Bar-20 Days - Clarence E. Mulford (read a book .TXT) 📗

Finding the rope was easier than finding a place to put it, and the unequal battle raged across the room and into the next, where it sounded as if the house were falling down. Johnny’s voice was shrill and full of vexation and his words were extremely impolite and lacked censoring. His feet appeared to be numerous and growing rapidly, judging from the amount of territory they covered and defended, and Red joyfully kicked Hopalong in the melee, which in this instance also stands for stomach; Red always took great pains to do more than his share in a scrimmage. Dent hovered on the flanks, his hands full of rope, and begged with great earnestness to be allowed to apply it to parts of Johnny’s thrashing anatomy. But as the flanks continued to change with bewildering swiftness he begged in vain, and began to make suggestions and give advice pleasing to the three combatants. Dent knew just how it should be done, and was generous with the knowledge until Johnny zealously planted five knuckles on his one good eye, when the engagement became general.

The table skidded through the door on one leg and caromed off the bar at a graceful angle, collecting three chairs and one sand-box cuspidor on the way. The box on Johnny’s leg had long since departed, as Hopalong’s shin could testify. One chair dissolved unity and distributed itself lavishly over the room, while the bed shrunk silently and folded itself on top of Dent, who bucked it up and down with burning zeal and finally had sense enough to crawl from under it. He immediately celebrated his liberation by getting a strangle hold on two legs, one of which happened to be the personal property of Hopalong Cassidy; and the battle raged on a lower plane. Red raised one hand as he carefully traced a neck to its own proper head and then his steel fingers opened and swooped down and shut off the dialect. Hopalong pushed Dent off him and managed to catch Johnny’s flaying arm on the third attempt, while Dent made tentative sorties against Johnny’s spurred boots.

“Phew! Can he fight like that when he’s sober?” reverently asked Dent, seeing how close his fingers could come to his gaudy eye without touching it. “I won’t be able to see at all in an hour,” he added, gloomily.

Hopalong, seated on Johnny’s chest, soberly made reply as he tenderly flirted with a raw shin. “It’s the mescal. I’m going to slip some of that stuff into Pete’s cayuse some of these days,” he promised, happy with a new idea. Pete Wilson had no sense of humor.

“That ghost was plumb lucky,” grunted Red, “an’ so was the sea-captain,” he finished as an afterthought, limping off toward the bar, slowly and painfully followed by his disfigured companions. “One drink; then to bed.”

After Red had departed, Hopalong and Dent smoked a while and then, knocking the ashes out of his pipe, Hopalong arose. “An’ yet, Dent, there are people that believe in ghosts,” he remarked, with a vast and settled contempt.

Dent gave critical scrutiny to the scratched bar for a moment. “Well, the Greasers all say there is a ghost in the San Miguel, though I never saw it. But some of them have seen it, an’ no Greasers ride that trail no more.”

“Huh!” snorted Hopalong. “Some Greasers must have filled the Kid up on ghosts while he was filling hisself up on mescal. Ghosts? R-a-t-s!”

“It shows itself only to Greasers, an’ then only on Friday nights,” explained Dent, thoughtfully. This was Friday night. Others had seen that ghost, but they were all Mexicans; now that a “white” man of Johnny’s undisputed calibre had been so honored Dent’s skepticism wavered and he had something to think about for days to come. True, Johnny was not a Greaser; but even ghosts might make mistakes once in a while.

Hopalong laughed, dismissing the subject from his mind as being beneath further comment. “Well, we won’t argue—I’m too tired. An’ I’m sorry you got that eye, Dent.”

“Oh, that’s all right,” hastily assured the store-keeper, smiling faintly. “I was just spoiling for a fight, an’ now I’ve had it. Feels sort of good. Yes, first thing in the morning—breakfast’ll be ready soon as you are. Good-night.”

But the proprietor couldn’t sleep. Finally he arose and tiptoed into the room where Johnny lay wrapped in the sleep of the exhausted. After cautious and critical inspection, which was made hard because of his damaged eye, he tiptoed back to his bunk, shaking his head slowly. “He wasn’t drunk,” he muttered. “He saw that ghost all right; an’ I’ll bet everything I’ve got on it!”

At daybreak three quarrelling punchers rode homeward and after a monotonous journey arrived at the bunk house and reported. It took them two nights adequately to describe their experiences to an envious audience. The morning after the telling of the ghost story things began to happen. Red starting it by erecting a sign.

NOTISE—NO GHOSTS ALOWED

An exuberant handful of the outfit watched him drive the last nail and step back to admire his work, and the running fire of comment covered all degrees of humor, and promised much hilarity in the future at the expense of the only man on the Bar-20 who had seen a ghost.

In a week Johnny and his acute vision had become a bye-word in that part of the country and his friends had made it a practice to stop him and gravely discuss spirit manifestations of all kinds. He had thrashed Wood Wright and been thrashed by Sandy Lucas in two beautiful and memorable fights and was only waiting to recover from the last affair before having the matter out with Rich Finn. These facts were beginning to have the effect he strove for; though Cowan still sold a new concoction of gin, brandy, and whiskey which he called “Flying Ghost,” and which he proudly guaranteed would show more ghosts per drink than any liquor south of the Rio Grande—and some of his patrons were eager to back up his claims with real money.

This was the condition of affairs when Hopalong Cassidy strolled into Cowan’s and forgot his thirst in the story being told by a strange Mexican. It was Johnny’s ghost, without a doubt, and when he had carelessly asked a few questions he was convinced that Johnny had really seen something. On the way home he cogitated upon it and two points challenged his intelligence with renewed insistence: the ghost showed itself only on Friday, and then only to “Greasers.” His suspicious mind would not rest until he had reviewed the question from all sides, and his opinion was that there was something more than spiritual about the ghost of the San Miguel—and a cold, practical reason for it.

When he rode into the corral at the ranch he saw that another sign had been put on the corral wall. He had destroyed the first, speaking his mind in full at the time. He swept his gloved hand upward with a rush, tore the flimsy board from its fastenings, broke it to pieces across his saddle, and tossed the fragments from him. He was angry, for he had warned the outfit that they were carrying the joke too far, that Johnny was giving way to hysterical rage more frequently, and might easily do something that they all would regret. And he felt sorry for the Kid; he knew what Johnny’s feelings were and he made up his mind to start a few fights himself if the persecution did not cease. When he stepped into the bunk house and faced his friends they listened to a three-minute speech that made them squirm, and as he finished talking the deep voice of the foreman endorsed the promises he had just heard made, for Buck had entered the gallery without being noticed. The joke had come to an end.

When Johnny rode in that evening he was surprised to find Hopalong waiting for him a short distance from the corral and he replied to his friend’s gesture by riding over to him. “What’s up now?” he asked.

“Come along with me. I want to talk to you for a few minutes,” and Hopalong led the way toward the open, followed by Johnny, who was more or less suspicious. Finally Hopalong stopped, turned, and looked his companion squarely in the eyes. “Kid, I’m in dead earnest. This ain’t no fool joke—now you tell me what that ghost looked like, how he acted, an’ all about it. I mean what I say, because now I know that you saw something. If it wasn’t a ghost it was made to look like one, anyhow. Now go ahead.”

“I’ve told you a dozen times already,” retorted Johnny, his face flushing. “I’ve begged you to believe me an’ told you that I wasn’t fooling. How do I know you ain’t now? I’m not going to tell—”

“Hold on; yes, you are. Yo’re going to tell it slow, an’ just like you saw it,” Hopalong interrupted hastily. “I know I’ve doubted it, but who wouldn’t! Wait a minute—I’ve done a heap of thinking in the past few days an’ I know that you saw a ghost. Now, everybody knows that there ain’t no such thing as ghosts; then what was it you saw? There’s a game on, Kid, an’ it’s a dandy; an’ you an’ me are going to bust it up an’ get the laugh on the whole blasted crowd, from Buck to Cowan.”

Johnny’s suspicions left him with a rush, for his old Hoppy was one man in a thousand, and when he spoke like that, with such sharp decision, Johnny knew what it meant. Hopalong listened intently and when the short account was finished he put out his hand and smiled.

“We’re the fools, Kid; not you. There’s something crooked going on in that canyon, an’ I know it! But keep mum about what we think.”

Johnny lost his grouch so suddenly and beamed upon his friends with such a superior air that they began to worry about what was in the wind. The suspense wore on them, for with Hopalong’s assistance, Johnny might spring some game on them all that would more than pay up for the fun they had enjoyed at his expense; and the longer the suspense lasted the worse it became. They never lost sight of him while he was around and Hopalong had to endure the same surveillance; and it was no uncommon thing to see small groups of the anxious men engaged in deep discussion. When they found that Buck must have been told and noticed his smile was as fixed as Hopalong’s or Johnny’s, they were certain that trouble of some nature was in store for them.

Several weeks later Buck Peters drew rein and waited for a stranger to join him.

“Howdy. Is yore name Peters?” asked the newcomer, sizing him up in one trained glance.

“Well, who are you, an’ what do you want?”

“I want to see Peters, Buck Peters. That yore name?”

“Yes; what of it?”

“My name’s Fox. Old Jim Lane gave me a message for you,” and the stranger spoke earnestly to some length. “There; that’s the situation. We’ve got to have shrewd men that they don’t know an’ won’t suspect. Lane wants to pay a couple of yore men their wages for a month or two. He said he was shore he could count on you to help him out.”

“He’s right; he can. I don’t forget favors. I’ve got a couple of men that—there’s one of ‘em now. Hey, Hoppy! Whoop-e, Hoppy!”

Mr. Cassidy arrived quickly, listened eagerly, named Red and Johnny to accompany him, overruled his companions by insisting that if Johnny didn’t go the whole thing was off, carried his