“Well, yes, that is I seen him when I was a young buck. But I never seen him die, and I never could find out jest how he was took off. I’ve seen some mighty hot arguments on the subject, and I’ve knowed one or two fellers to die with their boots on after gittin’ in a quarrel in jest that way.”
“I heard one account a few years ago,” said Red, “that may be right. There was a feller in Amarillo named Gabriel Asbury Jackson. He’d worked his self out of a job in Kansas and had come to Texas to buck the cigarette evil. One time he cornered a bunch of us that was too drunk to make a git-away and begun talkin’ to us about smokin’.
“‘Young men,’ he says, ‘beware of cigarettes. You think you’re smart to smoke a sack of Bull Durham every day, do you? Well, look at Pecos Bill. A stalwart young man he was, tough as nails, a fine specimen. But he got to foolin’ with cigarettes. What did they do for him?’ he says. ‘Why, nothin’ at first. But did he quit? No!’ he says. ‘He puffed away for ninety years, but they finally got him. And they’ll git you, every mother’s son of you, if you don’t leave ’em alone.’”
“That ain’t so,” said Joe. “That man was jest a liar. Cigarettes never killed Pecos Bill. He was, however, a great smoker, but he never smoked Bull Durham. He made him up a mixture of his own, the principal ingredients bein’ Kentucky home-spun, sulphur, and gun-powder. Why, he would have thought he was a sissy if he’d smoked Bull Durham.
“When the matches was scerce Bill used to ride out into a thunderstorm and light his cigarette with a streak of lightnin’, and that’s no doubt what’s back of a tale you hear every once in a while about him bein’ struck and kilt. But nobody that knows how Bill throwed a surcingle over a streak of lightnin’ and rode it over Pike’s Peak will ever believe that story.”
“I heard it was liquor that killed pore Bill,” said Hank.
“Must of been boot-leg,” said Red.
“Naw,” said Hank. “You see, Bill bein’ brought up as he was from tender youth on whiskey and onions, was still a young man when whiskey lost its kick for him. He got to puttin’ nitroglycerin in his drinks. That worked all right for a while, but soon he had to go to wolf-bait; and when that got so it didn’t work, he went to fish-hooks. Bill used to say, rather sorrowful-like, that that was the only way he could git an idear from his booze. But after about fifty years the fish-hooks rusted out his interior parts and brought pore Bill to an early grave.”
“I don’t know who told you that windy,” said Joe. “It might of been your own daddy. But it ain’t so. It’s jest another damn lie concocted by them damn prohibition men.”
“I heard another tale,” said Red, “which may be right for all I know. I heard that Bill went to Fort Worth one time, and there he seen a Boston man who had jist come to Texas with a mail-order cowboy outfit on; and when Bill seen him, he jist naturally laid down and laughed his self to death.”