"Well, up against this squeeze-spindle plant goes this here Jink McAtee that I started to tell you about. Jink wasn’t then known as a horse-thief. He had been a sooner—he got in long before the trumpet call on a thoroughbred Kentucky horse that he was afterward found to have pinched out of a barn—and he had made a pretty good thing out of the Guthrie corner lot that he had staked off. He sold it three days after the dash for $6000, and then he laid back on his liquor with a whole lot of content. He was a low forehead in looks and manners. He was the veriest duffer in his attempts to make the Reeves-Pendleton combination put up their shutters by attacking their square games, and he lost over $3000 of his corner-lot money at their faro tables. He blew in another couple of thousand of the bunch at the honkatonks around town before his little beady eyes fell on Gately’s squeeze-spindle, and he perceived a chance to get all of his money back in jig-time. Gately pointed it out to him just how easy it was.
"Before McAtee put a dollar down on the spindle Gately got Jink’s eyes to popping by roping in a booster who pulled $3200 out of the squeeze-spindle in quicker time than a cayuse could make two jumps, and when Gately looked chagrined and sorrowful McAtee bit. Gately knew his man pretty well, and he permitted Jink to not only win $1600 ’conditionally,’ right off the reel, but he actually passed $400 of Jink’s winnings over to him. Then he proceeded to wipe Jink out. When McAtee was all trimmed up, Gately looked sad.
"’You didn’t have quite enough along with you, McAtee,’ he said, shaking his head real mournfully. ’If you’d had another $200 to cover that $1600 that you’d won and left in the hole, why, you’d had me heading for the Canadian River by this time.’
"McAtee ate this spiel of Gately’s up as if it was so much lunch on a counter, and went away filled with the idea that there was riches in the squeeze-spindle if it was hit right, and with enough money to back up the plays. So he went to just eleven of his sooner friends and talked squeeze-spindle to ’em. He put it to them just what a good thing the squeeze-spindle was rightly hammered. He told ’em how near he’d been to pulling out his losings, and more besides, through the medium of Gately’s squeeze-spindle at the Reeves-Pendleton layout. They took Jink’s word for it, and they all joined the pool that McAtee organized to smash that spindle. They got together $2600, and on the afternoon following Jink’s play they walked down to the Reeves-Pendleton plant in a body. Each man had a rifle along with him. There wasn’t anything remarkable about that. During the first year of Guthrie’s existence every man carried a long-iron over his arm. If twelve men, all with rifles, were to line up in front of the Reeves-Pendleton layout in Guthrie to-day there’d be good reason for the people inside to suppose that they were going to be ’stuck up,’ but there was no reason to suppose anything of the kind when Jack McAtee brought along his eleven subscribers to his squeeze-spindle-smashing pool that afternoon. Gately wasn’t worried a little bit.
