Huck Out West(18)

I was scared and ashamed and only wanted to run off somewheres and hide when we got back, but it was late November, which ain’t never a good time for setting off nowheres. Soon as spring come, though, I lit out. The army life warn’t for me. I knowed that before, but I’d forgot.





CHAPTER VIII


HAT WAS THE summer I become an ornerary Lakota Sioux. I’d been awful afraid a that tribe since they ambushed Dan Harper’s patrol to death, and from what people was saying, I warn’t even for certain they was human altogether. Yet, the next thing a body knows, there I am, smoking, hunting, and drinking with them, even living in one a their buffalo-skin lodges with a native woman.

But the trail to that life warn’t a straight and easy one. When I left General Hard Ass’s fort that spring, I’d rode northards, aiming for the old Dakota Territory where I’d found work before, because if I signed onto another drive from out a Texas, I’d only end up back where the general could take a-holt of me again. He warn’t customed to people taking their leave without his say-so. Only look what happened to poor Homer. I warn’t no deserting soldier boy, I was only hired for a spare wrangler, but it warn’t reliable the general respected the difference. If the general took a notion to hang a body, he generly just went ahead and done it.

I left fast and early without telling nobody. It was Charlie who set me running. He come by the stables one evening to talk about the scouting life. He says he reckoned I have a talent for it, and that might be useful because him and the general was having some difficulty between them. Charlie was twitchier’n he commonly was and it took him some time to get it out, but it seems the general warn’t crediting his scouting reports no more. “Well, it’s his funeral,” Charlie says spitting through his whiskers. Charlie says to keep it quiet, not to make the whole place go crazy, but what he seen out in the desert was some Cheyenne braves fixed to the ground by their navel strings, and he tried to warn the general about that, but the general wouldn’t pay no heed. “I seen ’em,” he says. “They was taking their feed direct. It’s why they cain’t be starved out, and why killing ’em don’t do no good. I lay them damn savages has made some kinder pack with the devil. I reckonized one of ’em as an injun I destroyed personal. He still had a red line acrost his throat where I took his head off, and there he was, back on his feet and sucking up strenth and meanness straight out a hell. It’s why them heathens always gather up their dead. It ain’t to bury ’em. They take ’em back and plug ’em in agin.” Charlie told the general the only way they could win the war against them was to hack out all their navels and burn them to a crisp and scatter the cinders, but the general says he didn’t think he was going to do that, and only give him a mean sneaky look like he himself was in cahoots with the devil. “So they might be needing another scout any time soon,” Charlie says, and I don’t say nothing, but soon as he was gone, I packed up.

I’d broke in more wild mustangs at the fort by then, and I wished I could a rode one of them out so as to let Jackson track along as only a packer, but I couldn’t resk getting chased down as a horse thief on top of what-all else they might want to hang me for. So the poor old fellow got loaded up with me and a pack saddle and everything else besides, my bedroll, tent, guns, powder and percussion caps, a sack of feed and enough vittles for a couple of weeks, plus a few handy trail supplies borrowed from the fort, like tin cook-pans, matches, spare shoes for Jackson, and clean army socks for me without no holes in them. I’d won a few two-bit racing bets with Jackson back in the days when we’d just left the Pony, he was the fastest animal I’d ever rode till then, but he’d slowed considerable over our years of hard traveling and was become more a moseyer than a galloper. He hung his head mostly, looking ever so mournful and low-spirited, and he let out a snort from time to time to show how disgusted he was with everything. His snarled mane hung down like knotted rags betwixt his eyes, which was always oozing something like tears, making him even sadfuller-looking. Him and me was two of a kind back then. Sometimes we just laid down together in a lonely place and moped a while.

We slid out at the streak of dawn, and that first day we put as many miles as we could betwixt us and the general, plodding along well past sundown. Jackson never complained. He wanted out of the army life bad as I did. The moon showed itself, one of them big fat ones with a pale face on it, and the open prairie we was passing through glowed unnatural round us like a ghost of itself. There warn’t nobody else out there, we was all alone, just a speck hardly moving in all that huge lighted-up emptiness, companied by the creepy night music, somewheres far off, of owls and wolves. “It’s like the end of the world out here,” I says to Jackson, and my voice scared me, so I didn’t say nothing more.

Finally, when the night sky was blackest, the moon brightest, we come upon a glittery water hole with a few skinny trees and dry shrubs loitering round it. I knowed the water could be pisoned, but there warn’t no bones or skulls I could see and we was mighty thirsty, so we pushed our snouts in and drunk our fill. We was too tired to keep on going on. We settled onto a patch of bunch grass alongside of the water for Jackson to nubble on and for me to spread open my bedroll and empty it out. I was too sleepy to strike a fire, so I peeled a potato and et it raw, then rolled myself into the blanket, dreaming of a hot breakfast of coffee, bacon rind and beans in the morning.