“What gosh-danged fool started that team?”
And Scenery staggers into our midst.
“You done it yourself,” states Fog-Horn.
“Did I?” he squeaks. “I ought to be shot! Lit on a rock and knocked all
my front teeth out. Make a fine-looking sheriff.”
“Was you aiming to bite your prisoners?” I asks, and just then Bill
McFee, the marshal of Paradise, enters our midst.
“What seems to be the trouble?” asks Bill.
“Thish is a campaign meeting,” states Scenery with sort of a lisp.
“We’ve come down here to show you pelicans of Paradise what’s what and
which. Is everybody dead around here?”
“Huh, you ought to have a hall,” says Bill pleasant-like. “Out here
ain’t no place for campaigning. Lacks dignity and disturbs the peace.”
“That’s wise advice,” nods Fog-Horn. “Let’s have some more ginger ale
and then hire a hall.”
“Whoo-e-e-e!” says I and empties both guns in the air.
“Come on,” says Bill. “I’ve got the best place in town.”
I don’t know where he led us, but I know we went inside a house. I heard
Froggy groaning a waltz on his jew’s-harp, and then I hears a strange
voice yelp:
“Shut up, you cross between a dying calf and a tight wire in the wind
and let an honest horse-thief sleep! What did they put you in
for—thinking you could play that grunt-organ?”
“Well,” says I to me, “I sure am busting up the local option machinery.
In one day I got the prohibitionists drunk, got ’em throwed in jail and
also knocked all the prospective sheriff’s front teeth out.”
Then I went to sleep.
They let us out the next morning. It wasn’t a private affair, if you
asks me. Paradise stood around in bunches and gazed upon our shame.
“Giving them old jails a looking over, Scenery?” yells Ricky Henderson,
and just then Old Testament breaks out of the main herd and lopes up to
Algernon.
“Brother martyr,” he sobs, putting his arm around Algy’s shoulders, “did
they jail you for your attitude?”