Sam Yelverton, with more money than he could possibly spend for whiskey, conceived, planned and began building the Dun Cow when he was drunk. When he sobered up, pride—and the necessity of upholding the fable that he, Sam, never got drunk—obliged him to finish the darn thing. When it was finished, the Dun Cow was high, wide and not handsome. Cowboys rode a hundred miles out of their way to view the huge-beamed and ceilinged room, the hanging lamps and the mirror-blazing back bar. The Dun Cow was something to see and talk about!
But the crowning glory of the Dun Cow was neither lamps, beams nor mirrors. While on his extended spree, which took him as far east as the capital, old Sam had viewed and admired a set of French windows. Nothing would do for Sam but those windows, but French windows necessitated a building in which to place them. The Dun Cow was the result.
Anything more incongruous and out of place than those tall, hinged windows extending from floor to ceiling would be hard to imagine. Many-paned French windows don’t go well with warped board sidewalks and lanterns hung on poles to serve as street lights.
Those windows greatly intrigued old Ben Sutler. He would sit forking his rangy skewbald and stare at them, shaking his white head and rumbling in his awesomely deep bass voice. Ben was a desert rat who had been prospecting for gold for more than half a century, and not finding it. He was nearing seventy and he and the black- and -white horse had been part of the scenery around Sotol for so long that nobody could recall the town without them.
The skewbald was Ben Sutler’s joy and pride. It had fire in its eye and the devil in its heart. It was a killer to everybody else, but in Ben’s hands it was as gentle as a lamb is supposed to be. It would do anything Ben told it to do, go anywhere he told it to go.
Ben Sutler had a way with all critters. Squirrels would eat out of his hands, coyotes crouch within the circle of his campfire light, Gila Monsters crawl around him without swelling up like pizened pups. Beansoup Perkins once told an awed audience in the Dun Cow, “And there was that old hellion settin’ on a rock with a dadblamed rattlesnake big ’round as my leg creepin’ up his arm. Snake reared up and looked Ben Sutler square in the eye and, gents, I’ve always heard tell that a snake can’t smile—but, gents, that snake was smilin’, or I’m a sheepherder!”
Beansoup Perkins was a person whose statements were not generally believed, but folks who had seen hummingbirds take crumbs from between Ben Sutler’s bearded lips were inclined to feel that for once Beansoup had made a mistake and told the truth.
Sotol drowsed sleepily in the early spring sunshine, and the skalleyhootin’ horseman hit the main street with a crash and a clatter and a yell like a panther with his tail caught in a crack. Up the street he bulged, white hair and white whiskers fanning it in the wind. Directly ahead was the Dun Cow, the panes of the French windows glinting in the sunlight.
Opposite the Dun Cow, the rarin’ skewbald made a fishhook turn. Old Ben Sutler howled like a Comanche with a new scalp that didn’t fit his own head. The skewbald answered with a ten-pig squeal—and old Ben sent him straight for the nearest pair of French windows.
There was a crash like a fair-sized mountain turning over onto a crockery store. The French windows went to blazes in a regular blizzard storm of smashed glass and splintered frames. Old Ben and the skewbald never stopped for so much as a splinter or a toothpick. The skewbald’s irons chugged on the hardwood floor, skittered, clawed. Clean across the room he skated, bringing up smack against the bar, snorting and foaming.
“Whoo-o-o-pee!” remarked old Ben, and mountain lions two miles back in the Guadalupes slunk for cover.
Old Sam Yelverton spouted out of the back room like a boiling over coffee-pot. “You spavin-hocked blankety-blank-blank!” he yelled. “You can’t bring that horse in here!”
“The heck I can’t” howled old Ben. “He’s here, ain’t he?”
“You mangy pelican! You’re crazy as popcorn on a hot stove!” screeched Sam. “Get him out of here! Look at my window!”
“To blazes with your window! I’ll buy you all the windows ’tween here and Heaven! Give me whiskey!”
“You couldn’t buy the foam off a glass of beer!” bawled Yelverton. “You ain’t seen a dollar for so long you forgot what an eagle looks like! Somebody hand me a shotgun!”
But old Ben let out another whoop, hauled a big buckskin sack from his saddle pouch, whirled it around his head and dumped it on the bar. A second later and you could have heard a pine needle drop on the roof of the Dun Cow.
The whole end of the bar was covered with big nuggets and hunks of “wire” gold!
There’s something about raw gold that sets men’s pulses to pounding. Men who are unmoved by a handful of minted double-eagles will grow deliriously excited over an equal amount of nuggets or dust. Here is something primal, elemental, the treasure of the dark places of the earth, born of fire and the travail and the awful shudderings of terrestrial upheavals. The molten yellow blood of the young world now frozen by the cold breath of years, ages and eons beyond number.
The bartender goggled at the pile. He choked, gurgled and finally broke the silence. “G-good gosh! Ben, where’d you get it?” he squeaked.
“Whiskey!” roared Mr. Sutler, uncompromisingly.
The barkeep scooped up a bottle, and his hand shook. Old Ben grabbed the bottle, knocked off the neck, clean as a diamond-cut, with his hand, and poured half of its contents down his throat.
“Whoo-o-pee!” he said again, and the hanging lamps jumped and jingled.
The barkeep scooped another quart. “Have another drink, old-timer, have two drinks!” he invited. “Belly up, gents, have one on the house!”
There was a concerted rush for the bar. Old Sam Yelverton voiced a thin wail of protest, but nobody heard or heeded him. They crowded around Sutler, sloshing glasses held high.
“Here’s to good old Ben!” they whooped. “Have one on me, Ben! Have another one!”
Old Ben gulped a swig from his bottle. His white beard wagged, opened in a grin of pleased content. His filmy little blue eyes gleamed and watered.
“Friends!” he opined. “All friends! Ev’body my friends!” He took another drink, looked mysterious, beamed on everybody present. “Going to let you all in on secret,” he declared. “Going to tell you where I got gold!”
The crowd drew closer, eyes flickering from the heap of nuggets on the bar to old Ben’s face.
“The sun shines bright on my ol’ Kaintucky home!” boomed Mr. Sutler, beating time with his nearly empty bottle. The crowd gave a hollow groan. Mr. Sutler smiled happily. “Gents, you’d never guess!” he chortled. “No, sir, you’d never guess!”
“We ain’t good at guessing, Ben,” somebody pleaded.
“Reckon that’s right,” Mr. Sutler agreed unexpectedly. “Ain’t going to make my friends guess, nohow. Gents, I got this gold out of the darndest hole in the Guadalupes. She come from Jericho Valley!”
There was a stunned silence. “But, Ben!” somebody protested at length, “there ain’t nothing in Jericho Valley but snakes and arsenic springs and falling rocks. Ain’t safe to even walk through there.”
“She come out of Jericho Valley,” old Ben reiterated stubbornly. “That’s where I got her. And there’s plenty more—more’n plenty more. Enough for the whole town, and then some. Rec’lect them shale banks down underneath the cliffs? Well, them shale banks are as thick with gold as a John Chinaman pudding is with raisins. That’s where I got her, gents. Help yourselves!”
The bartender suddenly shucked off his apron and tossed it under the bar. He went over the bar in one jump.
“Gents,” he bawled as he went through the swinging doors so fast the paint smoked, “gents, I’m resigning! Help yourselves!”
A wild yell greeted this announcement—and