, you know.”
“You buy cattle in Mexico?” I ask.
“Well,” he says, “I gets quite a lot of steers from across the line. I has to have men watchin’ all the time to keep them greasers from comin’ over and stealin’ everything I got. What’s that?”
Outside come a thunder of hoofs and a voice yelled, “Beldon! Beldon!”
“Who’s that?” demanded Beldon, scrambling up and grabbing his gun.
“It’s Richards!” called one of the men, looking out of the winder with a rifle. “He’s foggin’ it up the south trail like the devil was ridin’ behind him.”
Beldon started lumbering toward the door, but about that time the horse slid to a gravel-scattering halt at the edge of the porch, and a man come storming in, all plastered with sweat and dust.
“What’s eatin’ you, Richards?” demanded Navajo.
“The greasers!” yelped Richards. “Early this mornin’ we run a herd of Diego Gonzales’ cattle across the line, and you know what happened? We hadn’t hardly more’n got back across the border when his blame vaqueros overtook us and shot up every man except me, and run them steers back home again!”
“What?” bellered Navajo, with his mustaches quivering in righteous wrath. “Why, them thievin’, yeller polecats! Ain’t they got no respect for law and order? What air we a-comin’ to? Ain’t they no honest men left besides me? Does they think they can treat me like that? Does they think we’re in the the cow business for our health? Does they think they can tromple on us after we’ve went to the trouble and expense of stealin’ them steers ourselves?
“Donnelly, take your men and light out! I’ll show them greasers they can’t steal my critters and get away with it. You fetch them cows back if you have to foller ’em right into Diego’s patio—blast his thievin’ soul!”
The feller he called Donnelly got up and told his men to come on, and they took a drink at the bar, and drawed up their gun belts and went stomping out toward the hitching rack. Richards went along to guide ’em.
“Don’t you wanta go?” says Navajo to me, still snorting with his indignation. “The boys may need help, and I can tell from the way you wear your guns that you know how to handle ’em. I’ll pay you well.”
Well, if they is anything I despises it’s a darned thief, so I told Beldon I’d go along and help recover his property. I left him bellering his grievances to the bald-headed old bartender and his Mexican boy helper, which was all that was left in the saloon.
* * * * *
Richards had changed his saddle onto a fresh horse, and as we rode off I looked at the horse which he’d rode in. It was a pinto and it seemed to me like I’d saw it somewheres but I couldn’t remember. It was so sweaty and dusty it was mighty near disguised.
We headed south along the dusty trail, nine or ten of us, Richards leading, and was soon out of sight of Piute. Them fellers was riding like Mexico was right over the next rise, but the miles went past, and I decided they was just reckless, damn fools. I kept trying to remember where I’d seen that pinto of Richards’, and all of a sudden I remembered.
The trail dipped ahead of us down into a tangle of cliffs and canyons, and Richards had drawed ahead of the rest of us. He turned to motion us to hurry, and as he turned, the sun flashed from the silver trappings on his saddle and bridle, and, like a shot, I remembered—I remembered where I’d seen them trappings, and where I’d seen that pinto. It was the horse I’d saw tied near them big rocks away to the east of Piute.
I involuntarily sat brother Bill’s horse back on his haunches. The rest of the gang swept on without noticing, but I sat there and thunk. If Richards was with that gang east, how could he be with the bunch driving cattle acrost the border away to the south of Piute? He come up the south trail into Piute, but what was to prevent him from cutting through the hills and hitting that trail just below the town? Richards had lied to Beldon; and Beldon had said that if a man wasn’t for him, he was for McBride.
I reined up onto a knob, and stared off eastward, and pretty soon I seen what I expected to see—a fog of rolling dust, sweeping from southeast to northwest—toward Piute. I knowed what was raising that dust: men on horses, riding hard.
I looked south for Donnelly and his men. They was just passing out of sight in a big notch with sheer walls on each side. I yelled but they didn’t hear me. Richards had pulled ahead of them by a hundred yards, and was already through the notch and out of sight. They all thundered into the notch and passed out of sight. And then it sounded like all the guns in southern Arizona let go at once. I wheeled and rode for Piute as hard as brother Bill’s horse could leg it.
The dust on the horizon disappeared behind a big boulder that jutted right up into the sky. Then, after a while, ahead of me, I heard a sudden crackle of gunfire, and what sounded like a woman screaming, and then everything was still again.
Ahead of me the trail made the bend that would bring me in sight of Piute. I left the trail and took to the thickets. Brother Bill’s horse was snorting and trembling, nigh done in. The town was awful quiet—not a soul in sight, and all the doors closed. I circled the flat, tied Bill’s horse in a thicket back of the saloon, and stole toward the back door, with my guns in my hands.
They wasn’t no horses tied at the hitching rack. Everything was awful quiet except for the flies buzzing around the blood puddles on the floor. The old bartender was laying across the bar with a gun still in his hand. He’d stopped plenty lead. His Mexican boy was slumped down near the door with his head split open—looked like he’d been hit with an ax. A stranger I’d never saw was stretched out in the dust before the porch, with a bullet hole in his skull. He was a tall, dark, hard-looking cuss. A gun with one empty chamber was laying nigh his right hand.
I believed they’d captured Navajo Beldon alive. His carcass wasn’t nowhere to be seen, and then the tables and chairs was all busted, just like I figgered they’d be after a gang of men had hog tied Beldon. That would be a job that’d wreck any saloon. They was empty cartridges and a broke knife on the floor, and buttons tore offa fellers’ shirts, and a smashed hat, and a notebook, like things gets scattered during a free for all.
I picked up the notebook and on the top of the first page was wrote, “Swag McBride owes me $100 for that there job over to Braxton’s ranch.”
I stuck it in my pocket but I didn’t need no evidence to know who’d raided Piute.
* * * * *
I looked out cautious into the town. Nobody in sight and all doors and winders closed. Then come a sudden rumble of horses’ hoofs and I jumped back out of the doorway and looked through a winder. Seven horsemen swept into the village out of a trail that wound up through the thickets back of the town; but they didn’t stop.
They cantered on down the south trail, with rifles in their hands. They didn’t look toward the saloon, and nobody stuck their head out of a house to tell ’em about me, though somebody must of seen me sneak into town. Evidently the citizens was playing strict neutral, which is wise when two gangs is slaughtering each other—if you can do it.
As soon as the riders was out of town I run back through the saloon and hustled up the hillside, paralleling the trail they’d come down. Who says all this wasn’t none of my business? Beldon had hired me and I’d been a pretty excuse for a man if I’d left him in the lurch.
I hadn’t gone far when I heard men talking—leastways, I heard one man talking. It was Beldon and he was bellering like a bull.
A minute later I come onto a log cabin, plumb surrounded with trees. Five horses was tied outside. The bellering was coming from inside the cabin, and I could hear somebody else talking in a kinda sneery, gloating voice. I snuck up to the rear winder and peered in, well aware that I was risking my life. But the winder was boarded up and I peeked through a crack.
Plenty of light come in through the cracks, though, and I seen Beldon, with blood oozing from a cut in his scalp, setting in a busted chair by a dusty old table, and looking like a trapped grizzly. Four other men was standing acrost the table from him, betwixt him and the door, with their guns leveled at him. One of them was awful tall, and rangy and quick in his motions, like a catamount. He combed his long drooping mustache with one gun muzzle whilst he poked the other’n into Beldon’s ear and screwed it around till Navajo cussed something terrible.
“Huh!” said this gent. “Boss of Piute! Hah! A fine boss you be. First and biggest mistake you made was trustin’ Richards. He was plumb delighted to sell you out. You thought he was with your men on Eagle River, didn’t you? Well, he was with me in the hills east of here all mornin’, whilst we laid our plans to get you.
“He sneaked away from your bunch on Eagle River last night. He brung you that lie about them cattle bein’ stole just so I could get your men out of the way. I knowed you’d send every man you had. You won’t ever see ’em no more. Richards will lead ’em into a trap in Devil’s Gorge where my men done laid an ambush for ’em. Probably they’re sizzlin’ in hell by this time. Them seven fellers I just sent down the trail will join the rest of my men at Devil’s Gorge, and they’ll clean out your outfit on Eagle River. I’m makin’ a clean sweep, Beldon.”
“I’ll get you yet, McBride,” promised Beldon thickly, gnashing his teeth under his heavy mustache.
* * * * *
McBride combed his mustache very superior. I was wondering why they’d taken Beldon alive. He wasn’t even tied up. I seen his fingers clinch and quiver on the table. I knowed he was liable to make a break for it any minute and get shot down, and I was in a stew. I could start shooting through the winder, of course, and snag most of ’em, but one of ’em was bound to get Beldon sure.
I knowed very well that at the first alarm they’d perforate him. I wisht I had a shotgun, because then I mighta got ’em all with one blast—probably including Beldon. But all I had was a couple of .45s and a clear conscience. If I could only let Beldon know that I was on hand, maybe he might get foxy and do something smart to help hisself, instead of busting loose and getting killed like I knowed he was going to do any minute. The veins in his neck swelled and his face got purple and his whiskers bristled.
All at once McBride said, “I’ll let you go, alive, if you’ll tell me where you got your money hid. I know you got several thousand bucks.”
So that was why they taken him alive. I mighta knowed it. But the mention of money reminded me of something and that put a idee into my head. I pulled out the notebook I found and tore out the first page and begun work with a pencil stub I had in my pocket. I didn’t write nothing. What I wanted to do was to slip Beldon a message he could understand, but that wouldn’t mean nothing to McBride, in case he seen it.
I remembered that talk about a Jeopard, when I first met Beldon, so I drawed a picture of a animal like a panther. But I couldn’t remember whether that feller from Santa Fe said a Jeopard had spots or stripes. Seemed like he said stripes, so I put a big un’ down the critter’s back. Beldon would know that pitcher meant that Buckner Jeopardy Grimes was lurking near, ready to help him the first chance I got, and, knowing that, he wouldn’t do nothing reckless.
Whilst I was doing this Beldon was thinking over what McBride had just said to him. He didn’t crave a lead bath no more’n the average man, and he was one of these here trusting critters which believes everybody keeps their word. It’s hard to credit, I know, but it looked like he actually believed McBride would keep his’n, and let him go if he told where he hid his dough.
McBride didn’t fool me none. I knowed very well the instant he told ’em, Beldon would get riddled. I knowed McBride itched to kill him. I seen it in the twist of his thin lips, and the nervous twitch of his hand as he pulled at his mustache. I read the killer’s hunger in his yeller eyes which blazed like a cat’s. But Navajo didn’t seem to recognize them signs. He was awful slow thinking in some ways.
McBride was pulling his mustache and just getting ready to say something, when I took a pebble and throwed it over the shack so it hit the stoop and made a racket. Instantly they all wheeled and covered the door, and I throwed my wadded-up paper through the crack in the winder boards, so it landed on the table right in front of Beldon. But he never seen it.
He’d rose halfway up like he was going to make his break, but quick as a flash McBride wheeled and covered him again, with his lip drawed back so his teeth showed like a wolf’s fang, and his eyes was slits of fire. If it hadn’t been for that dough he wanted, he’d have shot Beldon down right then. I seen his finger quiver on his trigger, and I had him lined over my sights.
But he didn’t shoot. He snapped, “You fools, keep him covered! I’ll see to this!”
The other three turned their guns on Beldon and he sunk back in his chair with a gusty sigh. They was a hard layout—one short, one tall, one with a scarred face. McBride stepped quick to the door and jerked it open and poked his gun out.
“Nothin’ out here,” he snorted. “Must have been a woodpecker.”
I was sweating and shaking like a leaf in my nervousness, waiting for Beldon to see that wad of paper laying right in front of him, but he never noticed it. He hadn’t seen it fall, and a wad of paper didn’t mean nothing to him. He couldn’t think of but one thing at a time. He had nerve and men liked him; that’s the only reason he ever got to be a chief.
McBride turned around and stalked back across the cabin.
“Well,” he said, “are you goin’ to tell me where the dough is?”
“I reckon I gotta,” mumbled Beldon heavily, and I cussed bitterly under my breath. Beldon was a goner. All I could do was start shooting and get as many of ’em as I could. But they was sure to drill him. Then McBride seen that wadded-up paper. He wasn’t like Beldon; he was observant and keen-witted. He remembered that paper hadn’t been there a few minutes before. He grabbed it.
“What’s this?” he demanded, and my heart sunk clean to my boot tops. He wouldn’t know what it meant, but it was gone out of Beldon’s reach for good.
McBride started smoothing it out.
“Why,” says he, “it’s got my name on it, in your handwritin’, Joe.”
“Lemme see,” said the tall feller, getting up and reached toward it. But McBride had straightened the paper all the way out, and all at once his face went livid. For a second you could of heard a pin drop. McBride stood like a froze statue, only his eyes alive and them points of hell fire, whilst the other hombres gaped at him.
Then he give a shriek like a catamount, and throwed that piece of paper into Joe’s face, and his gun jumped and spurted red. Joe flopped to the floor, kicking and twitching. The other two fellers was white and wild-looking, but the short one says, kind of choking, “By Heaven, McBride, you can’t do that to my pal!”
His gun jerked upward, but McBride’s spoke first. Shorty’s gun exploded into the floor and he slumped down on top of Joe. It was at that instant I kicked a board off the winder and shot “Scarface” through the ear. McBride howled in amazement and our guns crashed simultaneous. Or rather, I reckon mine was the split fraction of a second the first, because his lead fanned my ear and mine knocked him down dead on the floor.
I then climbed through the winder into the cabin where the blue smoke was drifting in clouds and the dead men was laying still on the floor. If the fight had been a tornado hitting the shack it couldn’t have been no briefer nor done no more damage. Beldon had had presence of mind enough to fall down behind the table when the fireworks started, and he now rose and glared at me like he thought I was a ghost.
“What the hell!” he inquired lucidly.
“We ain’t got no time to waste,” I told him. “We got to take to the woods. Them seven men McBride sent south ain’t out of hearin’. They’ll hear the shots and be back. They’ll know it wouldn’t take all them shots to cook your goose, and they’ll come back and investigate.”
He lurched up, and I seen he was lame in one leg.
“I got it sprained in the fight,” he grunted. “They was in Piute and stormin’ my saloon before I knowed what was happenin’. Help me back to the saloon. My dough’s hid under the bar. If all my men’s been wiped out, we got to travel, and I got to get my dough. They’s horses in a corral not far from the saloon.”
“All right,” I said, picking up the wad of paper I’d throwed through the winder, but not stopping to discuss it. “Let’s go,” I said, and we went.
If anybody thinks it’s a cinch to help a man as big as Navajo Beldon down a mountain trail with a sprained ankle, he’s loco as hell. He had to kind of hop on one leg and I had to act as his other leg, and before we was halfway down I felt like throwing him the rest of the way down and washing my hands of the whole business. Of course, I didn’t, though.
* * * * *
Piute was just as quiet and empty as before—heads bobbing a little way out of doors to gawp at us, then jerking back quick, and everything still and breathless under the hot sun.
Beldon cussed at the sight of the dead men in the bar, and he sounded sick.
“I feel like a skunk,” he said, “runnin’ out like this and leavin’ Piute to the mercies of them devils which follered McBride. But what else can I do? I—”
“Look out!” I yelped, jumping back out of the doorway and blazing away with my six-gun, as there come a rattle of hoofs up the south trail and them seven devils of McBride’s come storming back into town. They’d already seen me, before I fired, and they howled like wolves and come at a dead run.
At the crack of my six-shooter one of ’em went out of his saddle and laid still, and they swung aside and raced behind a old dobe house right across from the saloon.
Beldon was cussing and hitching hisself to one of the winders with a rifle he’d brung from the cabin, and I took the other winder. The old dobe they’d took cover behind didn’t have no roof and the wall was falling down, but it made a prime fort, and in about a second lead was smacking into the saloon walls, and ripping through the winders and busting bottles behind the bar, and when Beldon seen his licker wasted that way he hollered like a bull with its tail caught in the corral gate.
They’d punched loop holes in the dobe. All we could see was rifle muzzles and the tops of their hats now and then. We was shooting back, of course, but from the vigor of their profanity I knowed we wasn’t doing nothing but knocking dust into their faces.
“They’ve got us,” said Beldon despairingly. “They’ll hold us here till the rest of them devils comes up. Then they’ll rush us from three or four sides at once and finish us.”
“We could sneak out the back way,” I said, “but we’d have to go on foot, and with your ankle we couldn’t get nowheres.”
“You go,” he said, sighting along his rifle barrel and throwing another slug into the dobe. “I’m done. I couldn’t get away on this lame leg. I’ll hold ’em whilst you sneak off.”
This being too ridiculous to answer, I maintained a dignerfied silence and said nothing outside of requesting him not to be a fool.
A minute later he give a groan like a buffler bull with the bellyache.
“We’re sunk now!” says he. “Here come the rest of them!”
And sure enough I heard the drum of more hoofs up the south trail, and the firing acrost the way lulled, as the fellers listened. Then they give a yell of extreme pleasure, and started firing again with wild hilarity.
“I ain’t lived the kind of life I ought to have,” mourned Beldon. “My days has been full of vanity and sin. The fruits of the flesh is sweet to the tongue, Buckner, but they play hell with the belly. I wish I’d given more attention to spiritual things, and less to gypin’ my feller-man—Are you listenin’?”
“Shut up!” I said fretfully. “They is a feller keeps stickin’ his head up behind that dobe, and the next time he does it I aim to ventilate his cranium, if you don’t spoil my aim with your gab.”
“You ought to be placin’ your mind on higher things at a time like this,” he reproved. “We’re hoverin’ on the brink of Eternity, and it’s a time when you should be repentin’ your sinful ways, like me, and shakin’ the dust of the flesh off your feet—Hell fire and damnation!” he roared suddenly, heaving up from behind the winder sill. “That ain’t McBride’s men! That’s Donnelly!”
* * * * *
The fellers behind the dobe found that out just then, but it didn’t do ’em no good. Donnelly and six of the men which had rode out with him come swinging in behind ’em, and they was ten more men with him I hadn’t never saw before. The six men behind the dobe run for their horses, but they didn’t have a chance. They’d been so sure it was their pals they didn’t pay much attention, and Donnelly and his boys was right behind ’em before they realized their mistake.
Of course, we couldn’t see what was happening behind the dobe. We just saw Donnelly and his hombres sweep around it, and then heard the guns roaring and men yelling. But by the time I’d run acrost the street and rounded the corner of the dobe, the McBride gang was a thing of the past, and three of Donnelly’s men was down with more or less lead in ’em.
“Carry ’em over to the saloon, boys,” said Donnelly, who had a broke arm in a blood-soaked sleeve hisself. We done so, whilst Navajo, who had got as far as the porch on his game leg, bellered and waved his smoking rifle like a scepter.
“Lay ’em on the floor and pour licker down ’em,” said Beldon. “What the hell happened?”
“Richards led us into a trap,” grunted Donnelly, taking a deep swig hisself. “They got Bill and Tom and Dick, but I plugged Richards as he took to the brush. They’d have snagged us all though, if it hadn’t been for these boys. They was with the outfit on Eagle River, and when Richards rode off last night they got suspicious and trailed him. They was just south of Devil’s Gorge where the ambush was laid, when they heard the shootin’, and they come up in time to give us a hand.”
“And if it hadn’t been for Grimes, here,” grunted Beldon, “McBride would have been boss of Piute right now. What you lookin’ at?”
“This here paper,” I said. “I’m tryin’ to figger out why a pitcher of a jeopard would start McBride to killin’ his own men.”
“Lemme see,” says he, and he took it and looked at it, and said, “Why, hell, no wonder! It’s got McBride’s name at the top, over that pitcher. He thought that feller Joe had drawed it to insult him.”
“But the pitcher of a jeopard—” I protested.
“You might have meant it for a jeopard,” he said, “but it looks a darn sight more like a striped skunk to me, and I reckon that’s what McBride took it for. I told you he went crazy when the subject of skunks was brung up. Never mind that; a hombre as quick with a gun as you are don’t need no other accomplishments; how about a steady job with me?”
“What for?” I said. “With the McBride gang cleaned out I don’t see what they is for an able-bodied man in these parts. Besides, I see art ain’t appreshiated here. I’m goin’ on to Californy, like Pap told me to.”
Knife-River Prodigal
Table of Contents
I HAD just sot down on my bunk and was fixing to pull off my boots, when Pap come out of the back room and blinked at the candle which was stuck onto the table.
Says he, “Well, Buckner, is they anything new over to Knife River?”
“They ain’t never nothin’ new there,” I says, yawning. “They’s a new gal slingin’ hash in the Royal Grand resternt, but Bill Hopkins has already got hisself engaged to her, and ’lows he’ll shoot anybody which so much as looks at her. They was a big poker game in back of the Golden Steer and Tunk winned seventy bucks and got carved with a bowie.”
“The usual derned foolishness,” grumbled Pap, turning around to go back to bed. “When I was a young buck, they was always excitement to be found in town—pervidin’ you could find a town.”
“Oh, yes,” I says suddenly. “I just happened to remember. I shot a feller in the Diamond Palace Saloon.”
Pap turned around and combed his beard with his fingers.
“Gittin’ a mite absent-minded, ain’t you, Buckner?” says he. “Did they identify the remains?”
“Aw, I didn’t croak him,” says I. “I just kinda shot him through the shoulder and a arm and the hind leg. He was a stranger in these here parts, and I thought maybe he didn’t know no better.”
“No better’n what?” demanded Pap. “What was the argyment?”
“I don’t remember,” I confessed. “It was somethin’ about politics.”
“What you know about politics?” snorted Pap.
“Nothin’,” I says. “That’s why I plugged him. I run out of argyments.”
“Daw-gone it, Buckner,” says Pap, “you got to be a little more careful how you go around shootin’ people in saloons. This here country is gittin’ civilized, what with britch-loadin’ guns, and stagecoaches and suchlike. I don’t hold with these here newfangled contraptions, but lots of people does, and the majority rules—les’n yo’re quicker on the draw than what they be.
“Now you done got the family into trouble again. You’ll have that ranger, Kirby, onto yore neck. Don’t you know he’s in this here country swearin’ he’s goin’ to bring in law and order if he has to smoke up every male citizen of Knife River County? If any one man can do it, he can, because he’s the fastest gunman between the Guadalupe and the Rio Grande. More’n that, it ain’t just him. He’s got the whole ranger force behind him. The Grimes family has fit their private feuds as obstreperous as anybody in the State of Texas. But we ain’t buckin’ the rangers. And what we goin’ to do now when Kirby descends on us account of yore action?”
“I don’t think he’s goin’ to descend any time soon, Pap,” I says.
“When I wants yore opinion I’ll ast for it!” Pap roared. “Till then, shut up! Why don’t you think he will?”
“ ’Cause Kirby was the feller I shot,” I says.
Pap stood still a while, combing his whiskers, with a most curious expression; then he laid hold onto my collar and the seat of my britches and begun to walk me toward the door.
“The time has come, Buckner,” says he, “for you to go forth and tackle the world on yore own. Yo’re growed in height, if not in bulk and mentality, and anyway, as I remarked while ago, the welfare of the majority has got to be considered. The Grimes family is noted for its ability to soak up punishment, but they’s a limit to everything. When I recalls the family feuds, gunfights and range wars yore mental incapacity and lack of discretion has got us into ever since you was big enough to sight a gun, I looks with no enthusiasm onto a pitched battle with the rangers and probably the State milishy. No, Buckner, I think you better hit out for foreign parts.”
“Where you want me to go, Pap?” I inquired.
“Californy,” he answered, kicking the door open.
“Why Californy?” I asked.
“Because that’s the fartherest-off place I can think of,” he says, lifting me through the door with the toe of his boot. “Go with my blessin’!”
I pulled my nose out of the dirt and got up and hollered through the door which Pap had locked and bolted on the inside, “How long I oughta stay?”
“Not too long,” says Pap. “Don’t forgit yore pore old father and yore other relatives which will grieve for you. Come back in about forty or fifty years.”
“Where ’bouts is Californy?” I asked.
“It’s where they git gold,” he says. “If you ride straight west long enough yo’re bound to git there eventually.”
* * * * *
I went out to the corral and saddled my horse—or rather, I saddled my brother Jim’s horse—because his’n was better’n mine—and I hit out, feeling kinda funny, because I hadn’t never been away from home no farther’n the town of Knife River. I couldn’t head due west on account of that route would ’a’ took me across “Old Man” Gordon’s ranch, and he had give his punchers orders to shoot me on sight, account of me smoking up his three boys at a dance a few months before.
So I swung south till I got as near the Donnellys’ range as I felt like I oughta, what with Joe Donnelly still limping on a crutch from a argyment him and me had in Knife River. So I turned west again and hit straight through the settlement of Broken Rope. None of the nine or ten citizens which was gunning for me was awake, so I rode peacefully through and headed into unknown country just as the sun come up.
Well, for a long time I rode through country which was inhabited very seldom. After I left the settlements on Knife River, there was a long stretch in which about the only folks I seen was Mexican sheep-herders which I was ashamed to ask ’em where I was, for fear they’d think I was ignerunt. Then even the sheep-herders played out, and I crossed some desert that me and Brother Jim’s horse nearly starved on, but I knowed that if I kept heading west I’d fetch Californy finally.
So I rode for days and days and finally got into better-looking country again, and I decided I must be there, because I didn’t see how anything could be any further from anything else than what I’d come. I was homesick and low in my spirits, and would ’a’ sold my hopes of the future for ten cents.
Well, finally one day, along about the middle of the morning, I found myself in a well-watered, hilly country, a little like that around Knife River, only with the hills bigger, and they was right smart rocks. So I thought to myself, “I’m good and tired of this here perambulatin’; I’m goin’ to stop right here and mine me some gold.” I’d heard tell they found gold in rocks. So I tied brother Jim’s horse to a tree, and I located me a likely boulder beside the trail, about as big as a barn, and begun knocking chips off it with a hunk of flint.
I was making so much noise I didn’t hear the horses coming up the trail, and the first thing I knowed I wasn’t alone.
Somebody said, “What in tarnation are you doin’?”
I turned around and there was a gang of five men on horses, hard-looking gents with skins about the color of old leather, and the biggest one was nigh as dark as a Indian with drooping whiskers. He twist these whiskers and scowled, and says, “Didn’t you hear me? What you bustin’ chunks off that rock for?”
“I’m prospectin’ for gold,” I says. He kinda turned purple, and his eyes got red and he snorted through his whiskers and says, “Don’t you try to make no fool outa William Hyrkimer Hawkins! The boundless prairies is dotted with the bones of such misguided idjits. I ast you a civil question—”
“I done told you,” I said. “I’m huntin’ me some gold. I heard tell they git it outa rocks.”
He looked kinda stunned, and the men behind him haw-hawed and said, “Don’t shoot him, Bill, the blame hillbilly is on the level.”
“By golly,” he said, twisting his mustash, “I believe it. But he ain’t no hillbilly. Who’re you, and where you from, and where you goin’?”
“I’m Buckner Jeopardy Grimes,” I says. “I’m from Knife River County, Texas, and I’m on my way to the gold fields of Californy.”
“Well,” says he, “you still got a long way to go.”
“Ain’t this Californy?” I says.
He says, “Naw, this here is New Mexico. Come on. We’re ridin’ to Smokeville. Climb on yore cayuse and trail with us.”
“What you want this gangle-legged waddy grazin’ around with us for?” demanded one of the fellers.
“He’s good for a laugh,” said Hawkins.
“If you like yore humor mixed up with gun smoke,” opined a bald-headed old cuss which looked like a pessimistic timber wolf. “I’ve seen a lot of hombres outa Texas, and some was smart and some was dumb, but they was all alike in one respect: they was all pizen.”
Hawkins snorted and I mounted onto my brother Jim’s horse and we started for Smokeville, wherever that was. They was four men and Hawkins, and they called thereselves “Squint” and “Red” and “Curly” and “Arizona,” and next to some of my relatives on Knife River, they was the toughest-looking gang of thugs I ever seen in my life.
* * * * *
Then after a while we come in sight of Smokeville. It wasn’t as big as Knife River, but it had about as many saloons. They rode into town at a dead run, hollering and shooting off their pistols. I rode with ’em because I wanted to be polite, but I didn’t celebrate none, because I was a long ways from home and low in my spirits.
All the folks taken to cover, and Hawkins rode his horse up on the porch of a saloon. There was a piece of paper tacked on the wall.
His men says, “What does it say, Bill? Read it to us!”
So he spit his tobaccer out on the porch, and read:
Us citizens of Smokeville has passed the follerin’ laws which we aims to see enforced to the full extent of fines and imprisonment and being plugged with a .45 for resistin’ arrest. It’s agin’ the law to shoot off pistols in saloons and resternts; it’s agin’ the law for gents to shoot each other inside the city limits; it’s agin’ the law to ride horses into saloons and shoot buttons off the bartender’s coat.
Signed: Us citizens of Smokeville and Joe Clanton, sheriff.
Hawkins roared like a bull looking at a red bandanner.
“What air we a-comin’ to?” he bellered. “What kind of a government air we livin’ under? Air we men or air we jassacks? Is they no personal liberty left no more?”
“I dunno,” I said. “I never heered of no such laws back in Texas.”
“I warn’t talkin’ to you, you long-legged road- runner!” he snorted, ripping the paper off the wall. “Foller me, boys. We’ll show ’em they can’t tromple on the rights of free-born white men!”
So they surged into the saloon on their horses and the bartender run out the back way hollering, “Run, everybody! Hawkins is back in town!”
So the feller they called Squint got behind the bar and started servin’ the drinks. They all got off of their cayuses so’s they could drink easier, and Hawkins told me to take the horses out and tie ’em to the hitching rack.
I done it, and when I got back they’d dragged the sheriff out from under the bar where he was hiding, and was making him eat the paper Hawkins had tore off the wall. He was a fat man with a bald head and a pot belly, and they’d tooken his gun away, which he hadn’t tried to use.
“A fine specimen you be!” said Hawkins fiercely, sticking his gun muzzle outa sight in the sheriff ’s quivering belly. “I oughta shoot you! Tryin’ to persecute honest men! Tryin’ to crush human liberty under the mailed fist of oppressive laws! Sheriff ! Bah! We impeaches you!” He jerked off Clanton’s star and kicked him heartily in the pants. “Git out! You ain’t sheriff no more’n a jack rabbit.” Clanton made for the door like he had wasps in his britches, and they shot the p’ints off his spurs as he run.
“The nerve of these coyotes!” snorted Hawkins, downing about a quart of licker at a snort and throwing the bottle through the nearest glass winder. “Sheriff ! Ha!” He glared around till he spied me. Then he grinned like a timber wolf, and says, “Come here, you! I make you sheriff of Smokeville!” And he stuck the badge on my shirt, and everybody haw-hawed and shot their pistols through the roof.
I said, “I ain’t never done no sheriffin’ before. What am I supposed to do?”
“The first thing is to set up drinks for the house,” said Red.
I said, “I ain’t got but a dollar.”
And Hawkins said, “Don’t be a sap. None of my men ever pays for anything they get in Smokeville. I got a pocketful of money right now, but you don’t see me handin’ out none to these sissies, does you?”
So I said, “Oh, all right then, the drinks is on me.”
And everybody yelled and hollered and shot holes in the mirror behind the bar and guzzled licker till it was astonishing to behold. After a while they scattered up and down the street, some into other saloons, and some into a dance hall.
So I taken brother Jim’s horse down to the wagon yard and told the man to take care of him.
He looked at my badge very curious, but said he’d do it.
So I said, “I understand none of Mr. Hawkins’ men has to pay for nothin’ in Smokeville. Is that right?”
He kinda shivered and said that Mr. Hawkins was such a credit to the country that nobody had the heart to charge him for anything, and them which had was not now in the land of the living.
* * * * *
Well, this all seemed very strange to me, but Pap once told me that when I got outa Texas I would find folks in other parts had different customs. So I went back up the street. Hawkins’ gang was still raising hell and very few folks was in sight. I never seen people so scared of five men in my life. I seen a resternt up toward the east end of the street, and I was hungry and went in. They was a awful purty gal in there.
I would ’a’ beat a retreat, because I was awful bashful and scared of gals, but she seen me and kinda turned pale, and said, “What—what do you want?”
So I taken off my hat, and said, “I would like a steak and some aigs and ’taters and a few molasses if it ain’t too much trouble, please, ma’am.”
So I sot down and she went to work and slung the stuff together, and purty soon she looked at me kinda apprehensive, and says, “How—how long are you men going to stay in Smokeville?”
I said I jedged the gents would stay till all the whisky was gone, which wouldn’t be long at the rate they was demolishing it, and I says, “You’re a foreigner, ain’t you, miss?”
And she says, “Why do you ask?”
“Well,” I says, “I ain’t never hear nobody talk like that before.”
“I am from New York,” she says.
So I says, “Where at is that?”
She says, “It’s away back East.”
“Oh,” I says, “it must be somewheres on t’other side of the Guadalupe.”
She just hove a sigh and shaken her head like she wished she was back there, and just then in come a old codger, with whiskers, which sot down and likewise hove a sigh, clean up from his boot tops. He said, “T’ain’t no use, Miss Joan. I can’t raise the dough. Them thievin’ scoundrels has stole me plumb out. They got the last bunch the other night. All I got on my ranch is critters too old or too sorry for Bill Hawkins to bother to steal—”
She turned pale and whispered, “For Heaven’s sake, be careful, Mr. Garfield; that’s one of Hawkins’ men sitting right there!”
He turned around and seen me, and he turned pale, too, under his whiskers, but he riz up and shaken his fist at me, and said, “Well, you heered what I said, and I ain’t takin’ it back! Bill Hawkins is a thief, and all his men air thieves! Everybody in this country knows they’re thieves, only they’re too skeered to say so! Now, go ahead and shoot me! You and yore gang of outlaws has stole me out and ruined me till I might as well be dead. Well, what you goin’ to do?”
“I’m goin’ to eat this here can of cling peaches if you’ll quit yellin’ at me,” I said, and him and Miss Joan looked astonished, and he sot down and mumbled in his beard and she looked sorry for him and for herself, and I et my peaches.
When I got through, I said, “How much I owe you, miss?”
She looked like she’d just saw a ghost and said, “What?”
“How much, please, ma’am,” I said.
She said, “I never heard of one of Hawkins’ men paying for anything—but it’s a dollar, if yo’re not kidding me.”
I laid down my dollar, and just then somebody shot off their gun outside. In come Hawkins’ man Curly. He was drunk and weaving and he shot his pistol into the roof and yelled, “Gimme some grub and be quick about it!”
Old man Garfield turned white under his whiskers and doubled his fists like he yearned to do somebody vi’lence, and Miss Joan looked scared and started fixing the grub.
Curly seen me and he guffawed, “Howdy, sheriff, you long-legged Texas sage-rooster! Haw! Haw! Haw! That there was the funniest one Bill ever pulled!” So he sot down and breathed whisky fumes all over the place, and when Miss Joan brung his vittles, he grabbed her arm and leered like a cat eating prickly pears, and says, “Gimme a kiss, gal!”
She says, quick and scared, “Let me go! Please let me go!”
* * * * *
I got up then and says, “What you mean by such actions? I never heered of such doins in my life! You release go of her and apolergize!”
“Why, you long, ganglin’ Texas lunkhead!” he yelped, reaching for his gun. “Set down and shet up before I pistol-whips the livin’ daylights outa you!”
So I split open his scalp with my gun barrel, and he fell onto the floor and kicked a few times and layed still. I hauled him to the back door and throwed him down the steps. He fell, head first, into a garbage can which upsot and spilled garbage all over him. He laid there like a hawg in its trough, which was the proper place for him.
“Pap told me other places was different from Texas,” I says fretfully, “but I never had no idee they was this different.”
“I’m getting used to it,” she says with a kinda hard laugh. “The people that live here are good folks, but every time Hawkins and his gang come into town I have to put up with such things as you just saw.”
“How come you ever come out here in the first place?” I asked, because it was just dawning on me that she must be one of them Eastern tenderfoots I’d heard tell of.
“I was tired of slaving in a city,” she said. “I saved my money and came West. When I got to Denver I read an advertisement in a newspaper about a man offering a restaurant for sale in Smokeville, New Mexico. I came here and spent every penny I had on it. It was all right, until Hawkins and his gang started terrorizing the town.”
“I was all set to buy her out,” said old man Garfield mournfully. “I used to be a cook before I was blame fool enough to go into the cattle business. A resternt in Smokeville for my declinin’ years is my idee of heaven—exceptin’ Hawkins and his gang. But I can’t raise the dough. Them thieves has stole me out. Five hundred buys her, and I can’t raise it.”
“Five hundred would get me out of this place and back to some civilized country,” said Miss Joan, with a kind of sob.
I was embarrassed because it always makes me feel bad to see a woman cry. I feel like a yaller dawg, even when it ain’t my fault. I looked down, and all to onst my gaze fell onto the badge which Hawkins had pinned onto my shirt.
“Wait here!” I said suddenly, and I taken old man Garfield by the neck and shoved him down in a chair. “You all stay here till I get back,” I says. “Don’t go no place. I’ll be back right away.”
As I went out the front door, Curly come weaving around the building with egg shells in his ears and ’tater peelings festooned on him, and he was mumbling something about cuckoo clocks and fumbling for his gun. So I hit him under the jaw for good measure and he coiled up under a horse trough and layed there.
I heard a gun banging in the Eagle Saloon, which was about a block west of the resternt, and I went in. Sure enough, Bill Hawkins was striding up and down in solitary grandeur, amusing hisself shooting bottles off the shelves behind the bar.
“Where’s the rest of the fellers?” I asked.
“In the Spanish Bar at the west end of town,” he said. “What’s it to you?”
“Nothin’,” I says.
“Well,” says he, “I’m goin’ to the resternt and make that gal cook me some grub. I’m hungry.”
“I reckon that’s what’s sp’ilin’ yore aim,” I says.
He jumped like he was stabbed and cussed. “What you mean, sp’ilin’ my aim?” he roared.
“Well,” I said, “I seen you miss three of them bottle tops. Back in Texas—”
“Shet up!” he bellered. “I don’t want to hear nothin’ about Texas. You say ‘Texas’ to me just once more and I’ll blow yore brains out.”
“All right,” I said, “but I bet you can’t write yore initials in that mirror behind the bar with yore six-guns.”
“Huh!” he snorted, and begun blazing away with both hands.
“What you quittin’ for?” I asked presently.
“My guns is empty,” he said. “I got to reload.”
“No, you don’t,” I says, shoving my right-hand gun in his belly. “Drop them empty irons!”
He looked as surprised as if a picture had clumb off the wall and bit him.
“What you mean?” he roared. “Is this here yore idee of a joke?”
“Drop them guns and h’ist yore hands,” I commanded.
He turned purple, but he done so, and then dipped and jerked a bowie out of his boot, but I shot it outa his hand before he could straighten. He was white and shaking with rage.
“I arrests you for disturbin’ the peace,” I said.
“What you mean, you arrests me?” he bellered. “You ain’t no sheriff!”
“I am, too,” I said. “You gimme this here badge yoreself. They’s a law against shootin’ holes in saloon mirrors. I tries you and I finds you guilty, and I fines you a fine.”
“How much you fines me?” he asked.
“How much you got?” I asked.
“None of yore cussed business!” he howled.
So I made him turn around with his hands in the air, and I pulled a roll outa his hip pocket big enough to choke a cow.
“This here dough,” I said, “is the money you got from sellin’ the steers you stole from pore old man Garfield. I know, from the remarks yore men let drop while we was ridin’ to Smokeville. Stand still whilst I count it, and don’t try no monkey business.”
So I kept him covered with one hand and counted the dough with the other, and it was slow work, because I hadn’t never seen that much money. But finally I announced, “I fines you five hundred bucks. Here’s the rest.” And I give him back a dollar and fifteen cents.
“You thief !” he howled. “You bandit! You robber! I’ll have yore life for this.”
“Aw, shet up,” I says. “I’m goin’ to lock you up in jail for the night. Some of yore gang can let you out after I’m gone. If I was to let you go now, I’d probably have some trouble with you before I could git outa town.”
“You would!” he asserted bloodthirstily.
“And bein’ a peaceful critter,” I says, jabbing my muzzle into his back, “I takes this here precaution. Git goin’ before I scatters yore remnants all over the floor.”
* * * * *
The jail was a short distance behind the stores and things. I marched him out the back door, and his cussing was something terrible every step of the way. The jail was a small, one-roomed building and a big fat egg was sleeping in the shade. I give him a kick in the pants to wake him up.
He throwed up his hands and yelled, “Don’t shoot! The key’s hangin’ on that nail by the door!” before he got his eyes open.
When he seen me and my prisoner his jaw fell down a foot or so.
“Be you the jailer?” I asked.
“I’m Reynolds, Clanton’s deperty,” he said in a small voice.
“Well,” I says, “onlock that door. We got a prisoner.”
“Wait a minute,” he said. “Ain’t that Bill Hawkins?”
“Sure it is,” I said impatiently. “Hustle, will you?”
“But, gee whiz!” says he. “You ain’t lockin’ up Bill Hawkins!”
“Will you onlock that door and stop gabblin’?” I hollered in exasperation. “You want me to ’rest you for obstructin’ justice?”
“It’s agin’ my better jedgment,” he said, shaking his head as he done my bidding. “It’ll cost us all our lives.”
“And that ain’t no lie!” agreed Hawkins bitterly. But I booted him into the jug, paying no attention to his horrible threats. I told Reynolds to guard him and not let him out till next morning, not on no conditions whatever. Then I headed back up the street for the resternt. Noises of revelry was coming from the Spanish Bar, way down at the west end of the street, and I figgered Hawkins’ braves was still down there.
* * * * *
When I come into the resternt, Miss Joan and old man Garfield was still setting there where I left ’em, looking sorry. I shoved the wad I had took from Hawkins into old man Garfield’s hands, and I says, “Count it!”
He looked dumfounded, but he done so, kind of mechanical, and I says, “How much is they?”
“Five hundred bucks even,” he stuttered.
“That there is right,” I said, yanking the roll out of his hands, and giving it to Miss Joan. “Old man Garfield is now owner of this here hash house. And you got dough enough to go back East.”
“But I don’t understand,” said Miss Joan, kinda dazedly. “Whose money is this?”
“It’s yourn,” I said.
“Hold on,” says old man Garfield. “Ain’t them Bill Hawkins’ ivory-handled guns you got stuck in yore belt?”
“Uh-huh,” I says, laying ’em on the counter. “Why?”
He turned pale and his whiskers curled up and shuddered. “Is that Hawkins’ dough?” he whispered. “Have you croaked him?”
“Naw,” I says. “I ain’t croaked him. He’s in the jail house. And it wasn’t his dough. He just thought it was.”
“I’m too young to die,” quavered old man Garfield. “I knowed they was bound to be a catch in this. You young catamount, don’t you realize that when Hawkins gits outa jail, and finds me ownin’ this resternt, he’ll figger out that I put you up to robbin’ him? He knows I ain’t got no money. You mean well, and I’m plumb grateful, but you done put my aged neck in a sling. He’ll tear this resternt j’int from rafter, and shoot me plumb full of holes.”
“And me!” moaned Miss Joan, turning the color of chalk. “My Lord, what will he do to me?”
I was embarrassed and hitched my gun belt.
“Dawg-gone it,” I says bitterly, “Pap was right. Everything I does is wrong. I never figgered on that. I’ll just have to—”
“Sheriff !” hollered somebody on the outside. “Sheriff!”
Reynolds staggered in with blood streaming from a gash in his head.
“Run, everybody!” he bawled. “Hawkins is out! He pulled the bars outa the winder with his bare hands and hit me on the head with one, and he taken my gun, and he’s headin’ for the Spanish Bar to git his pards and take the town apart! He’s nigh loco he’s so mad, and ravin’ and swearin’ that he’ll burn the town and kill every man in it!”
At that old man Garfield let out a wail of despair, and Miss Joan sank down behind the counter with a moan.
“Le’s take to the hills,” babbled Reynolds. “Clanton’s hidin’ out there somewhere, and—”
“Aw, shet up,” I grunted. “You all stay here. I’m sheriff of this here town, and it’s my job to pertect the citizens. Shet up and set down.”
* * * * *
And, so saying, I hurried out the back door and turned west. As I passed the corner of the building I noticed that Curly was still laying where I left him, being overcome with licker and swats on the dome, though he was showing some signs of life.
I run along behind the backs of the buildings, dodging from one to the other. The Spanish Bar was on the same side of the street as the resternt, so I didn’t have to cross the street to get to it. Evidently, word of the impending massacre must have spread, because the town was perfectly still and tense, except the racket that was goin’ on in the Spanish Bar, where evidently the bold bandits was priming on raw licker and blasphemy for wholesale murder.
I ducked into the back door and was in the saloon before they knowed it, with a gun in each hand. They all whirled away from the bar and glared at me; there was Red, Squint, and Arizona. Hawkins wasn’t there; I heard him bellering out in the street for Curly.
“Don’t move,” I cautioned ’em.
But as if my remark was a fuse to set off a explosion, they all yelled and went for their guns.
I killed Red before he could unleather his irons, and Squint only got in one shot which chipped my ear before I perforated his anatomy in three important places. Arizona missed me with his left-hand gun, but planted a slug in my thigh with his right, before giving up the ghost, hot lead proving harder than even his skull. It was short and deadly as a concentrated cyclone—guns roaring at close range—bullets spatting into flesh—men falling through the smoke. And just as Arizona dropped, Hawkins loomed in the door with Reynolds’ gun in his hand.
He was big as a house anyhow, and he looked even bigger through the curling smoke, with his eyes blazing and his mustaches bristling. He roared like a hurricane through the mesquite, and we fired simultaneous. His bullet lodged in my shoulder, and the last slug in my right-hand gun knocked his pistol out of his hand, along with a finger or so.
He then give a maddened roar and come plunging at me bare-handed. I planted the last three bullets of my other gun in various necessary parts of his carcass as he come, but they just seemed to irritate him. The last shot went into his belly so close the powder burned his shirt. Every other man I ever shot that way imejitately bent double and dropped, but this New Mexican grizzly merely give a enraged beller, jerked the gun outa my hand, fell on me and started beating my brains out with the butt.
He derned near scalped me with that .45 stock. We rolled over and over across the bloodstained floor, bumping over corpses and splintering chairs and tables, him bellering like a bull and choking me with one hand and bashing my head with the gun handle in the other one, and me feeding my bowie to him free and generous in the groin, breast, neck, and belly. I fed it to him sixteen times before he stiffened and went limp. I could hardly believe I’d won. I’d begun to think he couldn’t be croaked. I rize up groggily and shaken some of the blood outa my eyes, and pulled back a loose flap of scalp, and stared dizzily at that shambles—
Presently the awed citizens of Smokeville crept out of their refuges and looked in pallidly to where I sot amidst the ruins, with my bloody head in my hands, weeping bitterly. Old man Garfield was there, and Miss Joan, and Clanton and Reynolds, and a lot of others.
“G-good gosh!” hollored Clanton, wild-eyed. “Are we seein’ things?”
“I reckon you want yore badge,” I says sadly, pulling it off my shirt.
He waved it away with a shaking hand. “You keep it!” he says. “I think Smokeville has found herself a real sheriff at last! Hey, boys?”
“You bet!” they hollered. “Keep the badge and be our regular sheriff!”
“Naw,” I gulped, wiping away some tears. “This ain’t my game. I just mixed in to help some folks. You keep that dough, Miss Joan, and you keep the resternt, Mr. Garfield. It was yore dough by rights. I ain’t no sheriff. I appreshiates yore trust, but if you all would just be so kind as to dig some of this here lead outa me, and sew my scalp back onto my skull in nine or ten places, I’ll be on my way. I got to go to Californy. Pap told me to.”
“But what you cryin’ about?” they asked in awe.
“Aw, I’m just homesick,” I sobbed, glancing around at the blood-smeared ruins. “This here reminds me so much of Knife River, way back in Texas!”
A Ring-Tailed Tornado
Table of Contents
I HEAR the citizens of War Whoop has organized theirselves into a committee of public safety which they says is to pertect the town agen me, Buckner J. Grimes. Sech doings as that irritates me. You'd think I was a public menace or something.
I'm purty dern tired of their slanders. I didn't tear down their cussed jail; the buffalo-hunters done it. How could I when I was in it at the time?
As for the Silver Boot saloon and dance hall, it wouldn't of got shot up if the owner had showed any sense. It was Ace Middleton's own fault he got his hind laig busted in three places, and if the city marshal had been tending to his own business instead of persecuting a pore, helpless stranger, he wouldn't of got the seat of his britches full of buckshot.
Folks which says I went to War Whoop a-purpose to wreck the town, is liars. I never had no idea at first of going there at all. It's off the railroad and infested with tinhorn gamblers and buffalo-hunters and sech-like varmints, and no place for a trail-driver.
My visit to this lair of vice come about like this: I'd rode p'int on a herd of longhorns clean from the lower Pecos to Goshen, where the railroad was. And I stayed there after the trail-boss and the other boys headed south, to spark the belle of the town, Betty Wilkinson, which gal was as purty as a brand-new bowie knife. She seemed to like me middling tolerable, but I had rivals, notably a snub-nosed Arizona waddy by the name of Bizz Ridgeway.
This varmint's persistence was so plumb aggravating that I come in on him sudden-like one morning in the back room of the Spanish Mustang, in Goshen, and I says:
"Lissen here, you sand-burr in the pants of progress, I'm a peaceable man, generous and retirin' to a fault. But I'm reachin' the limit of my endurance. Ain't they no gals in Arizona, that you got to come pesterin' mine? Whyn't yuh go on back home where you belong anyhow? I'm askin' yuh like a gent to keep away from Betty Wilkinson before somethin' onpleasant is forced to happen to yuh."
He kind of r'ared up, and says: "I ain't the only gent which is sparkin' Betty. Why don't you make war-talk to Rudwell Shapley, Jr.?"
"He ain't nothin' but a puddin'-headed tenderfoot," I responded coldly. "I don't consider him in no serious light. A gal with as much sense as Betty wouldn't pay him no mind. But you got a slick tongue and might snake yore way ahead of me. So I'm tellin' you—"
He started to git up in a hurry, and I reached for my bowie, but then he sunk back down in his chair and to my amazement he busted into tears.
"What in thunder's the matter with you?" I demanded, shocked.
"Woe is me!" moaned he. "Yuh're right, Breck. I got no business hangin' around Betty. But I didn't know she was yore gal. I ain't got no matrimonial intentions onto her. I'm jest kind of consolin' myself with her company, whilst bein' parted by crooel Fate from my own true love."
"Hey," I says, pricking up my ears and uncocking my pistol. "You ain't in love with Betty? You got another gal?"
"A pitcher of divine beauty!" vowed he, wiping his eyes on my bandanner. "Gloria La Venner, which sings in the Silver Boot, over to War Whoop. We was to wed—"
Here his emotions overcome him and he sobbed loudly.
"But Fate interfered," he moaned. "I was banished from War Whoop, never to return. In a thoughtless moment I kind of pushed a bartender with a clawhammer, and he had a stroke of apperplexity or somethin' and died, and they blamed me. I was forced to flee without tellin' my true love where I was goin'.
"I ain't dared to go back because them folks over there is so prejudiced agen' me they threatens to arrest me on sight. My true love is eatin' her heart out, waitin' for me to come and claim her as my bride, whilst I lives here in exile!"
Bizz then wept bitterly on my shoulder till I throwed him off in some embarrassment.
"Whyn't yuh write her a letter, yuh dad-blamed fool?" I ast.
"I can't write, nor read, neither," he said. "And I don't trust nobody to send word to her by. She's so beautiful, the critter I'd send would probably fall in love with her hisself, the lowdown polecat!" Suddenly he grabbed my hand with both of his'n, and said, "Breck, you got a honest face, and I never did believe all they say about you, anyway. Whyn't you go and tell her?"
"I'll do better'n that if it'll keep you away from Betty," I says. "I'll bring this gal over here to Goshen."
"Yuh're a gent!" says he, wringing my hand. "I wouldn't entrust nobody else with sech a sacred mission. Jest go to the Silver Boot and tell Ace Middleton you want to see Gloria La Venner alone."
"All right," I said. "I'll rent a buckboard to bring her back in."
"I'll be countin' the hours till yuh heaves over the horizen with my true love!" declaimed he, reaching for the whiskey bottle.
So I hustled out, and who should I run into but that pore sapified shrimp of a Rudwell Shapley Joonyer in his monkey jacket and tight riding pants and varnished English boots. We like to had a collision as I barged through the swinging doors and he squeaked and staggered back and hollered: "Don't shoot!"
"Who said anything about shootin'?" I ast irritably, and he kind of got his color back and looked me over like I was a sideshow or something, like he always done.
"Your home," says he, "is a long way from here, is it not, Mister Grimes?"
"Yeah," I said. "I live on Wolf Mountain, 'way down near whar the Pecos runs into the Rio Grande."
"Indeed!" he says kind of hopefully. "I suppose you'll be returning soon?"
"Naw, I ain't," I says. "I'll probably stay here all fall."
"Oh!" says he dejectedly, and went off looking like somebody had kicked him in the pants. I wondered why he should git so down-in-the-mouth jest because I warn't goin' home. But them tenderfoots ain't got no sense and they ain't no use wasting time trying to figger out why they does things, because they don't generally know theirselves.
For instance, why should a object like Rudwell Shapley Jr. come to Goshen, I want to know? I ast him once p'int blank and he says it was a primitive urge so see life in the raw, whatever that means. I thought maybe he was talking about grub, but the cook at the Laramie Restaurant said he takes his beefsteaks well done like the rest of us.
Well, anyway, I got onto my hoss Cap'n Kidd and pulled for War Whoop which laid some miles west of Goshen. I warn't wasting no time, because the quicker I got Gloria La Venner to Goshen, the quicker I'd have a clear field with Betty. Of course it would of been easier and quicker jest to shoot Bizz, but I didn't know how Betty'd take it. Women is funny that way.
I figgered to eat dinner at the Half-Way House, a tavern which stood on the prairie about half-way betwix Goshen and War Whoop, but as I approached it I met a most pecooliar-looking object heading east.
I presently recognized it as a cowboy name Tump Garrison, and he looked like he'd been through a sorghum mill. His hat brim was pulled loose from the crown and hung around his neck like a collar, his clothes hung in rags. His face was skint all over, and one ear showed signs of having been chawed on long and earnestly.
"Where was the tornado?" I ast, pulling up.
He give me a suspicious look out of the eye he could still see with.
"Oh, it's you Breck," he says then. "My brains is so addled, I didn't recognize you at first. In fact," says he, tenderly caressing a lump on his head the size of a turkey aig, "It's jest a few minutes ago that I managed to remember my own name."
"What happened?" I ast with interest.
"I ain't shore," says he, spitting out three or four loose tushes. "Leastways I ain't shore jest what happened after that there table laig was shattered over my head. Things is a little foggy after that. But up to that time my memory is flawless.
"Briefly, Breck," says he, rising in his stirrups to rub his pants where they was the print of a boot heel, "I diskivered that I warn't welcome at the Half-Way House, and big as you be, I advises yuh to avoid it like yuh would the yaller j'indus."
"It's a public tavern," I says.
"It was," says he, working his right laig to see if it was still in j'int. "It was till Moose Harrison, the buffalo-hunter, arrove there to hold a private celebration of his own. He don't like cattle nor them which handles 'em. He told me so hisself, jest before he hit me with the bung-starter.
"He said he warn't aimin' to be pestered by no dern Texas cattle-pushers whilst he's enjoyin' a little relaxation. It was jest after issuin' this statement that he throwed me through the roulette wheel."
"You ain't from Texas," I said. "Yuh're from the Nations."
"That's what I told him whilst he was doin' a war-dance on my brisket," says Tump. "But he said he was too broadminded to bother with technicalities. Anyway, he says cowboys was the plague of the range, irregardless of where they come from."
"Oh, he did, did he?" I says irritably. "Well, I ain't huntin' trouble. I'm on a errand of mercy. But he better not shoot off his big mouth to me. I eats my dinner at the Half-Way House, regardless of all the buffler-hunters north of the Cimarron."
"I'd give a dollar to see the fun," says Tump. "But my other eye is closin' fast and I got to git amongst friends."
So he pulled for Goshen and I rode on to the Half-Way House, where I seen a big bay hoss tied to the hitch-rack. I watered Cap'n Kidd and went in. "Hssss!" the bartender says. "Git out as quick as yuh can! Moose Harrison's asleep in the back room!"
"I'm hongry," I responded, setting down at a table which stood nigh the bar. "Bring me a steak with pertaters and onions and a quart of coffee and a can of cling peaches. And whilst the stuff's cookin' gimme nine or ten bottles of beer to wash the dust out of my gullet."
"Lissen!" says the barkeep. "Reflect and consider. Yuh're young and life is sweet. Don't yuh know that Moose Harrison is pizen to anything that looks like a cowpuncher? When he's on a whiskey-tear, as at present, he's more painter than human. He's kilt more men—"
"Will yuh stop blattin' and bring me my rations?" I requested.
He shakes his head sad-like and says: "Well, all right. After all, it's yore hide. At least, try not to make no racket. He's swore to have the life blood of anybody which wakes him up."
I said I didn't want no trouble with nobody, and he tiptoed back to the kitchen and whispered my order to the cook, and then brung me nine or ten bottles of beer and slipped back behind the bar and watched me with morbid fascination.
I drunk the beer and whilst drinking I got to kind of brooding about Moose Harrison having the nerve to order everybody to keep quiet whilst he slept. But they're liars which claims I throwed the empty bottles at the door of the back room a-purpose to wake Harrison up.
When the waiter brung my grub I wanted to clear the table to make room for it, so I jest kind of tossed the bottles aside, and could I help it if they all busted on the back-room door? Was it my fault that Harrison was sech a light sleeper?
But the bartender moaned and ducked down behind the bar, and the waiter run through the kitchen and follered the cook in a sprint acrost the prairie, and a most remarkable beller burst forth from the back room.
The next instant the door was tore off the hinges and a enormous human come bulging into the barroom. He wore buckskins, his whiskers bristled, and his eyes was red as a drunk Comanche's.
"What in tarnation?" remarked he in a voice which cracked the winder panes. "Does my gol-blasted eyes deceive me? Is that there a cussed cowpuncher settin' there wolfin' beefsteak as brash as if he was a white man?"
"You ride herd on them insults!" I roared, rising sudden, and his eyes kind of popped when he seen I was about three inches taller'n him. "I got as much right here as you have."
"Name yore weppins," blustered he. He had a butcher knife and two six- shooters in his belt.
"Name 'em yoreself," I snorted. "If you thinks yuh're sech a hell-whizzer at fist-and-skull, why, shuck yore weppin-belt and I'll claw yore ears off with my bare hands!"
"That suits me!" says he. "I'll festoon that bar with yore innards," and he takes hold of his belt like he was going to unbuckle it—then, quick as a flash, he whipped out a gun. But I was watching for that and my right-hand .45 banged jest as his muzzle cleared leather.
The barkeep stuck his head up from behind the bar.
"Heck," he says wild-eyed, "you beat Moose Harrison to the draw, and him with the aidge! I wouldn't of believed it was possible if I hadn't saw it! But his friends will ride yore trail for this!"
"Warn't it self-defence?" I demanded.
"A clear case," says he. "But that won't mean nothin' to them wild and woolly buffalo-skinners. You better git back to Goshen where yuh got friends."
"I got business in War Whoop," I says. "Dang it, my coffee's cold. Dispose of the carcass and heat it up, will yuh?"
So he drug Harrison out, cussing because he was so heavy, and claiming I ought to help him. But I told him it warn't my tavern, and I also refused to pay for a decanter which Harrison's wild shot had busted. He got mad and said he hoped the buffalo-hunters did hang me. But I told him they'd have to ketch me without my guns first, and I slept with them on.
Then I finished my dinner and pulled for War Whoop.
It was about sundown when I got there, and I was purty hongry again. But I aimed to see Bizz's gal before I done anything else. So I put my hoss in the livery stable and seen he had a big feed, and then I headed for the Silver Boot, which was the biggest j'int in town.
There was plenty hilarity going on, but I seen no cowboys. The revelers was mostly gamblers, or buffalo-hunters, or soldiers, or freighters. War Whoop warn't popular with cattlemen. They warn't no buyers nor loading pens there, and for pleasure it warn't nigh as good a town as Goshen, anyway. I ast a barman where Ace Middleton was, and he p'inted out a big feller with a generous tummy decorated with a fancy vest and a gold watch chain about the size of a trace chain. He wore mighty handsome clothes and a diamond hoss-shoe stick pin and waxed mustache.
So I went up to him. He looked me over with very little favor.
"Oh, a cowpuncher, eh? Well, your money's as good as anybody's. Enjoy yourself, but don't get wild."
"I ain't aimin' to git wild," I says. "I want to see Gloria La Venner."
When I says that, he give a convulsive start and choked on his cigar. Everybody nigh us stopped laughing and talking and turned to watch us.
"What did you say?" he gurgled, gagging up the cigar. "Did I honestly hear you asking to see Gloria La Venner?"
"Shore," I says. "I aim to take her back to Goshen to git married—"
"You $&*!" says he, and grabbed up a table, broke off a laig and hit me over the head with it. It was most unexpected and took me plumb off guard.
I hadn't no idee what he was busting the table up for, and I was too surprised to duck. If it hadn't been for my Stetson it might of cracked my head. As it was, it knocked me back into the crowd, but before I could git my balance three or four bouncers grabbed me and somebody jerked my pistol out of the scabbard.
"Throw him out!" roared Ace, acting like a wild man. He was plumb purple in the face. "Steal my girl, will he? Hold him while I bust him in the snoot!"
He then rushed up and hit me very severely in the nose, whilst them bouncers was holding my arms. Well, up to that time I hadn't made no resistance. I was too astonished. But this was going too far, even if Ace was loco, as it appeared.
Nobody warn't holding my laigs, so I kicked Ace in the stummick and he curled up on the floor with a strangled shriek. I then started spurring them bouncers in the laigs and they yelled and let go of me, and somebody hit me in the ear with a blackjack.
That made me mad, so I reched for my bowie in my boot, but a big red- headed maverick kicked me in the face when I stooped down. That straightened me up, so I hit him on the jaw and he fell down acrost Ace which was holding his stummick and trying to yell for the city marshal.
Some low-minded scoundrel got a strangle-holt around my neck from behind and started beating me on the head with a pair of brass knucks. I ducked and throwed him over my head. Then I kicked out backwards and knocked over a couple more. But a scar-faced thug with a baseball bat got in a full-armed lick about that time and I went to my knees feeling like my skull was dislocated.
Six or seven of them then throwed theirselves onto me with howls of joy, and I seen I'd have to use vi'lence in spite of myself. So I drawed my bowie and started cutting my way through 'em. They couldn't of let go of me quicker if I'd been a cougar. They scattered every which-a-way, spattering blood and howling blue murder, and I riz r'aring and rampacious.
Somebody shot at me jest then, and I wheeled to locate him when a man run in at the door and p'inted a pistol at me. Before I could sling my knife through him, which was my earnest intention, he hollered:
"Drap yore deadly weppin! I'm the city marshal and yuh're under arrest!"
"What for?" I demanded. "I ain't done nothing."
"Nothing!" says Ace Middleton fiercely, as his menials lifted him onto his feet. "You've just sliced pieces out of five or six of our leading citizens! And there's my head bouncer, Red Croghan, out cold with a busted jaw. To say nothing of pushing my stomach through my spine. Ow! You must have mule blood in you, blast your soul!"
"Santry," he ordered the marshal, "he came in here drunk and raging and threatening, and started a fight for nothing. Do your duty! Arrest the cussed outlaw!"
Well, pap always tells me not to never resist no officer of the law, and anyway the marshal had my gun, and so many people was hollering and cussing and talking it kind of confused me. When they's any thinking to be did, I like to have a quiet place to do it and plenty of time.
So the first thing I knowed Santry had handcuffs on me and he hauls me off down the street with a big crowd follering and making remarks which is supposed to be funny. They come to a log hut with bars on the back winder, take off the handcuffs, shove me in and lock the door. There I was in jail without even seeing Gloria La Venner. It was plumb disgustful.
The crowd all hustled back to the Silver Boot to watch them fellers git sewed up which had fell afoul of my bowie, all but one fat cuss which said he was a guard, and he sot down in front of the jail with a double-barreled shotgun acrost his lap and went to sleep.
Well, there warn't nothing in the jail but a bunk with a hoss blanket on it, and a wooden bench. The bunk was too short for me to sleep on with any comfort, being built for a six foot man, so I sot down on it and waited for somebody to bring me some grub.
So after a while the marshal come and looked in at the winder and cussed me.
"It's a good thing for you," he says, "that yuh didn't kill none of them fellers. As it is, maybe we won't hang yuh."
"Yuh won't have to hang me if yuh don't bring me some grub purty soon," I said. "Are yuh goin' to let me starve in this dern jail?"
"We don't encourage crime in our town by feedin' criminals," he says. "If yuh want grub, gimme the money to buy it with."
I told him I didn't have but five bucks and I thought I'd pay my fine with that. He said five bucks wouldn't begin to pay my fine, so I gave him the five-spot to buy grub with, and he took it and went off.
I waited and waited, and he didn't come. I hollered to the guard, but he kept on snoring. Then purty soon somebody said: "Psst!" at the winder. I went over and looked out, and they was a woman standing behind the jail. The moon had come up over the prairie as bright as day, and though she had a cloak with a hood throwed over her, by what I could see of her face she was awful purty.
"I'm Gloria La Venner," says she. "I'm risking my life coming here, but I wanted to get a look at the man who was crazy enough to tell Ace Middleton he wanted to see me."
"What's crazy about that?" I ast.
"Don't you know Ace has killed three men already for trying to flirt with me?" says she. "Any man who can break Red Croghan's jaw like you did must be a bear-cat—but it was sheer madness to tell Ace you wanted to marry me."
"Aw, he never give me time to explain about that," I says. "It warn't me which wants to marry yuh. But what business is it of Middleton's? This here's a free country."
"That's what I thought till I started working for him," she says bitterly. "He fell in love with me, and he's so insanely jealous he won't let anybody even speak to me. He keeps me practically a prisoner and watches me like a hawk. I can't get away from him. Nobody in town dares to help me. They won't even rent me a horse at the livery stable.
"You see Ace owns most of the town, and lots of people are in debt to him. The rest are afraid of him. I guess I'll have to spend the rest of my life under his thumb," she says despairfully.
"Yuh won't, neither," I says. "As soon as I can git word to my friends in Goshen to send me a loan to pay my fine and git me out of this fool jail, I'll take yuh to Goshen where yore true love is pinin' for yuh."
"My true love?" says she, kind of startled-like. "What do you mean?"
"Bizz Ridgeway is in Goshen," I says. "He don't dare come after yuh hisself, so he sent me to fetch yuh."
She didn't say nothing for a spell, and then she spoke kind of breathless.
"All right, I must get back to the Silver Boot now, or Ace will miss me and start looking for me. I'll find Santry and pay your fine tonight. When he lets you out, come to the back door of the Silver Boot and wait in the alley. I'll come to you there as soon as I can slip away."
So I said all right, and she went away. The guard setting in front of the jail with his shotgun acrost his knees hadn't never woke up. But he did wake up about fifteen minutes after she left. A gang of men came up the street, whooping and cussing, and he jumped to his feet.
"Curses! Here comes Brant Hanson and a mob of them buffler-hunters, and they got a rope! They're headin' for the jail!"
"Who do yuh reckon they're after?" I inquired.
"They ain't nobody in jail but you," he suggested p'intedly. "And in about a minute they ain't goin' to be nobody nigh it but you and them. When Hanson and his bunch is in licker they don't care who they shoots!"
He then laid down his shotgun and lit a shuck down a back alley as hard as he could leg it.
So about a dozen buffalo-hunters in buckskins and whiskers come surging up to the jail and kicked on the door. They couldn't get the door open so they went around behind the shack and looked in at the winder.
"It's him, all right," said one of 'em. "Let's shoot him through the winder."
But the others said, "Naw, let's do the job in proper order," and I ast them what they wanted.
"We aims to hang yuh!" they answered enthusiastically.
"You cain't do that," I says. "It's agen the law."
"You kilt Moose Harrison!" said the biggest one, which they called Hanson.
"Well, it was a even break, and he tried to git the drop on me," I says.
Then Hanson says: "Enough of sech quibblin'. We made up our mind to hang yuh, so le's don't hear no more argyments about it. Here," he says to his pals, "tie a rope to the bars and we'll jerk the whole winder out. It'll be easier'n bustin' down the door. And hustle up, because I'm in a hurry to git back to that poker game in the R'arin' Buffalo."
So they tied a rope onto the bars and all laid onto it and heaved and grunted, and some of the bars come loose at one end. I picked up the bench aiming to bust their fool skulls with it as they clumb through the winder, but jest then another feller run up.
"Wait, boys," he hollered, "don't waste yore muscle. I jest seen Santry down at the Topeka Queen gamblin' with the money he taken off that dern cowboy, and he gimme the key to the door."
So they abandoned the winder and surged arount to the front of the jail, and I quick propped the bench agen the door, and run to the winder and tore out them bars which was already loose. I could hear 'em rattling at the door, and as I clumb through the winder one of 'em said: "The lock's turned but the door's stuck. Heave agen it."
So whilst they hev I run around the jail and picks up the guard's shotgun where he'd dropped it when he run off. Jest then the bench inside give way and the door flew open, and all them fellers tried to crowd through. As a result they was all jammed in the door and cussin' something fierce.
"Quit crowdin'," yelled Hanson. "Holy catamount, he's gone! The jail's empty!"
I then up with my shotgun and give 'em both barrels in the seat of their britches, which was the handiest to aim at, and they let out a most amazing squall and busted loose and fell headfirst into the jail. Some of 'em kept on going head-down like they'd started and hit the back wall so hard it knocked 'em stiff, and the others fell over 'em.
They was all tangled in a pile cussing and yelling to beat the devil, so I slammed the door and locked it and run around behind the jail house. Hanson was trying to climb out the winder, so I hit him over the head with my shotgun and he fell back inside and hollered.
"Halp! I'm mortally injured!"
"Shet up that unseemly clamor," I says sternly. "Ain't none of yuh hurt bad. Throw yore guns out the winder and lay down on the floor. Hustle, before I gives you another blast through the winder."
They didn't know the shotgun was empty, so they throwed their weppins out in a hurry and laid down, but they warn't quiet about it. They seemed to consider they'd been subjected to crooel and onusual treatment, and the birdshot in their sterns must of been a-stinging right smart, because the language they used was plumb painful to hear. I stuck a couple of their pistols in my belt.
"If one of you shows his head at that winder within a hour," I said, "he'll git it blowed off."
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