Huck Out West(41)
“If it’s so damn dangerous,” Pegleg says, “why’re YOU goin’ in there?”
“I got the impunity from tending Jacob. I catched the pox, too, but I only broke out in freckly spots. There ain’t pus leaking out a more’n one or two now. I can show you if you ain’t scared of drawing too close.” They didn’t show no signs of wanting to do that, so I says, “Zeb’s stilling up a special whisky to welcome folks to the Gulch tonight. It’ll be for free, so they’re already getting in line. Maybe I’ll see you up there later.”
“Awright, you carry on, chief,” Eyepatch says, holstering his pistol. The one who drawed on me was still moaning and cussing and clutching his wrist. “C’mon, Bill, le’s go git you doctored up.”
“How you going to do that?” whined Bill. “There ain’t no doctors.”
“There’s a dentist turned up. He prob’bly can do it. Git them bones shifted, chief. Pronto. We’ll be back.”
I watched them move up the slope till they was near out of sight, then ducked inside. It was all tore up in there. I grabbed up the blanket to beat out the fire, and I seen that the guns had been took. It was just what I was afeard of. Eyepatch and his gang had got to them first. Our plans was ruined.
But then I seen the eagle feather.
CHAPTER XVII
HEY WAS ALL having a grand time up in Zeb’s that night. Pap would a felt right at home. It only took one swallow of Zeb’s special brew to melt a body’s brains and knees, and two was good enough for delirium tremens. Of course Pap would a got in a fight with everybody, even if he couldn’t get his feet under him, but that was part a the revelment for Pap, maybe the importantest part—and it was just the sort of climacteric Zeb was aiming at that night so as to make our escape from the camp without resk of nobody on our tails. Zeb’s mastiff Abaddon was penned up and mighty unhappy about it, growling out something betwixt a snarl and a whimper all night, but Zeb didn’t want the dog to chase nobody off before he’d soused them up.
That yaller-whiskered banker-dentist turned land surveyor was there and he was the most popular man in the shack. Zeb’s bar was just a plank set on two hogsheads, and Yaller Whiskers was standing there, alongside of a chinless character with long droopy moustaches spread round a set of mule teeth. Mule Teeth was showing off a speck a gold, which he says he come on that day by following a map he bought off of the surveyor. The speck probably warn’t worth ten cents, but you’d a thought the fellow was become a millionaire, and now everybody wanted to buy a five-dollar map from Yaller Whiskers. There was some who’d already bought maps who hadn’t struck nothing. “They warn’t maps, they was more like newspaper cartoons,” one of them says, and Yaller Whiskers spit through his bushy beard and says, “Well, you prob’bly warn’t readin’ ’em proper, son, so you messed out the punchline.” They asked the millionaire over and over where he’d staked his claim, and he smiled round his big teeth like a king and slurped and unloosed a handsome heap a lies.
Some was complaining to Zeb about that hanged hayseed still blowing in the wind out a-front the shack, saying it warn’t an eddyfying sight and couldn’t be no good for business. Zeb says business right now was most all he could handle, but they was free to go cut him down if they warn’t afeard a being ha’nted by him after. Several was willing, saying ghosts don’t scare them none, except maybe spinster ghosts who was knowed to be the vilest sort, but they didn’t want to lose their approximity to the free whisky whilst it lasted, undrinkable hellbegot bomination though it was.
One of the emigrants fetched along a homemade fiddle and he was a-ripping away on it, yelping out songs he’d thought up about the awful Silver War and about lonesome, whooping, dogie-driving, and dying cowboys. Some a the drunks was yelping and yuppeeing along with him and some was bawling and some was cussing the memory of their trail bosses and the wretchid lives they had. I remembered the lonesome part, but the rest was mostly sentimentery hogwash. I wouldn’t be unhappy to go back to the cowboying trade, but I wouldn’t be specially happy nuther.
Then the chap got to singing about young women in calico frocks and Sunday bonnets, and that got the drunks to hooting and hollering and in generl misabusing theirselves. One of them tied the sleeves of a sheepskin jacket round his back to make a kind of skirt out of it, and he commenced to prance around like a prairie nymph and then strip himself off one thing at a time, like I seen the ladies do in saloons down in Abileen. They was all awful excited. If a real woman had turned up, she wouldn’t a stood a chance. All the loafers was roaring and clapping and haw-hawing until the dancer was start-naked, and then they booed him and asked him when’s the last time he washed that nasty thing.
“When I felled in a river,” he says, “back in ’68.”
Eyepatch crept over through the crowd, stepping on the bodies that had already got knocked down by Zeb’s vegilanty whisky, his earrings and gold teeth a-glinting in the lamplight, and asked me with his everyday snarl if my brother was moved away yet. I says that Jake was out a the ground and laying down there in the tepee under a blanket. His two pals was watching me from across the shack. Pegleg was chawing a plug, and nuther him nor Bill was drinking. “I promised to help out Zeb tonight, and when I’m done I mean to pack Jake off to a proper burial back home. Him and me’ll be gone by noon.”