Hopalong Cassidys Rustler Round-Up | Page 3

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Etext prepared by Andrew Heath

Hopalong Cassidy's Rustler Round-Up (BAR-20)
by Clarence Edward Mulford

1906


CHAPTER I
Buckskin
The town lay sprawled over half a square mile of alkali plain, its main
Street depressing in its width, for those who were responsible for its
inception had worked with a generosity born of the knowledge that
they had at their immediate and unchallenged disposal the broad lands
of Texas and New Mexico on which to assemble a grand total of twenty
buildings, four of which were of wood. As this material was scarce, and
had to be brought from where the waters of the Gulf lapped against the
flat coast, the last-mentioned buildings were a matter of local pride, as

indicating the progressiveness of their owners.
These creations of hammer and saw were of one story, crude and
unpainted; their cheap weather sheathing, warped and shrunken by the
pitiless sun, curled back on itself and allowed unrestricted entrance to
alkali dust and air. The other shacks were of adobe, and reposed in that
magnificent squalor dear to their owners, Indians and Mexicans.
It was an incident of the Cattle Trail, that most unique and stupendous
of all modern migrations, and its founders must have been inspired with
a malicious desire to perpetrate a crime against geography, or else they
reveled in a perverse cussedness, for within a mile on every side lay
broad prairies, and two miles to the east flowed the indolent waters of
the Rio Pecos itself. The distance separating the town from the river
was excusable, for at certain seasons of the year the placid stream
swelled mightily and swept down in a broad expanse of turbulent,
yellow flood.
Buckskin was a town of one hundred inhabitants, located in the valley
of the Rio Pecos fifty miles south of the Texas-New Mexico line. The
census claimed two hundred, but it was a well-known fact that it was
exaggerated. One instance of this is shown by the name of Tom Flynn.
Those who once knew Tom Flynn, alias Johnny Redmond, alias Bill
Sweeney, alias Chuck Mullen, by all four names, could find them in the
census list. Furthermore, he had been shot and killed in the March of
the year preceding the census, and now occupied a grave in the young
but flourishing cemetery. Perry's Bend, twenty miles up the river, was
cognizant of this and other facts, and, laughing in open derision at the
padded list, claimed to be the better town in all