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Badland's Bill is a fictitious ol'
coot that came a-wonderin’ up outta the lower watershed area of my mind several years ago. Near
as I kin tell he’s been around for more’n 150 years now. Most of them years he's been pretty
much a loner a-livin' up an' down the Devil's River, out in the Dry River Country of West Texas,
an’ to have spent a spell of about thirty years with the Comanche. 'Course, that wuz before Col.
Mackenzie rounded 'em up an' corralled 'em on the reservations in Oklahoma. Badlands even claims
to have been a right fierce warrior, too.
I'll never forget the first time I
saw him comin' up outta the draw a-leadin' that ol' sway-back Paint gelding of his, he called Mala
Swerte (that's Spanish fer "Bad Luck"). They looked like racks of bones with hides
stretched over 'em! I was cowboyin' fer the Juno Ranch an' a-fixin' fence along the Dry Devils'
that day when he come up outta the draw on the other side of the fence. Said he'as a-lookin' fer
work an' that he'd been driftin' up and down El Rio Diablo (Devil's River) a-doin' day-work an'
odd jobs. He allowed as I could ask any of the ranchers an’ folks who trade regular over at the
Juno Store, an' they could give ref'rence.
Well, we took 'im on an I kept him
up at the bunkhouse for a spell to teach him a thang or two about the social graces. Shoot! He
wadn't fit company to be ‘round gentle folk. I got to know ol’ Bill pretty good durin' the
time he wuz hired-on. Seein’s as how I could write an' wuz a-lookin' fer somethin' to write
about, he asked me to put down some of his stories. So, I've been keepin’ ‘em put-up an' in a
collection called, "The Life and Legends of Badlands Bill".
One of the stories I'm sorta
partial-to happened about the time he quit a-punchin’ Longhorns an’ drivin’ ‘em up the
trail. That wuz around nineteen ought-one or ought-two. Bill drifted into Juno durin' it's hey-day
an' as you’ll see, it’s little wonder why he’s kinda skittish about the queer ways of
town-folk an' why he is the way he is around 'em …
Click here to read what I'm
a-tawkin' about -->
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