Pecos Bill

by James Cloyd Bowman

  This was positively the first exhibition on this planet of real bucking. Before this time, no bronco had ever discovered in public that it was possible for it to cut up such outlandish capers. This particular bronco made the discovery through being scared almost out of its wits by Pecos Bill’s unearthly yowl. When it began to buck, it went through all the antics of skyscraping, cake walking, straight bucking, corkscrewing, circling, pivoting, sunfishing, high sailing, and high diving. Everything that a bronco does to this day, that bronco did.

  “The Devil’s sure got into that calico horse,” Old Baldy, a prosperous rancher, shouted as he jumped to his feet and waved his arms.

  “Go to it, you calico horse! Wouldn’t I like to be in that rocking chair! Say, I’d give my wages for the next ten years for the chance to ride like that!” Each and every man was shouting at the top of his lungs, so that he could scarcely hear what the next man to him was saying.

  To cap the climax, the bronco very unexpectedly sailed high, and Pecos Bill flew from his back like a toy soldier and landed at what seemed almost a mile away. But he came down running, grabbed up his lariat and galloped back beside the defiant pony. With another perfectly timed air flop, Pecos Bill once more mounted his steed.

  Again the bronco began cake walking and high sailing, but Pecos was more careful this time. He dug his toes into the animal’s sides and began coolly to do some fancy ropework with his lariat.

  He started the large loop rotating into what to this day is called spinning the wedding ring. The wide loop slowly rose and fell over the head of the rider, then around the astonished bronco. The magical noose moved exactly as though it knew what it was going to do the next second.

  When that bronco next started to sail high, the noose revolved swiftly on its spinning axis and the confused horse jumped suddenly through it, like a circus dog through a hoop.

  A second later, Pecos Bill leapt lightly down from the winded bronco and ran to fetch a bag full of small objects. When the animal saw him returning this second time, it kicked up its heels and snorted in anger. Pecos simply turned another airy flip-flop and landed astride, as pretty as a picture.

  Gun Smith now rode his own bronco alongside of Pecos Bill. Pecos threw all sorts of things into the air: hen’s eggs, quarter dollars, and small bits of glass. With unerring accuracy, Gun Smith shot the yolks out of the eggs and pierced the quarter dollars through the center. Finally, Gun Smith fired his gun and Pecos fired his with such accuracy that he split Gun Smith’s bullet in full flight.

  “Who-ee!” shouted Old Baldy from the sideline. “Git along, little dogie, and see this World’s Wonder, Pecos Bill. He’s no Coyote!”

  “You can sort of see the clawed toes of the Coyotes, though!” replied the excited Big Bull with dry humor.

  “Well, whoever he is, he’s makin’ the rest of us look like yearling mavericks!” continued Old Baldy.

  Without warning, Gun Smith now drove a wild four-year-old Texas roan steer into the enclosure. Pecos borrowed Chuck’s Old Pepper and rode alongside the snorting critter. And then Pecos performed—for the very first time in history—bulldogging.

  He leapt from the back of the galloping bronco and, while he was still flying through the air, grabbed the fleeing steer by the horns. By immediately forcing his weight on one horn, he overbalanced the astonished beast and threw it heavily on its side. Before the felled animal had time to collect its senses, Pecos quickly grabbed it by one horn and by the tail and held it helpless on its side.

  “Well, upon my life, I never thought I’d live to see anythin’ like that. He’s crazy!” gasped Old Baldy.

  “Well, I’ll be—” was heard on all sides.

  Pecos had no sooner finished with the steer than Gun Smith drove in a fresh bellowing brindle, mottled with white over the red. Pecos again leapt lightly into the saddle, and this time lassoed the galloping steer. With a quick tightening of the rope, he threw the lumbering beast.

  Then he pulled the bronco up sharply on its haunches, anchored the taut rope with two half-turns across the saddle horn, and springing from his steed, leapt across to the struggling steer and tied its four feet together with rawhide. Everybody today knows what that was—hog-tieing. But this was positively the first time it was ever done.

  “Go to it!” shouted Old Baldy as he clapped his hands vigorously. “Pecos Bill, you’re the World’s Wonder.”

  When Pecos and Gun Smith had finished their part of the entertainment, Rusty Rogers did a turn to show his strength. He asked Pretty Pete Rogers to rope and hog-tie the largest yearling maverick he could find. Rusty took this calf first in one hand and then in the other, and lifted it arm-high above his head. The men applauded wildly, and Old Baldy shouted, “I’ll be flea-bitten. If it don’t weigh a thousand pounds, it don’t weigh a thing!”

  “Looks like we got another Hercules in our cow camp,” roared Big Bull.

  Next Fat Adams gave the cowmen a sample of his ability to run away from his own shadow. He stepped forward to Old Baldy, held out his hand and said, “How do ye do?”

  While Old Baldy was lifting his hand in greeting, Fat turned sidewise and vanished into thin air. When Old Baldy saw him next, he was standing ten feet away with his hand still extended.

  “You must be seein’ double,” shouted Fat Adams. “I’m here, and not where you’re reachin’ out your paw.”

  “Old Baldy’s been nibblin’ too much moonshine again. He’s seein’ double,” shouted the crowd, as they gave him the horse laugh.

  “I’ll be flea-bitten…!” coughed Old Baldy.

  The men had heard so much about Bean Hole’s gyrating pancakes that they now called for him to show them his little trick. Bean Hole laid the batter in his frying pan for three cakes. When they were just right, he flipped the pan, and the cakes flew ten feet in the air, turned over, and returned to their places as pretty as you please. This the men thought very good.

  Bean Hole flipped his next three cakes thirty feet into the air. When they returned to his frying pan this time, there were but two cakes instead of three.

  “The big bad wolf has ate Little Red Riding Hood,” Bean Hole informed them.

  The men were now sure that Bean Hole was a magician, second only to Pecos Bill.

  The third time, Bean Hole poured his batter into the middle of his pan and made one giant cake. He gave the pan a quick flip, and the cake flew fifty feet into the air before it turned over. He caught it in the very center of his frying pan without blinking an eyelash. When the cake was baked to a crisp brown on both sides, Bean Hole gave the frying pan an enormous flip.

  The men saw the great pancake fly into the air like a whirling dervish. They watched it fly fifty feet, a hundred feet, a thousand feet, until it finally disappeared in the heavens. While they were still holding their breath in wonderment, Bean Hole quietly remarked, “That one I’m donatin’ to the Man in the Moon.”

  “Bless my bunions,” Old Baldy cackled. “That pancake’ll go right on gyratin’ like one of the planets until we have a regular downpour of molasses rain.”

  The men cheered and cheered. Bean Hole’s fame was secure.

  “The show will not be complete,” called Pecos, “without music. Mushmouth, show the boys what you can do on the lip piano. And you, Bullfrog Doyle, come in with your foot play. Strike up the dance!”

  Mushmouth was so happy that he pressed a different mouth organ against either side of his jaw and played two tunes at the same time. And Bullfrog Doyle, not to be beaten, danced each of Mushmouth’s tunes with a different foot. The men cheered and shouted and called them back again and again.

  When Pecos Bill’s program was at an end, the crowd pushed around him in excited delight. “Nobody but you could’ve thought it up,” they declared.

  But Pecos was modest. “We have joined to give you this little entertainment,” Pecos smiled, “simply to introduce a little fun into our annual roundup. Every roundup should have a show—a Wild West show.”

  Bean Hole
and his gyrating pancakes

  “You’re right as usual,” came the reply from a hundred different throats.

  “This will be a good plan to follow,” continued Pecos. “After each fall roundup we can give a first, a second, and a third prize for the best horsemanship. We can also give the same number of prizes for the best fancy ropework and the most skillful gun play, for the cleanest bulldogging, and also for the quickest job of hog-tieing.

  “These various contests will furnish us a great deal of fun. Very soon it will come to be considered a high mark of honor to win any one of these prizes. To hear yourself declared the best man of the range country in one of these events will be a mark of distinction worthy of the hardest work.”

  “You’re right again, as usual! But why did you wait so doggone long to show us what we should have known all along? Nine rousin’ cheers for Pecos Bill!” came the hearty chorus from all the men.

  Pecos could not help knowing that his actions and words had struck the hearts of his followers. The men had become boys again. Their blood was up.

  Within a month the price of rawhide had doubled, and orders for cartridges had to wait several weeks before they could be filled. Moreover, every wild bronco on the range suddenly caught the bucking fever and in no time at all an order for a million saddle girths of extra width and strength was sent to New York. When the supply in America was exhausted, an extra order of another million was cabled to London. Before time for the next fall roundup cowmen everywhere on the plains were using two girths to each saddle instead of one. Yes, and new factories for lip pianos and fancy cowhide boots and saddles were being built all the way from the Mississippi to the Atlantic.

  Pecos Bill had awakened the spirit of play which had lain dormant on the range and this now came to life in good earnest. All across the wide prairie, the cowpunchers were playing and singing and dancing and making preparations for carrying away one or more of the annual prizes.

  Thus was started the regular yearly competitions that will continue as long as there are wild, bucking broncos to be conquered, and as long as there are long-horned Texas steers to be laid low. And each succeeding year goes on adding its names to the lengthening rolls of honor.

  Well, after all that had transpired, Pecos Bill couldn’t be blamed for going back to the I. X. L. Ranch from this particular roundup with a song in his heart. He had come up to the ranch house with his brother Chuck on that first notable day, expecting to find all inhumans poor creatures at best. Now he knew that the best there is in man is the very best there is anywhere. Not even his beloved Coyotes could equal this. Where muscle and nerve and honor and courage are caught in the saddle, there also rides humanly joy.

  The Perpetual Motion Ranch

  CHAPTER 7

  PECOS BILL INVENTS THE PERPETUAL MOTION RANCH

  There was just one kink Pecos Bill never could get out of his rope. On his home ranch he was silently opposed by Moon Hennessey, who went about scattering poison among the minds of the cowmen.

  “Before this here self-appointed dictator come to the I. X. L. Ranch,” Moon would say, “each of us was his own boss. We knew what real, honest-to-goodness freedom was. Now we’re forever dragged about in the noose and kicked about by the spurs of this upstart son of a Coyote! There is never a minute’s time to rest. Huh! We’re slaves, that’s what we are, cowardly slaves!’’

  When the noise of this barking first came to the ears of Pecos Bill, he said nothing, but he did do a lot of thinking.

  “I’ve simply got to invent a ranch that will run itself. A ranch where every job will be a snap—so easy that even Moon Hennessey will say that it’s child’s play!”

  The solution didn’t occur to him at once. Pecos Bill’s invention of a ranch that would run itself by perpetual motion evolved slowly in his subconscious mind.

  But it arrived at last and in this way. One day Tim Toothacre, the boss of the Palo Pinto outfit, happened to mention a peculiar mountain he knew about. It was, in fact, the Pinnacle Peak that Paul Bunyan and his much-advertised lumberjacks had logged a dozen years earlier.

  “It’s what you might call a perfect mountain,” Tim began. “It’s as round as a silver dollar at the base, and it rises ten or a dozen thousand feet above the clouds, to a point so sharp an eagle couldn’t hardly keep his balance on it. Its sides—now that the timber has been taken off—is covered with the finest bunchgrass anywhere around. And it’s so round it has a sample of every kind of weather there is. At its foot, on the sunny side it’s summer all the time. Higher up it is always spring, and still higher it’s winter all the time.

  “I’ve often thought it wouldn’t be a bad idea to own Pinnacle Mountain, for then you could have whatever climate you wanted. If you wanted it hot you could build your place on the sunny side where the mountain and the plains come together. If you wanted it cold, why, all you would have to do would be to set yourself at the top.”

  “And where do you say this Pinnacle Mountain is to be found?” asked Pecos Bill as if he weren’t the least bit curious.

  “It’s called about a hundred and fifty miles from here, a trifle to the west of north as the crow flies,” Tim replied. “And I’ve heard tell there’s a lot of strange animals and birds there too. You see, the sides is so regular and round that all the wild critters has to go around in circles. After a while they either shrink down their leg or legs, as the case may be, on the side next the mountain. They say the rabbits there has two long and two short legs. They always run around the mountain the way the hands of a clock move. And there’s a bird, called the dodo, that has a long leg and a short one, a long wing and a short one. Yes, and they lay square eggs to keep ’em from rollin’ down into the valley before they can be hatched. You see, once anything gets started rollin’ down the mountain, it never stops till it’s a mile away on the prairie.”

  “This is all mighty interesting,” Pecos Bill said calmly.

  “Yes, and the prairie dogs has one forepaw shorter than the other, and their noses sets at an angle so that when they start diggin’, their holes’ll be perpendicular and there’ll be no danger of their rollin’ out of their beds while they’re asleep. And there’s a mountain goat that has its legs shortened on one side and the horn it carries next the mountain is overweighted so that when it starts runnin’ at full speed it’ll be drawn in a circle. Otherwise, it would get goin’ so fast that it’d fly off at a tangent. And the ears of the jackrabbits there is balanced just right. It’s some place, Pecos.”

  “I’ll have to take a run down that way when I find time some day and look the place over,” Pecos rejoined, scarcely able to conceal his excitement.

  Unfortunately, for a long time after this conversation, Pecos Bill was kept too busy to think of anything besides getting the ranchers of the Texas valleys to cooperate in work and in play. But when this was finished, he decided to visit Pinnacle Mountain. He tucked his boots under his arm, threw his rope over his shoulder, and was there in three hours and ten minutes.

  Pecos found Pinnacle Mountain even more perfect than Tim had described it. To make sure there was no mistake, Pecos loped around the base of the mountain two or three times searching for some slight imperfection, but search as he might he was disappointed, for everywhere it was as round as a silver dollar with all the milling around the edge worn off.

  This so pleased Pecos Bill that he tried to find some imperfection on the sides of the mountain. He started to wind his way round and round the mountain. Up and up he went, up and up. Everywhere there was bunchgrass. Everywhere there was smooth pastureland. Up and up he went till he struck the snow line. Beyond that he could see, between the clouds, the pointed peak glistening in the sunlight like the fixings on Mushmouth’s lip piano.

  “Well, this is the most wonderful mountain I’ve ever seen or even heard about,” Pecos said to himself. “If I hadn’t actually loped about all over it, I never would have believed that everything could be so perfect.”

  As he started down the mounta
in, he began searching for the strange animals and birds. By coming down in circles opposite to the way the animals traveled, he was able to catch them with no trouble at all. All he would have to do would be to scare up a jackrabbit. By running up the side of the mountain a few rods, he would then simply wait ten or fifteen minutes until it made its first round and pick it up as it passed.

  The jackrabbit, he found, was exactly as Tim had said. Its two inside legs were shorter than its two outside legs. The ear it carried next to the mountain was twenty times larger than its other ear. And it was the same with the dodo bird. He actually found one of these birds sitting on a nest of square eggs. A little farther down he came upon a nest that was just hatched. Sure enough, the young birds were all headed in the proper direction with their short leg next the mountain.

  But the funniest thing Pecos saw was a colony of crooked-snouted prairie dogs. They looked so comical and Pecos laughed so hard at them, at first he couldn’t do any thinking. But as he turned away to leave, something snapped inside his head. “Why didn’t I think of it before!” he shouted to himself excitedly. “This is just the place to start my perpetual motion ranch.”

  Pecos Bill lost no time galloping back to the I. X. L. boys. With his boots under his arm, he split the wind like a swallow. The men were at breakfast when he came rushing in, shouting, “I’ve got good news for you, boys. Get ready to move the herd at once. Our ranch here is entirely too hard to work. I’ve found a new location that will suit us all much better. As soon as we can get ourselves settled, the new ranch will run itself. There’ll be absolutely no saddle work during the day. There’ll be no sitting up and singing songs all night to keep the herd from stampeding. There’ll be no driving the herd to fresh pastures and to distant watering places, and no need of the spring and the fall roundup. There’ll not even be any need of branding the calves. In fact, there can never be a stray or a maverick. Really, it’s the one ideal location for a ranch in the whole world.”