“Will—will Mason go west, Cap?” I asks husky.
“No,” he answers emphatic. “You did a good job of first aid, Bill, and that rip-tootin’ outlaw has an amazing constitution. Also plenty of fighting grit. He’ll live to be foreman of my outfit.”
READY FOR A COFFIN, by Gene Austin
There was a heavy silence in the saloon as the big man got to his feet, holding his his bloody mouth with one hand and beating the sawdust off the seat of his levis with the other.
“There, ain’t nobody can do that to Luke James and get away with it,” he swore, glaring around with hate gleaming in his little eyes. “I’ll be back—don’t anyone forget it.”
He turned and stumbled through the batwing doors into the darkness outside, and the men lined up at the bar shifted their eyes to the only seated man in the place.
Jake Perkins wouldn’t have been sitting down if it had been possible for him to stand, but his legs had grown old while his mind stayed young, and they no longer responded to the orders he would like to have given them. And he didn’t like the air of silence and concern in the saloon.
“Lookee here,” he growled, scowling ferociously. “I didn’t trundle this here wheelchair of mine down here to be stared at like a two-headed maverick. Everybody order up drinks on me, and let’s get back to the merrymaking. If’n you want to stare, stare at this blasted freak of a bird I got here—he don’t mind it!”
Jake addressed a few cuss words at a big, black glossy crow seated on the arm of his wheelchair, which had been looking with a watering beak at one of the bright silver buttons on Jake’s breast. Probably conscious of the attention called to it, the crow flapped its wings several times and returned to its contemplation of the button. Jake cussed it again and scowled back at the men.
“Well, what you waitin’ on? James ain’t comin’ back tonight, at least!”
“You’re mighty cool about it, Jake,” somebody said. “If Luke James got it in for me like he did you tonight, I don’t reckon I’d stay in this country two minutes.”
“What if he did get it in for me!” Jake bawled. “Was I supposed to sit here like a cripple while he gun-whipped that new schoolteacher? Or was I supposed to take off this here belt of mine and whop him across the face with it and give the schoolteacher a chance to paste him one? Eh? I was supposed to whop him, naturally. Say, where is that school-teacher? What happened to him?”
Everybody looked around for the schoolteacher, but he was no longer present.
“Musta slipped out,” somebody said.
“Well, no matter,” Jake said. “Let’s warm our windpipes with some o’ that rotgut they sell here, and let the crow worry about Luke James. Satan,” he growled, sneering at the crow again, in the way he had of showing his love for anything, “what does an ignorant, good-for-nothin’ bird have to say about this?”
The crow, which had a vocabulary of four or five extremely profound sentences, looked around and observed, “If I go to heaven, I want to take my horse. Ha! Go to heaven and take my horse. Blast, it! Ha, ha!”
Jake took a sock at the bird, which flew to a safer point atop a nearby whiskey bottle, and the drinking in the saloon was resumed.
* * * *
Jake left a few minutes afterward, after coaxing Satan back and placing him in his special cage under the chair seat, and then wheeling himself through the doors and into the cool night air.
“Ready to go home?” A voice said, and a man who had been leaning against the saloon hitch-rack stepped over to him. It was the new schoolteacher, Bob Partridge.
“What you hangin’ around out here for?” Jake demanded, halting the progress of his wheelchair.
“I just wanted to make sure that Luke James didn’t hang around,” the schoolteacher said. He was a tall, good-looking young man, and obviously new to Western ways. He wore his sixgun belted tight around his waist, and after informing him that it would be much easier to reach if allowed to hang slack on his hip, Jake added suspiciously: “What you, askin’ me if I’m ready to go home for? You ain’t got any ideas that I pay any’ attention to my niece sayin’ I got to be in by ten, do you?”
“Oh, of course not,” Partridge said blandly. “I just wondered if you’d mind my walking along with you—I understand your house isn’t far down the road. And I want to thank you for what you did in there, although I wish I could have handled him myself. Uh—your niece—that’s Miss Mary Platt, isn’t it—the girl who teaches the younger children at the school?”
“That’s her all right,”’Jake snorted. “And of all the no-good females that ever lived, she’s the worst. As for thankin’ me for what I did, it warn’t nothin’ at all. Luke James didn’t have no call to start on you jus’ because you said he ought to learn to read. Everybody ought to learn to read.”
“You read, of course,” Partridge said.
Jake coughed. “Well—it’s been a long time. I mean, I don’t exactly read, but I sure like to look at pictures. I—”
Partridge quickly changed the subject, all the more because Jake’s curfew time was fast approaching, and he well knew the old man wanted to get home on time.
“That’s fine, Mr. Perkins—but it don’t get rid of Luke James. I’ve only been here two days, but I’ve seen enough to know he’s as dangerous as a snake. He’s got a lot of pride—he’s off somewhere now licking it, and he isn’t going to stand for the humiliation he took in that saloon. He’s going to be after both of us—you for hitting him in the face with your belt-buckle, me for knocking him down and disarming him.”
“I ain’t scared of him,” Jake butted in, his face very grim now. “But you’re right; if you’re as smart as schoolteachers are supposed to be, you’ll get out of town quick. You got guts and a good left, but no gun-savvy. If you don’t leave, you’ll be teachin’ the stiffs up in Boothill the correct way to lay in a coffin.”
Partridge tried the gun on his hip, drawing it clumsily and causing Jake to fear that he would accidently blow them both to Boothill.
“And what about you?” Partridge asked.
“What about me?” Jake roared, maneuvering his wheelchair out of the way till the schoolteacher holstered the .45. “I’m sixty-five years old—older’n any man should live to be in these United States. It’s high time I died and made room for some young feller. There ain’t nobody cares nothin’ for me—I ain’t worth a stale sour-dough cracker even to myself. And so I’d be glad to let James have the privilege of puttin’ me out of my misery—except for one thing—”
“What’s that?” Partridge asked, grabbing the handle of Jake’s wheelchair and pushing him down the street, much to the old man’s distress—and over vigorous protests.
“I’ll tell you, what it is,” Jake snapped, surrendering to be pushed. “It’s just that I got thirty-thousand dollars I got to get rid of ’fore I die. That blasted niece of mine is just waitin’ for me to fall in my grave so’s she can get her hands on it, but I’ll fool her. I’ll get rid of it somehow, and then James can come ahead—”
“I’m not very well acquainted with your niece, but she seemed to be a very sincere and honest young lady,” Partridge insisted.
“Baloney! I had a brother once that had money too, an’ when he died you should have seen the way those relatives fought over it—it was like throwin’ an apple to‘ a bunch of hogs. They’re all dead now but me and my niece, but when I keel over it’ll be the same with her, much as she pretends she likes me. An’ if she thinks