Gabby Hayes Western #9

Wilbur the waiter dreads the arrival of Mr. Heeby-Jeeby, his most jittery customer—a man so perpetually on edge that even a cup of coffee would be rattled by his presence. This quick Western humor tale plays with the absurd notion of nervousness taken to its logical extreme.

When mysterious fires plague the town of Rawhide, Gabby Hayes finds himself wrongly accused of arson after a chance encounter with the real firebug goes sideways—and a pair of borrowed boots with distinctive snake spurs makes him look guilty as sin. With the town ready to string him up and the actual culprit still at large, Gabby has to clear his name and catch the real fire-starter before the whole town burns down. Jack Binder's pencils and inks bring plenty of slapstick chaos to this tale of mistaken identity and frontier justice gone haywire.

Gabby Hayes and his ward Tippy Ryan are cooling off at the swimming hole when a crafty coyote named Lop Ear steals Gabby's clothes—and with a hundred-dollar bounty on the ornery varmint's head, our whisker-faced foreman sets out for revenge. What follows is a hilarious battle of wits across the range, with traps, pits, and quicksand, as Gabby discovers that sometimes the toughest opponent can teach you something about friendship.

Young Falcon, the surviving son of a massacred tribe, enters a trading post to buy food for the people who sheltered him through a harsh winter—but a bigoted store helper named Tanner tries to overcharge him, sparking a confrontation that forces the young man to defend himself. When Tanner falsely cries robbery to save face, Trader Roy sees through the deception and learns a hard lesson about fair dealing, regardless of a man's skin. The next day, Young Falcon encounters a desperate doctor caught in a town epidemic with insufficient medicine, and the brave's sense of honor compels him toward a perilous choice.

Gabby Hayes suspects Kangaroo Kelly's clever pouch-carrying animal is being used to hide stolen goods around Rawhide, but when he tries to investigate, Kelly doses him with amnesia powder and sends him wandering the town with no memory of who he is—just as the smooth-talking crook plans his biggest heist yet on a traveling jeweler. Now amnesiac and framed for the very thefts he was trying to stop, Gabby must dodge an angry posse while the real culprit and his kangaroo partner make their move.