Huck Out West(42)

Eyepatch says they seen an injun sneaking around down there.

“Yes. He’s watching over the body so there don’t nobody come too close and catch the pox off it.”

“Ain’t the bugger apt to catch it hisself?”

“Probably, but he’s only an ignorant savage. He don’t know nothing about poxes and I ain’t telling him.”

Eyepatch and his pals was too sober, and I knowed we’d have to keep a sharp lookout for them when we pulled out with Zeb. When I says so to Zeb, he says I should take care. “Them rapscallions is afeard a you’n yer gun, and there ain’t nothing more dangersomer than a skeered killer.”

Deadwood was uncorking his stretchers in the middle of the shack for any loafers tight enough to listen at him, and showing his fob watch at most every opportunity, popping it open and closed, though now there warn’t no point. He was presently telling about when he scouted for Louie Clark. He says Louie asked him to bed down a princess name of Porky-Hauntus to have her learn him the secret tunnel through the mountains to the ocean. “She took me in thar and showed me more’n I never wanted t’see, and when I come out I was ten years younger, boys, but limp as a dern noodle till I’d growed back them lost ten years.”

Zeb had richened up his brew with a gallon of homemade black rum donated from one of the emigrant wagons I passed by earlier, plus some store hair slick, a bowkay of chili peppers, a pot of crabapple jam, some powder that Zeb tasted and said was most like rat pison, and other useful rubbage that had turned up in prospectors’ wagons and saddlebags. One of the drunks says he reckonized the sweet muddy taste as out’n his own rum jug that was stole that day whilst he was off staking his claim, and before I could move, he’d drawed his pistol on Zeb and says he was going to kill him dead, and other guns come out round the room. But the drunk had been sampling Zeb’s mulekick all night and his eyes rolled back of a sudden and his pistol dropped and he stiffened up and keeled over, and everybody put their guns away again.

But it was a sign of how the party was hotting up. There was knife-throwing games and rassling and fancy shooting contests that could easy turn vilent. A bespectacled chap in a black derby hat had borrowed an old army drum from somewheres and was a-beating on it, adding to the racket. Some of the boys, wearing scraps and tatters of blue and gray uniforms, was already doing some pushing and shoving and cussing out each other’s generals. It wouldn’t take long. That long bony coffin-maker come through the door, took one look around, and went back to hammering boxes together.

I’d been thinking about our leaving all day and couldn’t hardly wait to get started. I had loved the Gulch, but it was most ruined now by this plague a grabby emigrants. As a haven for loafers, it warn’t one no more. It was time to go.

Eeteh he was ready, too. He was down at the tepee, hiding out from all the Indian-hating emigrants and watching over our goods, waiting for Zeb and me. I’d left Tongo with him and I was glad of it, seeing how ugly things was turning in the shack. Everything except the lodge-skins was packed up down there and ready to be grabbed on the run. The reward for killing Indians was rising up every day, so Eeteh was restless that we had to wait for Zeb, but he was happy about traveling with the old whisky-maker and his magical mother, who he said Coyote was planning to marry. He says the tribe was proud about what we done and they maybe warn’t happy we was going, but they wouldn’t try to stop us. They might even give us an escort if we asked them. He says they wished I was the chief of my tribe, though they knowed my tribe was too stupid to think of that, and I says, yes, they was stupid, but I ain’t the chief a nothing and won’t never be, and he nodded at that and lighted up his pipe and I lighted up mine.

Before I left him to come up to Zeb’s, he told me another Coyote story. There was a time, he says, when things was going poorly for Coyote. He had the earache, the toothache, the bellyache, and monster boils under his tail, but the worse thing was the rash of pustulous sores that broke out in his crotch. His wife was disgusted when she seen them and left him to go live with Snake, but he couldn’t a done nothing with her anyways. A woman come to take care of him, but she pisoned him with an evil potion that left his innards twisted wrongside out, and then robbed him of all his money, tobacco, and spirits. He knowed that Snake had powerful medicines and “speak great wisdom,” as Eeteh put it, so he decided to go visit him. Snake might a s’posed Coyote was a-coming to kill him on account of the cheating wife, but by then Coyote was so sick he could only crawl like a worm (Eeteh imitated this), so Snake laughed and took him in and doctored him and talked to him whilst he was getting cured. The peyote that Snake et give him visions of the beginnings and endings of things, and those visions led him to concluding that nothing mattered in the world no more and everything, even boils and pustules, was funny. Coyote laughed along with him, and then when he was well again, he killed both Snake and his woman and cooked them up with prairie onions, wild mushrooms, and buffaloberries, and et them, saying he hoped Snake got the joke and didn’t take revenge whilst he was passing through. Eeteh was telling me this story in Lakota, and I had to stop him now and again to ask him what some words meant. I had the feeling that whenever I done that, he was changing the story a little.

Things was a-biling up now in Zeb’s shack. Folks was turning testy and old Zeb was nerviouser’n I never seen him. The drummer in the derby was pounding the skin of his insterment like he was trying to bust it, and the fiddler was scratching his strings and screeching away through his nose like something of his’n down below was a-getting twisted. A new emigrant come in wearing a string a black-haired scalps on his belt, some of them with their ears still on. He knocked over a drunken loafer who was in his way and opened up his pants and let fly against a wall. One of Zeb’s regulars took offense at that and was just sober enough to take aim and shoot the emigrant’s pecker off. That crazied the new emigrant so, he fetched out two six-shooters and he might a hurt somebody if the others hadn’t stopped him dead with twenty or thirty shots before he could start blasting away. “Thanks, boys,” Zeb says, crawling out from under the bar plank. “Some people ain’t got no manners.”