“Scenery might sell his camel,” says I, merely as a suggestion.
That camel was always a sore spot with Dirty Shirt. Him and Scenery owned a placer mine back on Dog Town Creek, and they cleaned up about fifteen hundred dollars, before the little pay streak played out. Durin’ that time, Dirty discovered a stretch of pretty good lookin’ quartz, and him and Scenery decides to work it. They needed machinery; so Scenery takes his share of the money and heads for Butte to buy the machinery.
In about a week he shows up, half drunk, leadin’ a moth-eaten camel. It seems that he got drunk in Butte, got in an argument with a feller over how long a camel could go without drinkin’, bought a camel from a travelin’ carnival and came back to prove he was right.
Naturally, Dirty Shirt got awful mad. He busted up his partnership with poor Scenery, bought Scenery out for fifty dollars, and went to Butte himself to get the machinery. And then he came back, trailin’ an old automobile behind a pair of misbegotten mules. He had got drunk, bought six hundred dollars’ worth of chances on a raffle—and won the danged thing.
It was the second automobile to ever come to Piperock, and a vigilance committee waited on Dirty Shirt right away; so Dirty stored it in the Piperock Livery Stable, where it couldn’t scare anythin’. Scenery kept his camel out at his shack, and put a warnin’ on the gate, which read:
BEWAIR THE CAMUEL
THE DAMN THING BIGHTS.
Scenery called it Araby. The danged thing smelt like a street in Frisco Chinatown, and it would bite. Acted most of the time as though it had a bad bellyache. The vigilance committee also warned Scenery to keep his menagerie off the main roads, ’cause every bronc that saw it throwed a fit and its rider at the same time.
Anyway, Dirty Shirt wouldn’t come in out of the cold; so I left him there and went into Buck’s place, where I finds Magpie Simpkins, Buck Masterson, Wick Smith and Old Testament Tilton, all settin’ around the old stove. While Old Testament is our minister, he’s broad minded, six feet six inches tall, and no man ever had a more “if I die right now you won’t hear a squawk out of me” expression on his face. Accordin’ to him, there ain’t no livin’ man knows more about hell. Magpie says Old Testament will prob’ly git a job as a guide down there, after he’s dead.
Magpie Simpkins is and has been my pardner for years. He’s as tall as Testament, wears a flowin’ mustache, and is a livin’ example of a man who never did mind his own business. He thinks his mission in life is to elevate humanity. His brain is filled with wonderful ideas, but each and every one is shy some sort of a dingus that makes ’em tick. But he’ll back any of his ideas with a six-gun or a neck yoke, when all else fails.