T. Haviland Hicks, Senior

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 ( 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 !