Down in the scrubble country
of the southeast Texas gold
There used to ride a brakeman,
a brakeman double tub
Well, they worked the town of Kilgore
In Longview, twelve miles down
Travelers all called him East Texas Red
The meanest bull around
If you rode by night or the broad daylight
In the wintry wind or the sun
You would always see Little
East Texas Red
Sportin' his smooth runnin' gun
Tails got switched down
to stems and manes
And everybody said
The meanest bull on them shiny irons
Was that Little East Texas Red
It was on a cold and a windy morning,
long towards nine or ten
A couple of boys on the hunt of a job
were out in that blizzardy wind
Hungry and cold,
they knocked on the doors
of the working people around
For a piece of meat, a carrot or a spud,
and a boil of stew, the round
Well, East Texas Red,
he come down the line,
and he swung off hole number two
He kicked their bucket over a bush,
he dumped out all of their stew
And the traveler said,
Mr. East Texas Red,
you better get your business fixed
You're gonna ride your little black train
just one year from today
Well Red, he laughed, climbed the bank
and swung on the side of a wheeler
The boys caught a tanker to Seminole
Then a west to Amarillo
They got them a job of oil field work
And they followed the pipeline down
Took them lots of places before
That year had rolled around
Then on a cold and a windy morn
They conked in a gulf -bound train
They shivered and shook,
though in their clothes
To the scrubble, lads again
In warm suits of clothes and overcoats
They walked into a store
Paid a man for some meat and stuff
to boil that stew once more
Well the Thais,
they tracked down that cinder dump
Till they came to that same old spot
Where East Texas Red
just one year ago
Had dumped their last stew pot
And the smoke of their fire
went higher and higher
And the red come down the line
His head ducked low in the wintery wind
He swung off full number nine
He walked on down to the jungle camp
And he came to that same old spot
And there sat the same two men again
A round that seems to pop
Red went to his knees and he hollered,
Please don't pull your trigger on me
I did not get my business fixed
But he did not get his say
Or a gun wheeled out of an overcoat
Had played that old one too
Red was dead, as the other two men
sat down to eat their stew