Huck Out West(32)

Deadwood was setting on a three-legged stool outside Zeb’s shack, studying his fob watch from time to time in the half-light, popping it open, snapping it shut, and regaling the drunks with his stretchers. Deadwood was about all what they had for entertainment, and sometimes they spotted him a ten-penny glass of whisky or a dribble of whatever they dug out of their saddlebags—“To grease up his wheels,” as they said. As me and Tongo passed by, they was asking him how the hole in his vest got burnt. He says it happened when he was defending the Alley-mo, his gun getting so hot he had to drop it in his pocket to cool it off and it set the vest on fire. But then Davy Crockett sent him off to find Sam Houston and bring back help, which was how him and them other fellers lost the Battle of the Alley-mo and all got killed. “Ole Davy was a passable tale teller, but he warn’t worth a mouthful a cold ashes as a cunnel. He’s got a plague of ornery Messykins flooding over the wall, and what does he go’n do? He sends his best dern shooter off shaking wild gooses.”

“You purty good with a gun, Deadwood?” someone asked.

“I was handy. They useter call me Dead-Eye Deadwood. I got stories wrote in books about me.”

I’d wanted to let him know about my new brother Jacob and his tragic disease so’s he didn’t speak to the contrary, but it warn’t no use, he was wound up for the night. I seen Eyepatch and his two pals looking me over like they was measuring me up for one a them pine boxes, so me and Ne Tongo headed back down to the tepee to see what vittles they might a left us for supper and to consider what we was going to do next. “Tongo,” I says, “we got no place to go and we got to go there.” He snorted like he understood, but like he warn’t no more pleased than what I was.

Who I found in my tepee this time was Eeteh, setting in the shadows and sampling from one of the jugs I’d laid aside for the tribe, his tomahawk in his lap. I was ever so glad to see him and I told him so. I told him I’d went looking for him with that jug and found everybody gone, and he says he was glad I didn’t get there sooner because they was so tore up about all these stampeeding white folks they might have scalped me on the spot.

“Even if I was bringing them whisky?”

Eeteh nodded. “All crazy,” he says, looking up at me through the stringy black hair hanging loose over his face and shoulders from under his headband. All the tribe wore long hair, they allowed it roused up their spirits, but the others kept it braided. Eeteh didn’t like nothing knotted up, and let it hang long and snarly, like mine. He never wore no eagle feathers in it, because they was tokens a killed enemies, and he never killed no one that he knowed of. The vest he wore was really an old fringed and beaded buckskin shirt that a cousin was wearing when he got killed in a battle. Eeteh tore the bloody sleeves off and worked some porkypine quills into the beadwork, which he says is who he is. Needley. “Tribe on warpath, Hahza. Want guns, no whisky.” Hahza is my real name in Lakota. When Kiwi first heard it, she busted out laughing and give me a punch where it hurt, and that set the whole tribe off laughing, except for Eeteh who said that his name was also a joke for everybody, so for him it meant the same as “brother.” Eeteh had brung along some buffalo jerky and we chawed on it, while sipping at Zeb’s liquor. “Long Hair,” he says. “Want war.”

“I know it,” I says. “When he rode in here, he had a thousand calvary boys with him, and I judge they ain’t far away, just itching for something to shoot at. It’s all too many for me. The general ain’t spotted me yet, but I don’t aim to let that happen. I’m riding out soon’s I’m packed up.”

Eeteh nodded and says he wants to go with me. He says the tribe with its glory fancies was driving him as crazy as they was, and Coyote told him that him and me had to leave before it become our fate to shoot at each other. But he says we wouldn’t get far if we didn’t find some guns for them because that’s what they sent him here to do, and he don’t want to think about what they’d do to him if he didn’t at least bring them back a few rifles. “They give me money. Silver.” He held up the soft leather pouch and jangled it. “Help, Hahza.”

I studied hard about that, chawing slow on the jerky. I knowed it was a most shameful and low-down thing to do, and I could get hung for it and wouldn’t have nothing to say to my defense, but I was lonely and scared and I needed Eeteh’s company. He was the first proper friend I’d had since poor Dan Harper, and Eeteh was scared, too. It had been whilst I was feeling ever so mournful about Dan’s killing that I first got in trouble with General Hard Ass. I run away, but he found me again, and after what I’d done, he’d want to hang me, so I didn’t really have nothing to lose except my ruputation and that was considerable ruined anyways. I’d never learnt how to do right and it warn’t no use to try to learn me now. “I seen wagonloads of them for sale today,” I says. “And Zeb has took in guns on credit for his whisky. I reckon they’d be cheap. I could take them up to that cave where I first lived with the bats till you come.”

“No. If they see you, bad trouble,” Eeteh says, giving me the pouch. “Leave guns in here. Go way. I find them.”





CHAPTER XIV


FTER EETEH LEFT, I couldn’t fall to sleep. I tried hard, knowing how pesky tight the next days was going to be, but it warn’t no use. I was too a-jitter. I was hearing all manner of rustlings outside the tepee like there was a mob of emigrants creeping round out there trying to see who they could rob and kill. Coyotes, wolves and wild bears would a been more welcomer; they was only hungry. It was cold, spring slow a-stirring up in the Hills, but I dasn’t light a fire and set the lodge cover aglow like an invite, so I shivered under blankets with my rifle across my knees and drunk more whisky just for the warmth in it, feeling most miserable.