The Catspaw of Piperock

In Piperock, where frontier vice and sudden piety collide, Christmas begins with a drunken repentance and ends in riotous chaos. Narrator Ike Harper watches Dirty Shirt Jones and Scenery Sims turn their eccentricities into a church fundraiser: a new bell, a better-looking chapel, a raffle, and a holiday spectacle built around Dirty's automobile and Scenery's biting camel. Ike is furious to discover his own money has been converted into raffle tickets, but Piperock's men—Magpie, Buck, Wick, Old Testament Tilton, and others—are determined to make devotion pay for itself. What follows is a comic Christmas Eve pageant that lurches from improvised Nativity to full-blown brawl. Ike is dragged into the festivities, costumed as Santa Claus and later as a wise man, only to be battered by bad luck, a camel's whiskers, gunfire, and collapsing scenery. As the raffle, the church fund, and local rivalries intensify, the crowd treats every disaster as part of the entertainment. In the end, the holiday spirit of Piperock proves equal parts generosity, mischief, and slapstick mayhem. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.