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!"
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!
"I'm not in a moving-picture show," Butch informed himself, as he donned
khaki trousers, football sweater, and heavy shoes. "I'm not on a Western
ranch, either. I'm in the sleep-shack of Camp Bannister, the football
training-camp of the Bannister College squad! Those fellows in the bunks
are not cowboys, Indians, and bandits—they are my teammates! I did dream
stuff that would shame a Wild West scenario, but I understand it all
now—my dreams were influenced by T. Haviland Hicks, Jr.!"
At that dramatic moment, to substantiate his statement, the raucous voice,
accompanied by resounding chords strummed on a banjo, sounded again. The
vocal and instrumental chaos was frequently punctured by revolver reports,
as the torturesome Caruso outside roared:
"Oh, Chuckwalla Bill thought life was sweet—
Till he met up with Sure-shot Pete;
A hotter shootin' match Last Chance never saw—
But Sure-shot Pete was some quicker on the draw!"
The pachydermic Butch, fully dressed—and awake, raging in his wrath like
an active volcano, glanced at his watch, and discovered that it was exactly
five A.M.! Intensely pacified by this knowledge, he lumbered toward the
bunkhouse door and flung it open, determined to crush the pestersome youth
who thus unfeelingly disturbed the quietude of Camp Bannister at such an
unearthly hour! However, his grim purpose was temporarily thwarted—before
him spread a beautiful panorama, a vast canvas painted in rich hues and
colors, that indescribably charming masterpiece of nature, entitled dawn.
Butch, gazing from the bunkhouse doorway toward the pebbly shore of the
placid lake stretching out for two miles before him, beheld Old Sol,
blood-red, peeping above the wooded hills on the far-off, opposite strand
of Lake Conowingo; the luminous orb laid a flaming pathway across the
shimmering waters, and golden bars of light, like gleaming fingers
outstretched, fell athwart the tall pines that towered on the high bluff
back of the camp. The glorious sunshine, succeeding a flood of rosy color,
inundated the scene; it bathed in a gorgeous radiance the early autumn
woods, it illumined the bunkhouse, and another rude shanty known to the
squad as the grub-shack, it poured down on old Hinky-Dink, the ancient
negro cookee, setting the breakfast tables just outside the canvas
cook-tent.