“Hey you, up there!” Billy Hutchinson shook his fist menacingly. “What do you mean by this outrage?”
Raucous laughter was his answer. The man hidden from view of the audience behind the box curtains was plainly a tough hombre and doubtless far gone in drink.
“You cut that out,” yelled Billy Hutchinson. “I’ll stand for no more disturbance from you. Interrupt this lady again and you’ll get what’s coming to you.”
The man in the box subsided. The Tombstone Nightingale, taking a step nearer to the footlights, resumed her song. Again the drunken voice:
“Awful. Rats. Take her out. Get the hook.”
Out from the wings bounced Billy Hutchinson, plainly boiling with wrath.
“Hustle up there and throw that fellow out,” he shouted to the bouncers.
The audience itself was worked up to a pitch of fury by this time. Cries of “Throw him out” rose all over the house. Up the stairs bounded the bouncers. Followed boisterous dialogue. The scuffling noise of violent tumult. Savage yells. Loud oaths. Then the crash of revolver shots. Smoke swirled from the box.
The excited audience leaped to its feet. Murder was more than it had bargained for. Out of the box a body hurtled. It plunged through the air, arms and legs flying helplessly, hat sailing off across the theatre. There was a mad scramble to get from under. But in vain. The body came crashing down on the heads of several wildly ducking, panic-stricken men.
Horrified silence for a moment.
Then up went a great roar of laughter. It was all a joke. The murdered man was only a suit of old clothes stuffed with straw.
The red-light beauties in Russian Bill’s box burst into shrill merriment. Thrilling. Ripping. That stuffed figure certainly fooled them. Looked exactly like a dead man. Hadn’t they had the scare of their lives? Best joke of the season. Just like Billy Hutchinson.
“Wasn’t it just too funny for anything?” Flashing eyes turned upon Russian Bill.
“Yes,” responded Russian Bill, smiling feebly from a corner. “Yes, it was very funny.”
“Why, Russian Bill,” exclaimed the painted lady, “whatever’s the matter with you? You’re as white as a sheet.”
Russian Bill, sitting at a table in the Alhambra, was entertaining his roistering companions with breezy, merry talk. Miners and cowboys were drinking at the bar. Faro and roulette tables were crowded. The place was filled with boisterous hubbub. Suddenly Russian Bill fell into a reverie. His eyes clouded. There was a look of sadness in them. Possibly just a suspicion of undue moisture. One of his half-tipsy comrades clapped him roughly on the shoulder.
“What’s eatin’ you?” he asked loudly.
Russian Bill seemed to wake out of a dream.
“I was thinking of my mother,” he said simply.
Doubtless the bold, bad outlaw was often thinking of his mother. His moods of silent reverie were frequent.
Russian Bill had a curiosity to see Charleston. He had heard much of the free-and-easy doings in the fantastic little capital of the San Pedro. He arrived there when, as it happened, Jack Swartz had on his war paint and all signs pointed to blood on the moon. Russian Bill was enjoying a quiet drink at a bar when in staggered Swartz.
“I’m a curly wolf,” yelled the inebriated hombre as he shot out the lights and all the hangers-on hunted cover. Deep darkness for a time was starred with spitting flames. When the lamps were relighted, Russian Bill was gone. He was travelling at an easy gallop on the road to Tombstone. Not frightened, you understand, but a little disgusted. He had no stomach for Charleston. The village plainly was lowbrow and vulgar.
Russian Bill rode east one morning alone. It was his farewell to Tombstone. The town never saw him again.
Curly Bill sat in a chair under the big live oak in front of Nick Babcock’s saloon in Galeyville, drinking beer out of a bottle and amusing himself with a few practice shots from his six-shooter at lizards and tin cans. It was a quiet day. Few people were about the street. The Chiricahua ridges were steeped in sunshine. The murmur of Turkey Creek came up out of the belt of timber below the mesa. Curly Bill’s black eyes opened wide as, across the street, he beheld a tall young man with a cameo face and golden-yellow hair falling on his shoulders, who looked, in his cowboy trappings, as immaculate as if he had just stepped out of a bandbox.
“Who the hell’s that?” growled the rustler chief in amazement.
“Sh‑h‑h!” whispered John Ringo. “Don’t you know who that is? That’s Russian Bill, the terrible outlaw.”
“Who the hell’s Russian Bill?” snarled Curly. “We oughter learn that tenderfoot not to wear his golden hair hanging down his back that-a-way in these here parts. It’s immoral.”
Russian Bill just at that moment was smoking a cigar held at a jaunty angle between his teeth. The next moment he wasn’t. The cigar had disappeared from his mouth as by magic. A thin wisp of smoke was twisting from the muzzle of Curly Bill’s six-shooter under the live oak tree. With his bottle tilted over his head, Curly Bill was taking a deep swig of beer.
That was Russian Bill’s introduction to Curly Bill. The real outlaw and the make-believe outlaw had many drinks together that day. They seemed to get on famously from the first. Possibly Curly liked the easy good-humour with which the tenderfoot took the joke of the vanishing cigar.
“I want to be an outlaw and join your band,” said Russian Bill with his usual simplicity after the new friendship had been sealed with many drink offerings.
“Bueno, compadre,” replied Curly, laughing. “Git your pony saddled. I’m ridin’ fer the Animos pronto.”
It was as if a king had said, “Arise, Sir Knight,” after laying on the sword. Naive directness was often the way to Curly Bill’s goodwill. When the rustler captain started for his ranch in the Animas Valley late in the day, Russian Bill was
