Huck Out West(15)

But then one day, when I was guiding some wagons bringing supplies up the trail towards the fort, we got set upon by a passel of wild whooping Lakota warriors storming down on us, painted up like demons out from the Widow Douglas’s end-times Bible stories. We was overnumbered, so we abandoned the wagons, set off some gunpowder to back them off, jumped on our horses and humped it out a there, making straight for the fort, arrows flying about our ears and off our backsides and those of the horses. A garrison was sent out to drive off the war party and fetch the wagons back and the captain took Dan with him. Then, another patrol was sent out later to bring back the bodies.

I went to where Dan was laid out with the others. They was all shot up with arrows and scalped and tomahawked, and some was eating what before was betwixt their legs, a most gashly and grievous sight. The Lakota had fooled them by disappearing, then popping up again further on, beguiling them over and over till they was trapped too far from the fort for help. Dan’s chest and belly was full of arrows like a porkypine’s, but there warn’t no blood. It was like as if all their arrows had been shot into a dead man. Laying on his back. “If I don’t come back, they’ll say I was deserting and they hadn’t no choice,” he said. I could a turned him over to see if there were bullet holes in his back, but I didn’t do that. Other soldiers was watching me like they was considering over something, so I packed up that night and drifted back southards and took up the cowboying line, and not long after, found myself marching through the snow with General Hard Ass.





CHAPTER VII


HEN DAN GOT himself massacred, I felt like I’d hit bottom, but the bottom was soft and ashy like Nookie’s soap and I only kept sinking deeper and darker, like there warn’t no end where misery could take a body. I ended up working for Texas ranchers, wrangling their spare horses whilst the cowpunchers was drovering the cows along. I got paid less’n the others, and it was a desperate hard life, but on the trail nothing cost nothing, and it beat shooting Indians and their ponies. And I was comfortablest around horses. Tom always tried to learn me about nobleness from the books he read, and fact is, horses has a noble side and human persons don’t.

As the railroads growed, the ranchers borrowed old Indian trails to river crossings and cut some new ones, driving longhorns up through the tribal lands to the new Kansas railheads so’s they could be carriaged to their last rites out east where the main beef hunger was. The natives that was in the way didn’t like it and so sometimes them and their ponies had to get shot just like before, but cowpokes ain’t settlers, and the tribes was mostly pleased to let us ride through for a dime a head and two-bit jugs a whisky for the chiefs on the side.

Moving two or three thousand cattle over all them woesome miles warn’t no Sunday-school picnic. We rode slow, not to burn too much meat off of the beeves, pasted to our saddles for upwards of eighteen hours a day in all kinds of weather, with nothing for grub some days but bread and coffee. There were boils and blisters to tolerate, ague, dispepsia, piles, and newmonia, plus rustlers and rattlers, trail bosses and wolfpacks, prairie fires, hailstorms, and stampeeds. A crack of lightning and the cows’d go thundering off like they’d et too much locoweed, and sometimes under sunny skies for no reason at all other’n to aggravate the cowhands. Some days it rained like it warn’t noway going to stop, the mud slopping up so deep the poor creturs resked getting stuck and had to be cruelly lashed to keep them plodding ahead, whilst other days it was so dry and dusty, riding drag at the rear, where I generly was, was worse’n getting buried alive under a pile a filthy potato sacks.

Some of the range hands went crazy on account of the horrible moan of the wind, the awful emptiness, and the way the sun seemed to eat a body alive, but I growed customed to it and it suited me. The desert seemed as lonely and sadful as me, so we got on in a family way. I owned my saddle, my guns, my hat and bedroll, bought back when I was earning extra riding for the Pony, and I had old Jackson to get me about. There warn’t nothing else I wanted, including being somewheres else, without it was back on the Big River, and maybe I didn’t want that neither. Since Dan Harper had got killed, I had the blues down deep, but I reckoned I’d never not had them, and I’d growed customed to that, too.

In my desperate low-spiritedness, I’d took up some of Pap’s habits, so when I warn’t on a horse I was likely in a saloon if there was one about, and there most surely was, for they was common as sagebrush. They was rough but easeful places where a body could generly find a plate of hot biscuits and bacon and maybe a loose woman or two, which I’d come to appreciate in my lazy and nonnamous but mostly grateful way. And one night in a saloon up at the northest end of the Chisholm Trail, after I’d just been paid off by the cattle ranchers and turned loose for the winter, a drunk army officer holding up the bar beside me set to blowing round about his general, calling him a mean low-down poltroon who didn’t give a hang about his troops, who wore out them and their horses till they all got sick and died whilst he was kissing bigwigs’ behinds and perfuming himself and chasing the ladies. “When his own soldiers got ambushed by savages, he warn’t even man enough to go back and try and rescue them!” he roared out with his fist in the air, and then his eyes crossed and he keeled over, busting his head on the bar as he dropped.

His friends come over and dragged him away. “Delirium tremenjus,” one of them says, a scraggly little chap in fringed buckskin and pinned-up slouch hat. He picked up the drunk’s beer and finished it off, then with a twitchy wink stuffed a plug in his whiskers. This gent, who called himself Charlie, says he’s a scout for that selfsame general, and when he asks what I was doing in this hellbegot town, I says I’d just rode in with a herd of beeves. “So you’re prob’bly out of a job,” Charlie says, knowing all about it. “Our wrangler at the fort catched the choler and ain’t no more, so they’re a-looking fur somebody new. You any good with hosses?” I told him what I could do, but also that I warn’t interested in nothing to do with soldier types, and he nodded and spit a brown gob on the dirt floor and squshed it with his boot and bought me a beer and struck a lucifer to light my clay pipe by and somehow, one thing stumbling along after t’other, there I was next day in an army corral trying to set a rumbustious young mustang. Tom is always living in a story he’s read in a book so he knows what happens next, and sometimes it does. For me it ain’t like that. Something happens and then something else happens, and I’m in trouble again.