You Ask Anybody

Author of “Cow Country,” “The Quirt,” Etc.

[Transcriber’s Note: This story appeared in the December 7, 1920 issue of The Popular Magazine.]

Tumultuous “Casey” Ryan had driven horses since he could stand on his toes, and as one of Nevada’s last stage-drivers speed was his middle name. Wherefore the ubiquitous Ford finally claimed him for its own—and so did The Widow at Lucky Lode Mine. A combination prolific of complications. You will be glad to continue Casey’s acquaintance in future numbers.

From Denver to Spokane, from El Paso to Butte, men talk of “Casey” Ryan and smile as they speak his name. Bearded men with the flat tone of age in their voices will suck pipes and cackle reminiscently while they tell you of Casey’s tumultuous youth—time when he drove the fastest six horses in Colorado to the stage line out from Cripple Creek, and whooped past would-be holdups with a grin of derision on his lips and bullets whining after him, and his passengers praying and clinging white-knuckled to the seats.

Once a flat-chested, lank man climbed out at the stage station below the mountain and met Casey coming off the box with whip and six reins in his hand.

“Sa-ay! Next time that gang starts in to hold up the stage, by gosh, you stop! I’d ruther be shot than pitched off into a cañon som’eres.”

Casey paused and looked at him, and spat and grinned. “You’re here, ain’t yuh?” he retorted finally. “You ain’t shot, and you ain’t laying in no cañon. Any time a man gets shot outa Casey’s stage, it’ll be because he jumps out and waits for the bullet to ketch up.”

The lank man snorted and reached under his coat tail for the solacing, plug of chewing tobacco. “Why, hell, man, you come down around that hairpin turn, up there, on two wheels!” he complained.

Casey grunted and turned away uninterested. “I’ve done it on one,” he belittled the achievement. “The leaders wasn’t runnin’ good, to-day. That nigh one’s tenderfooted. I gotta see about havin’ him shod before the next trip.” He started off, then paused to fling reassurance over his shoulder. “Don’t you never worry none about Casey’s driving. Casey can drive. You ask anybody.”

Well, that was Casey’s youth. Part of it. The rest was made up of reckless play, fighting for the sheer love of action, love that never left a scar across his memory and friendships that laughed at him, laughed with him, and endured to the end. Along the years behind him he left a straggling procession of men, women, and events, that linked themselves reminiscently in the memory of those who knew him. “Remember the time Casey licked that Swede foreman up at Gold Gap?” one would say. “Remember that little girl Casey sent back to her folks in Vermont—and had to borrow the money to pay her fare, and then borrow the money to play poker to win the money to pay back what he borrowed in the first place? Borrowed a hundred dollars from Ed Blair, and then borrowed another hundred off Ed the next day and boned Ed to set into a game with him, and won the money off Ed to pay Ed back. That’s Casey for yuh!”

As for the events, they were many and they had the Casey flavor, every one of them. A few I should like to tell you, and I’m going to begin with one which shows how Casey was born an optimist and never let life get the better of him, no matter what new wallop it invented.

From the days when his daily drives were apt to be interrupted by holdups—and once by a grizzly that rose up in front of his leaders on a sharp turn and all but made an end of Casey and his record for shaving death close and never drawing blood—Casey drifted from mountain to desert, from desert to plain, blithely meeting hard luck face to face and giving it good day as if it were a friend. That was the remarkable trait which Casey possessed. Nothing downed him, because he never seemed to know when he was whipped, but thought it merely an incident of the game. Cheerfulness was in the bones of him—though he had a temper as Irish as his name.

So, in time, it happened that Casey was driving stage from Pinnacle down to Lund and making boast that his four horses could beat any automobile that ever infested the trail. Infest was the word Casey would have used often had he known the dictionary contained it. Having been deprived of much knowledge of books, but having a facile imagination and some creative ability, Casey invented words of his own and applied them lavishly to all automobiles and, in particular and emphatically, he applied the spiciest ones to Fords.

Put yourself in Casey’s place and sympathize with him. Imagine yourself with a thirty-mile trip down a twisty, rough mountain road built in the days when men hauled ore down the mountain on wagons built to bump over rocks without damage to anything but human bones. You never stopped for stage robbers or grizzlies in the past, and you have your record as the hardest driver in the West to maintain. You pop the lash over the heads of your leaders and go whooping down a long, straight bit of road where you count on making time. And when you are away halfway down and the four horses are at a gallop and you are happy, around the turn below comes a Ford, rattling its various joints, trying to make the hill in “high.”

More likely than not, the driver honks his horn at you to turn out—and you are Casey Ryan, of whom men talk from El Paso to Butte, from Denver to Spokane. Wouldn’t you writhe, and wouldn’t you swear, and wouldn’t you hate the man who invented Fords? Yet you would turn out. You would have to, unless the Ford did—and Fords don’t. A Ford will send a twin-six swerving to the rocky rim of a road, and even Casey Ryan must swing his leaders to the right in obedience to that raucous challenge.

Casey had the patience of all optimists, and for a long while he had contented himself with his vocabulary and the record he held of making the thirty miles from Pinnacle to Lund in the same time a Ford would make it. He did not, by the way, say what his stage cost him in repairs, nor did he mention the fact that Lund and Pinnacle citizens rode with him once and then never again, and that his passengers were mostly strangers picked up at the railroad station at Lund because they were tickled with the picturesque four-horses-and-Casey stage. He had never killed anybody with his record, but he had almost.

Once Casey did not turn out. That morning he had been compelled to stop and whip a heavy man who came up and berated him because the heavy man’s wife had ridden from Pinnacle to Lund the day before, and had fainted at the last turn, and had not revived in time to catch the train for Salt Lake, which she had been anxious to catch; so anxious that she had ridden down with Casey rather than take the narrow-gauge train which carried ore and passengers and mail to Lund every day, arriving when most convenient to the train crew.

Casey had managed to whip the husband, but the difference in weight had given him the victory by a narrower margin than Casey liked. Besides, the fight delayed him so that he started out ten minutes late. He was reflecting upon the injustice of the case, and asking himself if he, Casey, were to blame because a woman fainted inconveniently and missed her train, and had answered emphatically that he was not, and that he would like to have given her husband another good punch, and would have given it, if he’d had the time—when the Ford came chugging around the turn and honked at him impertinently.

Casey popped his whip, yelled and charged straight down the road. He would make that Ford turn out, or bust something. He would show them that Casey was Casey Ryan. Wherefore Casey was presently extricating his leaders from his wheelers, ten feet below the grade. On the road above, the Ford stood still with one front fender cocked up rakishly and a headlight smashed, mulishly balking while the driver cranked and cranked and swore down at Casey, who squinted into the sun that he might see the man he likewise cursed.

They were a long while there exchanging disagreeable opinions of one another. When the leaders had veered to the edge of the grade at the last second before the collision, and the wheelers had responded, the left front wheel of the stage did something to the Ford. It would not start, and Casey finally freed his four horses, mounted one and led the others and so proceeded to Lund, as mad a little Irishman as Lund ever beheld.

“That settles it,” he snorted when the town came into view in the flat below. “They’ve pushed Casey off’n the grade for the first time and the last time! What pushin’ and crowdin’ and squawkin’ is done from now on, it’ll be Casey that’s doin’ it—mind what I’m telling yuh, now! Faint? I’ll learn ’em what to faint over. They can’t hand it to Casey. They never did and they never will. If it’s Fords goin’ to rule the country from now on, and take the road away from the horses, you can climb a tree if yuh like, and watch how Casey’ll drive the livin’ tar outa one! Go ’em one better—that’s Casey Ryan, and you can go tell ’em I said so. Hawnk! Wait till yuh hear the hawnkin’ Casey’ll be doin’!”

I tell you his horses knew the mind of Casey and all his fell purpose by the time he rode into town and up to one of those ubiquitous “Ford Agencies” that write their curly tailed blue lettering in one endless chain from the high nose of Maine to the shoulder of Cape Flattery.

“Gimme one of them gol-darned blankety bing-bing Ford autymobils,” he commanded the garage owner who came to meet Casey amicably, in his shirt sleeves. “Here’s four horses I’ll trade yuh, with what’s left of the harness. And up at White Ghost turn you’ll find a good wheel off the stage, ’t I’ll make yuh a present of.” He slid down from the sweaty back of his horse and stood bow-legged and determined before the garage owner.

“Well—there ain’t much sale for horses, Casey, and I ain’t got a place to keep ’em, nor anything to feed ’em. I’ll sell yuh a Ford.”

Casey glanced over his shoulder to make sure the horses were standing quietly, dropped the bridle rein and advanced a step, his Irish eyes fixed upon the face of the other.

“You trade,” he stated flatly.

The Ford man backed a little. “Sure, Casey. What yuh want for the four, just as they stand?”

Casey did not trouble with triumph. He continued to forge straight at his object. “Me? I want a Ford autymobil. I want you to put on the biggest horn you got, so I c’n be heard from here to Pinnacle and back in one hawnk. And run the damn thing out here and show me how it works, and how often yuh gotta wind it and when. I’ve got my stage line to take care of, and I’ve missed a run on account of being pushed off’n the road. I’ll sign papers tonight when I get in. Show me the biggest horn yuh got.”

Thus was the trade effected, with much speed and few preliminaries, because the garage man knew Casey well, and had seen him in action when his temper was up. He adjusted a secondhand horn he happened to have; one of those terrific things warranted to lift a medium-sized man off his feet at one hundred yards or money refunded. Casey tried it out on himself, walking down the street several doors and standing with his back turned while the garage man squawked at him.