Mounted now in style, Dick came curving out of the corral on the dead run and again went careering up and down the street, yelling and pumping lead at everything in view. But all the citizens having ducked out of sight, Dick, as an actor giving a high-class performance, felt the loss of his audience. Tearing up and down an empty street with nobody to shoot at wasn’t much fun. A brilliant inspiration flashed upon him. He would ride into the bar and break up the poker game. That would be a great joke on Curly Bill. His stupid drunken face twitched in a gargoyle grin as he drew rein in front of the saloon. Guiding his stumbling horse up on the board sidewalk, he bent low in the saddle as he rode through the door.
For an instant there was profound silence. Then the saloon seemed to explode with a roar of six-shooters. Out of the door the horse lunged, snorting and wild-eyed, saddle empty, pommel shot away. Blue smoke drifted out into the street. The old cowboy’s joke had been a riot. Laughing with huge enjoyment, Curly Bill and the rustlers settled back to their card game. The humorist lay sprawled in the middle of the floor, shot all to pieces.
“Old Dick,” remarked Curly Bill, “was a good feller. Gimme three kyards.”
“But what gits me,” drawled Joe Hill, “is why that bughouse reptile—two to me—as soon as he gits his war paint on …”
“Bet you ten,” said Curly Bill, shoving in a stack.
“I shorely never would have suspicioned nohow that that locoed tarantler, with me a-settin’ here playin’ poker and him knowin’ it—I call.”
“Aces up,” said Curly Bill.
“Good hand. But what I can’t figure out is how in the hell that simple-minded pifflicated centipede ever had the cold guts to come ridin’ in here on my own hoss.”
“Old Dick never meant no harm,” said Curly Bill, skinning down his cards and reaching for the pot. “He was jest drunk and havin’ a little fun.”
They dressed old Dick in a brand-new suit of black clothes with white shirt, white collar, and black bow tie, Curly Bill contributing the money and insisting on such mortuary regalia.
“Them old duds of Dick’s,” he said, “wuz good enough fer ridin’ range, but now he’s dead, he oughter look stylish like a regular corpse.”
The spring wagon hearse went at a gallop out of town, the outlaws clattering behind and firing at every jump. At the grave in the cactus on the hill, Curly Bill tucked a pint of whisky beneath the dead man’s folded hands.
“You might, maybe, need a swig along the trail, Dick,” he said.
Beer bottles popped as the body was lowered to its rest on rawhide riatas.
“Here’s how, old cowboy,” said John Ringo, holding up his bottle. “You went out crazy drunk, but you’ll have a hell of a long time to sleep it off.”
They set the empty beer bottles around the mound and placed a quart whisky bottle at the head. Then, with a last six-shooter volley over the grave, the outlaws swung into their saddles and galloped back to their poker game in E. Mann’s saloon. The man who played a joke on Curly Bill had passed into history.
Curly Bill, it was said, never forgot a kindness or an injury and never failed to repay either when opportunity offered. Sandy King, one of his rustlers, having been shot in a brush with officers, Curly Bill was nursing him in the hills near Fort Bowie. A lieutenant at the fort, out one day chasing jackrabbits with greyhounds, rode into the outlaw camp and explained the accident of his presence under cover of Curly’s gun. When the officer learned of King’s wound, he offered to ride back to the post and fetch an ambulance.
“What then?” asked Curly suspiciously.
“The man will be given proper surgical attention,” replied the lieutenant.
“That all?”
“That’s all.”
The lieutenant brought out an ambulance and took King to Fort Bowie, where, in the post hospital, the outlaw recovered from his injury and went his way in peace.
Several months later, Curly Bill raided the army corrals at Fort Bowie and ran off a number of horses. The same lieutenant was placed in charge of a squad of soldiers that took the trail. He found the stolen horses at Hughes’s ranch in a corral surrounded by a high adobe wall behind which stood Curly Bill’s outlaws with rifles.
“What do you want?” challenged the outlaw.
“I’ve come for those stolen horses,” replied the lieutenant.
“Try to take ’em,” shouted the outlaw, and the rustlers cocked their guns.
Curly Bill took a second look at the lieutenant.
“Hold on, boys,” commanded Curly. “That’s the man who saved Sandy King’s life.”
Curly Bill threw open the corral gate and helped the soldiers cut out the stolen army horses. He shook hands with the lieutenant.
“You can have anything you want from Curly Bill any time you want it,” he said in parting.
Curly Bill’s outlaw kingdom had two capitals. The first was Charleston on the San Pedro. The second was Galeyville in the San Simon. When it seemed to King Curly that Charleston was a little too close to Tombstone and the reign of law and order Wyatt Earp had set up, he moved his headquarters eastward across the Chiricahuas to Galeyville.
Charleston was a town of five hundred people, under the shade of great cottonwood trees on the west bank of the San Pedro and half-encircled by that pellucid stream. To get drunk and shoot up this quaint village now and then was only to show one’s self a public-spirited citizen. When one drew near Charleston at night, one estimated the distance by the definiteness of the revolver
