Huck Out West(19)

I dropped off so hard I didn’t know nothing till I waked up with the sun in my eyes and my belly fretting from emptiness. What I seen when I could see was that we’d had visitors overnight. Things was chawed up and scattered and all my vittles was gone. I couldn’t tell how big the varmints was, but we was probably lucky all they wanted was the vittles. What it minded me of was that, no matter what it might a seemed like in the moonlight, we warn’t never alone by ourselves out there. Even that lonesome prairie was a-swarm with living creturs, and nary a one of them that warn’t desperately hungry.

Then I seen, far off on the horizon, varmints of a familiarer sort. Dust was raising up from a train of covered wagons, pulled by oxes and slowly rolling my way. I could make out people walking longside, women and children amongst them. I gathered up all my scattered goods what warn’t ruined and rolled them into my blanket and tied it up, filled my canteen from the water hole, loaded up Jackson again, and rode out to meet them, hoping they might have some corn-bread or jerky for a poor wayfaring stranger.

There was a white-bearded gent setting the lead wagon, and when I drawed close enough, he tipped his black hat at me and shouted, “God bless you, sir! Who are you and what’s your business out here?”

“Huckleberry Finn, sir. I’m heading up Fort Laramie way to look for work,” I shouted back, touching the floppy brim of my own crumpled hat, whilst keeping my eye on the fellows walking along with their rifles out. The women and children looked scared to see me.

“Why, that’s where we’re a-going. Ain’t you pointed the wrong way?”

“No, sir. You must a left the trail. Fort Laramie is over your shoulder.”

The old fellow looked back like he was trying to see it somewheres off on the bare horizon. He was setting beside a little old lady in a white sun-bonnet, smiling kindly at me behind her wire-rim spectacles. A couple of the bullwhackers come over to palaver with them. They called him Reverend. They looked up at the sun and done some pointing and calculating, and then the old fellow hollered out, “How many days we got to go, you reckon?”

“For me and my horse, a week maybe, but for your wagons, at least three.”

They all give themselves a sad look. “You ever been up thataway?”

“Yes, sir, I’ve got some practice,” I says. “Rode that stretch for the Pony Express, then scouted some. Helped move a herd of breeding cattle up into the Montana Territory. They know me at the forts.”

“The Pony Express! Do tell! We was thinking about maybe preceding on Montana way. Are you a shooter?”

“When I got to be.”

After the reverend and his followers had got their heads together again, he says, “Well, maybe you could join us. We’re only jest pore Christian missionaires, a-looking for the Promised Land. We don’t have no money, but we got enough breadstuff to feed you and your horse as fur as Fort Laramie.”

I warn’t untempted. I was most about starved and there warn’t much to hunt nor fish for out there, but I says, “That’s mighty kind, mister, but I’m dead busted and I need to earn some money. I think I best get on to Laramie as fast I can.”

The reverend raised his hand like to say wait a minute, got a nod from the others, and says, “Well, we can offer you nine dollars and free grub for the three weeks. If you’ll also hunt for us.”

“That ain’t Christian, Ezekiel,” says the old lady beside him, wearing her sweet smile like the main argument. “You should pay him twenty dollars like you done that slicker you hired who got us lost.”

“Hush, Abigail.”

“You got family, son?” she asked.

“No’m. I’m an orphan.”

“There. You see, Ezekiel?”

Abigail was still smiling. Old Ezekiel seen he was beat. “All right, then,” he says, and he gives a grumpy little shrug. “A dollar a day up to twenty, payable when we get there.” Their wagons was moving mighty slow and the general’s fort warn’t all that far away yet, but I’d been ready to take the nine dollars so as to get fed, so I nodded. “Which way you reckon we should go?”

“Best aim up towards Fort Sedgwick and the Oregon Trail,” I says, pointing, and they all swiveled around. I knowed that border stretch well because of the plague of desperadoes and warring tribes that habited the region back when me and Tom was riding through it for the Pony. Our home station up at Horseshoe Crick warn’t no Sunday school nuther, but that Julesburg relay station a-near the Nebraska line was a dreadful wild place. We had to keep our heads down and push fast as we could so as to dodge all the murdrous road agents and Indians. Even the stationmaster was a bandit, so we had to keep our routes secret from him not to get waylaid by his own boys. I was always scared, but there warn’t nothing made Tom so all over happy as heeling it through there when the bullets and arrows was flying. “The mail must go through!” he would yell out, laughing like crazy. He wrote down what he done every day in a little purpul notebook, adding a few stretchers and some things people told him, and he read it to me whenever we was in the same place at the same time. He called it “The Wild West Adventures of Tom Sawyer and His Trusty Sidekick Huckleberry Finn.” Huckleberry was pretty stupid, but with Tom Sawyer’s help, he done interesting things. “The railroad stops a-near there now,” I says to the missionaires, “and there’s outfitters and trading stations where you can rest your bulls and stock up for the rest a the trip.”