Huck Out West(16)

This time the trouble come from the dandified curly-haired general with the red silk noose at his throat, watching me bust the bronc. The horse was a wild mustang with a white star in his forehead and a long thick tail that swopped the dirt when he reared. His belly was swoll from the free grazing life, the difficultest trick being to cinch the saddle round him, but I had him roped and hobbled and snubbed to a corral post, so in the end he didn’t have no choice. When he was bridled and saddled, I freed him from the ropes and, twisting his ear to keep his mind off of ought else, grabbed the saddle horn and sprung aboard. He was a feisty cretur and done what he could to buck me off him, but I finally wore him down and rode him to a standstill. The general nodded like I done what I was s’posed to do and says to get some horses ready, we was going to take them for a walk.

It was already darkening up into an early night, and Charlie had just come riding in to declare a snowstorm rolling our way—“Like dark angels on the warpath!” he says—so I warn’t sure I’d heard the general rightly. But he was soon back and a-setting his horse in his bearskin coat and shiny calvary boots, and he fetched out his sword and stabbed the low sky with it and give the order and we all slung on a cartridge belt and marched off into the blow. I was still on the pony I’d broke, so I left Jackson in the stables so’s Star, as I’d come to call him, could work off some of his excess belly. He was still a-quivering like he’d catched a fever, but he did not reject my company.

That night I learnt why his troops called him General Hard Ass. We was marched all night through a power of swirling snow and nobody warn’t happy. It was so cold, a body couldn’t think two thoughts in a row. The troopers I was riding with was a hard lot, with every other word a cussword and scalps of all sizes strung from their belts like fish on a trot-line. They liked to brag what they done to the native ladies before they took their hair off. Or whilst they was taking it off. Some of them was former runaway-slave hunters, now chasing down natives whilst still lynching ex-slaves whenever they could snatch one in the neighborhood. There warn’t no bounty profit in ex-slaves no more. They said they done it for honor. Which is about the worse reason for doing whatever except, maybe, passing wind.

The officers was all riding up front with the general, so the troopers felt free to cuss him out behind his back. But they was scared of him, too. They wanted to run away, but they knowed he didn’t tolerate it. Back as a Union officer in the war, he was already famous for hanging deserters and he had not give up the practice.

A beefy character name of Homer was riding alongside of me, his bushy red beard peeking out through the snow heaping up there. He had a squeaky bark when he talked that minded me of people I knowed from the Ozarks back home, and when I asked, he said he might of been from there or thereabouts, but he was born a rambling man and place didn’t stick to him. As for the general, he says he was a dirty low-down liar and a fraud. “He ain’t even a general, only just a cunnel, he dresses like a floozy, and a hatefuller bully I hain’t never seen. He shot deserters without no trial and wouldn’t let doctors tend the wounded nor drug their pain whilst they was a-dying. I was there. I seen it. They court-martialed the weasely shite-poke, but here he is, sporting about free and easy, whilst the only officer who ever had the guts to stand up to him has been wholly ruint!”

“I think I met that sad fellow in a saloon,” I says, and Homer he says, “Well, he was a hard drinker, but he was the straight-shootingest sumbitch I ever knowed, leastaways when he was down sober.”

Whilst Homer was trumpeting on (“I’ll rip that hard-ass cunnel apart with my bare hands if I ever catch him alone by hisself!”), I fell asleep in the saddle, waked from time to time by the snow and Star’s restlessness. My head weighed down and kept bouncing off my chest. My limbs didn’t have no feeling in them and my thoughts was all muddled up. There was a moment when me and Dan was in a circus, and it seemed like the realest thing ever. We was way up on a high icy platform skiddering about, and Homer was up there, or else it was Tom, trying to push Dan off. Their feet went out and they both dropped away, and I was a-dropping, too—I come to with a start, nearly falling off of the horse, and when I looked around, I couldn’t think at first where I was, only that it was dreadful dark and cold.

“Who was that Dan feller you was yelping about?” says someone beside me. It warn’t Homer there no more, it was General Hard Ass’s whiskery scout Charlie.

“A soldier I knowed who got killed.”

“By injuns?”

“Maybe. Maybe not.”

“Which tribe done it?

“They said it was the Lakota.”

“You and the general got that sadfulness in common, then,” Charlie says. “He lost a young officer in a ambush, the boy and all his party. They was a-bringing the general a dispatch, but they got entirely massacreed instead. All them sweet boys with their glistning headbones on show, it warn’t a uplifting sight.” Charlie’s whiskers was white with snow like I s’posed mine was, except his was painted with tobacco drool. “Them injuns was also Lakotas. Lakotas and Cheyennes, palling together in their heathen devilment. We gotta larn ’em they cain’t do that. It’s like larning your dog not to shit in the tent—the stupid creturs cain’t think fur theirselves, so you hafta swat ’em now’n agin to make the rules stick.” Charlie took off his slouch hat to knock the snow off of it and unpin the floppy front brim, then he set it back on his bald dome, tugging it down to his ears, and he touched his forehead and shoulders like some religionists do for luck. “They’s a pack a them shameless Cheyenne butchers camped just up ahead. They think night-fighting is unsivilized, the iggorant sapheads, so they won’t be especting us. We’ll catch ’em with their breechclots down.”