Huck Out West(47)

“And that ain’t ALL!” Eyepatch says. “Him and his brother and his dog catched the POX and they didn’t TELL no one—did any a you ever hear of it? NO! Them flat-heads went on recklessly spreadin’ their mortal sickness round THE WHOLE TERRITORY! They wanted everybody to catch it like they catched it theirselves! Now the brother is dead, the dog is dead, only this KILLER is still a-kickin’! But, genlmen—” he looked around at them all with his glittery one eye—“he only’s got JEST ONE KICK LEFT!”

They was all a-whooping and hollering for justice and saying they had to hang me NOW! They had a terrible itch in their pants and couldn’t wait no more. Yaller Whiskers had a hammer for a gavel, and he was belting a stump with it like he was trying to split it for kindling, and yelling for them to just hang on, ding-bust it, they’ll all get their chance.

“And even THAT ain’t all!” hollered Eyepatch above the ruckus. There still warn’t much light in the sky. The day was slow at waking up like it was afraid to open its eyes. “He also shot our jury boss when there warn’t no warrant for it and ruint his hand so bad the pore man cain’t even pan for gold no more! Jest look at it! Hold it up thar, Bill! Ain’t that the horriblest mess you ever seen? If Finn ain’t been such a bad shot, he would a killt him, cuz he’s a natural-born crippler and killer! Why, jest last night he give our feller Gulch citizen Deadhead an unmerciless hiding that peart nigh destroyed the ole rip!”

“That ain’t so!” I says, though I knowed better than to say nothing at all. Huck, I says to myself, you ain’t never going to learn.

Eyepatch he only smiled his cold gold smile at me and signaled to his jury chairman to go for Cross-Eyes. They fetched the old toothless prospector on his plank and set him down and Eyepatch pointed at me and asked him if I was the one who give him his awful thrashing. Deadwood raired his head an inch or two and aimed one or t’other of his crossed eyes at me, groaned and nodded, and he fell back and they carted him away again. “I cain’t hardly believe how any human person could be so despicable crool and mean!” Eyepatch says. “Such a varmint don’t DESERVE to live!” Them two robbers was shaking their heads sadfully, like they couldn’t believe it nuther.

If all them red-eyed emigrants reckoned I was the one who beat up Deadwood, they also reckoned I doctored him afterwards, because when they seen that his bandages was ripped from their own missing shirts, they shouted that if they catched the new-monia and died, there’d be even more murders to hang me for. Others was cussing me out for pisoning Zeb’s whisky, saying I was the worse killer since Ulysses Grant, nor else Robert Lee, they warn’t all agreed which one was prime.

Eyepatch says Zeb was toting some a that pison in a fancy box which probably his killer hid there to be shut of it after he stole everything else. When they smelt its horrible stink, he says, they poured it out so’s it wouldn’t harm nobody never again, hoping only it didn’t kill off all the trees.

“You oughtn’t a done that,” I says. “That was his mother.”

“Sure it was,” says Eyepatch, “and you’re my sister.” And they all fell about snorting and hee-hawing.

I asked Pegleg why he don’t point out the bullet holes in Zeb’s back which was what killed him, and he spit a gob and says, “What bullet holes?” The old whisky-maker’s body was still a-drooped over the mare’s back and them holes was in plain view.

“You can see how desprate he is, yeronner,” Eyepatch says to Yaller Whiskers with a meloncholical smile, fingering his badge, “unloosing bare-face lies like that to try’n save his wretchid hide whilst losing forever his pit-black soul.”

The jury thought that was the splendidest thing that they ever heard and they clapped their hands together in testimony of it, leastways those of them that warn’t back to sleep again or throwing up or drifting off to attend to the biling disturbance in their bellies, grabbing their guts and holding up two fingers to ask Bill’s permission.

My lawyer he stuffed a plug of chaw in his jaws and says I should ought to plead guilty. I says I warn’t guilty a nothing and I ain’t saying I was. “The defender says he’s guilty, Judge,” Pegleg says, and Yaller Whiskers rapped the hammer down on the tree trunk, and says there ain’t nothin’ for it, I got to be hanged till I’m completely mortified, the trial was done and over.

They swarmed over me again. I thought I was about to join that rube in the tree and my heart was in my throat, but they fetched me along to Zeb’s shack and throwed me in it. The chinless mule-toothed prospector who struck the gold fleck the day before was posted at the door with an old shotgun, looking like he’d only made it partways into the new day and warn’t inclined to go no further. His moustaches hung like sad stringy curtains around his big front teeth.

The old whisky shack stunk more’n it commonly done, not only of sick and privies and stale whisky like always, but also from a couple of carcasses laying about and starting to go off. They’d stay there till somebody decided they wanted the shack for theirselves, and then they’d get throwed in the woods for the wolves to supper on. Which was where I was headed. Wolf vittles. My feelings was sunk low and such thoughts warn’t of a nature to raise them up again.





CHAPTER XX


ULE TEETH WAS soon tipping back in a chair, taking a snooze, the shotgun leaning against the wall, and I judged I could walk out past him and just keep on going. He half opened one bloodshot eye under his floppy hat brim and seen me calculating. “I know what you’re thinkin’,” he drawls from under his two monster teeth. “I don’t sejest you try it. I don’t give a keer, one way or t’other, and I ain’t goin’ to stop you, but they’s a posse a hongry bounty hunters out thar jest a-waitin’ for sumthin live to shoot at.” He raised the other eyelid halfway up and struggled slow to his feet like his bones was made a lead. “C’mere. Look at behind all them wagons and trees. See ’em?” I seen them. All watching my way. “I don’t reckon you done what they say you done, and I’m nation sorry for you, but there ain’t nothin’ I kin do, nor not you nuther.”