Selected Works of Wilbur C. Tuttle

I still contend that Magpie Simpkins is too finicky. It’s all right for a feller to desire to appear to a good advantage, especially on Sunday, but a finicky person hadn’t ought to pack a gun at a time when he’s just acquired something out of the ordinary in haberdashery.

New boots don’t mean nothing but misery to me. They could set diamonds all the way around the sole, but just the same she don’t spell nothing but blisters and cramps to Ike Harper. Anyway, I’m so bow-legged that my heels have got to be run over on the outside edges before I can be comfortable around the knees.

Magpie paid twenty dollars for them yaller boots. They was glowing with youth, vitality and shiny polish when Magpie leaned ’em against the side of that Pullman berth. They was a thing of beauty and a joy forever.

A pair of boots ain’t nothing but footwear, except when they’re the color of a sunset in Injun Summer and fit like the skin on a sausage—and cost twenty dollars.

Some folks will likely argue that Magpie hadn’t owned said boots long enough to become attached to ’em, but to those critics I will say: you don’t have to have a twenty-dollar bill around the house very long before you becomes sentimental about it.

Me and Magpie are on our way back from the Stampede at Totem, where we went to clean up some money, figuring that we knowed a little more than the fellers did who run the games. We found out that honesty is a poor poker policy in Totem.

Magpie sheds bitter tears over them boots. Their pristine yaller has went. A porter, suffering from color-blindness, lack of illumination, or gin, has rubbed ’em plentiful with black polish until there ain’t nothing identifying left except the shape and size.

Magpie also bought a new blanket from an Injun robe vender. It contains all the colors of the rainbow, and the design is supposed to invoke a special blessing from some high-cheeked god of some kind.

Magpie looks at said boots, folds ’em reverently in the blanket and then pushes the bell in the berth. Them boots has been under that seat ever since we got up in the morning. Magpie, being a heap vain, desires to pack ’em openly and places same in the aisle at night, along with his regular ones. Now that he wishes to show off a little, he opines to put ’em on. He sets there in his socks and pushes that little button.

As I said before, Magpie is too finicky and sudden. No matter if he did know the certain porter connected with our car and didn’t wait for an apology—he might ’a’ sounded a warning.

He didn’t hit the porter, but he would as soon as he got used to the sway of that car, ’cause his third shot busted the glass right by the porter’s head.

Maybe the conductor was right, and maybe he wasn’t. Anyway, it’s danged bad form to hop on to a man’s back when he’s trying to settle a personal matter. Him and Magpie went down in the aisle, and everybody begins to exercise their lungs.

Being part and parcel of Magpie’s crew, I immediate and soon bends my gun over the conductor’s head. Folks will likely say that I was wrong, that I had no interest in them yaller boots; but there’s bound to be some Sundays when Magpie won’t wear ’em, and there ain’t no law against me dressing up a little.

What is politely known as consternation seems to prevail. Some folks even go so far as to try and hand us their valuables, while others seem to have the instinct of prairie-dogs and hunt a hole.

Then the train jerks to a stop, which almost upsets me, and Magpie backs into me, poking shells into his gun.