"I know he's a friend of yours, Buck, but could you get that damn vampire off the set? We're trying to make a Western here, for Christ's sake!"

I looked around and saw Bela Lugosi standing just outside the batwing doors of the saloon set. He took a cigar out of his mouth, smiled at me, and nodded.

I thumbed my Stetson to the back of my head and told the director, "Yeah, wait just a minute and I'll see what he wants."

The director sighed in exasperation, but since a lot more folks had heard of Buck Jones than had heard of him, he didn't complain. I'm not saying that to brag, mind you, it's just the way things are in Hollywood. Probably everywhere else, too, for that matter.

Spurs jingling, I went over to the door and rested my hands on the batwings. "Good afternoon, Buck," Bela said in that thick Hungarian accent of his.

"I don't mean to be rude, Bela, but what are you doing here? We're supposed to be shooting."

He put the cigar in the corner of his mouth and said around it, "I wonder if we could have dinner. There is a matter I would like to discuss with you."

Some actors sound a lot different when they're not acting. Bela's not one of them. When he says, "I vonder if ve could haff dinner," he sounds just like Count Dracula. Now, don't get me wrong, he's one of the nicest fellas I know, but people sometimes look at him a mite odd when they hear him talking. Not that I'd let that stop me from having dinner with him. Nobody picks my friends for me.

"Sure, I reckon that'd be all right," I told him. "Brown Derby at seven?"

He nodded and said solemnly, "I will make the reservation. Thank you, Buck."

"Anything for a pal. Say, I got to get back to work here."

He nodded again. "Farewell, my friend."

That's Bela for you. Even when he's just saying goodbye, it sounds ominous.

He looked mighty spiffy that evening in a cream-colored suit and a flowerdy bowtie. Folks expected him to walk around in a tuxedo and cape, but he didn't. Well, hardly ever. I'd ditched my cowboy duds in favor of a plain dark suit and striped tie, so the people in the Brown Derby didn't pay much attention to me as I walked in, although a few looked at me and then whispered to their companions. I'd been in pictures long enough, though, that such stuff didn't make much of an impression on me anymore.

Bela stood up from the table and gave me a grave half-bow as I walked up. I waved him back into his chair and sat down.

"I took the liberty of ordering the wine," he said.

"That's fine. What can I do for you, Bela?" I wasn't trying to be rude, I just wanted to be able to spend part of the evening at home with my wife Dell. Also, I was curious. I hoped he wasn't angling for a part in one of my pictures. For the past couple of years, his career hadn't been going as well as it once had. I thought he was a great guy, but nobody's going to buy Bela Lugosi in a Western.

"You cowboys. Right down to business, eh?" Bela smiled. "I have a problem, Buck."

Maybe he was going to put a touch on me. I supposed I could loan him some money, but that was never a good thing for a friendship.

"You know I'll be glad to help you out. What's the problem?"

He picked up his wineglass and took a sip, then set it down and said, "Vampires are after me."

Well, that wasn't what I expected him to say. I frowned and told him, "Very funny, Bela."

He shook his head. "This is not a joke, my friend. A group of my fans believe so strongly in what they have seen on the motion picture screen that they wish to become vampires themselves. To that end, they have been pursuing me, insisting that I bite them and turn them into... children of the night."

I was so surprised all I could say was, "Really?"

Bela nodded. "Unfortunately, it is true."

I didn't have any choice but to believe him. He wasn't the sort of fella who'd lie. And I knew that movie fans sometimes got carried away and did some mighty strange things.

"What is it you'd like for me to do?" I asked him.

Bela took another sip of wine—dark red wine, not that it means anything—and said, "I would like to get away from Hollywood for a time. I need some peace and quiet for my nerves. I remember you saying that you have a place north of here..."

"Yeah, up close to Placerville," I said, getting his drift. "Beautiful country, and it's pretty isolated." I started warming up to the idea. "There's a cabin on it. It's not much, but it'd be all right for a couple of fellas batching it for a spell. We could do some fishing and hiking."

He arched those slightly bushy eyebrows of his. "You would come with me?"

"Why not? This picture I'm on wraps tomorrow morning. We've just got one little scene to shoot. And the next one doesn't go into production for a couple of weeks. We could drive up tomorrow afternoon and spend a few days taking it easy. Do you a world of good."

He nodded slowly and said, "A very generous offer, my friend. I admit, I would enjoy the company of a gentleman such as yourself."

It was true that we got along mighty well, which you might not expect, him being a cosmopolitan foreigner who made horror pictures and me just an old cowboy, but we'd hit it off ever since we ran into each other in one of the studio cafeterias a couple of years earlier while I was making the serial Gordon of Ghost City and he was getting ready to shoot The Black Cat. So I thumped my palm down on the table and said, "It's a deal, then. Tomorrow we head for Hangtown."

His eyebrows went up again. "Hangtown?"

"That's what they used to call the place, back in the gold rush days." I grinned. "Because they strung up so many claim jumpers and owlhoots, I reckon."

"Ah, I see." He picked up his glass. "We should drink to Hangtown."

"Good a reason as any," I said as I reached for my wine.

We had a good dinner, and then as we were leaving the place together one of those gals who takes publicity pictures wanted to snap a shot of us together. So we linked arms and grinned for the camera, the cowboy and the vampire, and then went out into the Hollywood night.

Where they were waiting for us. Or rather, for Bela.

"There he is!" somebody yelled. "I told you I spotted the master going in there!"

We looked down the street as a dozen or more men and women rushed toward us. The men all wore tuxes and capes, and the women had on long, slinky dresses that didn't cover as much as they should have. I never saw a paler, sicklier-looking bunch in my life.

"They have found me again," Bela said.

"Master! Master!" they yelled at him. "Make us like you, master! Let us join you in the ranks of the undead!"

I could see where something like that would give a fella the fantods, all right. Some folks will believe just about anything they see up there on the silver screen, and these fans of Bela's had that wide-eyed, scary look of true believers.

Bela had gotten kind of skittish, like he wanted to make a run for his car, but I told him, "Hold on. Maybe we can settle this here and now."

"Buck, be careful," he muttered as I planted myself between him and the on-rushing fans. "They might be capable of... anything."

Hell, I'd tangled with Moro tribesmen in the Philippines when I was in the army, and I had a three-inch scar on my leg from one of their knives to prove it. I wasn't scared of a bunch of movie fans, even if they did have strange notions in their heads.

I held up a hand and called out, "Hold on there!"

The would-be vampires came to a stop in front of me.

"What's wrong with you folks? Can't you leave this poor man alone?"

"He's our master," one of the men said.

"Our dark master," a woman added. I'd never seen a gal with paler skin or blacker hair.

"He has to give us the gift. We want to be immortal, too!"

"All it would take is one bite." The woman pulled the neckline of her gown to the side and turned her head the other way so that the skin of her throat was stretched taut. She leaned forward to offer it to Bela.

Yeah, they were serious, all right. Off their nut, sure, but they believed what they were saying. I wondered if they held normal jobs during the day and only went crazy at night.

"Listen," I told them. "He's not a vampire. He's an actor. There aren't any real vampires."

They just stared at me like I was the one who ought to be locked up. Then they surged forward again across the sidewalk, reaching out for Bela and crying, "Master! Master!"

"Buck, watch out!" Bela said.

I was about to get trampled by a herd of would-be bloodsuckers. I wasn't going to stand still for that. I hauled off and punched the fella closest to me.

As a former stuntman, I knew how to make it look like I'd hit somebody when actually I hadn't even touched them. That wasn't what happened here. I landed a good one and the man I hit went sailing backward into his pals. Three or four of them went down, sprawling on the sidewalk. The rest of them set up an angry howl, and Bela tugged at my sleeve as he said, "Come on, Buck, let's get out of here!"

His roadster was parked close by at the curb. I didn't want to get into a brawl that would attract a lot of bad publicity, so I piled into the car with him and he took off. We left his fans behind. Bela took one hand off the wheel and passed it over his face.

"You see now why I need to get away for a while," he said.

"Why don't you just have 'em arrested?" I asked.

"On what charge? They never do anything except beg me to turn them into vampires."

"Well, then, they ought to be locked up because they're loco."

"That might alienate my other fans." He smiled sadly and shook his head. "My career is not what it once was, Buck. I cannot risk the publicity."

I knew what he meant. If the public ever turned on a fella, it could ruin him. You could ask Fatty Arbuckle about that, if he wasn't dead.

Bela drove around for a while, then circled back by the Derby. That bunch of loons were gone. He dropped me off at my car and said, "Tomorrow, then, we head for Hangtown. I will pick you up."

"It'll do you a world of good to get away," I told him again. "Nothing but peace and quiet for a few days."

Bela picked me up at my house, as promised, and we headed north in his car after I packed my bags and fishing gear in the trunk. The shoot had wrapped up successfully that morning, so I felt pretty good.

Bela wore an outdoorsy get-up with a brown coat and one of those Tyrolean hats with a little feather attached to it. He looked more like he was headed out for a stroll in the Carpathian Mountains than a few days in the Sierra Nevadas. I wore boots, jeans, and a flannel shirt, because I knew it could get chilly up there.

"You know, I have been thinking," he said as he drove. "Perhaps the motion picture business is no longer what I am meant to do."

"Aw, hell, Bela," I said. "You've been in pictures for years. What else would you do if you quit making them?"

"I was thinking something in the country, something that would keep me out in the fresh air, would be nice. Have you ever been to a dude ranch, Buck?"

That question took me by surprise. I'd not only been to a dude ranch, I'd worked on one, the Miller Brothers' 101 Ranch in Oklahoma, which operated as a dude ranch in addition to putting on traveling Wild West Shows. I had been to other such places, too.

"I think it would be nice to run a dude ranch," Bela said when I answered him.

That's not the sort of thing you expect to hear from Count Dracula, but I didn't argue with him. In fact, since he was a pal, I said, "If that's what you want, I could help you find some land. Maybe somewhere up around Hangtown."

"That would be wonderful. Living such a life, I would no longer have to worry about fans."

That was true. Folks might even forget that he'd ever been in the movies. The public has a short memory.

I could see him start to relax during the long drive through Fresno and Sacramento, where we cut east toward Hangtown. The sun was setting as he turned off the highway onto a dirt road I pointed out and we started climbing toward the mountains.

It would be dark by the time we reached my cabin. It didn't have electric power, but there were a couple of lanterns and a fireplace with a good supply of wood. We would be fine.

Or we would have been if Bela's low-slung roadster hadn't hit a rock in the road and torn out something underneath it.

Steam shot up and the car lurched to a stop. Bela started to apologize, but I told him not to worry about it.

"It's only a couple more miles to the cabin. Shoot, we'll just walk it. I've got an old jalopy I keep there. We can drive back down and get our gear, then in the morning we'll head to town and find somebody to haul your car in and fix it."

"A splendid plan," he agreed.

So that's how I came to find myself walking along a rough mountain trail in the fading light with Bela Lugosi.

We were far enough off the highway that we couldn't hear any traffic. In fact, there wasn't much of anything to hear except a few birds and the occasional rustle of a small animal in the brush. It was mighty peaceful. Bela kept taking deep breaths of the clear, cool air and saying things like "This is wonderful!" and "How bracing!"

"Yeah, I like it up here. Beats the heck out of all the hustle and bustle of Hollywood, doesn't it?"

"The more I think about it, the more I like the idea of a dude ranch," he mused. "I am ready to put everything else behind me, Buck."

"Well, if that's what you want." I still wasn't convinced that he was ready to give up making pictures, but it was up to him.

I suppose we'd gone about half a mile when I spotted someone walking toward us. The sun had set a while earlier and the shadows were getting pretty thick. It's hard to see in uncertain light like that. Seemed like one second the fella wasn't there at all, and then the next he was. He strolled toward us along the dirt road like he didn't have a care in the world. He wore spurs with big fancy rowels, like the old Californios. I could hear them spinning and clinking.

"Who is that?" Bela asked.

"I don't know. I'm not acquainted with too many of the folks who live around here." The man came closer to us. "Mexican fella, from the looks of him."

He had dark, curly hair and a little mustache, and he wore a flat-crowned hat pushed to the back of his head. A serape was draped over his shoulders but thrown back over the left one to reveal a red sash around his waist. I started to get a bad feeling when I saw the heavy revolver tucked behind the sash. We were a long way from anywhere, and this fella might decide to stick us up.

He had a friendly enough smile on his face, though, as he lifted a hand in greeting and said, "Hola, señores. What brings you out here?"

"I have a cabin a little ways up yonder," I told him as I pointed to the mountains looming darkly above us. Then I jerked a thumb over my shoulder and added, "Our car's broken down, back there about half a mile."

The stranger didn't say anything to that. After a second, I stuck out my hand and went on, "My name's Charles Gebhart." I gave him my real name instead of Buck Jones. You never know where or when you'll run into a fan. "This is my pal Bel—" I stopped short, realizing I was about to spill the beans. "Bell," I went on. "His name's Bell."

The stranger nodded. "Señor Gebhart. Señor Bell. I am called Joaquin."

"Is that so?" I was about to say that I'd played a character named Joaquin once, in a picture called The Avenger. The famous bandit Joaquin Murietta, in fact, whose stomping grounds had been right around here. I didn't say that, though, since Bela and I wanted to remain incognito. "Well, we're, uh, pleased to make your acquaintance, Joaquin. You live around these parts?"

"I did."

"Back for a visit, are you?"

"I returned to... look for something."

"Wish we could give you a hand," I said with a shrug, "but we need to get on to my cabin—"

"There is no cabin," he said.

"What? Of course there is. You mean, something's happened to it?"

"I know every foot of these mountains. There is no cabin up this road. In fact, this road should not be here!"

He was starting to get a mite agitated, and I wondered if we had been unlucky enough to run into somebody else who was a little crazy. Before I could ponder long on that, though, I heard voices coming from behind us.

"It's them!" Bela said. "Good Lord, how did they ever find us?"

I swung around and saw those would-be vampires from the night before hurrying up the dirt road toward us. Some of them had flashlights, and the glare from the lights lit up their pale faces and made them look even spookier. They started yelling, "Master! Master!"

"Aw, hell," I muttered. "They must've been following you, Bela. Either that or they recognized me and were keeping an eye on my place when you picked me up."

He clutched my arm. "What are we going to do? We cannot get away from them."

I thought he was right to be worried. The bunch closing in on us didn't look like adoring fans anymore. They looked mad. They wanted something from Bela, and in their delusional state, they couldn't understand why he wouldn't give it to them. After Bela and I became friends, I watched Dracula a couple of times, and those folks reminded me 'way too much of Dwight Frye, who played Renfield. Crazy as a son of a bitch, old Renfield was, sitting around eating flies.

I didn't know what they had in mind for Bela, but I was pretty sure it wasn't anything good.

"We'd better make a run for it," I said, but before we could move, the stranger who called himself Joaquin stepped past us and plucked the revolver from behind his sash.

"Captain Love and his men!" he cried breathlessly. "Give it back! It belongs to me!"

Then he charged toward the vampires, and Colt flame bloomed in the shadows as that revolver started to roar.

"Wait!" I shouted. "Don't kill 'em!" They might be crazy, but they were still fans. The ticket-buying public.

Joaquin ignored me, though, and continued his assault, and the vampires yelled and panicked, turning and stampeding back along the road. I don't blame 'em.

You'd run, too, if you had a headless Mexican charging at you and firing an old cap-and-ball revolver. Now that Joaquin was between us and the flashlights, I could see in the flickering glare that no head sat on his shoulders, even though while he was standing in the shadows it had seemed to be there a moment earlier.

More of the things I had learned from the script for The Avenger a few years earlier came back to me then, like the fact that Captain Harry Love, a former Texas Ranger, had been appointed the leader of a special band of California Rangers, and Love and his men had been given the chore of capturing or killing the notorious bandit Joaquin Murietta. The Rangers had done just that, blasting old Joaquin into eternity in a gun battle in 1853 and then, to prove it, cutting off his head and preserving it in a jar of brandy.

Of course, the scribbler who wrote the picture changed things around a mite. I didn't mind playing the Robin Hood of Old California, but damned if I was going to get my head cut off, even if it was just in a movie!

But all that came flooding back to me at that moment, and I grabbed Bela's arm and said, "Run!"

I didn't have to tell him twice. The vampires were screaming and the headless Joaquin was shooting and running after them, telling them to give him back his head, and Bela Lugosi and I turned and hotfooted the other way like the Devil himself was right on our heels.

Considering all the other crazy things going on, he might have been. I didn't turn around to look.

We didn't stop until we reached that little cabin of mine, and we didn't stay there for long, either. I jumped behind the wheel of that old jalopy and told Bela to crank it, and I was praying the starter would work. It did, and as the engine popped and sputtered into life, Bela hopped in, too, and as the cowboys say, we lit a shuck out of there. We didn't stop when we got back to Bela's car, either, but just kept going. I figured we could come back for the car later, like when it was broad daylight and there weren't any headless ghosts roaming around.

Bela reached over and grabbed my arm. "My God, Buck, look there."

I looked where he pointed and saw the whole gang of vampires scattering across a field with Joaquin Murietta in hot pursuit behind them. I felt bad about leaving them there, but I'd got to thinking about it and decided that he couldn't really hurt them. He was a ghost, after all. That revolver wasn't firing real bullets. Once they settled down, they would be all right.

But the trip that Bela and I had planned was ruined, so we just headed back to L.A. That bunch of loco fans probably wouldn't bother him for a while, not after tonight.

As it turned out, they never did again. Bela told me that he saw one of the fellas on the street later, and the guy grabbed a crucifix out of his pocket, stuck it out toward Bela, then turned and ran. That didn't bother Bela. Having played Count Dracula, folks reacted like that to him all the time.

We found some land for him near Hangtown—not on the same mountain where we'd run into the ghost of Joaquin Murietta—and he bought it and talked for a while about starting up a dude ranch. But then Republic signed him up to play a mad scientist in the serial SOS—Coast Guard opposite Ralph Byrd, and I guess he sort of forgot about the whole dude ranch idea. We didn't speak of it much after that.

Nor did we talk of what we'd seen one night near Hangtown, and I never told Bela what I found when I went back up there a couple of days later to see about retrieving his car. (He was in seclusion by then, trying to recover from the ordeal.)

It was just lying there at the edge of the dirt road, as shiny as if it had been brand-new.

The fancy rowel from a Mexican spur.

-END-

Author's Note: This story is a little bit of fact mixed with a lot of fiction. Buck Jones and Bela Lugosi really were friends in the 1930s, and with Jones's help, Lugosi actually bought property near Placerville with the intention of starting a dude ranch. Everything else is the invention of the author. Special thanks to Richard Moore for the idea and the historical information.

Copyright © 2009 by James Reasoner