Playing Safe in Piperock

“‘Magpie,’” says I, “if my corns wasn’t hurting —— out of me I’d have tears in my eyes from such sentiment. I’m all choked up—with alkali.”

“You’ve got to admit that she rhymes,” says Magpie Simpkins, spitting out a mouthful of dust and lifting his canteen to his lips. “I done figured ’em all out of my own head, Ike.”

“You better leave off taking things out of your own head,” says I. “First thing you know, old-timer, you’ll be taking out what prompts you to chaw your grub, and I’ll have to feed you with a stummick-pump.”

Then we pokes off the mountain and hits the trail toward Piperock. For you who ain’t never heard of Piperock, I’ll say this much: Piperock was the place the feller was thinking about when he wrote “Let sleeping dogs lie.”

Piperock looks like a siesta settlement, but she sure is deceiving. Few folks ever get killed in the town. The good old village usually invigorates ’em to a mile-a-minute clip, and we makes it a point never to shoot anybody in the back.

She ain’t the birthplace of nobody, and nothing much except horse-thieves are buried there. When it comes to law and order, we’ve got old Judge Steele. He’s got two law books and a copy of the Congressional Record for 1885, which about covers all the crimes that mankind is heir to, I reckon. Piperock ain’t on no map nor railroad and she ain’t never been sung in song or story, but if you don’t think she’s there, just get off the train at Paradise, ride north on Art Miller’s stage to where he unhitches his team, and then start something.

She’s there like sixty per cent dynamite and no questions answered. Me and that long-mustached, brainless, asinine arguer of a—well, me and Magpie have been away for two months doing assessment work on some mining claims that nobody would jump if we moved ’em down to the railroad and offered to develop ’em free of charge. We sort of hankers for the bright lights of Piperock. Even kerosene dazzles after using candles for two months.

Magpie stops, sudden-like, and appears to be looking down at a little flat below us. I adds my gaze to his and gets astonished right away. There is “Half-Mile” Smith and “Yuma” Yates: Half-Mile is one of our own home folks, but Yuma is sort of e pluribus unum with me and Magpie.