Dead Men Singing by H. Bedford-Jones

Book Details

Dead Men Singing – Remember the Alamo! H. Bedford-Jones turns his massive story-telling talents to the Texas Revolution and the Battle of the Alamo. One hundred years after the Texas Revolution, Henry Bedford-Jones penned this paean to the heroes of Texas Freedom, the defenders of the Alamo.

The stories of Jim Bowie, Ben Milam and Davy Crockett are featured, along with James Fannin, William B. Travis and Sam Houston.

"We were hunters and politicians,
   soldiers, half-breeds and scouts,
Preachers and clerks and gentry,
   gamblers and country louts,
Lawyers and ciboleros,
   wandering to and fro—
And by God, sir, we fought for Texas
   a hundred years ago!"

"Yankees and courtly Spaniards,
   Tennessee mountaineers,
Creoles and Dutch and slavers
   (gentlemen in arrears)
Shoulder to shoulder gathered,
   answering blow with blow—
For by God, sir! We fought in Texas
   a hundred years ago!"

"We didn't have much book-learning,
   we knew the feel of dirt,
Some of us had fine manners
   and some of us lacked a shirt;
We could shoot or swing a broadaxe,
   handle a pick or hoe—
And by God, sir! We fought for Texas,
   a hundred years ago!"

"We gambled and chawed terbaccer,
   we did as we had a mind,
We'd fight for a horn of liquor,
   and we left our wives behind;
We scalped and we cussed and ranted,
   we could wrassle heel and toe—
And by God, sir! We wrassled for Texas
   a hundred years ago!"

Dead Men Singing – (1936)
The Men Who Fought For Texas A Hundred Years Ago
I. The Buffalo Hunter
II. The Seventh Child
III. The Jailbird
IV. The Rifleman

The Men Who Fought For Texas

Henry James O’Brien Bedford-Jones was born in Napanee, Ontario, Canada in 1887. After being encouraged to try writing by his friend, writer William Wallace Cook, Bedford-Jones began writing dime novels and pulp magazine stories. Bedford-Jones was an enormously prolific writer; the pulp editor Harold Hersey once recalled meeting Bedford-Jones in Paris, where he was working on two novels simultaneously, each story on its own separate typewriter.

Bedford-Jones wrote over 100 novels, earning him the nickname “King of the Pulps.”

Dead Men Singing has 14 illustrations.

Files:

1. HBJ-DeadMenSinging.epub

Excerpt: Dead Men Singing

I. The Buffalo Hunter

A  COLD, blowing night in Texas, near the Guadeloupe River. Dawn was threatening the pale stars. A strange singing sound reached me, yet for miles around was no human presence. Startled, incredulous, I listened.

Again and again, now fainter, now clearer, drifted the sound of voices. It came from nowhere, from everywhere; from the thin clouds, from the chaparral, from the very ground. Then suddenly the lilt grew upon me, the words became distinct, as though the singer were passing close by me but invisible:

"We were hunters and politicians,
   soldiers, half-breeds and scouts,
Preachers and clerks and gentry,
   gamblers and country louts,
Lawyers and ciboleros,
   wandering to and fro—
And by God, sir, we fought for Texas
   a hundred years ago!"

And then—I could have sworn to it— through the darkness from nowhere came a burst of rough, ribald, bawdy voices swelling and dying away again down the night upon a rush of ghostly hoof beats:

“Here’s to you, Cibolero, damn your eyes!”

Cibolero? The swing of the word fascinated me. What did it mean? What were these voices from the prairie? True, the Texan war for freedom had started close by here at Gonzales, in 1835, a hundred years ago.

•   •   •   •   •

THE Cibolero reined in his shaggy horse, alert for a repetition of the laugh. He was a rangy, thin-faced, bearded man, very brown, clad in ragged buckskin. His Comanche moccasins rasped in the wooden clogs of his Spanish stirrups. He held a long rifle poised across his saddlehorn, poised and cocked, ready.

The harsh laugh came again. Then a hideous, unspeakable scream that drove across the sunlight to chill the very blood.

Somewhere below lay the waterhole, invisible. Here the naked rocks blazed with heat. The entire Puercos Valley shimmered and danced with heat waves, clear to the hot blue mountains. The downpour of sunlight was parching, furious, intolerable.

“All right, stranger!” rose a voice. “Water up and welcome, but keep that rifle low. You’re covered.”

The Cibolero let his eager horse go on down the steep descent. The trail turned very sharply. The waterhole came into sight, twenty feet distant. The Cibolero halted dead, as another harsh laugh greeted him, and the scene.

“Bet ye never heard a ‘Pache holler afore! Well, this ‘un did.”

The Cibolero stared at a short, squat man of forty, wearing stained buckskin and an enormous sombrero wound with tarnished silver braid. Muttonchop whiskers, Mexican style, and small shrewd eyes flanked a huge hooked nose.

At this man’s feet lay a bound and naked Indian, still quivering, as a snake quivers long after life is extinct. At one side were two dead horses and an old, rickety wagon, and against the wheels lay four dead bodies—Mexicans, perhaps pulque hunters. Two men, a woman, a young girl, all naked and dead. The men were much cut up; Apache raiders believed in removing the source of future generations.

Excerpt From: H. Bedford-Jones. “Dead Men Singing.”