Huck Out West(4)
You don’t cross Moses and his holy gang without you get a hiding or struck with leppersy, but the Great Spirit hadn’t no choice, he had to live with Coyote and his mischief. It was more fair. I ain’t never seen him, but Eeteh says he has been to hell with the tricksome cretur to gamble with the dead, has helped him build a fire in a river bottom so as to catch cooked fish, and has walked the sky with him. The stars up there, Eeteh says, are like stones in the river and you have to hop from one to the next. It’s scarier than a river, though, because if you slip you fall up into the black night and never stop falling. The tribe don’t know whether to believe him or not, but just like the folks back in St. Petersburg living their own crazy lies, they’re afraid he might be right, and so they give him his space and some attention. Deadwood warn’t so lucky.
To be sure I couldn’t butt in on his claim, Deadwood left me out of his yarns, which I took as a good thing because I didn’t want no share of the trouble his crowing was bound to land him in. Our old neighbors was used to Deadwood’s stretchers and was mostly too muddled up with Zeb’s brew to be a worry, but rumbustiouser elements been moving into the Gulch who didn’t know him. Some of them was there in Zeb’s shack that night and they was already closing in on Deadwood in their grim friendly way. It looked like getting out might be a sight more harder’n getting in was.
I laid my rifle across my arm like I was thinking about maybe shooting somebody just for the heck of it and said we had to get back to the fort whilst there was still enough light to follow the mountain trail. I asked Zeb for some feed for the panther so’s it don’t bite my head off when I get back. Zeb was feeling flush with the windfall the barter of his antique vest had fetched him, so besides the feed sack he throwed in a couple of lumps of sugar. Deadwood was having a grand time and warn’t easy to shift, but I remembered him not to forget what Dan’l Boone once told him, and that confused him enough to stumble out after me with his jug and gunny sack.
“What’d he say? What did Dan’l Boone say to me?”
“He says, Deadwood, he says, when strangers start a-crowding in, it’s time to pick up and move on. You got them greedy boys all in a froth, showing them that rock a yourn, and now they want it, and they look ornery enough to try’n get it, any which way. I reckon you best stay with me tonight, and hope only we don’t get followed.”
“Dad-burn it, I ain’t humpin’ myself over no mountains t’bunk down with a blamed panther!”
“Well, stay and get killed then. But just so’s you know, them mountains is all downhill from here and my panther has got better things to chaw on than smelly old prospectors.”
He glanced back over his shoulder. There were three of them hard-looking strangers standing in the doorway, watching our way and talking together. Deadwood fetched out his fob watch and squinted his cross-eyes and studied it a moment. “Well, awright then,” he says.
I throwed his gunny sack over my shoulder and walked us towards his shack until we got hid into the woods, shadowy now with the sun lost in the branches, then I made a quick turn down to the crick and hurried along it upstream to the tepee, moving faster’n suited Deadwood, grunting and complaining about his rheumatics behind me. There’s a sad creamy glow about twilight that smooths off the edges and mashes thoughts and things together, like memory does when it’s let loose on its own. It’s the time of day when I most find myself thinking about the faraway river town where I growed up and about all the things I done there and the folks I knowed, most specially Tom Sawyer, who always had a lively idea of what howling adventure to try on next. Long time ago. Felt like a hundred years or more. So many awful things had happened since then, so much outright meanness. It was almost like there was something wicked about growing up.
Deadwood was weaving about, having oversampled, and was panting like an old dog when we reached the tepee, so I set him down by the woodpile with his jug and sack and went to feed Tongo the forage Zeb give me, letting him nubble the sugar out of my hand. I was glad to see him and he was glad to see me, bobbing his big head and snorting like as if to say so.
It was the tribe that give me the horse, about the same time they give me the woman. They come in the same parcel. I mostly got on better with the horse. My old horse Jackson had been with me since our Pony days, and if you counted up the miles, he’d hoofed it round the world a hundred times and at least thirty times flat-out. He was plumb knackered. I’d named Jackson after an island in the Big River where my life took a change because, with me and Tom setting out on our western adventures, it was a-changing again and I wanted to mark that. The tribe cooked Jackson up and et him which they said was doing him a great honor. When I named the new horse, Eeteh says to the others, “Ne Tongo,” and they approved of that and give him a few baptizing slaps on his croup, and I approved of it, too.
That horse was a grand adventure, and I named him after the Big River, what the Lakota called the Big Water, thinking about the grand adventures me and Jim’d had on it all them years ago. We’d brung Jim out west with us when we’d run away, Tom and me, but we shouldn’t never a done. When we hired on as riders for the Pony, we didn’t know what to do with him. The war hain’t yet started up, and though Jim was a free man, the bounty hunters didn’t always mind such particulars. Sometimes we had to pretend he was OUR slave, and we always had to be on the watch-out he didn’t get stole. The Pony Express Stables, however, was hiring only skinny young white orphans like me and Tom, and though Jim was surely an orphan, he come up short on the other requirements. The station-keeper said if we wanted the job, we had to get rid of him. I says we can’t leave Jim behind on his lonesome, we have to look for another job. But they paid fifty dollars a month, which was more money than a body could tell what to do with, and Tom says we hain’t no choice, and he sold him to a tribe of slaveholding Cherokees. “It’s the right thing to do, Huck,” Tom said after he’d gone and done it. “Jim’s used to being a slave and he’s probably happier when he has someone telling him what to do. And besides, they’re more like his own kind.” I knowed Tom was surely right as he most always was, but it made my heart sink into my wore-out bootheels to see Jim’s grieved eyes that day. I waved at him and he looked at me like he was asking me a dreadful question, and then he was gone, with a rope round his neck. Tom bought us new riding boots with the money.