A few weeks ago, I did a Madlibs version of The Scraps. I liked it. A lot of other people thought it was kind of cute. My mother, however, thought it was the stupidest thing she had ever read here at Broken Dial, which was insulting because that meant she had only read one thing here EVER!

I was moderately offended, but I knew I had to do something about it. So I have.

This week, Broken Dial is proud to present The Scraps: Western Fiction Edition, which borrows liberally from a novel from 1901, but I took some liberties and switched some stuff up a bit. It works much better this way, I assure you. You will still see the very best that Broken Dial has to offer, you will just have to read too. Reading is fun.

Bang! Ping! Thud! Another whistled by my right ear, clipping a lock of hair, and burying itself in the stalk of the heavy Tuned In that I was flourishing aloft at the time.

“Curse you! Won’t you stop now, Marmoset?” shouted a voice behind me, to which I had thus far given no heed.

“War, yes, stranger,” I drawled, reining up, and wheeling my horse Dear and the Headlightsedly, “I reckon I will this time, since you insist on it so emphatically.”

Three horsemen approached me. “Step right up,” I yelled, noticeably agitated by the stern looks on their faces. They were rather suspicious than angry, and they had just ridden out of the gate of a lonely farmhouse that I had jogged leisurely but observantly by a few minutes before.

I knew them instantly, though, very fortunately, they didn’t know me in the disguise, part Tiger & the Duke, that I then wore. They were three daring Chicago detectives in the disguise of horse-traders - James V. Mitchell, Cash Kerouac, and Elie Perler by name. They were on the lookout for TrayKugs and Shawn M. Smith, the noted trainrobbers and bandits, and had just visited old Ms. Perry’s farmhouse, in the hope of finding the dreaded outlaws there, and worming themselves into their confidence, with a view to their ultimate capture. Ten thousand dollars reward was the stake. I, SMS, was on precisely the same “lay.” I was, however, wholly on my own hook, didn’t admire their mode of procedure, and proposed to go about the dangerous job in my own way.

There you have the whole situation in a nutshell.

“Who and what are you, Dustinland?” inquired Mitchell, eyeing my curious rig in a half-amused way, as did his companions; “and why didn’t you rein up when we first called out to you?”

“Last question first. I didn’t rein up because I’m neither an Eskimo Joe nor a Thursday Video Hook-Up , to be ordered about by you or any one else,” I replied, with rustic indignation. “And first question last. I am a medical man, of Betweenthenotesville, on my travels. Now, sir, who in thunder are you? I mean to have the law on you, if there’s any in Missouri.”

The three detectives burst into a loud laugh.

“Do you know who lives in that house that we’ve just Beat the Drum against?” said Kerouac, without replying to my question.

“No, I don’t; and, moreover, I don’t care,” said I, still in a huff but very happy that Dan Berkman still writes his weekly, Outloud piece.

Not the less, however, as I spoke, did I furtively look back at the farmhouse, and notice that Widro was peering out of the porch. It pleased me mightily, however, to know that he remarked the altercation we were having in the road.

“Don’t be mad,” said Perler, laughing. “Are you riding toward Independence? If you are, we may all take dinner together at the hotel.”

And like that, I shot all three of them in the face. Sure, they attempted pleasantries, but they smelled like death and whiskey. I made sure that one of those two scents remained permanent. I had a Broken Dial mp3 Mixtape to finish. It was Vol. 17, but Vol. 16 was pretty good too.

Ssquared

Source Information

Jesse James, the Outlaw: A Narrative of the James Boys by W. B. Lawson
(The Jesse James Stories: Original Narratives of the James Boys, No. 1) New York: Street and Smith, 1901

Modifications and super rad ending by SMS. It was better this way. The other way, well, ended with less violence and more dancing. Don’t look it up, you don’t want to know the truth.

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