Huck Out West(51)

He declared he was sent here by the govment in Washington as a federal overmarshal with a legal jury’s diction over the whole Territory. I didn’t know what an overmarshal was, but I didn’t doubt but what Tom would learn me. “The United States is a-going to take over this Territory to itself and kick out the blastemous cannibal redskins—who ain’t even completely HUMAN!” he says. “And from here on, the American army is a-going to protect ALL legal emigrants and miners! WHEREVER you want to go!” They was all cheering like crazy. “I tell you, friends, there ain’t going to BE no more injun massacres nor no more mob trials nor lynchings nuther! Everything is going to be LEGAL and on the UP’N UP, accorded to the BOOK! The AMERICAN book! Highwaymen and hoss-tiles and claim-jumpers will be PERSECUTED! Everything’s going to be like it OUGHTER be! We’re making the first ever perfect nation out here and there ain’t no damn injuns going to stand in the way, nor not no kings nor no sentimentery Quaker tomfoolery nor foreign bankers nuther! It’s going to be a paradise on earth where everybody’s RICH and nobody’s trying to take away what’s rightfully YOURN! It’s the new ELDERAYDO!”

Then Tom set about putting things in order—and people let him do it! They was grateful and done what he said! He ordered Pegleg to be laid out in the box meant for me to have his picture took. He pointed to a naked hill a ways off with a pine stand at the foot and says that will be the Gulch’s burying place, but that Pegleg warn’t good enough for it. He says they should take off the wooden leg afterwards and save it, and handle the body over to Doc Molligan for his scientific purposes. He ordered up new nooses for the scaffold and vittles for the prisoners. He says he’s using his own money to pay for them. He announced an election for mayor-govner of the Gulch and himself as a candidate, and everybody yay’d again and elected him on the spot and he says he was honored to serve.

He borrowed the land surveyor’s pine table standing there in the middle of the street and set up what he called the first legal claims office. “All previous claims is dull’n void,” he says. The miners who’d already staked some claims warn’t happy, but Tom asked me who was here before the Rush begun. I pointed them out, and Tom he give them first dibs on their old claims or new ones for free, so they was well pleased. “But only one free claim each, the rest has to be paid for with goods or money, just like everybody else. There’s lots of deserving folks has come to the Gulch and more is on the way. Caleb here is a licensed court reporter and official recorder of claims and deeds, and he’ll make sure everything’s fair and square and that all the right words get used.”

Caleb, a scrawny gent hiding his balditude under an orange too-pay, with stringy whiskers on his chin and a Colt revolver on his hip, nodded solemner’n a preacher at a tomb-laying, and set down behind the table alongside of a bespectacled assistant, spreading out his charts and maps, the prospectors squirming and scrouging to get in line. Knives and guns was quickly out, but Tom’s other pals took the weapons away, breaking arms when they had to.

I begun to breathe again, and I told Tom about the old whisky-maker who’d been murdered by Eyepatch and his gang and who was now laying dead up in the shack. Tom says he’ll be the first registered resident of the new graveyard, and he ordered up a proper funeral for that very afternoon, with Caleb’s goggled assistant Wyndell doing the preaching, that being one of his trades on the side. There was objections from some of the emigrants who’d got deathly sick on Zeb’s vegilanty brew and was still not getting over it, but those that was here before all agreed that old Zeb was a genius legend and rightly deserved the honor, never mind he also near killed them all. They missed him and his mother, they says, more’n their own mothers, who they didn’t even hardly remember, and whose hearts warn’t never so pure.

Tom bought some corn-bread and grilled wild pig sausages at a food stall in the main street. People cheered him wherever they seen him, and he tipped his white hat at them. Sometimes he grinned, but he tried not to. I et one a the sausages he bought and Tom et the rest. “You don’t weigh no more’n you done in your Pony days,” he says. He asked me who it was discovered the gold here that the colonel wrote up about, so I told him some of what had happened and took him to see Deadwood.

With the trees cleared away, Deadwood’s old shack seemed closer into the middle than it was before. New streets was winding every which way around it, with tents and shanties popping up alongside of them like locoweeds. The streets was jam full of wagons, animals and restless miners, lugging picks and rifles. A blacksmith had set up a forge and smithy. Saw-logs was stacked up in the mud, and loafers was setting on them. The ghost-town scavenger had a sign on his new storefront that says he has pump handles, a pitchfork, gold pans, guns, and used pants for sale. The Gulch was already a town and everybody in it was strangers.

Deadwood was laying in his union suit on his old straw tick. The union suit looked like something his mother might a wore long ago. He’d took off his splints and slings before things had got healed, and I was sorry to see it. His arms and legs now angled ever which way. The shack was mighty fragrant, which was probably why nobody warn’t bothring him. When Tom seen his awful injuries, he got madder’n the devil. “Who DONE this to you, old man?” he barked, his dander up. “I’ll see personal he’s HUNG for it!” The old prospector lifted his working arm and pointed a feeble finger at me.