"A Whizzer on Willer Crick" is a comic Western tall tale narrated by cowpuncher Sleepy Stevens, sidekick to the lanky, unflappable Hashknife Hartley. The two drifting bronc-riders are, by their own sly admission, wanted men: earlier a mix-up in the towns of Yolo and Pecos left two unrelated outlaws riding matching pinto horses, both fleeing lawmen who mistook one crime spree for the other. Hashknife and Sleepy, guiltless but implicated by circumstance, keep their guns loose and their pasts vague. At a rodeo in Pemberton, the pair enters the bucking finals to win a prize saddle, drawing the outlaw broncs El Diablo and Gray Wolf. Mid-contest Sleepy spots one of the actual pinto-riding fugitives in the crowd; the two exchange a signal, spur their broncs off the track, and let the "unrideable" horses carry them in a wild, unplanned escape across open country, outrunning any pursuit. Riding cross-country, they lasso a runaway horse belonging to Glory, a sharp-tongued, gun-handy seventeen-year-old, their first encounter with the near-mythical clannishness of Willow Creek, a valley settled by intermarried Missouri families so tangled by cousin-marriages that no one can say who's related to whom. A Chinese cook warns them the district is "dam bad" and full of feuding kin, but the two ride in anyway. At a ranch house they find dying old rancher Ebenezer Godfrey, freshly shot, who with his last strength scrawls a will leaving his entire estate — ranch, cattle, and a copper mine — to the two strangers, purely to spite his own conniving relatives, chief among them Pete Godfrey and Jim Albright, who expected to inherit. When local toughs try to run the newcomers off, gunfire is exchanged, and the body mysteriously vanishes before witnesses can confirm the death, threatening to invalidate the will entirely since Willow Creek law requires proof of death. Hashknife and Sleepy learn from Glory that she is contracted to marry the loathsome Pete Godfrey once he inherits the ranch, a match arranged by feuding relatives to keep property "in the family." Hashknife tracks down and recovers Godfrey's hidden corpse himself, then stages an elaborate bluff: he and Sleepy bury seven boxes of the old man's dynamite in a mock grave topped with a comic epitaph, daring anyone to dig. When Albright and the local "lawyer" Sol Vane, along with Pete, attempt to exhume it to disprove the death, the charge detonates, obliterating Albright and Pete and leaving Sol Vane scorched, hairless, and half out of his wits. A tense standoff at a Willow Creek council meeting nearly ends in a lynching before Sleepy and Hashknife shoot their way free with the help of Glory's father, Sillman, who despises the valley's inbred clannishness. Sillman proposes a scheme: whichever of the two cowboys marries Glory and immediately leaves the country will collect a $500 reward from her wealthy, estranged uncle, freeing her from Willow Creek's marriage plot without shaming her father. The two friends cut cards for the privilege — Sleepy loses again to his unlucky "seven of clubs" — and Hashknife rides off with Glory to be married. Sleepy, evading Willow Creek riders and the arriving county sheriff, escapes cross-country and reunites with Hashknife at the crossroads signpost warning of the valley's feuding "click." Hashknife reveals he neither married Glory nor collected the money: her uncle unexpectedly turned out to be Sheriff Luke of Yolo — the very lawman who has been hunting the two of them since the pinto-horse mix-up — turning their entire scheme, and their unlikely inheritance, into one last practical joke on Willow Creek.
By W. C. Tuttle · First published 1920 · Genre: Western, Humorous Fiction, Adventure