



Produced by Andrew Heath





HOPALONG CASSIDY'S RUSTLER ROUND-UP

or

BAR-20


By Clarence Edward Mulford



1906




CHAPTER I. Buckskin

The town lay sprawled over half a square mile of alkali plain, its main
Street depressing in its width, for those who were responsible for its
inception had worked with a generosity born of the knowledge that they
had at their immediate and unchallenged disposal the broad lands of
Texas and New Mexico on which to assemble a grand total of twenty
buildings, four of which were of wood. As this material was scarce, and
had to be brought from where the waters of the Gulf lapped against the
flat coast, the last-mentioned buildings were a matter of local pride,
as indicating the progressiveness of their owners.

These creations of hammer and saw were of one story, crude and
unpainted; their cheap weather sheathing, warped and shrunken by the
pitiless sun, curled back on itself and allowed unrestricted entrance to
alkali dust and air. The other shacks were of adobe, and reposed in that
magnificent squalor dear to their owners, Indians and Mexicans.

It was an incident of the Cattle Trail, that most unique and stupendous
of all modern migrations, and its founders must have been inspired with
a malicious desire to perpetrate a crime against geography, or else they
reveled in a perverse cussedness, for within a mile on every side lay
broad prairies, and two miles to the east flowed the indolent waters of
the Rio Pecos itself. The distance separating the town from the river
was excusable, for at certain seasons of the year the placid stream
swelled mightily and swept down in a broad expanse of turbulent, yellow
flood.

Buckskin was a town of one hundred inhabitants, located in the valley of
the Rio Pecos fifty miles south of the Texas-New Mexico line. The
census claimed two hundred, but it was a well-known fact that it was
exaggerated. One instance of this is shown by the name of Tom Flynn.
Those who once knew Tom Flynn, alias Johnny Redmond, alias Bill Sweeney,
alias Chuck Mullen, by all four names, could find them in the census
list. Furthermore, he had been shot and killed in the March of the
year preceding the census, and now occupied a grave in the young but
flourishing cemetery. Perry's Bend, twenty miles up the river, was
cognizant of this and other facts, and, laughing in open derision at
the padded list, claimed to be the better town in all ways, including
marksmanship.

One year before this tale opens, Buck Peters, an example for the more
recent Billy the Kid, had paid Perry's Bend a short but busy visit. He
had ridden in at the north end of Main Street and out at the south. As
he came in he was fired at by a group of ugly cowboys from a ranch known
as the C 80. He was hit twice, but he unlimbered his artillery, and
before his horse had carried him, half dead, out on the prairie, he had
killed one of the group. Several citizens had joined the cowboys
and added their bullets against Buck. The deceased had been the best
bartender in the country, and the rage of the suffering citizens can
well be imagined. They swore vengeance on Buck, his ranch, and his
stamping ground.

The difference between Buck and Billy the Kid is that the former never
shot a man who was not trying to shoot him, or who had not been warned
by some action against Buck that would call for it. He minded his own
business, never picked a quarrel, and was quiet and pacific up to
a certain point. After that had been passed he became like a raging
cyclone in a tenement house, and storm-cellars were much in demand.

"Fanning" is the name of a certain style of gun play not unknown among
the bad men of the West. While Buck was not a bad man, he had to rub
elbows with them frequently, and he believed that the sauce for the
goose was the sauce for the gander. So be bad removed the trigger of his
revolver and worked the hammer with the thumb of the "gun hand" or the
heel of the unencumbered hand. The speed thus acquired was greater than
that of the more modern double-action weapon. Six shots in a few seconds
was his average