Huck Out West(44)

About halfway down, I heard a most woeful moan and fetched up short. I thought it might a been a wild animal and I spun around with my rifle pointed at it, but it was Deadwood a-laying there in a patch a moonlight, looking half-ruined. His face was just raw meat, he was a-bleeding round the ears, and at least one of his arms was broke; a leg, too, looked like. He didn’t have many teeth before, now he didn’t have none. “Deadwood! Who done this to you?” I asked. He couldn’t talk, he could only groan. Anyways I knowed who. His fob watch was gone. Looked like his jaw might be busted. He needed a doctor, but there warn’t none anywheres I knowed of. Unless Eeteh could help. I started up my emigrant owl hoot.

Zeb limped up with the packhorse behind me. “We don’t have no time for this!” he says. You could still hear the hollering and the guns popping, but not so loud down here. “If that damfool’s in trouble, it’s trouble he’s made for hisself! WE GOT TO KEEP MOVIN’!”

“It was the fob watch, Zeb. Them robbers reckonized it. It’s them that’s done this. I told Deadwood to show it, so’s we could get everybody up to your shack tonight. He done it for US! And he ain’t got nobody else to help.” I could hear Eeteh far off answering me. I let out some more urgent hoots.

“We AIN’T takin’ that crazy old liar WITH us!”

“No, we ain’t. He’s anyways too beat up to travel. He might not even make it through the night. But we can’t leave him here to die where they throwed him!”

Me and Eeteh kept on hooting, and soon he was down in the ravine and crawling up. Zeb was still complaining, and when Eeteh took one look, he says he don’t know no medicine powerful enough for the mess Deadwood was in. “Zeb right, Hahza. We leave now.”

“You know some things that might help,” I says, staring into his black eyes, shining out from behind their curtain of ropy black hair like from behind hanging vines. “You and Coyote. You know.” Eeteh shrugged and looked down at the old prospector. “Leastways we can try to set what’s broke and carry him back to his shack where he can rest more easier. After that he can take care of himself.”

Eeteh sighed and shook his head. “Is right thing to do, Hahza,” he says solemnly in Zeb’s language and mine. “Is wrong thing to do. But I do what you do.” Zeb grunted irritably.

“You’re pulling a slow packhorse, Zeb,” I says. “You can get a head start.” I took off the bear-claw neckless I was wearing under my shirt, and give it to him. “This is for good luck, Zeb. It ain’t done me no favors, but maybe it’ll work for you. Watch you follow that back trail like we said, so’s we can find you. Me and Eeteh will settle Deadwood and catch you up before dawn.”

Zeb looked like his spirits was sunk in his boots, but he dropped the bear claws in his jacket pocket and clumb up into the mare’s saddle. He reached into his saddlebag and give me a small flask a that black rum he’d used for the vegilanty brew. “I was keepin’ this for the road,” he says. “But Deadwood’s gonna need it more.” Then, leading the packhorse behind him, he trudged off slowly, climbing up into the dark.





CHAPTER XVIII


HILST WE WAS setting Deadwood’s broke bones in the moonlight, using sticks and branches tied with rags tore from the shirts of emigrants laying dead-drunk in the mud up the hill above us, Eeteh got to telling the story of how Coyote tricked Time. Deadwood was favorably busted up, but he warn’t feeling no pain. He didn’t know where he was and he probably wouldn’t never know again. His nose was squashed and Eeteh had molded up a new one, pushing his fingers up the nostrils to press the inside papery bits back together. We scooped up mud and grass to make a cast for it.

When Eeteh was resetting Deadwood’s toothless jaw, I sneaked back up to Zeb’s to pry the bar plank out from under the drunks who’d fell over on it. Things was still pretty crazy in there, but sinking towards a generl stupidness. The hooting and hollering and gunshots was mostly moved outside where it warn’t so crowded up with bodies.

We strapped Deadwood down to the plank like a litter, and betwixt the old prospector’s scrawny shoulder blades, we stuffed a shirt I’d hived off of a fallen emigrant. We stripped off his filthy old coat and pants, leaving him in a kind of handmade union suit he probably hadn’t took off since he put it on, and begun trying to do something about his busted bones. It was slow work, stretching all the bones apart and settling them back together best we could, then splinting and bandaging them up, and time was exactly what we hadn’t got near enough of. Which was why Eeteh was gabbling on about it. We was both scared, but we neither of us was trying to show it.

Eeteh says that Time used to be lost in empty space and nobody growed old, until Sun and Moon come along. Sun and Moon they worked for Time. Time was the boss. He could talk to you, mostly just to push you around, but you couldn’t talk to him. There warn’t no stars yet and Moon was always either shining or not shining, so there was only two days in each month and they flew by, tick-tocking back and forth like Deadwood’s fob watch. People growed old so fast they didn’t hardly have time to get born before they was dying. It was how Time wanted it. Dying warn’t a particular concern a his and he didn’t have to learn to count past two.

Coyote was feeling very sad about it, Eeteh says, so sad he thought he might kill himself to stop growing older, but he was a coward as bad as we was and couldn’t make himself do that. He reckoned the only other solution was to stop Time or at least stretch him out somehow like we was doing to old Deadwood.