About sunset the gang started for camp, their weapons returned to them with many warnings from Tex not to shoot until clear out of town. They mounted their ponies and struck out on a dead run down the main street, whooping and yelling like a bunch of coyotes, but carefully refraining from firing a shot. About half a mile below town, however, the white "Yard Limit" sign of the railroad company was too good a mark for the crowd to pass unchallenged. True, the heavy piece of boiler iron, some thirty inches across, was pierced in a hundred places from previous attacks, but a few more wouldn't hurt it, and Baldy Peters, the crack shot of the camp, drew his revolver and, spurring his pony into a dead run, took quick aim at the black spot in the center and pulled the trigger. No answering shot came, and, although he tried all five of the chambers (no true cowboy or frontiersman ever carries six cartridges in his revolver) they were all silent.
Baldy jerked his pony up on its haunches, and carefully examined the cylinder. Sure enough every shell was there, but empty. Jack Gibson, who had followed Baldy, had the same luck, and when the rest came up a general investigation followed. It did not take them long to see that they had been tricked by some one. Their indignation knew no bounds. "Jes to think," said Big Pete, "s'posin' one of us ud a got inter a row, and some blame town galoot had a drawed a gun on him, wouldn't he 'a' been in a fine ole fix to 'a' jerked his 'hog-leg,' and nary a bean in the wheel?"
The more they thought about it the madder they got. Revenge they must have. What its form, they scarcely knew, nor cared. Without more talk, they all reloaded the weapons from their well-filled belts and turned their horses' heads toward town, speculating as they rode along as to just what they would do to show the town of Horse Head the danger of monkeying with a cow puncher's weapons. As they rode, they hatched up a plan, suggested from the fertile brain of Mac, the horse-wrangler, which, they thought, if successfully carried out, would give them the requisite amount of satisfaction for their wounded dignity.
It was on Tex, the bartender, and Jenkins, the town marshal, that they poured out the vials of their wrath. Who else than they would have removed the cartridges from all those cylinders and replaced them with empty shells?
Now, they knew that Tex was the marshal's right-hand man when it came to any trouble, and that, during the shipping season, when the outfits were around town a good deal, each of them kept a horse in the corral back of the "Bucket of Blood," ready for any emergency. Arriving in town, they proceeded to get gloriously full again, while Tex and Jenkins, secure in the knowledge of those empty shells they had placed in their revolvers, enjoyed the fun and allowed them full play.
Along toward ten o'clock the boys drifted down to the only restaurant in Horse Head that kept open all night as well as all day. It was kept by "Chinese Louie," an almond-eyed celestial who ran a store, restaurant, wash-house, and the village photograph gallery, all under one long roof.
Now, when a puncher gets into a restaurant, the only thing he craves is ham and eggs. Of beef he has a surfeit. The menu of the round-up wagon is coffee, bread, and meat three times a day, with awful regularity. Therefore, the gang was soon busy, seated on high stools at the long counter. After they had eaten their fill each wadded up his paper napkin and fired it at the cook, lit a cigar from the case at the end of the counter, and paid his bill.
Then the fun opened by some one pulling a revolver and taking a shot at the big kerosene lamp that hung from the ceiling. In an instant twenty shots were fired; every lamp in the place was out and bored full of holes; the fancy water cooler that sat in the corner was riddled; and the coffee and tea pots on the big range behind the counter, as well as a lot more tempting marks in the way of copper cooking utensils that hung overhead on a rack, were turned into sieves.
Poor Chinese Louie and his assistant lost no time in making themselves scarce; and, after it got too dark, for want of lamp-light, to see to shoot anything more, the now hilarious punchers swaggered out to their ponies, standing quietly at the "snorting post" in front of the restaurant, and with a parting volley up the main street toward the "Bucket of Blood," rode furiously out of town.
Instead of going straight on down the railroad track they turned sharp to the left, at the first corner, and headed for the county bridge which spanned the river at Horse Head, a wooden structure with huge beams overhead, and some six or seven spans long.