“Well, what about it?” I demanded, hitching my harness for’ard. The political foe don’t live which can beard a Elkins in his lair.
“We demands to know who conducks it,” stated Leary. “At least half the men in camp eligible to compete is in our crowd. We demands fair play!”
“We’re bringin’ in a cultured gent from another town,” I says coldly.
“Who?” demanded Allison.
“None of yore dang business!” trumpeted Soapy, which gets delusions of valor when he’s full of licker. “As a champion of progress and civic pride I challenges the skunk-odored forces of corrupt politics, and—”
Bam! McDonald swung with a billiard ball and Soapy kissed the sawdust.
“Now look what you done,” I says peevishly. “If you coyotes cain’t ack like gents, you’ll oblige me by gittin’ to hell outa here.”
“If you don’t like our company suppose you tries to put us out!” they challenged.
So when I’d finished my drink I taken their weppins away from ’em and throwed ’em headfirst out the side door. How was I to know somebody had jest put up a new cast-iron hitching-rack out there? Their friends carried ’em over to the Red Tomahawk to sew up their sculps, and I went back into the Silver Saddle to see if Soapy had come to yet. Jest as I reched the door he come weaving out, muttering in his whiskers and waving his six-shooter.
“Do you remember what all I told you?” I demanded.
“S-some of it!” he goggled, with his glassy eyes wobbling in all directions.
“Well, git goin’ then,” I urged, and helped him up onto his hoss. He left town at full speed, with both feet outa the stirrups and both arms around the hoss’ neck.
“Drink is a curse and a delusion,” I told the barkeep in disgust. “Look at that sickenin’ example and take warnin’! Gimme me a bottle of rye.”
Well, Gooseneck done a good job of advertising the show. By the middle of the next afternoon men was pouring into town from claims all up and down the creek. Half an hour before the match was sot to begin the hall was full. The benches was moved back from the front part, leaving a space clear all the way acrost the hall. They had been a lot of argyment about who was to compete, and who was to choose sides, but when it was finally settled, as satisfactory as anything ever was settled in Yeller Dog, they was twenty men to compete, and Lobo Harrison and Jack Clanton was to choose up.
By a peculiar coincidence, half of that twenty men was Gooseneck’s, and half was Bull’s. So naturally Lobo choosed his pals, and Clanton chosed his’n.
“I don’t like this,” Gooseneck whispered to me. “I’d ruther they’d been mixed up. This is beginnin’ to look like a contest between my gang and Bull’s. If they win, it’ll make me look cheap. Where the hell is Snake River?”
“I ain’t seen him,” I said, “You ought to of made ’em take off their guns.”
“Shucks,” says he. “What could possibly stir up trouble at sech a lady- like affair as a spellin’ bee. Dang it, where is Snake River? Old Jake said he’d git him here on time.”
“Hey, Gooseneck!” yelled Bull Hawkins from where he sot amongst his coharts. “Why’n’t you start the show?”
Bull was a big broad-shouldered hombre with black mustashes like a walrus. The crowd begun to holler and cuss and stomp their feet and this pleased Bull very much.
“Keep ’em amused,” hissed Gooseneck. “I’ll go look for Snake River.”
He snuck out a side door and I riz up and addressed the throng. “Gents,” I said, “be patient! They is a slight delay, but it won’t be long. Meantime I’ll be glad to entertain you all to the best of my ability. Would you like to hear me sing Barbary Allen?”
“No, by grab!” they answered in one beller.
“Well, yo’re a-goin’ to!” I roared, infuriated by this callous lack of the finer feelings. “I will now sing,” I says, drawing my .45s “and I blows the brains out of the first coyote which tries to interrupt me.”
I then sung my song without interference, and when I was through I bowed and waited for the applause, but all I heard was Lobo Harrison saying: “Imagine what the pore wolves on Bear Creek has to put up with!”
This cut me to the quick, but before I could make a suitable reply, Gooseneck slid in, breathing heavy. “I can’t find Snake River,” he hissed. “But the bar-keep gimme a book he found somewheres. Most of the leaves is tore out, but there’s plenty left. I’ve marked some of the longest words, Breck. You can read good enough to give ’em out. You got to! If we don’t start the show right away, this mob’ll wreck the place. Yo’re the only man not in the match which can even read a little, outside of me and Bull. It wouldn’t look right for me to do it, and I shore ain’t goin’ to let Bull run my show.”
I knew I was licked.
“Aw, well, all right,” I said. “I might of knew I’d be the goat. Gimme the book.”
“Here it is,” he said. “‘The Adventures of a French Countess.’ Be dern shore you don’t give out no words except them I marked.”
“Hey!” bawled Jack Clanton. “We’re gittin’ tired standin’ up here. Open the ball.”
“All right,” I says. “We commences.”
“Hey!” said Bull. “Nobody told us Elkins was goin’ to conduck the ceremony. We was told a cultured gent from outa town was to do it.”
“Well,” I says irritably, “Bear Creek is my home range, and I reckon I’m as cultured as any snake-hunter here. If anybody thinks he’s better qualified than me, step up whilst I stomp his ears off.”
Nobody volunteered, so I says “All right. I tosses a dollar to see who gits the first word.” It fell for Harrison’s gang, so I looked in the book at the first word marked, and it was a gal’s name.
“Catharine,” I says.
Nobody said nothing.
“Catharine!” I roared, glaring at Lobo Harrison.
“What you lookin’ at me for?” he demanded. “I don’t know no gal by that name.”
“%$&*@!” I says with passion. “That’s the word I give out. Spell it, dammit!”
“Oh,” says he. “All right. K-a-t-h-a-r-i-n-n.”
“That’s wrong,” I says.
“What you mean wrong?” he roared. “That’s right!”
“‘Tain’t accordin’ to the book,” I said.
“Dang the book,” says he. “I knows my rights and I ain’t to be euchered by no ignorant grizzly from Bear Creek!”
“Who you callin’ ignorant?” I demanded, stung, “Set down! You spelt it wrong.”
“You lie!” he howled, and went for his gun. But I fired first.
When the smoke cleared away I seen everybody was on their feet preparing for to stampede, sech as warn’t trying to crawl under the benches, so I said: “Set down, everybody. They ain’t nothin’ to git excited about. The spellin’ match continues — and I’ll shoot the first scoundrel which tries to leave the hall before the entertainment’s over.”
Gooseneck hissed fiercely at me: “Dammit, be careful who you shoot, cain’t’cha? That was another one of my voters!”
“Drag him out!” I commanded, wiping off some blood where a slug had notched my ear. “The spellin’ match is ready to commence again.”
They was a kind of tension in the air, men shuffling their feet and twisting their mustashes and hitching their gun-belts, but I give no heed. I now approached the other side, with my hand on my pistol, and says to Clanton: “Can you spell Catharine?”
“C-a-t-h-a-r-i-n-e!” says he.
“Right, by golly!” I says, consulting The French Countess, and the audience cheered wildly and shot off their pistols into the roof.
“Hey!” says Bill Stark, on the other side. “That’s wrong. Make him set down! It spells with a ‘K’!”
“He spelt it jest like it is in the book,” I says. “Look for yoreself.”
“I don’t give a damn!” he yelled, rudely knocking The French Countess outa my hand. “It’s a misprint! It spells with a ‘K’ or they�
�ll be more blood on the floor! He spelt it wrong and if he don’t set down I shoots him down!”
“I’m runnin’ this show!” I bellered, beginning to get mad. “You got to shoot me before you shoots anybody else!”
“With pleasure!” snarled he, and went for his gun... Well, I hit him on the jaw with my fist and he went to sleep amongst a wreckage of busted benches. Gooseneck jumped up with a maddened shriek.
“Dang yore soul, Breckinridge!” he squalled. “Quit cancelin’ my votes! Who air you workin’ for — me or Hawkins?”
“Haw! haw! haw!” bellered Hawkins. “Go on with the show! This is the funniest thing I ever seen!”
Wham! The door crashed open and in pranced Old Jake Hanson, waving a shotgun.
“Welcome to the festivities, Jake,” I greeted him, “Where’s—”
“You son of a skunk!” quoth he, and let go at me with both barrels. The shot scattered remarkable. I didn’t get more’n five or six of ’em and the rest distributed freely amongst the crowd. You ought to of heard ’em holler — the folks, I mean, not the buckshot.
“What in tarnation air you doin’?” shrieked Gooseneck. “Where’s Snake River?”
“Gone!” howled Old Jake. “Run off! Eloped with my datter!”
Bull Hawkins riz with a howl of anguish, convulsively clutching his whiskers.
“Salomey?” he bellered. “Eloped?”
“With a cussed gambolier they brung over from Alderville!” bleated Old Jake, doing a war-dance in his passion. “Elkins and Wilkerson persuaded me to take that snake into my boozum! In spite of my pleas and protests they forced him into my peaceful $# %* household, and he stole the pore, mutton-headed innercent’s blasted heart with his cultured airs and his slick talk! They’ve run off to git married!”
“It’s a political plot!” shrieked Hawkins, going for his gun, “Wilkerson done it a-purpose!”
I shot the gun out of his hand, but Jack Clanton crashed a bench down on Gooseneck’s head and Gooseneck kissed the floor. Clanton come down on top of him, out cold, as Mule McGrath swung with a pistol butt, and the next instant somebody lammed Mule with a brick bat and he flopped down acrost Clanton. And then the fight was on. Them rival political factions jest kind of riz up and rolled together in a wave of profanity, gun-smoke and splintering benches.
I have always noticed that the best thing to do in sech cases is to keep yore temper, and that’s what I did for some time, in spite of the efforts of nine or ten wild-eyed Hawkinites. I didn’t even shoot one of ‘em; I kept my head and battered their skulls with a joist I tore outa the floor, and when I knocked ’em down I didn’t stomp ’em hardly any. But they kept coming, and Jack McDonald was obsessed with the notion that he could ride me to the floor by jumping up astraddle of my neck. So he done it, and having discovered his idee was a hallucination, he got a fistful of my hair with his left, and started beating me in the head with his pistol-barrel.
It was very annoying. Simultaneous, several other misfits got hold of my laigs, trying to rassle me down, and some son of Baliol stomped severely on my toe. I had bore my afflictions as patient as Job up to that time, but this perfidy maddened me.
I give a roar which loosened the shingles on the roof, and kicked the toe- stomper in the belly with sech fury that he curled up on the floor with a holler groan and taken no more interest in the proceedings. I likewise busted my timber on somebody’s skull, and reched up and pulled Jack McDonald off my neck like pulling a tick off a bull’s hide, and hev him through a convenient winder. He’s a liar when he says I aimed him deliberate at that rain barrel. I didn’t even know they was a rain barrel till I heard his head crash through the staves. I then shaken nine or ten idjits loose from my shoulders and shook the blood outa my eyes and preceived that Gooseneck’s men was getting the worst of it, particularly including Gooseneck hisself. So I give another roar and prepared to wade through them fool Hawkinites like a b’ar through a pack of hound-dogs, when I discovered that some perfidious side-winder had got my spur tangled in his whiskers.
I stooped to ontangle myself, jest as a charge of buckshot ripped through the air where my head had been a instant before. Three or four critters was rushing me with bowie knives, so I give a wrench and tore loose by main force. How could I help it if most of the whiskers come loose too? I grabbed me a bench to use for a club, and I mowed the whole first rank down with one swipe, and then as I drawed back for another lick, I heard somebody yelling above the melee.
“Gold!” he shrieked.
Everybody stopped like they was froze in their tracks. Even Bull Hawkins shook the blood outa his eyes and glared up from where he was kneeling on Gooseneck’s wishbone with one hand in Gooseneck’s hair and a bowie in the other’n. Everybody quit fighting everybody else, and looked at the door — and there was Soapy Jackson, a-reeling and a-weaving with a empty bottle in one hand, and hollering.
“Big gold strike in Wild Hoss Gulch,” he blats. “Biggest the West ever seen! Nuggets the size of osteridge aigs — gulp!”
He disappeared in a wave of frenzied humanity as Yeller Dog’s population abandoned the fray and headed for the wide open spaces. Even Hawkins ceased his efforts to sculp Gooseneck alive and j’ined the stampede. They tore the whole front out of the city hall in their flight, and even them which had been knocked stiff come to at the howl of “Gold!” and staggered wildly after the mob, shrieking pitifully for their picks, shovels and jackasses. When the dust had settled and the thunder of boot-heels had faded in the distance, the only human left in the city hall was me and Gooseneck, and Soapy Jackson, which riz unsteadily with the prints of hob-nails all over his homely face. They shore trompled him free and generous in their rush.
Gooseneck staggered up, glared wildly about him, and went into convulsions. At first he couldn’t talk at all; he jest frothed at the mouth. When he found speech his langwidge was shocking.
“What you spring it this time of night for?” he howled. “Breckinridge, I said tell him to bring the news in the mornin’, not tonight!”
“I did tell him that,” I says.
“Oh, so that was what I couldn’t remember!” says Soapy. “That lick McDonald gimme so plumb addled my brains I knowed they was somethin’ I forgot, but couldn’t remember what it was.”
“Oh sole mio!” gibbered Gooseneck, or words to that effeck.
“Well, what you kickin’ about?” I demanded peevishly, having jest discovered that somebody had stabbed me in the hind laig during the melee. My boot was full of blood, and they was brand-new boots. “It worked, didn’t it?” I says. “They’re all headin’ for Wild Hoss Gulch, includin’ Hawkins hisself, and they cain’t possibly git back afore day after tomorrer.”
“Yeah!” raved Gooseneck. “They’re all gone, includin’ my gang! The damn camp’s empty! How can I git elected with nobody here to hold the election, and nobody to vote?”
“Oh,” I says. “That’s right. I hadn’t thunk of that.”
He fixed me with a awful eye.
“Did you,” says he in a blood-curdling voice, “did you tell my voters Soapy was goin’ to enact a political strategy?”
“By golly!” I said. “You know it plumb slipped my mind! Ain’t that a joke on me?”
“Git out of my life!” says Gooseneck, drawing his gun.
That was a genteel way for him to ack, trying to shoot me after all I’d did for him! I taken his gun away from him as gentle as I knowed how and it was his own fault he got his arm broke. But to hear him rave you would of thought he considered I was to blame for his misfortunes or something. I was so derned disgusted I clumb onto Cap’n Kidd and shaken the dust of that there camp offa my boots, because I seen they was no gratitude in Yeller Dog.
I likewise seen I wasn’t cut out for the skullduggery of politics. I had me a notion one time that I’d make a hiyu sheriff but I learnt my lesson. It’s like my Pap says, I reckon.
“All the law a man needs,” says he, “is a gun tucked into his pants. And the mai
n l’arnin’ he needs is to know which end of that gun the bullet comes out of.”
What’s good enough for Pap, gents, is good enough for me.
* * *
EVIL DEEDS AT RED COUGAR
First published in Action Stories, June 1936
I BEEN accused of prejudice agen the town of Red Cougar, on account of my habit of avoiding it if I have to ride fifty miles outen my way to keep from going through there. I denies the slander. It ain’t no more prejudiced for me to ride around Red Cougar than it is for a lobo to keep his paw out of a jump- trap. My experiences in that there lair of iniquity is painful to recall. I was a stranger and took in. I was a sheep for the fleecing, and if some of the fleecers got their fingers catched in the shears, it was their own fault. If I shuns Red Cougar like a plague, that makes it mutual, because the inhabitants of Red Cougar shuns me with equal enthusiasm, even to the p’int of deserting their wagons and taking to the bresh if they happen to meet me on the road.
I warn’t intending to go there in the first place. I been punching cows over in Utah and was heading for Bear Creek, with the fifty bucks a draw poker game had left me outa my wages. When I seen a trail branching offa the main road I knowed it turnt off to Red Cougar, but it didn’t make no impression on me.
But I hadn’t gone far past it when I heard a hoss running, and the next thing it busted around a bend in the road with foam flying from the bit rings. They was a gal on it, looking back over her shoulder down the road. Jest as she rounded the turn her hoss stumbled and went to its knees, throwing her over its head.
I was offa Cap’n Kidd in a instant and catched her hoss before it could run off. I helped her up, and she grabbed holt of me and hollered: “Don’t let ’em get me!”
“Who?” I said, taking off my hat with one hand and drawing a .45 with the other’n.
“A gang of desperadoes!” she panted. “They’ve chased me for five miles! Oh, please don’t let ’em get me!”
“They’ll tech you only over my dead carcass,” I assured her.
Delphi Works of Robert E. Howard (Illustrated) (Series Four) Page 229