"A Bull Movement in Yellow Horse" by W. C. Tuttle is a comic Western tall tale about two cowhands whose impulsive purchase of a circus elephant plunges a small mountain town into chaos. Drifters Cobalt Williams and Slim Hawkins, tracking enormous unidentified footprints toward the town of Yellow Horse, encounter Buckley, a stranded circus man riding Frederick the First, the last surviving animal of his defunct one-ring circus. Talked into believing the elephant is a versatile beast of burden, the pair buy Frederick for two hundred dollars and, unable to resist showing off something the town has never seen, ride him double straight into Buck Masterson's saloon during a poker game. Frederick, who despises the smell of liquor, promptly demolishes the bar, scatters the patrons, hurls pool balls through the doorway, and shoulders through the back wall. A runaway rampage follows through Yellow Horse: he stampedes hitched horses, unseats their riders, wrecks the post office porch (terrifying the postmistress), and drinks from the creek, where Cobalt and Slim briefly try to ride him again before being dumped in the water. Seizing the moment, the two commandeer the abandoned horses of their pursuers and flee across the state line as accidental horse thieves, marveling ruefully at Frederick's destructive "affection." Some days later, the men wake hungover and disoriented in a corral, their memories of the intervening time a blank, only to find Buck Masterson standing over them with a drawn six-gun. Rather than shooting them, Masterson demands they return and remove the elephant, which has continued wrecking Yellow Horse in their absence: torn-down fences, a vanished hitching rack and town pump, a buckboard hoisted onto a roof for safekeeping, and a cow-shed relocated to save it. Cobalt and Slim agree to go back as reluctant "Go Getters" in exchange for amnesty. In town they find Frederick barricaded in a shed that is buckling under his weight. When he breaks loose, panic erupts again: Slim vaults a fence in a spectacular but painful hand-spring, landing on two townsmen, while Cobalt is pinned to the ground under the elephant's trunk, saved only because Frederick grows skittish and merely toys with him. Just as Slim manages to calm the animal by gentleness, a pack rat spooks it into a fresh stampede, and Frederick collides with a wagon carrying the local judge, badly injuring him. With the judge's fate uncertain, the furious townspeople lock Cobalt and Slim in an old adobe jailhouse to await a doctor's verdict, debating whether to hang them. That night, Frederick tracks the men to the jail and inadvertently frees them by pulling down its walls while investigating the window. The two escape on foot into the darkness and start up a narrow, dangerous mountain trail too risky for horses, hoping finally to be rid of both the town and the elephant. But Frederick follows them onto the same treacherous path. From their vantage point above, Cobalt and Slim watch his shadow creep along the trail below until a rattle of loose stone and a muffled cry mark his fall into the gorge. Slim removes his hat and pronounces a mock-solemn "Requiescat in pace," and the story closes on the pair's dry, affectionate epitaph for the elephant whose "affection" made outlaws of them both.
By W. C. Tuttle · Genre: Western, Comedy, Adventure