Pecos Bill

by James Cloyd Bowman

  By straining their eyes to the limit, Pecos Bill and what remained of the Devil’s Cavalry could just make out the gaunt figure of Old Satan, still astride the saddle, seated on the very tip-top of the rocky summit of Pike’s Peak.

  “He looks about as comfortable as a dilapidated tin rooster weathervane,” Sandy Biddle commented between fits of laughter.

  “Anybody that can throw a leg across Pike’s Peak is some rider! He’s captured an everlastin’ world’s record, I’m tellin’ you!” laughed Ace High Ricker.

  “The name of that buckaroo ain’t Pegasus,” shouted Nevada Bunk. “Call him Widow Maker.”

  “Right you are,” chimed in Ace High. “Leapin’ Lulu wouldn’t be half good enough for this critter. Pecos, you’ve got to name him Widow Maker!”

  “Widow Maker is right,” added Shady. “We’ll all call him that name from now on!”

  “Well, I won’t be contrary about it,” agreed Pecos Bill. Then, turning to his horse, he talked a while to him in horse language that none of the men understood. After a few minutes the horse seemed to understand and whinnied sweetly. “Yes, now that the horse understands me, I christen him Widow Maker!”

  Now that this weighty matter was off their minds, the watchers began to think of a way out of this new dilemma. “The question before the house is,” began Shady seriously, “how in thunder is Old Satan to be got out of the middle of this bad fix?”

  “You mean, got down, idiot!” shouted Ace High. “Don’t you know Pike’s Peak is twenty thousand feet high, if it’s an inch?”

  “Better talk of pullin’ down the moon or the Pleiades or the Big Dipper,” contributed Nevada. “Old Satan is set for good up there kissin’ the stars and duckin’ his head once every day to let the moon go by. I’m tellin’ you, he’s right there to stay!”

  “If you’ll only wait a minute, I’ll see what can be done about it,” Pecos Bill commented as he fingered his lariat.

  Walking over near where Widow Maker was still standing, Pecos lifted his lariat from his shoulder and began fondling its many coils as if he actually loved them. Then, tying a short calf loop, he waved the lariat frantically about his head. With a twist of his wrist and forearm, he sent it flying through the air so fast that no one could possibly see where it was going. After a few minutes, when Pecos Bill felt that the loop had caught over something, he gave a mighty jerk. It was then that the befuddled Old Satan began to fly back to earth, even more rapidly than he had left it a short while before.

  When Old Satan finally landed on a pile of granite rock near Pecos’s feet, there was a terrific crash. The Devil’s Cavalrymen sadly picked up all they found of their senior officer.

  At first they feared Old Satan had been killed. But as they listened they could just make out the sound of his heart. Even so, he seemed more like scrambled eggs than anything else, inside his baggy clothes. They picked him up tenderly and placed him on his cot within the ranch house.

  They felt carefully of every part of his body, but there didn’t seem much that they could do. There were no pieces of his bones long enough to try to set.

  After lying there unconscious for three weeks, one day Old Satan simply sat up in bed, opened his eyes, and asked where he was. When Pecos Bill told him what had happened, he smiled sadly.

  “That’s funny,” Old Satan said faintly. “At first I thought I was sittin’ pretty and ridin’ the most wonderful horse in all creation. Then the earth flew out from under me, and after a thousand years I tell you I just set down gently right where the pearly gates was swingin’ ajar. I was just gettin’ ready for my harp when I felt another yank, and bless me if I wasn’t goin’ straight down to hell! I guess there wasn’t much I’d ever did I wasn’t mighty sorry for on that trip. But what happened next’s clean out of my mind. All I know is, my ears exploded and my senses went clear to glory.”

  At the end of six weeks Old Satan had grown an entirely new skeleton and was able to walk about and even brag about his accident. After another fortnight, he was just as well as ever—a little better, if anything.

  When Pecos Bill saw how really tough these Devil’s Cavalrymen were it came to him like a flash of greased lightning that these were the very cowmen for him to use in starting his proposed ranch.

  But these Cavalrymen are so used to tall talk, Pecos thought to himself, that I’m afraid what I have to say to them will seem pretty tame and flat. It won’t be a bed of roses convincing these dreamers that they’ll be better off with me. But here goes.

  The next day, while they were all squatting in a circle, each bragging how much tougher he was than Old Satan, Pecos began: “Gentlemen of the Long Bow, I’m about to leave you. This Hell’s Gate Gulch is, in many ways, a pleasant place to live, I’ll agree. But it doesn’t offer a man any room at all for a life of burning excitement. The trouble is, there isn’t a chance here for real action; we haven’t got the room to do anything of any real bigness. When we want a thrill, we’ve got to go all the way to Dallas or else ride across the mesa until we find some lone outrider with a herd of unprotected cattle. What’s that, when you come right down to it? Besides, what is there to do here in this Gulch except to squat on our toes and tell tall tales?”

  “Pecos, you better remember who you’re talkin’ to,” commented Old Satan, and he wasn’t any too polite, the way he said it either.

  “Please don’t get me wrong,” Pecos continued. “What I’m trying to say is simply this: Personally, Widow Maker and I have got to get straight away from here and out where there’s at least room to take a full breath. That horse and I weren’t meant to be cooped up in any place that’s as small and confining as Hell’s Gulch. We’re rapid travelers, once we get going. What we want—and what we’re going to get—is some of that good prairie land and a hundred or so nice, fertile river valleys that’s lying around going to waste because nobody has the nerve. What’s the matter with you men? Can’t you remember when these plains were jam-packed with buffalo and antelope?”

  “Yes, we do recollect the good old days,” mumbled Old Satan. “But what’s that got to do with it? I can’t see what difference that would make.”

  “What I’m about to suggest,” added Pecos, smoothly, “is that it’s high time for us to begin to replace the millions of buffalo with just as many steers or maybe more. Those Yankees back in New England are just yelling for our western beef. England’ll take all she can get. The other states of Europe are getting thin waiting for it. Who’s going to raise the beef for ’em? We are! What I’ve got in mind is for us to go into the cattle business on such a big scale nobody ever saw anything like it before.”

  “Oh,” scoffed Ace High, “you may have caught Widow Maker, Pecos. But that’s not sendin’ beef to England by a darn sight.”

  “When we get this proposed ranch rightly started,” continued Pecos with growing spirit, “this pigmy valley of yours won’t offer sufficient room to shelter the calves that will be born in our herd on a single May morning before breakfast! Why, we’ll simply stake off New Mexico for our calf pasture. The valley of the Rio Grande won’t be hardly large enough for one of our smallest herds. We’ll crowd the Arkansas valley with another herd. The Missouri valley we’ll fill as full of cattle as a prairie dog colony’s full of houses. Why, I tell you, Canada from coast to coast won’t have enough space for the summer overflow from our herds!

  “England? Did you say England? Sure, we’ll feed her, and we’ll feed Germany, France, and Italy. We’ll get Japan and China so het up about beef, they’ll turn up their noses at rice.”

  “Say, Pecos, how about the moon and the Milky Way?” inquired Old Satan, as he twisted his mustache.

  “All the ranches that are now running,” continued Pecos Bill, without winking an eyelash, “are small fry compared to what we’re going to have. Who says a cowman’s rich if he has a thousand steers? We’ll have millions, yes, trillions of ’em, if we ever stop to count, which we won’t—we’ll be too busy.”

  “You’re
some talker, Pecos,” commented Old Satan with sympathy. “And you know I like nothin’ better’n tall talk. But what’s botherin’ me is how in thunderation you’re ever goin’ to carry out any such wonders.”

  “Well, listen and I’ll tell you. You, Old Satan, you, Shady, you, Ace High, you, Nevada—all of you Devil’s Cavalrymen are going to cut loose and help me. Of course, I wouldn’t think of tackling the job alone. I’ve got to have a good string of cayuses to give me a hand.

  “Now listen. What you men need to bring out the real hero that’s in you is the chance to help do a real piece of honest-to-goodness hard work. You need the chance to cut loose. The trouble here is that all you can do is to talk big.

  “Come with me, my merry cayuses, and each and every one of you will soon be famous. Your names’ll be told and your fame sung wherever the taste of beef is sweet upon the tongue. In other words, there won’t be a country the sun shines on that won’t be talking about you and me too.

  “Old Satan, you are going to be the foreman of one of my ranches. The rest of you men’ll go to work with him. You’re going to swing the long rope and ride the flying bronco.

  “We’ll make Hell’s Gate Gulch into a breeding place for our horses. With Widow Maker the sire for our herd, we’ll soon have a breed of broncos that’ll lick the world.

  “All you’ve got to do to put bedrock under this dream is say yes. As soon as you make up your minds to come in with me, the world is ours to walk in anywhere!”

  “I’ll tell you, Pecos Bill, you and your Widow Maker are as pretty a pair of aces as ever I see,” Old Satan smiled dryly. “If there’s a chance of me bein’ your right bower, I’m right there!”

  “Count me in.”

  “Me too.”

  “And me.”

  There wasn’t one that held back. The ayes had it.

  “That’s the stuff,” grinned Pecos. “You stay right here, limbering yourselves up on the lasso, and I’ll be back as quick as I can from a visit I’ve got to pay to another string of cayuses I have in mind.”

  CHAPTER 11

  EYEGLASS DUDE ENGLISHMEN

  When Pecos Bill left Hell’s Gate Gulch to make a visit to Pinnacle Mountain Ranch—which was what he had in mind next—he found that plenty had been going on in his old crowd.

  Gun Smith, Rusty Peters, Moon Hennessey, Mushmouth, Bean Hole, and all the others were squatting on their toes, whittling, shooting at targets with tobacco juice, and laying bets to see who could tell the biggest yarn.

  “It’s funny,” Pecos Bill said to himself as he came up and saw how things were. “Here’s the same old crimp in the rope. Things going along just too soft. So they have to tell tall tales about how good they are.”

  “Well, how are things going since I’ve been away?” he said aloud as he came up quietly behind the men.

  “Goin’,” laughed Gun Smith, “they’re gone!”

  “What do you mean?” asked Pecos Bill, looking puzzled.

  “Well, we’ve just sold out everything, and a lot more. When you hear how we cleaned up on a couple of these eyeglass dude Englishmen you’ll agree the Devil hasn’t anybody slicker’n we are,” answered Gun Smith as he lifted his chest high.

  “Do tell! Say, you talk just like the Devil’s Cavalrymen I’ve been visiting down at Hell’s Gate Gulch. It seems as if idleness locoes everybody alike.”

  “Well, if you’ll agree not to stop me with any more of your burnin’ remarks,” growled Gun Smith, “I’ll tell you what happened.”

  “Agreed,” answered Pecos Bill as he too squatted on his toes and made one of the silent circle.

  “Well, when you first left us, Pecos, we was to blame, I suppose. There was so little work to do that we didn’t even attend to what there was.

  “Things went along like a tune of the heavenly choir for a long while—for six or eight months, I should say. The corral fence was new and as solid as the rock of Gibraltar, and the cattle was too afraid to go up the side of Pinnacle Mountain, or off of it.

  “Once in a while, when we was all fed up with settin’ around without any more eggs to hatch, we’d maybe ride out daily to see that nothin’ had gone wrong.

  “But everything was always so perfectly fine that after a while it was just a waste of time, to our way of thinkin’, to ride around the twelve miles of fence once a month.”

  “But don’t forget,” broke in Chuck, “that all this happened while the fence was so tight a prairie dog wouldn’t have been able to find his way through it.”

  “As I was sayin’,” continued Gun Smith, “after a while the old steers got all the grass cropped around the foot of the mountain next the corral. So they just naturally had to crawl higher and higher up Old Pinnacle. We was, by this time, pattin’ ourselves so hard on the back that it began to be much worse’n sunburn. With nothin’ but just bare stubble between the steers and the fence, we all argued that there wasn’t a thing could possibly go wrong. The further they got away from the neighborhood of the fence, the less need there was for us to keep our eye on them. You get the idea, Pecos.

  “Well, about this time things begun to get dull, and so we naturally fell to arguin’. We tried to make out which method of picketin’ a bronco’s the best. Chuck and me held that it’s best to hobble the critter’s front legs, but Moon Hennessey and his friends held just as strong that the best way’s to use the picket rope around the critter’s neck.

  “Well, day after day, we had it hot and heavy. Moon Hennessey put in his time tryin’ to prove that a bronco with his front legs hobbled would jump along with his front feet and walk with his hind feet, and it wasn’t anythin’ for him to get over at least a dozen miles in a night.

  “Chuck and me all the while held fast to our first original point, that it was easier for a bronco to lift a picket stake and get away than it was for him to go hippity-skippity, helter-skelter for any distance.

  “After about a month of this talkin’ and arguin’, we was further apart than we’d been at the start. The only kind of agreement that was left us in the end, was to agree to disagree.”

  “You’ve developed the gift of gab while I’ve been away, Gun Smith,” Pecos commented.

  “But this wasn’t all,” Gun Smith continued. “We’d no sooner ended one argument than we got into the middle of another. Moon Hennessey and his crowd took the stand that a walleyed white bronco could out buck all the other critters in creation. Chuck and me then tried to prove that a pinto was the buckaroo that had the biggest bag of tricks.

  “Well, this argument lasted the biggest part of another month. And we come out right where we ended up the other time. I mean the only kind of agreement we could reach was to agree to disagree.

  “Of course by this time we was most of us feelin’ that the fellows opposed to us wasn’t usin’ any more reason than a stubborn mule. We didn’t have the nerve to say what we felt—bein’ all worked to such a high pitch of feelin’—or there would’ve been a free-for-all fight.

  “Well, we all got so excited about ourselves that we completely, entirely forgot our bovine charges on Pinnacle Mountain.

  “Then one day I begun to get teetotally fed up on battlin’ with Moon Hennessey and his string of cayuses. I begun to see that it’s easier to remove a mountain the size of Pinnacle than to change a man’s mind against his will. So in a day or two I got up from the circle and made up my mind I’d ride around the corral just as a matter of exercise and recreation. I needed a change in scenery all right.

  “Well, everything looked fine and dandy for the first four or five miles. I was whistlin’ a lively tune and feelin’ as saucy as a Blue Jay. Then I thought I saw something and the next minute I was sure that I did. A full mile and a half of that perfectly beautiful fence was completely broke down. The poles and the posts was ground in the dust. It was as flat out as if a cyclone had passed that way!

  “Then I looked up the mountainside and couldn’t believe my eyes. What I saw was the dents of steers’ horns, thousands o
f ’em, and a hundred or more broken horns themselves scattered everywhere. Next I looked down the valley, and a couple of miles away I saw a swarm of vultures that nearly pulled my eyes out—as many as five or ten thousand, it seemed. I’d have bet my best lariat I had a whiff of somethin’ that didn’t smell exactly like wild flowers.

  “I couldn’t make it out at all. So I got down off my bronco and walked up the side of the mountain to make a careful examination. I could still see the dents the steers had made in the mountain. And when I got up higher I could see where the stampede’d started. It was like the mowers leavin’ off their last swath right at that exact spot. Down below, the mountain was as bare as my hand; up above it was covered with rank bunchgrass not eaten, tramped down or anythin’.

  “But I wasn’t satisfied yet so I climbed higher and looked everywhere. Then I got on to what had happened, all right. A bald eagle had swooped down to pick up a jackrabbit. Mr. Rabbit had seen him comin’ and was too smart on his feet to be caught sittin’ still. I could see distinctly where the tussle had been carried on. Here the eagle had clawed up a clump of bunchgrass, here he had swooped down in the dust, and here a short distance away, lay a neat pile of bones.

  “When the eagle had at last caught him, Mr. Rabbit had let out such a squeal of fright that the old roan steer nearest him was scared into a sudden panic and started at breakneck speed. He hadn’t taken more than three jumps when he lost his balance and started to roll head over heels down the mountain, and of course his horns tore up the turf every time they struck. This naturally started a stampede among the other fool steers, and in less than a minute the entire side of the mountain wasn’t anythin’ but flyin’ horns and tails.

  “Say, I’d have given a million dollars to have seen them thousand steers tumblin’, their crazy tails flappin’ like lariats, and their horns glistenin’ every which way. I can’t think of a single sight I’d rather have seen than just that!