Bar-20 Days by Clarence Edward Mulford (new reading TXT) 📗

Hoppy—he's only thirty-six hours late,” suggested Red. “An' he might be a week,” he added thoughtfully, as his mind ran back over a long list of Johnny's misdeeds.

“Yes, he might. An' won't he have a fine cock-an'-bull tale to explain it,” growled Hopalong, reminiscently. “His excuses are the worst part of it generally.”

“Eh, does he—make excuses?” asked Dent, mildly surprised.

“He does to us,” retorted Red savagely. “He's worse than a woman; take him all in all an' you've got the toughest proposition that ever wore pants. But he's a good feller, at that.”

“Well, you've got a lot of nerve, you have!” retorted Hopalong. “You don't want to say anything about the Kid—if there's anybody that can beat him in being late an' acting the fool generally, it's you. An' what's more, you know it!”

Red wheeled to reply, but was interrupted by a sudden uproar outside, fluent swearing coming towards the house. The door opened with a bang, admitting a white-faced, big-eyed man with one leg jammed through the box he had landed on in dismounting.

“Gimme a drink, quick!” he shouted wildly, dragging the box over to the bar with a cheerful disregard for chairs and other temporary obstructions. “Gimme a drink!” he reiterated.

“Give you six hops in the neck!” yelled Red, missing and almost sitting down because of the enthusiasm he had put into his effort. Johnny side-stepped and ducked, and as he straightened up to ask for whys and wherefores, Red's eyes opened wide and he paused in his further intentions to stare at the apparition.

“Sick?” queried Hopalong, who was frightened.

“Gimme that drink!” demanded Johnny feverishly, and when he had it he leaned against the bar and mopped his face with a trembling hand.

“What's the matter with you, anyhow?” asked Red, with deep anxiety.

“Yes; for God's sake, what's happened to you?” demanded Hopalong.

Johnny breathed deeply and threw back his shoulders as if to shake off a weight. “Fellers, I had a cougar soft-footing after me in that dark canyon, my cayuse ran away on a two-foot ledge up the wall,—an'—I—saw—a—ghost!”

There was a respectful silence. Johnny, waiting a reasonable length of time for replies and exclamations, flushed a bit and repeated his frank and candid statement, adding a few adjectives to it. “A real, screeching, flying ghost! An' I'm going home, an' I'm going to stay there. I ain't never coming back no more, not for anything. Damn this border country, anyhow!”

The silence continued, whereupon Johnny grew properly indignant. “You act like I told you it was going to rain! Why don't you say something? Didn't you hear what I said, you fools!” he asked pugnaciously. “Are you in the habit of having a thing like that told you? Why don't you show some interest, you dod-blasted, thick-skulled wooden-heads?”

Red looked at Hopalong, Hopalong looked at Red, and then they both looked at Dent, whose eyes were fixed in a stare on Johnny.

“Huh!” snorted Hopalong, warily arising. “Was that all?” he asked, nodding at Red, who also arose and began to move cautiously toward their erring friend. “Didn't you see no more'n one ghost? Anybody that can see one ghost, an' no more, is wrong somewhere. Now, stop, an' think; didn't you see two?” He was advancing carefully while he talked, and Red was now behind the man who saw one ghost.

“Why, you—” there was a sudden flurry and Johnny's words were cut short in the melee.

“Good, Red! Ouch!” shouted Hopalong. “Look out! Got any rope, Dent? Well, hurry up: there ain't no telling what he'll do if he's loose. The mescal they sells down in this country ain't liquor—it's poison,” he panted. “An' he can't even stand whiskey!”

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