Huck Out West(38)

Eeteh had thought I was already completely dead. He says that pestiferous brother told everybody he was scouting for the tribe and he seen Long Hair and his soldiers grab me and drag me off to be shot. He was all alone, he couldn’t do nothing about it. He even said he heard the firing squad before he sneaked away. The brother drooped his head down and says he was terrible sorry about it. I says the general found me all right, but if that sorry brother was watching, he didn’t stay around long enough to see what happened next. Eeteh says that he didn’t see nothing, he just set the general on me, and cut. It’s what the low-down liar fetched the whole tribe there to do, he didn’t care about what trouble he was dragging them into. Eeteh was madder’n I never seen him, and says that brother don’t belong in the tribe.

I told Eeteh all the general said, how he declared me guilty of an awful sight of hanging crimes, and how he wanted me to repent my wickedness by leading the whole tribe into a death trap. Eeteh nodded and sipped his whisky and says the tribe and me should move separate to the Black Hills, which warn’t fur off, and where the army warn’t allowed. The tribe can send out a decoy to lead Long Hair and his troopers the wrong way, he says, and then, whilst his calvary is a-chasing ghosts, they can haul their lodges over there. He told me about the whisky-maker in the Gulch and drawed a map on birch bark how to find him and says he’d look for me there when the tribe finally reached the Hills.

So that was how it was I first come to the Hills, which for me, till now, was more like home than home was. Soon as Eeteh got nearby, he brung me my lodge-skins and helped me cut some poles and set up my tepee and move down out a the bat cave where I’d been living. Tepees are the changeablest kind of a layout for living in. They make a body feel at home wherever they are. I’d stayed with the tribe for a few years, moving round, and could a gone back with them again, but they seen I was a Hard Ass magnet, and was afeared a me being too close. I was also a little wearied of them and their peculiars, so both Eeteh and me was agreed it was best to abide in the Gulch on my own.

When old Zeb first seen me and Eeteh together, he hired us to do his trading with the tribe, and that made it easier for Eeteh to come and go when he wanted to. It was the best time of my life, and of Eeteh’s, too. The Indian-hating emigrants hadn’t arrived yet, and we could set around in my tepee and drink and jabber the night through. Zeb needed grains for his whisky-mash, and meat and fish for himself, turnips, hog nuts, berries, whatever other food the tribe gathered, and he also traded for things he could sell to emigrants passing through. All in all, Zeb was doing tolerable well, he was the richest man in the Gulch, though back then that warn’t saying much. Now, everybody was going to be rich in the Rush and old Zeb maybe the richest of them all. I worried Eeteh’s money pouch wouldn’t mean beans to him.

It was a cold damp morning and I had my chin tucked down in my buckskin shirt. It was too dark to see nothing, but I could hear the noises of others up sneaking about, stumbling over the bodies lying in the cold mud, cussing back whenever one of the bodies got stepped on and let out a nasty bark. There was an awful stink like everybody was just dropping their pants wherever and doin’ their producin’, as Zeb would say, and it made me push my nose deeper into my shirt.

Then, just as me and Tongo was pulling up to Zeb’s shack, somebody kicked me in the head and knocked me slap off of the horse into the mud. I sprung up and swung my rifle round in the dark, trying to see who done that. And how. The emigrants in their sivilizing fever had chopped down most of the trees thereabouts, but one out a-front of Zeb’s was still rairing up, and something long and lumpy was a-hanging from it. It was so dark, I had to get right under the muddy farm brogans to see that it was that country jake in the floppy straw who come to the camp with just only a pitchfork and a wheelbarrow. I judged it must be desperate bad luck to get kicked in the head by a dead man, specially one who was wearing your own hat, and I begun to feel worried and shaky about the rest of the day ahead.

Abaddon, Zeb’s cantankery mastiff, was a-guarding the door, but him and me was old pards, so he only wagged his tail and grinned his devil grin whilst I scratched his pointy ears. Inside, Zeb was already set to work by lamplight on a new batch of liquor. His shack was always in ruins, but it was ruineder than ever. Them strangers piling in last night had wrecked everything that could still be wrecked. “It got purty mean,” he acknowledged, scratching his chin. There was a heap of rifles, pistols and other goods like saddles, spurs and even britches and boots, over in a shadowy corner behind the plank bar, things Zeb had took in exchange for whisky. There was also blood on the dirt floor. “Year’s wuth a whisky. Swallered in a night. Tried t’shut the shack down afore that happened, but they shoved a gun in my face.”

“I’ve had trouble down at the tepee, too.”

“Some tough-lookin’ jackasses come askin’ to buy up my stock’n close the place permanent, sayin’ they’ll be tearin’ my old shack down t’build somethin’ fancy with whores’n gamblin’, and I kin work fur ’em. But I ain’t stayin’. I don’t work fur nobody. And after yestidday’s rush, I ain’t got no stock left to sell. Jest the mother. They ain’t gettin’ that over my dead body,” he says, jutting his jaw further out under his nose like he was daring a body to argue with him, his yaller bottom teeth showing like scattered nuggets.

I asked him about the tree decoration out front, and Zeb says, “Shootout over the last jug a whisky. One of ’em killt t’other one like usual. Committee formed theirselves up, mostly stewed pards a the loser who was a-layin’ there with his mouth open. They poured some whisky in it, and when it only filled up like a cup, they says the winner’d committed murder, which they declared t’be a hangin’ offense. They was generous, though. Let the feller have a slug a the whisky he’d fought over afore stringin’ him up, then drunk the rest to his mem’ry.”