Huck Out West(3)
“Awright then,” he says with a cross-eyed scowl, lowering the gun but keeping it cocked, “show me. And no dad-burned monkey business.”
At first I couldn’t think where to take him and just set off walking. Then I recollected that old bat cave above the crick where I lived when I first come to the Hills. By luck, him and me was already on the path up to it, and it was fur enough off that I’d have time to ponder my strageties, as Tom called them.
The way the land humped up here was right peculiar, like something inside had tried to shoulder its way out. Back in school they learned us about the jeanie-logical ages. I didn’t much credit it at the time, though when the widow said it went against the Good Book, I thought there might be something in it. I’d seen things hove up out on the desert, naked things carved by the wind into the strangest shapes, but here the hills was smothered over with wildflowers and big trees and was full of flying and scurrying varmints, with lots of dark damp places that smelt full of secrets. As the climb got steeper, the blackjack pines had trouble hanging on, which accounted for all the mortified trees down below us, though Deadwood says it was a mighty hurry-cane done it. He says the hurry-cane picked him up and hoisted him over into the Wyoming Territory, and what with all the buffalo stampeeds and scalping parties he had to fight his way through, it took him nigh two years and a half to get back from there.
“It was in here I struck the rock,” I says when we come to the cave.
“You set right thar en don’t run off,” Deadwood says, thinking my thoughts for me. “Ef you do, I’ll hunt you down’n shoot you, even ef I do find gold in thar.”
I lit up my stone pipe and sunk back on a granite outcrop, outweighing my choices. I didn’t know where that rock he found come from, but not from inside that cave, where there warn’t nothing but a dirt floor carpeted over with bat droppings, so if I wanted to stay I’d have need of a good story, and he might shoot me anyway just out of exasperation. I could run away—Deadwood’s head didn’t work too good, it’s likely he’d forget to chase after—but I’d have to leave the Gulch just as I’d growed customed to it, and I could knock into that general again out there and wind up like all them misfortunate Santees in Minnysota.
All of a sudden, whilst I was still studying over my perdicament, Deadwood set to whooping and hollering in the cave. I was afraid he might a found a bear, or a bear found him, and I was on my feet, ready to tear, but he come out a-dancing with a big potato sack. “Looky here, looky here! Better’n gold! Money! Heaps of it! And other stuff, too! Look at this gold fob watch!”
“I know,” I says, though it was news to me just like the rock was. I warn’t the only body who’d holed out in that cave. “I seen all that. But it warn’t mine, so I only kept the rock. Robbers, I reckon. Better leave it be.”
“Ef they’re robbers, they’re most prob’bly hanged by now. I say, finders keepers. I’m a-goin’ to buy me a jug from ole Zeb to celybrate. Ef you tote the poke, I’ll ’low you t’come along.”
CHAPTER II
O WE DONE that, Deadwood not losing the opportunity at Zeb’s to show off his rock to all the loafers there. How did he find that when nobody else had, they wanted to know. “Cuz I been here since afore time begun,” says he, “and I knowed where it got hid.” They asked him if he’d struck a seam, and he squinted, his eyes closing down on his nose, and says, “Yup, but I ain’t talkin’.” Though of course he warn’t doing nothing else. After a few more swallows from the jug, that lode would be solid gold a mile wide and long and a hundred fathoms deep, but strangers and greenhorns couldn’t see it if they was standing on it. For the price of a jug, he wheedled Zeb out of his raggedy old black vest so’s to have a pocket to plunk the fob watch into. Deadwood says the watch was give him by the owners of the Pacific Rileroad. “I was out thar to show ’em how to spike up them rile things and they gimme it in reckonition.”
“That must of been that golden spike I heerd tell about,” Zeb says with a wink to the others. “You prob’bly stole that, too.”
“Maybe. I ain’t sayin’,” Deadwood says, looking mysterious, and they all laughed at that.
Deadwood couldn’t never resist a good brag. He liked to say he’d helped old Dan’l Boone, who’d got lost, find his way into Missouri, had learnt Jim Bowie how to handle a knife, and when he was just a pup, had went surveying with General Washington. “They credited him, but I done all the dern work.” When I said I thought that gent lived in the last century, he said then maybe it was his younger brother. That lady liar Sarah Sod who Tom was always going on about couldn’t hold a candle to Deadwood.
The only person could match him lie for lie was my Lakota friend Falls-on-His-Face. Eeteh was mostly a happy loafer like me with a particular hankering for Zeb’s whisky and a generl dispreciation of the harsh ways of his tribe which, to hear Eeteh tell it, was nigh as ugly as the sivilization I’d lit out from. They got a Great Spirit that bullyrags them worse’n Moses and sets down what fundamentals they can and can’t do, mostly can’t. Eeteh says he never paid no attention to none of it, he couldn’t see no advantage about it, and for that he took a power of whalings until Coyote learned him how to act a fool. Everybody laughed at him now, and they was always playing mean jokes on him, but they never whipped him no more.