Huck Out West(31)
“Oh, I ain’t staying,” I says. “I don’t use it no more, not since my brother Jacob died in here. It don’t feel right.”
“Your brother? What was wrong with him?”
“He got the pox and there warn’t no doctors round here to cure him from it, even if they could of. It was dreadful to watch him go. He screamed all the way t’other side.”
“Pox? You mean, small—?”
“Warn’t nothing small ABOUT it! Jake had the gashliest sores you ever seen, all bubbling up from head to toe like hot springs, and he spitted up green stuff that had something crawling inside it. It most made me down sick to see my own brother in such a woesome state. His only relief was sucking on that pipe you’re smoking.” Soon’s I said so, Pegleg warn’t smoking it no more, only staring at it through his tangle of greasy hair like it might shoot him. “His birddog Ranger wouldn’t leave his side and the poor cretur catched it, too. It let out a nasty drool like Jake’s and its eyes filled up with pus so’s it couldn’t see. Him and Jake they died at the same time, the dog’s paw on my brother’s chest. It was ever so sadful. I most wish you’d been here to see it. They was a-laying together, right there where you’re setting.” The one setting where I was pointing jumped up and brushed off the seat of his pants, mumbling something around the two or three brown teeth left in his mouth about how he s’posed at least the fish fresh from the crick was in good health, and I says they probably was. “Jacob used that frypan for a spittoon as he was a-dying, but I rinsed it off in the crick and drownded most a them crawly things.” Thinking about that poor faithful dog a-dying by its master, even though there warn’t no such animal, had set my eyes to watering up, and that done it for them, they was all three out of there on the double, spewing out the fish they’d been chawing.
The rest of the day, I kept Tongo with me lest he get stole, walking him by his rawhide thong through the strangers crowding in. Tongo wouldn’t let nobody but me ride him, but a body who’d got throwed or kicked might be mad enough to want to shoot the horse that made such a damfool of him, so I didn’t plan to let him never out of my sight. As we walked along, I explained to Tongo what was happening, so as to get him of a disposition to give up his pasture and move on again, and he shook his head from time to time and snorted. He didn’t like the looks of things, nuther.
The fortune hunters was still rolling noisily into the Gulch like they was coming to the circus, most of them tearing off into the hills with their picks and pans and wooden stakes. One country jake carried only a pitchfork and a big wheelbarrow for toting all the gold he was going to dig up like potatoes. He was wearing muddy brogans and a floppy straw hat just like the ones I used to wear back in St. Petersburg, and he looked a fool like I must a done. I couldn’t let the tepee out of my sight and had to go back down there from time to time to make sure nobody else warn’t thinking about moving in. It looked like poor old Jacob was going to die a thousand deaths before the day was done.
Most of the new emigrants was heading out to mine the cricks and hills, though some was setting up to mine the miners. A stout man with bushy yaller whiskers put up a sign saying he was a banker and also a dentist at a dollar a pull. One chap come hauling in an old shackly wagon all weighted down with painted signs, mirrors, doorknobs, pump handles, and fancy wall clocks, even some hinged doors and old chawed-up hitching posts, which he says he’d cleaned out from a deserted mining ghost town. There was lots of wagons filled with borrowed truck like that. It was like the towns theirselves had hitched up their pants when they got left behind and had went chasing after their restless townsfolk.
By the middle of the afternoon, even with many of the prospectors out digging and panning, the Gulch was filled up to near half as big as St. Petersburg and twice as ugly, and it got ever thicker and nastier by the hour. A body could learn more cusswords in five minutes than in a lifetime back on the river. There warn’t no women around, so the whole camp become a public outhouse. The banker-dentist with the yaller whiskers had set out a plank table and added a new sign saying he was also offering a friendly game of cards. The ghost-town scavenger was nailing up a storefront, startling up all the birds and people was shooting them. Under the falling birds, a long bony man in a black stovepipe hat come riding in with a wagonload of pine boxes which looked like they might probably be coffins, and folks stepped out of his way and let him pass.
Word had got out that General Hard Ass’s famous chunk of ore had been found by Deadwood, and each new arrival dragged the old prospector out to show where he found it, and so he was famous in his way but he warn’t happy. I lettered a wooden sign that claimed him the spot, and most everybody respected that, like enough because they didn’t believe the rock was really born there and he didn’t nuther. Most of them looked up into the hills above the Gulch, trying to cipher out where it might of fell from. Some of them offered him a share of their stake if he could fetch them to the source. One of the old loafers passed by and asked Deadwood with a wink at the others to show them another rock from that giant lode he struck. “No, I ain’t taking no resks,” he says. “I put ’em all where that bandit cunnel can’t find them. I done a good job of it. It’ll take me more’n a week to find ’em myself.”
The sun scrunched down behind the hills like it dreaded to see what was going to happen next, and throngs of prospectors, empty-handed and feeling grumbly, begun drifting back, scowling round to make sure nobody had beat them to a find. It was early spring and still chilling down when the sun dipped. Open fires was built in the streets and birds and small animals was spitted over them. You had to watch where you walked not to stomp on the heads and innards being flung about. The plank bar in Zeb’s shack was crowded round with gruff sweaty men toting picks and shovels like battle-axes, a bonanza for Zeb maybe but not for his old regulars, who couldn’t even squeeze in the door and was apt to get a drubbing if they tried too hard. The prices had shot up, but Zeb, surrounded by ornery bands of strangers fighting each other for custody of his goods, did not look all that happy, even if he was getting rich.