Down in the scrub oak
timbers of the southeast
Texas
Gulf
There used to ride a brakeman,
and a brakeman double tough
He worked the town of
Kilgore
And
Longview nine miles down
And us travelers called him
East
Texas
Red
The meanest bull around
If you rode by night, by broad daylight
In the wind and the snow and sun
You'd always see
Little
East
Texas
Red
Sportin' his smooth runnin' gun
Well the town got switched down
the stems and the mains
And everybody said
That the meanest man on the shiny irons
Was
Little
East
Texas
Red
It was early in the mornin' and along
George 9 or 10
When a couple of boys on
the hunt of a jowl
Stood in the blizzardy wind
Hungry and cold they knocked on the doors
Of the workin' folks around
For a piece of meat or a spud or two
To boil their stew around
Red come down the cinder dung
And he flagged down number two
He kicked their bucket over a bush
And dumped out all of their stew
One traveler said,
Mr.
East
Texas
Red, you better get your business fixed right,
because
you're going to ride your little black
train just one year from tonight.
Well
Red just laughed as he climbed the bank,
swung on the side of a wheeler, the boy was
took on a tanker to
Seminole
And westward to
Amarillo
They struck them a job of ball field work
And they followed the pipeline down
And it took them lots of places
Till one year had rolled around
On one cold and wintry day,
they hooked them a
Gulf -bound train
They shivered and they shook
with dough in their clothes
To
Old
Kelgore again
Over hills of sand and hard -froze roads
where the cotton wagons rode
Out past the town of
Kelgore and on to
O 'Longview
Where their warm suits of clothes
and their overcoats
They'll walk into a store
They'll pay the man for
some meat and stuff
They'll boil their stew once more
They walked the tides back to the yard
And they came to the same old spot
Where
East
Texas
Red just one year ago
Had dumped their last steel pot
The smoke from their fire
went higher and higher
And a man come down the line
He ducked his head in the blizzardy
wind and waved old number nine
He walked off down the cinder dump
and he'd come to the same old spot
And there was the same two men
again around that same stew pot
Red went to his knees and he hollered,
Please don't pull that trigger on me.
I never did get my business fixed,
Red never got his say.
A gun wheeled out of an overcoat
And it laid the old one to
Red lay dead.
While the other two men sat
down to eat their stew