Huck Out West(50)
From up on the platform I could see all the tents and lean-tos, the muddy streets, the half-built shanties and storefronts, the long line of incoming wagons stretching back into the hills. Many of the new-comers was hopping out a their wagons and running towards us with big grins on their faces. Others was galloping in on horses. They didn’t know what was happening, but they didn’t want to miss nothing.
Pegleg stood me onto the trapdoor and fitted the scratchy rope round my neck. “Kin I have the next dance?” he asks with a mean grin. I warn’t able to grin back. I was feeling desperately lonely and wished there was somebody to hold my hand. But I was all alone. Did you ever notice, Eeteh says to me one day, how making a world always begins with loneliness? The Great Spirits could invent all the suns and moons and rivers and forests they wanted, but it warn’t never enough. They was still lonely. There warn’t nobody to talk to and nothing was happening. So, they had to make us loafers to kill so’s to liven up the passing days.
One of the arriving emigrants was galloping in on a high white horse with a passel a friends behind him. He was fitted out in bleached doeskin and a white hat, with white kid gloves and a red bandanna tied round his throat, gleaming silver spurs on his shiny boots. He had big bushy moustaches ear to ear and long curly hair, twinkling eyes. Puffing on a fat seegar. Coming for a laugh. “HANG HIM QUICK!” Eyepatch shouted. Pegleg drawed his pistol with one hand and reached for the lever with t’other and I dropped. My throat got snagged and then there was a shot and I kept on dropping, landing hard on the ground under the gallows. Then more shots, and Pegleg come falling through the trapdoor and landed on top of me. That seegar-smoker must a shot the rope!
Only one man I knowed could do that. He was grinning down at me from his white horse. “Hey, Huck,” he says, flicking some ash off his seegar. It was Tom Sawyer! His own self!
CHAPTER XXI
OM SAWYER ALWAYS did know how to throw on the style. Except for his ear-to-ear moustaches and fancy white duds, he warn’t changed a whit. Eyepatch and Bill broke off on a run, and Tom flung out a rope straight off of his horse and lassoed both of them with one throw and hauled them in. Everybody cheered and howled and clapped their hands like they meant it. The two pock-faced robbers was heeling it out through the crowds with the plump yaller-whiskered judge, but Tom hollered out “GRAB THEM DESPERADOS!” and the emigrant miners snaggled them and rassled them to the mud and give them a few licks just for fun. Then they fetched them up to the gallows, and Tom’s pals tied them up.
“We don’t have no bull pit yet to lock them in,” Tom says with a sadful look. “If they’re guilty, I allow we’ll just only have to hang them.” Everybody says, “Yay!” They was all pining for a hanging. But Eyepatch warn’t of the same opinion, and says so in so many cusswords. He pointed out Zeb’s shack where they’d held me, and Tom put on his boss’s face and give Eyepatch a long look and nodded and posted a guard with a rifle in charge of keeping them all in there. The guard was a big fellow named Bear with thick black brows and a warty nose, and he warn’t the sort that a body’d care to argue with.
The ropes was cut off my wrists and I was helped to my feet. I was wobbledy and my throat hurt. My heart was still a-thundering in my ears. But I was standing in a world that still seemed real, or mostly real.
Then Tom jumped onto the gallows platform direct out of his saddle. He told the crowd his name and they all give off a mighty cheer. He pointed down at me, and, in a big voice so’s everybody could hear, he says, “There stands afore you the daredevilest rider of the famous Pony Express, one of the greatest heroes of all our country’s injun wars, and the best scout and horse wrangler I ever knowed ANYWHERES!” They was whooping at every word he says. “The legendry Huck Finn and me rode together at the battles of Glorieta Pass and Sand Crick, Circleville, Skull Valley and Skeleton Cave, and HUNDREDS MORE! He saved my life I don’t know HOW many times! He was the best pard a body COULD EVER HAVE!” I warn’t none too pleased with his stretchers, but I ain’t never been so happy as I was to see Tom Sawyer again, so I just grinned and let him blow. I was still his pard. He said so. “He has been holing out here in the Gulch because Sitting Bull HIMSELF is after him! And not for no reason! Huck Finn has took more’n three hundred injun warrior scalps, and five of them was CHIEFS!” These emigrants was new arrived and didn’t know nothing, so Tom could say whatever he wanted to. “And that’s NO SITTING BULL!” Tom hollers out. Maybe he didn’t say “sitting.” The miners all roared and hooted and stormed and haw-hawed. It was a first-class show. Nobody could spread himself like Tom Sawyer when it come to unloading a speech in the grand style. “Huck Finn was born modest, so he’ll try to say it ain’t so, but DON’T YOU BELIEVE HIM! Them thieving scoundrels was trying to lynch a NATIONAL HERO! They don’t deserve NO MERCY!”
They cheered Tom and they cheered me, too. He raised up his white hat and waved it at them, winking down at me. He might a been elected king right where he stood, if kings warn’t gone out a style. He held the hat up long enough for the picture-taker to get his photograph. His moustaches was the happy sort and made it look like he was always smiling. When his hat was lifted off his head, I seen his long curly hair was sneaking back on top towards the shiny place at the back of his scalp, and that was a sad thing, to think that even Tom Sawyer was a-growing old.