Huck Out West(39)

“It was too dark to see clear, but it looked like he still’s sporting his old straw hat.”

“Heerd one of ’em sayin’ that accordin’ to the laws back home, where they had hangin’s ever week, it was reckoned the most sivilized thing t’do.”

“All this sivilizing is too many for me and Eeteh,” I says. “We’re moving on, too. If you want, we can scout for you. We’re a-going to Mexico, and we’d be happy to have you and your mother as company all the way, if you wouldn’t care to join along.”

“I’m headed thataway, but I’ll prob’bly jest go on back home on the river, now the war’s over,” Zeb says, staring off like he was already a-pulling in there. “But I could use a coupla guns breakin’ out a this hellhole’n some help totin’ the provisions.”

I says we can do that. “But me and Eeteh we can’t leave till after sundown.”

“Me nuther. Cookin’ up a new batch. More like injun whisky. Givin’ it away free. Git the whole camp fallin’ down stone drunk. Then heel it out.” Injun whisky was brewed from black chaw and pine sap and hot peppers and wood alcohol and other worse pison. Zeb never done that. Seeing him go against his principles only showed how horrible things really was. He give me a list of vittles for the road and of rubbage to add to his devil-brew, if I seen them laying round free, and then he flung me a worried look, his bottom teeth chawing on his flabby upper lip. “This dern stuff rots the head cheese, Huck. Turns some people desprate crazy.”

“I’ll come watch your back, Zeb. First, though, I need some a them guns piled up over there. I’m organizing a, you know, a vegilanty gang.” I showed him the soft leather pouch Eeteh give me. “I can pay.”

“Don’t give two hoots who or what they’re fur,” Zeb says, seeing through me like everybody else done. He pocketed the pouch without looking inside it. “Jest need the money t’set up a new still somewheres.”

“How many will that buy?”

“All of ’em. Any left, they’d jest git stole anyways. If it warn’t fur Abaddon, they’d awready got stole back. And I don’t want no extry guns layin’ about tonight when the craziness sets in.”

As we was piling the weapons into grain sacks, I told Zeb about my “brother Jacob” so’s he don’t blunder up my story, and Zeb says somebody asked about him last night. “Feller with an eyepatch.”

“You didn’t tell him nothing?”

“Don’t know nothing.”

We settled the sacks over Tongo’s back, and him and me set off downslope to the tepee, easing wide round the hanged man, floating there like a creepy shadow in the darkness. It was still nightish, but not like pitch no more. There was just enough dismal light to make a body feel they might was being watched. Through a gun sight. To get to Zeb’s in the old days, you had to walk through a woods. Now there was only a couple of lonesome trees still standing, leaving his shack set out on a wide muddy clearing clogged up with emigrant wagons, parked higgledy-piggledy. The bodies laying in the muck was starting to stir, cussing and snorting and trumpeting out their backsides. Some warn’t getting up, and didn’t look like they probably never would.

Down at the crick, there was a scrawny young prospector in a round stiff-brimmed black hat hammering a stake into the shore below my tepee. I didn’t say nothing, I just walked towards him with my rifle cradled in my arm. He had a few black hairs blooming on his upper lip like he was thinking about growing a moustache but couldn’t made up his mind about it. Under it, he muttered something that warn’t American, pulled up his stake, and planted it further upstream. I fired a shot off into the air, and he picked up his stake and moved further on. I warn’t about to shoot nobody over land I was fixing to leave behind, but I couldn’t allow nothing to bother getting the guns to Eeteh, so’s we’d be freed up to go.

In the tepee, I dug a shallow hole next to the fire and laid in it the guns, still in their grain sacks, covering them over with an old tribal blanket Eeteh give me. I cooked up some fish for breakfast, then I scattered a few fishbones and ashes from the fire on the blanket so’s it’d look like it’d always been there. With charred sticks from the fire, I drawed a skull and crossbones on the tepee hide outside, and wrote POX! PISON! above them and CONDAMNED! below.

By the time I was done, the sky was commencing to lighten up and a ceaseless commotion of banging and yelling was a-rumbling down from above again. I let out my emigrant owl hoot and heard what might a been an answering hoot somewheres far off, or maybe I only wanted to hear it. The day was still just a-dawning, but prospectors was already swarming up and down the crick shore and through the hills, staking claims, fighting with each other. Sometimes a gun went off.

To give Eeteh time to collar the weapons, I hiked Tongo back up to the emigrants’ camp, where things was so thickening up, there warn’t hardly no room to pass through. More covered wagons and overloaded freighters and prospectors on horseback was still stampeeding in, there was a long line of them out into the hills far as a body could see, and new shanties and lean-tos was cropping up like cheatgrass. There were streets now of a sudden, though there warn’t no pattern to them, lined out any which way by the tramping boots and hoofs and the wagon tracks. Storefronts with signs on them was raising up at the edges of the tracks, most of them without nothing behind them yet but gumbo. If them emigrants had come here prospecting for mud, they would surely all been rich.