Lay that pistol down

Korero (AEWS), Volume 2, Issue 18, 11 September 1944, Page 25

Lay that pistol down

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From the Atlantic Monthly, April, 1944

At the bar of the Silver Dollar Saloon the boys from the Tumbling-T Ranch are watching Black Dalton and the Pecos Kid. They know that only death can sunder the chain of hate between those two. “ Black Dalton,” says the Kid evenly, scarcely parting his thin lips, “ draw ! Dalton, his hand cautiously distant from his hip, shakes his head. “ I ain’t swappin’ lead agin’ the Pecos Kid—not Black Dalton.” “ Like I thought,” rasps the Kid. “ More like you to dry-gulch a waddy, yah yaller-gilled dehorn ! Dalton, goaded to the quick, gnaws his mustache and fingers the diamond horseshoe in his cravat. The Kid, his, cold gaze never veering from the shifting eyes of his adversary, rolls himself a smoke, completing the operation with one hand. “Yer wastin’ yer time, Pecos,” Black Dalton snarls. “ I know that one. Yer temptin’ me to draw, but I ain’t doin’ it.” Baffled, the Kid half turns to the bar and pours himself a moderate hooker (four fingers). He picks the glass up with his right hand, but like lightning he wheels in mid-gesture. The Colt in his left hand blazes once and Black Dalton staggers back, a bullet between his eyes. A derringer clatters out of his treacherous hand, limp in death. He is cold as a smelt. The Pecos Kid, his cigarette dangling from his lower lip, picks up his glass and holds the fiery rye up to the light. “ This’n,” he says, “ this’n is on the late Mr. Dalton.”

He swallows the drink in one gulp and smashes the glass against the back bar. Then with easy grace he turns to the door, his lithe back a target for any cowardly ball. But none dare shoot. The fear of his swift, deadly guns is still upon them. Those who have witnessed that scene or its equivalent in the movies are well advised to treasure its memory. Its like will not be seen again, for it is now the Gotterdammerung of the centaur who spoke with a six-gun in each hand and never gave an order twice. It is the hour of twilight for the Western Hero. And the bicycle racks in front of the Little Gem and Bijou theatres throughout the land are empty in token of adolescent lament for his passing. The Pecos Kid has been succeeded by a milk-fed man of parts —one part Sir Galahad, one part Chevalier Bayard, and two parts Model Youth. This one has yet to pistol his first man, drink his first tumbler of anything headier than lime coke, utter his first cuss, or, for that matter, embrace one female who is not his mother. He is not a refined version of that nonpareil of sagebrush derring-do, but an entirely new specimen from the soles of his eighty-five-dollar custom boots to the crown of his fifty-dollar dovecoloured Stetson. He is the Singing Cowboy, a laboratory product, designed jointly by the Producers Association (otherwise called the Hays Office), the Congress of Parents and Teachers, the American Legion Auxiliary, the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, the Legion of Decency, and forty-four State Censorship Boards.

When the Pecos Kid strode the screen, evil was not mere mischief and its perpetrators were double-dyed scoundrels. There was no shriving for their sins except bloodletting, and the Kid was there to administer. When they committed robbery, they did it with pistols and invariably left gory and incontrovertible evidence upon the floor of the First Drovers’ and Cattlemen’s Bank. When Black Dalton (or Ace Simmons or Hole-card Beaucaire) lusted after Florabel, the Prairie Nightingale, he panted, pawed, and knocked the furniture over. He was pressing kisses that carried a 125-pound head of steam on her throat when the Kid let him have it, from both guns— without, of course, the punctilio of calling upon him to draw. The Pecos Kid was often launched upon the screen at the working end of the Vigilantes’ rope. The devotee of the Western knew that there were two methods by which he could denoose himself : a confederate could shoot the rope apart with a bullet at the instant of the Kid’s strangulation ; or the Kid would ask the final solace of a condemned Western hero—a dram. “ Pass him up a flask of mouthwhiskey,” the Vigilante leader would direct. The Kid swigged to the count of nine. His cheeks puffed out like an ape’s. Suddenly he’d expel the whiskey in a stinging spray. There were flurries, howls, and curses, reaching for guns, and a random fusillade. But the Kid was well away, pouring leather into his cayuse. Try that with a lemon phosphate. The Pecos Kid, weary, dusty, and unshorn, having traversed a trail strewn with the skulls of buffler, would enter a settlement. He was never indiscreet enough to inquire, “ What’s the name of this town, pardner ? ” because the invariable reply would be, “ We don’t ask names hereabouts, stranger. We stay —or we ramble.” Nor did he ever give his name. Instead, he was recognized, usually by the fleetness of his draw in his first encounter with a henchman of the villain, who in turn was advised of the advent of the Kid into these precincts. The plot began to simmer with the villain’s invocation, “ Hmmm.

So it’s the Pecos Kid. Ridin’ a apronfaced bronc, Huh ? Well, I'll fix his wagon ! ” The Kid would be found eating ham and eggs in The Chinaman’s. Why always ham and eggs and always in a restaurant operated by a Chinese, the deponent is not prepared to say. But that’s the way it was. Not always was Black Dalton the proprietor of the Silver Dollar Saloon. Sometimes he was Lafe Dalton, Indian agent; Si Dalton, the crooked banker ; Hank Dalton, sheriff of Lop Ear County ; or Lame Elk De-Aw-La-Ton, leader of a bank of marauding Navajo that had busted off the reservation and were taking a census of the white settlers by scalp. In some pictures he was Ponsonby Smythe-Dalton who swore by his hypothecated coronet that, damme, he was going to run sheep on land hitherto sacred to horned cattle, egad.

Organized lawlessness was an essential ingredient of the Western movie for a generation. When the industry and civic agencies realized that the audiences for these films included millions of Mexicans, British, South and Central Americans, they abolished criminal conspiracy by manifesto and directive. A sheriff could no longer, under any circumstances, work in concert with a theiving band. At worst, he could only be honestly mistaken. Indians took the warpath only up to 1879 ; hence any picture in which the aborigine takes up arms must make it clear that nothing like that happens now ; that the Navajo peacefully weaves rugs for the Fred Harvey tourist trade and the Apache handles a wholesale line of prime mutton.

A speech such as this serves to make the point more than amply lucid : ‘‘ Me friend to Crazy Dog people. Me travel many moons to say to Chief, put um pistol down chief, put um pistol down ! Smoke calumet with Paleface brother. If not do, Great White Father Rutherford B. Hays send um long rifles. I have spoken.” Crime can no longer be done in concert; but it is still permissible in a duet—one villain, one henchman. Neither of these may be a Mexican any longer, for obvious good-neighbourly reasons. Pablo, Jiminez, or Ildefonso is frequently cast, in the modern Western, as the ally and devoted friend of the hero, a model of dignified conduct and elegant deportment.

After the picturization of high crime had been thoroughly bowdlerized, the movies found to their confusion that the hero himself was no meekling. He still shot to kill and never missed. Something had to be done about that. The lag between the reformation of the villain and the continued bloodthirstiness of the hero

had to be taken up. Then for a period the hero had to content himself with merely getting the drop on his adversaries, disarming and sometimes whipping them. However, the frequent show of pistols and the infrequency of firing them was a recognizably false note in a proper Western. It were better, the producers reasoned, if the hero carried no guns at all. They gave him instead, a guitar (pronounced gitter They tailored him to the nines and barbered him until he glowed a cherry red. The Pecos Kid would have shot him on sight. The Kid in his day rode anything that had four legs and hair. Occasionally when it was fractious, he’d growl, ” Whoa, yah jughead ! Stan’ quiet, or

I’ll let yuh have one on the honker.” But it was obvious that the new hero couldn’t ride a common hoss, a bronc, or even a critter. It had to be a Sunday hoss, caparisoned in a thousand dollars’ worth of saddle and tack, resplendent with silver filigree. This photogenic animal, like his master, now has a double who does the more perilous riding for him. He arrives on location in a padded van and eats nothing but irradicated barley soaked in sherry. Upon this palfrey, the latter-day Western hero, accompanied by a comic aide, rides into the picture. He no longer enters that Xanadu of the horseopera, the Western Town, but a flourishing prairie village complete with a handsome placard : “ Welcome to the Incor-

porated 1 own oi Happy Valley. Lions Club Meets Tuesdays 12.15 at Himmelfarb’s Cafe.” Nobody calls him “ Stranger ” or snarls at him, “ Better keep movin’, cow-prod. Nobody in Singing Skull asts to see Cameo Dalton. If it wasn’t he sent for you, bust brush and save yer pelt whole.” There is a saloon, of course, in Happy

Valley, but the drinking is done with genteel sleight-of-hand, so that the audience never sees the passage of glass to lip. The Singing Cowboy knows that this is the cocktail hour and it is here that he finds J. Pedley Dalton, banker, realtor, and secretary to the Junior Trade Council. Dalton has been identified by a kindly citizen as receiver-in-bankruptcy of the Rancho de los Quantros Ladrones. The Pecos Kid would have asked for a job by simply stating that he’d hung his poncho on a vacant nail in the bunkhouse and is willing to let it hang there for the customary forty dollars a month and chuck; otherwise he’ll drift, and no harm done. The Singing Cowboy, however, after properly declining a drink, a smoke, and the blandishments of a

nearby siren, introduces himself as *‘a graduate of the Kaupocks Institute of Animal Husbandry, Class of '39, more concerned with future prospects than size of starting salary.”

Naturally, J. ... , . r , n -r\ ix • A model of elf. Pedley Dalton sees m ' this newcomer a tool in the scheme he is even now brewing to gain possession of the ranch and its secret vein of high-test gibonium, an essential ingredient in the manufacture of tooth-paste. The Singing Cowboy arrives at the Rancho just as the fiesta is beginning. It is apparent that this is what’s wrong with the Rancho de los Quatros Ladrones—too much fiesta and too little work.

When he has finished the second verse of “ My Pearl of the Purple Sunset,” Senorita Caramela de las Pimientas Negras is nigh aswoon. The tide of her Castilian blood ebbs and flows with love — and fear. Can it be ? She, the daughter of the hidalgos, and this simple cowboy ? No, it cannot. For five more reels he rides and he sings. He talks, too, but

more than two lines of dialogue in one speech leaves him somewhat dished. He uncovers the plot and restores to the Senorita Caramela the yellowed parchment grant in perpetuity to the Rancho, with the signature of His Most

Catholic Majesty, Ferdinand, upon it. He has shot at nobody, and no one has shot at him. His weapon was bel canto, and with it he softened the heart of the villain to contrition. Black Dalton has confessed so convincingly and with such fervour that Senorita Caramela consents to marry him. The Singing Cowboy sings again. The music follows him out to the corral where he mounts Old Paint. Caramela, her nuptial mantilla whipped by the zephyr of her flight, runs to him. “ Shore, miss,” he says. “ Shore. I ain’t got no objection to kissin' the bride.” He rides west. Always west. Into the sunset, singing for the last time? —a dirge, slightly on the hot side.