Huck Out West(2)
This was a few seasons back, before everything got so lively, when there warn’t no town, just the Gulch, not no saloons nor churches nor women, nor not no gold, nothing to trouble the peace, only a few hairy old bachelors, one of whom, old Zeb, cooked up home whisky and sold it by the ten-penny glass in his front room which was the only room his dirt-floor shack had, except for a little tack-on shed where he kept his still and yist mash. His shack was the X on the map Eeteh drawed me. Zeb was the only body in the Gulch actuly producing anything, the others mostly living off of hunting and fishing and fruit and the few vegetables they growed or dug up. “Most a these lunkheads ain’t producin’ nothin’ except what drops out their rear ends,” Zeb says.
Zeb hailed from somewheres further down the Big River from me and Pap. He might not a been all white. He come west with only his old rags, his copper worms and pot, and a dona jugful of his pappy’s yist mash, stirred up in buckets on his pappy’s back porch, a stinking muck Zeb loved so much he called it his mother. Zeb was not a vilent man though he was said to have shot a few fools reckless enough to mess with her, and he kept a fierce mastiff named Abaddon who would chaw a body’s leg off if Zeb give him leave. Zeb was a loner who didn’t hardly talk to no one and then it was most like Abaddon’s growl, but he was proud of his whisky like a fiddler is of his music. He didn’t have no upper teeth, so his white-bearded lower jaw with its yaller teeth poked out under his nose like a cracked plate for it. He limped round like one peg was shorter’n t’other. Zeb’s local clients was mostly luckless prospectors, chasing doubtful dreams like gamblers do, their profession one I’d never took to heart on account of it being such pesky hard work.
The prospectors warn’t legal nuther, but there warn’t many of them and they was tolerated by the Lakota on account of Zeb’s whisky. They was all crazy about it. They mostly got sold by white traders a rubbagy whisky made out a black chaw, red pepper, ginger, and molasses, but Zeb never done that, and they appreciated it, Eeteh specially. The whole name they give Eeteh meant Falls-on-His-Face, and he always done his best to live up to it. He rode a piebald pinto the tribe give him. It had a peculiar hip wiggle the tribe thought was funny, though it could still outrun most a their other horses. Because of the pony’s comic walk and pied colors, Eeteh called him Heyokha, which meant Clown, or Thunder Dreamer, in the Lakota tongue.
When he found me there, he fetched along my buffalo-hide lodge-skins and pipes and what-all else I’d left behind when me and Tongo took to our heels. We cut and trimmed some lodge-poles and hoisted a tepee by the crick, leaving the cave to the bats, and set down to enjoy Zeb’s brew. Eeteh told me the treacherous brother who’d set General Hard Ass on me had got throwed out a the tribe, but that might not a been a good thing, because the rumor was he’d took up scouting for the general.
Me and Eeteh helped Zeb trade his liquor to the tribe for buffalo meat and for the maize and barley he needed to richen up his whisky mash, as well as for blankets, hides, pelts, rawhide rope, pots and pipes, and other goods to trade with emigrants passing through. Zeb shared the meat with me and Abaddon, and he give me stillage for Tongo. The main occupation in the Gulch was lazing around and stopping by the bar in Zeb’s shack every night, nor else a-jawing with Eeteh down at my tepee, smoking our pipes and sharing a jug. The Gulch was mighty peaceful and about as close as one could get in this world to the Widow Douglas’s fancied Providence.
Well, this is a story with a fair number of years and persons in it and I’ve already took a wrong turn and got a-front of myself, so let me go back and tell you about me and loony old Deadwood and his antique musket and that fateful rock with gold in it, and then I’ll try to give out the rest of it. His name was the same as that of the Gulch, but whether he’d got his name first or the Gulch did is in generl disputation. He says his pap, who was a Canuck trapper just passing through, give him his real Christian name which was Edouard, but his mam, who was part Pawnee—Deadwood’s a mongrel, but who ain’t—couldn’t announce it proper. Others say that she changed it a-purpose because she judged that all he had betwixt his ears was like what laid at the bottom of the Gulch, and everybody thought that was comical and it stuck. Which might a gave others the idea of how to name the place, or anyhow that’s how he likes to tell it because he says it gives him first dibs on anything found here, gold or whatsomever.
Well, now he’d found that glittery yaller rock, which I knowed as soon as I seen it was a powerful bad-luck sign, and he had got it in his mostly empty head that I was going to hire me a slick lawyer and steal his claim. To be sure that wouldn’t happen, he’d raised his gun, took my rifle away, and got ready to shoot me, saying he hoped I was all right with Jayzus and all them other holy folks.
“Put that consounded thing away, Deadwood,” I says. “You know I ain’t no prospector.”
“Well, maybe you ain’t and maybe you is, but I cain’t take no resks. I was borned here, ain’t nobody else got rights, everything here is mine.”
“Did I ever say it warn’t?” Deadwood only shrugged his shoulder bones and cocked the musket. I was in a tight place and knowed I had to conjure up something quick like what Tom Sawyer would a done. “Now listen to me, Deadwood. You can go ahead and shoot, but just so’s you’re not disappointed, I’m bound to tell you that I set that rock there. I been feeling sorry for you being so low-spirited, and I done it to cheer you up. I don’t know if there’s more and I don’t care, but if you shoot me I can’t show you where I found it. You need me, and not only for finding gold. If you didn’t have me around, who else would you have to listen at all your bullwhacky?”