All Else Is Folly. Peregrine Acland

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      * * *

      As he lay, helpless, with his back on the bar-room floor, Alexander Falcon damned the face that grinned drunkenly down at him. He damned the reek of whisky which that face, barely twelve inches above his own, breathed into his nostrils. He damned the great hands that held down his shoulders. He damned, with the most extravagant flourishes of his imagination, the knee that dug into the pit of his stomach.

      He damned loud. He damned long. And as he cursed, he laughed.

      Tum-tum-tumtitum.… Tum-tum-tumtitum.

      The beating on the wood floor hammered in his ears.

      “The harlots of Jerusalem — the harlots of Jerusalem.”

      A score of voices bellowed to the stamping of their heels. Drunken heels. Spurred heels. Stamping on the floor. Up the room and down again. Across the room and back again. All around the bar-room floor.…

      Tum-tum-tumtitum.… Tum-tum-tumtitum.

      “The harlots of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Jerusalem,

      The harlots of Jerusalem — the pride of all the na — tions.”

      Falcon had a thought; an inspiration. His right leg was free. He lifted his spurred right heel. Swiftly, firmly, hard, he drove the spur into his enemy’s rump.

      Rage, anguish, bellowed from the face above. One of the ham-like hands that held Falcon’s shoulders sprang back to console the injured buttock.

      Falcon wrenched himself free, leaped to his feet.

      “Blast you, Alec!” the other roared as he, too, struggled up. “I’ll rub your nose in the dirt for that. You bastard! You ripped the seat out of my pants.”

      Cud Browne, the big bronc’ twister, laughed as he thundered. Laughed at his own plight. A bare-seated Berseker going into battle.

      He lunged at Falcon.

      But young Falcon, fresh from college in the East, had learned his rough-and-tumble in better places than bar-rooms.

      As Cud Browne hurled himself at him, Falcon swung his body from the waist to one side. Left one leg in Cud’s way. Caught him by the back of the shoulders as he stumbled by like a mad bull. Swung him over his hip to the floor.

      The cowboys stopped their square dance to cheer.

      Falcon stopped scrapping to bow.

      One moment too long.

      Heels over head he went, back to the floor.

      “Cowboys in town! Yip! Yip!” chortled Browne as he bounced his bare buttocks on Falcon’s belly.

      “Ugh! Ugh!” grunted Alec.

      With Browne’s hand gripping his nose, rubbing the back of his head in a beer puddle, Alexander Falcon meditated on the vanity of lust for adventure. Why wasn’t he at this moment at home, sitting in a large leather chair in a cool corner of his father’s library in the East, reading about the lovers of Oraly in George Moore’s “Memoirs of My Dead Life,” instead of …

      “Have a heart, Cud,” he protested.

      Cud said:

      “You gotta buy me a new pair of pants.”

      Before Falcon could promise anything, they were startled by the sound of hoof-beats. Not on the ground outside. On the floor. It must be somewhere on the floor of that one-story building. It seemed in their very ears.

      Then came shouts.

      A tremendous sound of ripping and tearing.

      A colossal crash.

      The floor on which they lay heaved.

      More shouts.

      The frightened whinnying of a horse.

      Still more uproarious shouting.

      Then —

      Crack — crack — crack!

      Above all the stupendous hubbub a forty-five barked out.

      One — two — three — four — five — six — seven — eight shots.

      It must be a pair of forty-fives talking closely together.

      Now, the sound of one man cheering!

      The two wrestlers disentangled themselves, leaped to their feet. The other cowboys were crowding pell-mell out of the bar-room, like a mob of steers trying to squeeze through the gate of a corral. Falcon and Cud Browne followed after. All were heading for the main hall of the hotel, towards the shouting and the shooting.

      As Falcon jostled with the others, pushing through the long, dark corridor that led from the barroom to the main hall, he was able to distinguish the cries that alternated with the shots.

      “More like Texas every day!”

      Crack!

      “Cowboys in town!”

      Bang!

      “More like Texas every day!”

      Crack!

      Browne said: “That’s Gyp Callahan shouting. What put him on the war-path?”

      But as the crowd of cowboys burst into the main hall, they, for a moment, could see no sign of Callahan.

      Before them stood only the red-faced, furious hotel proprietor.

      “Hey, Murphy, what have you done to Callahan?” Cud Browne, at the back, shouted threateningly over the heads of the cowboys as he shoved his way forward.

      “What have I done to Callahan?” Murphy, the red-faced hotel proprietor, stuttered with rage. “What has Callahan done to me?”

      Then Falcon and Browne, breaking through to the front of the crowd, saw Callahan … all that was left of him.

      In the centre, not of the floor but of an enormous hole in the middle of the floor, was the head of Callahan.

      A yard in front was the head of his horse.

      “More like Texas every day!” roared the head of Callahan.

      Click! click! went his now empty forty-fives as he aimed them at the ceiling.

      A door slammed. Spurs jingled. A voice thundered:

      “Who’s been doing all this shooting?”

      The cowboys turned their heads. A tall constable of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police had just closed the main door of the hotel behind him.

      “Constable Brazenose,” whispered Cud Browne to Falcon.

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