Huck Out West(14)

Her telling me the war was over made me think of Jim. Nookie didn’t know who won the war, and when I asked others, they just laughed at me or punched me if they thought I was making fun. Which was how I calculated the North must a won. So I reckoned maybe Jim was free now. This cheered me up some when nothing else did, except maybe Nookie’s baths.

Then one day I come back from leading some people in funny hats over to the Mormon Trail junction and found her cabin all busted up and Nookie gone. She’d left her tin bathtub behind. I waited two or three days, but she never come back, so finally I washed myself in the tub one last time, thinking how she done it, and struck out for the Bozeman trailhead to look for work as a scout and guide. There was forts being built along the trails up there to protect the cows and emigrants rumbling through, and it didn’t take me long to know the trail and the tribes along it. The worst was the Lakota Sioux. It was like they was born angry. I was deathly afraid of them. Them and snakes.

It was in one of the forts I met Dan Harper. Dan was a Union soldier, a Jayhawker from Kansas who had volunteered for the army in a fit of patriotics, but the war betwixt the States was over before he got to kill nobody, so they sent him out west to destroy Indians instead. He was lonely like I was, so him and me we spent a good while just setting over our pipes and jawing. I told him I knowed a Harper back in St. Petersburg who wanted to become a robber but who probably took up loafing like everybody else, and Dan says he might a been a relative, it was a sizable clan, but he’d only been to Missouri once and that was to burn down a town full of Rebs. He says it was fun at the time, but he didn’t know what good it done. He hoped I didn’t have no relations there, and I says I didn’t have no relations nowheres.

I told him about Tom Sawyer and Ben Rogers and Nookie and her muddytatings, and he told me about a fat lady in Fort Laramie who could crack nuts with her bottom. I says I didn’t believe that, and he says he don’t neither, but that’s what they say. When I told him about Jim, he says he ain’t never knowed any Negro people up close like that and warn’t sure he wanted to. They didn’t have none in the town where he growed up, even though they was abolitionists. I said about Nookie’s brother stopping work to ask for more water and getting strung up with five other Chinamen as a warning to the rest of them, and how white folk come and cheered the hangings and shot the dead bodies for sport.

“Leastways they was already dead,” Dan says, and he tells me the worse thing he ever done was when they catched some Indians and the officer made them throw them live off of a cliff. “’Le’s listen at ’em yell!’ the officer shouts, but the Indians didn’t yell. The silence was awesome scary. Finally, the officer he begun yelling for them. YI-I-I-i-i-iee . . . And then we all did.”

His fort was on Lakota land and the tribe was cranky about it, so their warriors was forever attacking it, and Dan had shot and killed a few of them, but he warn’t bragging about it. “Of course they’re bothersome,” he says. “These lands was their’n and we’re bullying in and taking it all away from them. If they was doing that to us, we’d be bothersome, too.” I told him about hiring on to shoot buffalos up in these parts not long after the war was over, and he says he got ordered by a general to do that, too, but he didn’t like it.

“I didn’t neither,” I says. “It was like killing bedrolls. But it don’t matter, they was only cows.”

“No, they warn’t, Huck. We was killing the Indians. They can’t live without buffalo. They use them for food, clothes, their tepees, soap, plows, thread, ever blamed thing. They burn dried buffalo shit to stay warm in the winter. They use their skins, their bones, their skulls, their horns, even their guts and ballocks. The little Irisher general he says, ‘Kill the buffalo and you kill the Indians.’ And that’s what we was doing, the whole derned point of it.”

“Well, he’s a general, so I guess he knows.”

“I guess he don’t.”

When I told him about the Minnysota hangings and what the loony old preacher said, Dan says he was maybe crazy, but he was also brave, standing up like that against everybody else. “When you’re living with a mob of other people, it’s hard not to fall into thinking like as they do, and then you ain’t YOU no more. It’s like when you’re in the army. You could rightly say everybody else in that town was crazy except the preacher. When we burnt down that Missouri town and killt all them people, I felt like a cloud had come down and sucked me up into it and it warn’t me that was doing the awful things I done.”

I was learning a lot from Dan. He was younger’n me, but he knowed more. There was some in the fort, he says, who didn’t like him for the things he said. They called him an injun-lover. Some a them was wearing scalps on their belts and they liked to get him down and rub his face with them. “That ain’t the pleasantest thing, but it don’t change what’s true and what ain’t.” Tom he had a way of talking like the books he read that sometimes beflummoxed me, but what Dan said mostly made tolerable good sense even if he was a Jayhawker, and we started looking forward to my passing through the fort with one wagon train or nuther, so’s to set back and smoke and jabber into the night.

Dan didn’t have no appetite for the army life, and we reckoned we might ride together when he was freed out of it. I says we could go up into the northern hills where the fishing and hunting was prime, and Dan says maybe we could go exploring down the Colorado canyons where nobody ain’t never been before. We was full of notions like that and they was all smartly better’n the lives we was stuck in. Dan’s bulliest idea was to join a circus, where we could do bronco riding and fancy shooting and lassoing tricks. “We can even set up our own circus if we can’t find one’ll take us. We can get some Indians to join with us and we can have some pretend fights and then be friends after.” I was most excited by this notion and I begun practicing on the dogs and pigs at the fort.