Pecos Bill and the Mustang 

Harold W. Felton 


Did you ever hear of Pecos Bill? 

He was a cowboy. The first cowboy. 

He invented cowboys and everything about them and he became the hero of all the other rootin’-tootin’, high-falootin’, straight-shootin’ cowboys. 

He could shoot a bumblebee in the eye at sixty paces, and he was a man who was not afraid to shake hands with lightning. 

But before he became a man, he was a boy, and before he was a boy, he was a baby. 

That seems only reasonable, doesn’t it? 

Bill was born a long time ago, away out in the wild and woolly west. 

It was so long ago the sun was only about the size of a dime. Of course, money went farther in those days, so naturally a dime was bigger than it is now. 

Bill always obeyed his parents. They used to say he was the best child they ever saw, and that was quite a compliment because he had seventeen brothers and sisters. 

One day, Bill’s family saw smoke from a new neighbor’s chimney. It was beyond the river and two hills but Bill’s paw allowed the country was getting too crowded. Bill’s maw agreed. They liked plenty of elbowroom, so they decided to move farther west. 

So they loaded their wagon with all their household goods and their eighteen children, and off they went over the Texas plains, across the rivers, and over the mountains and the valleys. 

They came to the Pecos River and crossed it. Then the left hind wheel hit a prairie-dog hole. The wagon lurched, and Bill fell out. 

He landed headfirst on a rock. The rock broke into a thousand pieces, and Bill’s head was bruised, a little. 

The wagon juggled and rumbled away into the distance, toward the setting sun. 

When Bill came to, he didn’t know where he was or who he was. He didn’t know what to do or how to do it. 

He didn’t remember a single thing about his life, his maw and paw, or his seventeen brothers and sisters. 

He was all alone on the west bank of the Pecos River in West Texas. 

He didn’t know his age, either, so no one knows exactly how old he was. But he was a little shaver, only about half as high as the withers of a pinto pony.   

An old coyote rescued him. The coyote’s name was El Viejo, which means “old man” in Spanish. 

El Viejo didn’t know what the little boy’s name was or what to call him. Finally, he called him Pecos Bill, and took him to live with the coyotes. 

So Pecos Bill grew up with the coyotes. He learned to walk like a coyote. He learned to talk like a coyote. He thought he was a coyote. That was only natural, considering that he had lost his memory when he fell out of the wagon and broke the rock into a thousand pieces and bruised his head, a little. 

His playmates were coyote pups. He wrestled with them and they yipped and yapped and growled playfully at him and nipped each other. 

Bill learned to howl at the moon. He learned to scratch his ear with his foot, and he could run fast enough to catch a rabbit. 

When he got older he could run down an antelope without losing his breath.  

(page 1)

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