Mountain Man by Robert E. Howard (the giving tree read aloud TXT) 📕

I throwed O’Tool and begun to stomp him, when somebody let bang at me from the crowd and the bullet cut my silk belt and my pants started to fall down.

I grabbed ‘em with both hands, and O’Tool riz and rushed at me, bloody and bellering, and I didn’t dare let go my pants to defend myself. So I whirled and bent over and lashed out backwards with my right heel like a mule, and I caught him under the chin. He done a cartwheel in the air, his head hit the turf, and he bounced on over and landed on his back with his knees hooked over the lower rope. There wasn’t no question about him being out. The only question was, was he dead?

A great roar of “Foul” went up from the Gunstock men, and guns bristled all around the ring.

The Tomahawk men was cheering and yelling that I had won fair and square, and the Gunstock men was cussing and threatening me, when somebody hollered: “Leave it to the referee!”

“Sure,” said Kirby, “He knows our man won fair, and if he don’t say so, I’ll blow his head off!”

“That’s a lie!” bellered a man from Gunstock. “He knows it was a foul, and if he says it wasn’t, I’ll carve his liver with this here bowie knife!”

At these words Yucca keeled over in a dead faint, and then a clatter of hoofs sounded above the din, and out of the timber that hid the trail from the east, a gang of horsemen rode at a run. Everybody whirled and yelled: “Look out, here comes them Perdition illegitimates!”

Instantly a hundred guns covered them, and McVey demanded: “Come ye in peace or in war?”

“We come to unmask a fraud!” roared a big man with a red bandanner around his neck. “McGoorty, come forth!”

A familiar figger, now dressed in cowboy togs, pushed forward on my mule. “There he is!” this figger yelled, pointing at me. “That’s the desperado which robbed me! Them’s my tights he’s got on!”

“What’s this?” roared the crowd.

“A dern fake!” bellered the man with the red bandanner. “This here is Bruiser McGoorty!”

“Then who’s he?” somebody bawled, pointing at me.

“My name’s Breckinridge Elkins and I can lick any man here!” I roared, getting mad. I brandished my fists in defiance, but my britches started sliding down again, so I had to shut up and grab ‘em.

“Aha!” the man with the red bandanner howled like a hyener. “He admits it! I dunno what the idee is, but these Tomahawk polecats has double-crossed somebody! I trusts that you jackasses from Gunstock realizes the blackness and hellishness of their hearts! This man McGoorty rode into Perdition a few hours ago in his unmentionables, astraddle of that there mule, and told us how he’d been held up and robbed and put on the wrong road. You skunks was too proud to stage this fight in Perdition, but we ain’t the men to see justice scorned with impunity! We brought McGoorty here to show you you was bein’ gypped by Tomahawk! That man ain’t no prize fighter; he’s a highway robber!”

“These Tomahawk coyotes has framed us!” squalled a Gunstock man, going for his gun.

“You’re a liar!” roared Richards, bending a .45 barrel over his head.

THE NEXT INSTANT GUNS was crashing, knives was gleaming, and men was yelling blue murder. The Gunstock braves turned frothing on the Tomahawk warriors, and the men from Perdition, yelping with glee, pulled their guns and begun fanning the crowd indiscriminately, which give back their fire. McGoorty give a howl and fell down on Alexander’s neck, gripping around it with both arms, and Alexander departed in a cloud of dust and smoke.

I grabbed my gunbelt, which McVey had hung over the post in my corner, and I headed for cover, holding on to my britches whilst the bullets hummed around me as thick as bees. I wanted to take to the brush, but I remembered that blamed letter, so I headed for town. Behind me there rose a roar of banging guns and yelling men. Just as I got to the backs of the row of buildings which lined the street, I run into something soft head on. It was McGoorty, trying to escape on Alexander. He had hold of only one rein, and Alexander, evidently having circled one end of the town, was traveling in a circle and heading back where he started from.

I was going so fast I couldn’t stop, and I run right over Alexander and all three of us went down in a heap. I jumped up, afraid Alexander was killed, but he scrambled up snorting and trembling, and then McGoorty weaved up, making funny noises. I poked my cap-and-ball into his belly.

“Off with them pants!” I yelped.

“My God!” he screamed. “Again? This is getting to be a habit!”

“Hustle!” I bellered. “You can have these scandals I got on now.”

He shucked his britches, grabbed them tights and run like he was afeard I’d want his underwear too. I jerked on the pants, forked Alexander and headed for the south end of town. I kept behind the buildings, though the town seemed to be deserted, and purty soon I come to the store where Kirby had told me old man Braxton kept the post office. Guns was barking there, and across the street I seen men ducking in and out behind a old shack, and shooting.

I tied Alexander to a corner of the store and went in the back door. Up in the front part I seen old man Braxton kneeling behind some barrels with a .45-90, and he was shooting at the fellows in the shack across the street. Every now and then a slug would hum through the door and comb his whiskers, and he would cuss worse’n pap did that time he sot down in a bear trap.

I went up to him and tapped him on the shoulder and he give a squall and flopped over and let go bam! right in my face and singed off my eyebrows. And the fellows across the street hollered and started shooting at both of us.

I’d grabbed the barrel of his Winchester, and he was cussing and jerking at it with one hand and feeling in his boot for a knife with the other’n, and I said: “Mr. Braxton, if you ain’t too busy, I wish you’d gimme that there letter which come for pap.”

“Don’t never come up behind me that way again!” he squalled. “I thought you was one of them dern outlaws! Look out! Duck, you fool!”

I let go his gun, and he took a shot at a head which was aiming around the shack, and the head let out a squall and disappeared.

“Who are them fellows?” I asked.

“Comanche Santry and his bunch, from up in the hills,” snarled old man Braxton, jerking the lever of his Winchester. “They come after that gold. A hell of a sheriff McVey is; never sent me nobody. And them fools over at the ring are makin’ so much noise, they’ll never hear the shootin’ over here. Look out, here they come!”

SIX OR SEVEN MEN RUSHED out from behind the shack and ran across the street, shooting as they come. I seen I’d never get my letter as long as all this fighting was going on, so I unslung my old cap-and-ball and let bam! at them three times, and three of them outlaws fell across each other in the street, and the rest turned around and run back behind the shack.

“Good work, boy!” yelled old man Braxton. “If I ever—oh, Judas Iscariot, we’re blowed up now!”

Something was pushed around the corner of the shack and come rolling down toward us, the shack being on higher ground than the store was. It was a keg, with a burning fuse which whirled as the keg revolved and looked like a wheel of fire.

“What’s in that keg?” I asked.

“Blastin’ powder!” screamed old man Braxton, scrambling up. “Run, you dern fool! It’s comin’ right into the door!”

He was so scared he forgot all about the fellows across the street, and one of ‘em caught him in the thigh with a buffalo rifle, and he plunked down again, howling blue murder. I stepped over him to the door—that’s when I got that slug in my hip—and the keg hit my legs and stopped, so I picked it up and heaved it back across the street. It hadn’t no more’n hit the shack when bam! it exploded and the shack went up in smoke. When it stopped raining pieces of wood and metal, they wasn’t any sign to show any outlaws had ever hid behind where that shack had been.

“I wouldn’t believe it if I hadn’t saw it,” old man Braxton moaned faintly.

“Are you hurt bad, Mr. Braxton?” I asked.

“I’m dyin’,” he groaned. “Plumb dyin’!”

“Well, before you die, Mr. Braxton,” I said, “would you mind givin’ me that there letter for pap?”

“What’s yore pap’s name?” he asked.

“Roarin’ Bill Elkins,” I said.

He wasn’t hurt as bad as he thought. He reached up and got hold of a leather bag and fumbled in it and pulled out a envelope. “I remember tellin’ old Buffalo Rogers I had a letter for Bill Elkins,” he said, fingering it over. Then he said: “Hey, wait! This ain’t for yore pap. My sight is gettin’ bad. I read it wrong the first time. This is for Bill Elston that lives between here and Perdition.”

I want to spike a rumor which says I tried to murder old man Braxton and tore his store down for spite. I’ve done told how he got his leg broke, and the rest was accidental. When I realized that I had went through all that embarrassment for nothing, I was so mad and disgusted I turned and run out of the back door, and I forgot to open the door and that’s how it got tore off the hinges.

I then jumped on to Alexander and forgot to untie him from the store. I kicked him in the ribs, and he bolted and tore loose that corner of the building, and that’s how come the roof to fall in. Old man Braxton inside was scared and started yelling bloody murder, and about that time a lot of men come up to investigate the explosion which had stopped the three-cornered battle between Perdition, Tomahawk and Gunstock, and they thought I was the cause of everything, and they all started shooting at me as I rode off.

Then was when I got that charge of buckshot in my back.

I went out of Tomahawk and up the hill trail so fast I bet me and Alexander looked like a streak. And I says to myself the next time pap gets a letter in the post office, he can come after it hisself, because it’s evident that civilization ain’t no place for a boy which ain’t reached his full growth and strength.