Huck Out West(48)
“It warn’t me who killed Zeb. It was that one-eyed persecuter and his pals who done it.”
“I know it,” he says, sinking dozily back into the chair. He slurped noisily and says he judged the Cap’n was setting to take over here, him and the judge together, and my hanging was their ticket for that, so it didn’t matter whether I done nothing crinimal or not. Mule Teeth was right. The rule a law warn’t about such matters. Eyepatch and his pals was rich now after robbing Zeb, and they was calculating how to use the law to get richer. Mule Teeth says that like enough they was the ones who robbed all my goods, too, because there warn’t nothing left down by the crick except the tepee poles.
Mule Teeth called Eyepatch Cap’n on account of that’s what he was in the Confederal army in the recent troubles. He lost his eye at the Battle of Shiloh, and he come out west after that to help the Rebs cut a trail to California through the New Mexico Territory to where the gold was. Leastways, that’s what Mule Teeth says that Eyepatch says. Me and Tom was scouting down there for the Rebs back then, so, until we got lost and ended up scouting for the Union instead, us and Eyepatch was maybe traveling together. But though I seen plenty one-eyed bandits like old Ben Rogers, I ain’t got no recollection of any long-haired one-eyed captains. Lying come easy to Eyepatch. Most probably he was a plain deserter, living off of robbing and killing like other ordinary runaway soldiers.
When Mule Teeth warn’t drowsing under his hat, him and me talked away the morning. It was my last one and it seemed as how there must probably be liver things to do with it, even penned up in a smelly old shack, but I couldn’t think of them. It was just only a morning like any other morning and it slipped by like they all done.
The bounty hunters was still outside, watching the open door, hoping I’d make a run for it, so I held my nose and stayed back in the shadows in case them fellows’ fingers got itchy. I could a broke out and got it over with, dying the way Dan Harper died, but I warn’t brave enough. Maybe, if Tongo was out there waiting for me, I might a took a chance. Nobody mentioned a wild horse down where the tepee was, so maybe he was with Eeteh or maybe he run away to live wild again, but I was scared for him, and for Eeteh, too.
Mule Teeth told me about having to pay extra for prostytutes on account of his teeth, and asked me what it was like to kiss a woman because ain’t none a them ever allowed him to do that. I says I ain’t done much kissing neither, because there warn’t nothing romantic about most a the women I knowed, except for one maybe, and my Crow wife she didn’t have no nose and was uncomfortable about a body getting anywheres close to the area.
“You had a squaw?”
“For a while, till she cussed me out one day and walked out a the tepee and never come back.”
“You lived with injuns? That’s innaresting,” he drawls and slurps again. “They say a squaw’s business runs sidewise ’stead of fore’n aft. Is that how you found it?”
“No, just ordinary,” I says. I was worried to know more about Eeteh and Tongo, but this didn’t seem the right way to get at it. “Old Man Coyote, though, had a wife with one that was like the mouth of a coiled-up snake that swallowed you down in like a whirlpool.”
“That must of been fun. But who was Old Man Coyote?”
“They have stories about him. A friend told me.”
“Injun friend?”
“Fellow who used to help the owner of this shack trade with the tribes.”
“The one you murdered. Or they say you did.”
Out a-front the shack, men was hacking away at the foot of the hanging tree, making the dead country jake jiggle and dance on his rope like a puppet till his straw hat fell off. Mule Teeth says they was chopping the tree down to knock up a gallows there. “The persecuter and the judge reckon it ain’t possible to sivilize a place without you got a proper insterment to hang a body. The coffin-maker’s busy a-buildin’ it, so you still got a little time. Wisht I could find somethin’ to help you pass it better, but we pretty much drunk the camp dry last night, and I’m anyways dead sick from it and ain’t got no stake left to buy nothin’. Don’t even have a dang chaw to share.”
I asked him what he done with the gold fleck the yaller-whiskered land surveyor helped him find. “I give it back to him,” he says. Yaller Whiskers was setting up a table in the street and there was already a line of emigrant prospectors waiting to buy one of his hand-drawed survey maps. “The judge only borry’d it to me to set out his bonyfydies, as he called ’em, so’s he’d fetch a fair price for his maps.” Yaller Whiskers was drawing pictures fast as he could, but new-comers was rolling in by the minute, he couldn’t keep up. He was finally only putting a few marks down on each page, and yelling cusswords whenever a body complained.
Meantimes, the tree with the rube still hanging in it got cut down and dumped upstream in the Gulch where all the other dead trees was. The coffin-maker had already built sections of the new gallows, and now he set to hammering it all up together where the tree had stood. A lantern-jawed picture-taker in a billed cap and black frock coat was setting up his camera in front of it.
The bran-new street out a-front was so packed with emigrants, wagons, horses and oxen, you couldn’t hardly move. The men was all excited and grinning ear to ear about the chance of watching a body get stringed up. Fingers was pointed at me in Zeb’s shack. They didn’t know who I was nor what I was s’posed to be hanged for, but that warn’t no matter. Eyepatch was right: the gallows was going to make the Gulch more sivilized-looking.