T. Haviland Hicks Senior

Excerpt

CHAPTER I

HICKS—WILD WEST BAD MAN

  "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 (<i>bang-bang</i>)! I'm a rip-snortin', high-falutin', loop-the-loopin' <i>bad</i> man (<i>bang-bang</i>)! 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 (<i>bang-bang</i>)! Yip-yip-yip-<i>yeee</i>!"

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...!