One night a certain lad of few words who had been drawn into the club was called upon to contribute.
“Wall,” he drawled, “I was raised away out in the bresh up whur I never heared nobody talk, and I jes’ ain’t got no story to tell.”
“Oh, go on and tell something,” the other club members urged.
“No,” the diffident youth remonstrated, “it ain’t no use fer me to try to make up anything. I jest can’t do it. I’ve been a-trying to figger up something while you all was telling your stories, and the pump won’t even prime.”
There was more urging and encouraging. But still the boy from up the creek hung back. As a member of the club, however, he simply had to tell something—or “take the leggins.” Finally the leader of the group suggested, “I guess we can let you off from lying if you’re so much like George Washington. Just go ahead and tell us about some interesting happening. It don’t have to be a lie.”
“Wall,” the drawly tongue started off, “I’ll tell you about something that happened to me. One morning I was a-leaving the ranch to look out for wormy calves. I was going to be gone all day, and jest as I throwed my leg over the saddle, a Meskin girl that lived with her people in a jacal close to the corral came a-running out. ‘Here,’ says she, ‘we’ve jest been making tamales out of the cow that got her leg broke yesterday and you all had to kill. The meat is fat and the corn is new, and the tamales are muy sabroso. You must take some of them with you.’
“Now I would do nearly anything this little Meskin girl suggested. So I told her all right, to wrop the tamales up in some paper and a flour sack and I’d put ’em in my morral with the hank of dried beef and the bottle of worm medicine. Which she did. Tamales ain’t much good unless they are hot, you know, and I figgered the wropping would keep these warm.
“Well, after I’d gone about six miles, I struck a bull that I decided to rope. Which I did. The bull he kept on going after he hit the end of the rope and my horse he could not stop him. He dragged me about forty miles more or less, I guess, before I hung up in a mesquite tree with my chin between the forks of a limb. I don’t know how long I hung there, but it was some time. People differ as to how long it was. Anyway, it was until the limb rotted down and I dropped to the ground.
“I didn’t want to go back to the ranch afoot, and so I hit out follering the horse’s tracks. I found him a good piece out looking purty gant but still saddled and the rope that had rotted off the bull’s neck still tied to the horn of the saddle. I went right up to the morral, for it was still on the saddle, and untied it. I was a little gant myself. Then I felt of the sacking around the tamales, and I couldn’t feel no heat. Says I to myself, ‘I bet that Meskin girl didn’t wrop ’em right and the danged things have got so cold they won’t be no count to eat.’ But I went on and unwropped the paper, and when I got to the shucks, danged if they didn’t burn my fingers. Them tamales shore tasted good after all that bull running and then hoofing it after the horse. It is remarkable the way tamales hold the heat when they are well wropped.”
Even the schools for ranch boys in Texas included “windjamming” among their activities. But many a frontiersman who had not had the advantage of an education must have been forced by circumstances to “make it strong” in telling about the Wild West to gentle Easterners. Every new land has marvels; hence “traveler’s tales.” When facts are taken for fabrications, then the narrator is tempted to “cut loose” sure enough. One of the most honest-hearted and reliable frontiersmen that ever boiled coffee over mesquite coals was Bigfoot Wallace. He came to Texas from Virginia long before barbed wire “played hell” with the longhorns. After he had himself become a regular Longhorn he went back to his old home for a visit. As John C. Duval in the delightful Adventures of Bigfoot Wallace (1870) has the old frontiersman describe his reception, he was egged on in the following manner to take the bridle off and let out the last kink.