Huck Out West(52)

“Me and a friend found him in a ravine after he’d took his hiding,” I says. “He was ruined with drink and he thought we was busting his bones stead of setting them. Them two pock-faced robbers you got penned up in the old whisky shack is who done it to him.”

“He stole the watch them rileroad bosses give me,” Deadwood whimpered faintly out the side of his crooked jaw, his bruised cross-eyes trying to find Tom. Without no teeth, nothing come out clear. “I don’t know now what’s a-goin’ to happen NEXT!” He sounded like he was fixing to cry.

“He was showing off a fob watch all night from some truck them two robbers stole that he found in a cave,” I says, “and they wanted to know where the rest a their loot was. The old fellow ain’t got no real memories left, so he didn’t even know what they was talking about. They might a killed him right out, but probably they was having too much fun beating on him.”

“Robbers, eh?” says Tom. He was grinning in an ornery sort of way. He settled a seegar butt in under his moustaches and went over and made Caleb into a judge. Then he turned the claims table into a courtroom bench so’s Caleb don’t even have to get up out a his chair. The photographer come over and took his picture.

Tom set the drummer in his black derby to rattling away, and ordered the two robbers be dragged out of Zeb’s shack. They seen straight off what was about to happen, but their ankles was roped together and when they tried to run, they could only hop and fall down. All the men in the street was laughing at the sight and hollering out friendly cusswords, and then tripping them up so’s they’d fall again.

As the crowds gathered, Tom stubbed out his seegar, put on a pair a wire-frame spectacles, set his hat straight over his scowl, and declared that the two prisoners was notorious murderers, highwaymen, skulduggerers, army deserters, blastemers and perverts. He says he has been tracking them for months and has been appointed by the American Congress to bring them directly to justice.

“We ain’t perverts,” one of them says, and the other says, “We ain’t none a them other things nuther.”

Tom peered over his eye-glasses and laid into them then with slathers of insofarases and wherefores, and though they couldn’t cipher out whatever he was talking about, they knowed it was going against them. They was both badly marked up, the sad stories of their lives carved into their hides like gravestone writing, scars drawing half-hid pictures of past crimes in their black beards. You couldn’t hardly tell them apart in their raggedy shirts and black waistcoats, except one of them had a gray ponytail hanging down to his bony shoulders, whilst t’other’s neck was sunburnt and bare.

Tom named all the scores a people they robbed and killed, including, with a sober wink at me, his Aunt Sally Phelps. I ain’t heard that and it made me terrible sadful to learn it. He swore in one of his gang members named Oren as a maternial witness to a famous Oregon Trail robbery and murder near Julesburg, which was one of the wickedest places we had to ride through when we was working for the Pony. Tom described it to a T. Oren hooked his thumbs in the straps of his bib overalls and called the killings that he seen “the terrible Devil’s Dive Massacree,” and says he lost his dear old pap on that dreadful occasion. “The old man was riding shotgun for the stagecoach and he throwed up his arms in surrender, but got croolly blowed away by them wicked buggers. That there,” Oren says, pointing, “was his fob watch.”

“Well, I guess we don’t need to wait for justice no longer,” Tom says.

“Wait! I ain’t done nothin’!” Ponytail yelped.

“Of course,” says Tom, stroking his jaw and looking at one of them, then t’other, “we can’t be sure which one of them done the actul killing.”

“I never done it! HE done it ALL!” screamed Ponytail, pointing at his partner.

“What are you saying, you snivelin’ low-down back-stabber?” says t’other one. “We warn’t even there!”

“I seen him! I SEEN HIM!” screamed Ponytail, his pointing finger all quivery. “Look! It’s HIM’S got the fob watch! HE murdered ’em all!”

“Consarn it, you traiterous bloodthirsty liar!” yells Redneck. “It was YOU done all the killin’! I says to take pity, fer God’s sake, spare them pore innercent people! But you cain’t wait t’cut their throats!”

“You lined up all them men and boys and shot ’em like they was bottles on a stump, you mizzerbul hyena!”

“It was YOU done that, you filthy piece a ratmuck! ’Member that lady whose belly you carved open jest to see what her dang innards looked like?”

Wyndell and Oren had already tied the robbers’ legs and elbows together and raised the two of them up on the scaffold platform. Wyndell was laying a prayer on them, but they warn’t listening. They was back-to-back, but still screaming at each other over their shoulders, and never stopped even when Tom fitted the ropes round their necks. It warn’t my intention to get them hung—that warn’t my intention for nobody—but that’s what happened. The rope burns on my own throat was tingling and I could feel again that fall into nothing, when I turned my back and heard the robbers drop. Somebody grunted. Might a been the robbers theirselves.





CHAPTER XXII


HEN TOM WAS gone east, there warn’t no way to tell one day from t’other. They just went a-slipping along like drift logs on the Big River, and near as dark. But now Tom was back, and the day was alive again, lit up and frisky. In less’n one of them, he rescued a pard from a lynching, showed off his shooting and lasso tricks, got himself elected mayor-govner of Deadwood Gulch, thought up a bunch a new laws, captured gangs a thieves and murderers, tried and hung some robbers, organized a funeral in a bran-new burying ground that he conjured himself, and let fly an amazing yellocution for an old whisky-maker he never even knowed.