Huck Out West(40)
Traders sold straight from their tents and wagons or set up rough lumber on barrels and laid their wares out on them in the street, or on the new wooden sidewalks being slung up so’s to be able to move around without sinking knee-deep in the muck. There was everything for sale from shovels and skillets to wooly underwear, picks and tin lanterns. A power of rifles and shotguns and six-shooters was being bought and sold, too, and axes and hatchets and mean-looking knives. That rawbone coffin-maker in the black stovepipe hadn’t stopped sawing planks and hammering boxes together since he got here, and he still didn’t have none left over.
There was rumors gold had been struck upstream, so regiments of fortune-hunters was charging out to scrouge for it. There warn’t no law about any of what was happening; it was a bully’s game. They was so eager to race out and grab up the gold, they mostly just left their wagons where they stood, offering up vittles and bottle liquor a-plenty for borrowing, and swarms a loafers was sneaking about doing that.
Others was prospecting for gold off of the prospectors. That fat little dentist-banker with the thick bush of yaller whiskers was now setting in front of a map he’d drawed and was announcing himself as a land surveyor for folks who wanted to know for a dollar where the gold was before they went rattling off into the heathen wilderness. Swarthy fellows was peddling burros and pack horses, herding them through the muddy streets. Sawyers and carpenters and millers hung out their shingles. I heard a baby cry, so families was starting to elbow in, too.
A beardy slack-jawed chap was pushing the country rube’s ownerless wheelbarrow, offering it up for sale. As he slopped along, somebody thronged a dead body in it. He looked the body over in his meloncholical way, slowly scratching his hairy jaw. Then, when he calculated he couldn’t profit by it, he tipped it out and pushed on again.
There was a small crowd of loafers a-wanting to get into Zeb’s, being persuaded off by Abaddon. When Abaddon first snarled me up against a wall, I thought I heard Zeb call him a bad ’un, but then I learnt it was the name of some devil, and he did have the snout and temper of one. Zeb didn’t hesitate to sick Abaddon on robbers and vilent drunks, and not every one a them had two working legs afterwards.
One of the old regulars leaning on a wagon next to the stone path leading up to the shack says he’s heard about a vegilanty gang I was banding up and he’d like to join it if we was passing out guns because he ain’t got his no more, Zeb does. He says he was told that members of the gang got to take a blood oath, and he was ready to stick himself and do that, so I seen Deadwood warn’t only spreading the word, he was tossing in a few of his own. “Tonight, at Zeb’s,” I says, “special vegilanty whisky. For free. Let the others know.”
Deadwood his own self warn’t far away. He was telling everybody who wanted to listen about his shooting contest with my brother Jacob. “We set out to see how long him and me could keep that silver dollar up in the air by shootin’ at it,” he was saying. “First one missed lost the dollar, though it didn’t hardly look like one no more. More like that chunk a the moon I struck here when I was a young’un, and first got famous.” When he seen me, he took his gold fob watch out of his vest pocket and raised it up and blinked both his crossed eyes like two winks at once. “We didn’t nuther two of us miss,” he says, pocketing the watch and returning back to his audience again. “But ole Jake he finally won on accounts of I run out a dern carteridges.”
Those rumors of plasser gold in the crick was spreading round, so me and Tongo went where I could keep an eye on the tepee. What I seen was smoke a-pouring out of it. I rode down there with my rifle and pistol cocked: it was Eyepatch and his pals again. Wooden claim stakes was springing up along the shore like jimson weeds, including a new one sprouting in Tongo’s pasture. The smoke warn’t from a cooking fire. They was trying to burn the tepee down.
Eyepatch snarls for me to get out, I’m trespassing on their claim. “I ain’t making no fuss about that,” I says. I’d helped the army burn down enough native villages to know the lodges burnt slow, but I couldn’t resk losing that hide cover, and I needed to know if the guns was still in there or if these rascals had already smouched them. “Ain’t a prospector, and don’t never aim to be one. But you’d best douse that fire.”
“We got a ordnance to burn it,” Eyepatch says, “it bein’ a mortal hazard.”
“Who give you that ordnance?” I says, both fingers on triggers.
“We done.” His gold teeth and the loops in his ears was glinting in the morning light. He didn’t seem to think I’d shoot him and he was probably right.
“Well, my brother’s buried in there and you’re spreading his pox all over the Hills by setting smoke a-flying out from that sick tent.”
Pegleg frowned and lifted his neckerchief over his nose. “Why the hell didn’t you tell us that in the first place, chief?”
The fellow with the scattered brown teeth says I’m a goddam liar and drawed his pistol, so I was obleeged to raise mine and fire off some damage to his hand, adding to all the old wounds he was already wearing like a thief’s campaign medals. The other two’s hands was twitching, but they warn’t taking no chances. “He’s a shooter,” Eyepatch snarls with a mean grin.
“I’m going to put out that fire and move my brother’s remains off of your claim. Him and me are going to be traveling soon. I’m a-taking him home. If you want to stay and watch, you got to come in there with me and help me dig him up.”