Tex Ritter Western #4

When Pinto Pete offers a dimwitted helper an absurd solution to dry a freshly washed floor—filling a wheelbarrow with sunshine and hauling it inside—the hapless fellow discovers that some shortcuts defy all logic. This 1951 humor tale captures the kind of silly reasoning that made early Western comics a treasure trove of slapstick and nonsense alongside the action-packed adventures.

Tex Ritter rides into a rodeo town and reconnects with Gail, an old friend whose ranch hangs in the balance—she needs to win the fifty-mile marathon race to save it from foreclosure, but her neighbor Link Hodge has other plans, sabotaging her horse and dispatching hired guns to stop anyone who might help her. When Tex puts himself in the line of fire to see the race through, he faces a gauntlet of bushwhackers, a forest fire, and a collapsed bridge, all while riding his faithful horse White Flash toward a finish line that could change everything.

Buffalo Bull shows up with a peculiar affliction—he's developed a twisted mouth after visiting the Brown family, and he's got the perfect tall tale to explain why. He launches into the yarn about the Browns themselves: a family where Ma, Pa, and their two daughters all sport mouths twisted in different directions, while only their son Jed came home from college with a normal one. When the family can't manage a simple task because of their twisted mouths, Jed's straight-talking advantage becomes the punchline to a lesson about the value of learning.

Tex Ritter, a Prairie Ranger with a reputation for fast action, heads into the trapping hills to investigate a string of robberies plaguing local trappers—only to discover a dangerous secret when his faithful dog Fury alerts him to something far more sinister than simple theft. With the help of Fury and his horse White Flash, Tex must track down the culprit behind both the stolen furs and a deadly cougar being used as a weapon, all while uncovering a hidden cabin and a conspiracy he never saw coming.

Loonie Les wants to prove he's got the arithmetic skills to clerk at the general store, so a skeptical store owner tests him with a math problem about selling fish—but Les's confused thinking about which type of catch he's supposed to be figuring leads to a laugh at his own expense. It's a quick, lighthearted gag from 1951 that shows there's more than one way to get your numbers crossed.