Huck Out West(37)

“No, sir. I wouldn’t never think of it.”

“In fact, you’re living with a squaw. I’m told Kiwingya is her name.”

“No, she—”

“It’s all right. Sometimes it’s a practical thing to do.” I warn’t sure how he knowed all this, but I could guess. “I once had a squaw myself. She was a princess of some sort and was kindly and serviceable. But I’d have happily had her disemboweled and fed to the wolves if that had been a convenient example to others, and I assume you’d do the same.”

“I hope I don’t never need such samples, General. But I anyways don’t live with her and the tribe no more. She throwed me over and turned the tribe against me.”

“I’m sorry to hear that, Finn. I have something for you to do, and it might be useful if you were still living among them. You’ll have to go back to them and make amends.”

“They’re awful mad at me. They won’t let me back.”

The general was giving Ne Tongo a long dark study. I took hold of Tongo’s rawhide thong. “I think I recognize this stallion,” he says. “He’s one of the animals that got away during our attack on the Cheyenne, when you couldn’t control your own horse. If so, he’s army property and you, in effect, are a horse thief.”

“No, sir. Wild Bill give me this horse back in Abileen. Roped it himself up in the Utah Territory. He says it was the wildest horse he ever seen, and when I broke him, he bought me a whisky and says I could keep him. You can ask him.”

“I will. I know Bill well. What’s the horse’s name?”

“Big River, sir. Mostly I just call him River.”

“When you were talking to him just now, he had a different name. An Indian one. And he has been broken the way the natives do it, not like I watched you do it for the army. Why do I get the feeling, Finn, you’re not being honest with me?”

He was right, I was unloosing one bare-face lie after t’other, and if I could a thought up another one, I surely would a let it out, but before I could roust one up, the general he says: “You’re an American, son, those savages aren’t. You mustn’t betray your own people. That’s treason.”

My crimes was a-stacking up. There warn’t no more sand in my craw. I could only hold onto Tongo and try not to show how guilty I was.

“We’re going to lure the Lakota warriors into a cul-de-sac and destroy them, the same way they murdered your friend Corporal Harper and his brave army unit. I also had a young friend in that garrison who was killed. And while the savages are chasing us, their camp will be vulnerable to attack, so it too will be destroyed and all who are in it. That’s what’s going to happen, Finn. And you’re going to help. You’ll return now to the tribe and when we need you, you will be informed and you will lead them to us and us to them.” He smiled down at me. “That’s an order, son.” He didn’t have to say no more. I knowed what they done to deserters, traiters, liars and horse thieves. General Hard Ass took another long hard look at Tongo, touched the wide brim of his hat and, still smiling his cold fixed smile, slowly rode away.





CHAPTER XVI


IDING NE TONGO up to Zeb’s shack in the dark before dawn, I felt like I was returning back to the beginning of my story without going nowheres. Zeb’s was where me and Eeteh met up when I was running away from General Hard Ass three years before, like now I was still running away from him again. What was the same was the running. Started back on the Big River, running from Pap. Ain’t never stopped.

When the general catched me up in the Wyoming Territory, I didn’t know where to go. I’d told the general that the tribe was mad at me and throwed me out, so if I went back to where they was camped in the mountains, and Eeteh’s pesky brother snitched to him, he’d see I was lying. Of course that wouldn’t change nothing, I was already a low-down liar in the general’s books, heaving stretchers at him by the muck-cartload, and him knowing it. But what if I led his troopers there? Maybe, I thought, looking back over my shoulder, he was only letting me go so’s I could do that, reckoning on my stupidness. So I dasn’t go back, but if I didn’t, Eeteh wouldn’t understand why. He might even calculate I’d been captured and stumble into trouble trying to find me. It was like one a Tom Sawyer’s pair a duckses.

The first thing I had to do was get word to Eeteh somehow. Maybe he’d know what to do. When him and me wanted to call out to each other without nobody knowing, we always hooted back and forth like owls, so I was listening everywheres for his hoots and I was who-whooing myself, best I could, but I didn’t hear nothing back. Me and Tom mostly me-yowed and I was naturaller at cats. They was more like family. Eeteh says my hoots might be exact, but they warn’t made by any owl he ever heard in these parts. “Then it’s the hoot of an emigrant owl,” I says. “That way, you’ll know it’s me.”

It was resky, but when it got dark and I hain’t heard from Eeteh all day, I rode Tongo up onto a rocky slope in hooting distance from the camp, done my emigrant owl who-whoos, and this time Eeteh was pretty soon hooting back. I was toting the whisky and tobacco I’d bought in the tavern for the tribe, so when he clumb his pinto up and found me, we settled into some boulders high up on the hillside under the moon to drink and smoke a pipe or two, happy we was both still alive, but not for certain how to stay that way.