Making Good for Muley

If there’s a word of truth in that old saying about beauty being only skin deep, Susie Abernathy was the thinnest-skinned person I ever saw. I may not be a judge of womanly beauty, and the poetry of my soul may have been shook loose by pitching broncos, and buried deep under a coating of alkali dust, but I sure do sabe when a woman is hard to look at.

Seems to me like it’s human nature for a feller with squirrel-teeth, no jaw to speak about and a physique like a corn cultivator to marry a beautiful female, and vice versa—not that “Muley” Bowles qualifies in the beauty division, but at that I reckon he shaded Susie a little.

Muley was a poetical puncher, of considerable avoirdupois, and he found Susie a thing of beauty and a joy forever. Susie was a niece of Zeb Abernathy, who owned a sheep outfit on Willow Creek, and a grouch toward all cowmen—and Muley punched cows for the Cross J outfit, and drew forty a month from old man Whittaker.

I’m not belittling Muley’s salary, ’cause I drew the same, and so did “Telescope” Tolliver and “Chuck” Warner. Back in the dim and distant past, when cows first come into style, the old-timers got together and settled the pay of the average cow-hand.

They figured that any normal puncher—if there is such an animal—would try at least three turns of the roulette wheel, at ten dollars per turn. That left him ten dollars. He’d buy some tobacco, some red neckties and perfume, and what was left, at two-bits a drink for hooch, would just carry him a few inches short of the murder and sudden death stage.

I’ve just been up to the house to draw my stipend from the old man, and am on my way back to the bunk-house, when Muley rides in. He’s humped over in his saddle, like Misery going to a cemetery, and if you can stamp despair on a full-sized milk-cheese he had it on his face.

He slips his saddle off, turns his bronc into the corral, leans against the fence and cuts loose the granddaddy of all sighs. There ain’t many men that you can hear sigh at pointblank range for a .30-30, but you could with Muley. It was like releasing the air on a freight train.