“Oh, a bold, bad man was Chuckwalla
Bill—
An’ he lived in a shanty on Tom-cat
Hill;
Ten notches on the six-gun he toted on
his hip—
For he’d sent ten buckos on the
One-way Trip!”
Big Butch Brewster, captain and full-back of the Bannister
College football squad, his behemoth bulk swathed
in heavy blankets and crowded into a narrow bunk,
shifted his vast tonnage restlessly. He was dreaming
of the wild and woolly West, and like a six-reel Western
drama thrown on the screen in a moving-picture show,
he visioned in his slumbers a vivid and spectacular
panorama.
The first lurid scene was the Deserted Limited held
up at a tank station in the great Mojave Desert by
a lone, masked bandit who winged the dreaming Butch
in the shoulder, the latter being an express guard
who resisted. After the desperado, Two-Gun Steve,
had forced the engineer to run the train back to a
siding, he had ordered Butch to vamoose. Quite
naturally, then, the collegian next found himself
staggering across the arid expanse, until at last,
half dead from a burning thirst, seeking vainly for
a water-hole, the vast stretch of sandy, sagebrush-studded
wastes shimmered into a gorgeous ocean of sparkling
blue waters. Then, as he collapsed on the scorching-hot
sand, helpless, the cool water so near, suddenly the
scene shifted.
In quick and vivid succession, Butch Brewster beheld
a burning stockade besieged by howling Indians, and
a frontier town shot up by recklessly riding cowboys
on a jamboree. Then he became a tenderfoot, badgered
by yelling, shooting roisterers, and later a sheriff,
bravely leading his posse to a sensational battle
with that same Two-Gun Steve and his gang, entrenched
in a rock-bound mountain defile.
Finally, he stood with hands above his head in company
with other passengers of the Sagebrush Stagecoach,
while a huge, red-shirted Westerner with a fierce
black mustache and a six-shooter in each hand belching
bullets at Butch’s dancing feet, roared out huskily:
“Oh—I’m a ring-tailed roarer
(bang-bang)! I’m a rip-snortin’,
high-falutin’, loop-the-loopin’ bad
man (bang-bang)! I’m wild an’
woolly, an’ full o’ fleas, an’ hard
to curry below the knees—I’m a roarin’
wild-cat, an’ it’s my night to howl (bang-bang)!
Yip-yip-yip-yeee!”
Big Butch, opening his eyes and starting up, gazed
about him in sheer surprise; for an instant, in that
state of bewilderment that comes with sudden awakening,
he almost believed himself in a Western ranch bunkhouse,
and that some happy cowboy outside roared a grotesque
ballad. He gazed at the interior of a rough shack
built of pine boards, with bunks constructed in tiers
on both sides. There were figures in them—Western
cowboys, perhaps. Then it seemed, somehow, that
the voice drifting from the outside was strangely
familiar. Back at Bannister College, where he
remembered he had gone in the dim and dusty past,
he had often heard that same fog-horn voice, roaring
songs of a less blood-curdling character, and accompanied
by that same banjo twanging, which tortured the campus,
and bothered would-be studious youths!
