GUN PLAY
By Michael J. Phillips
Wherein a nickel-plated bad-man runs up against a chap of the blue-steel variety, and powder is burned.
“Yip! Yip-yip-yip yoo—ooo!”
The thick-shouldered counter man, who looked as though he might have been a bartender once, raised his head with a smile meant to placate and excuse. He nodded toward the flyspecked window.
“That there’s young Chihuahua Pete,” he explained, mopping the barlike lunch counter. “With a coupla shots o’ hootch under his belt! Just don’t mind him. He’s all right unless somebody steps on his toes.”
The five or six men sitting on the tall stools, eating a hasty midday lunch while the stage driver changed a tire, turned curiously at the yells and the explanation. They saw a pinto horse, irregularly patched with brown and white, coming out of the sagebrush and greasewood to the southward at a dead run. A “warbag,” in which the cowboy carries his personal belongings when he changes jobs, bounced wildly on either side. There was a rifle in the boot under the rider’s left leg.
The rider was tall, young and cone-hatted. A purple silk handkerchief was knotted at the back of his neck. The free corners fluttered under his chin above a red shirt which was blocked off with black lines. He wore a vest, without which a cowpuncher considers himself only half clad, but no coat. His chaps of cowhide were luxuriantly covered with black hair.
The spotted horse did his best. Nevertheless the driver beat him right and left and fore and aft with a quirt. Supple-wristed, he swung it viciously. The pinto, pink nostrils stretched wide, swooped like a swallow over the railroad track a few yards in front of the Last Chance.