Huck Out West(54)

We could see some a Zeb’s goods scattered about in the ravine below, so we hobbled Bill’s mule and crawled down to look around. It was mostly just Zeb’s old rags and spilled vittles, but I did come on his yist-mash bucket. It was still half-full of muck, with maybe enough live yist left in the stillage to seed a new batch, so I hoisted it up and toted it along. I says it was Zeb’s mother, and Tom says, well then, we can charge them with mattresside. “We can bile them in oil, if we got any. That’s what the books say.”

Tom raired his nose and sniffed. “I smell something else,” he says, and he crawled deeper down in the ravine. “And here it is!” he shouted from the bottom.

It was already turning dark down there, but when I crept closer I seen it: the carcass of Zeb’s old packhorse with Tom’s fist up its backside. “Hah! We hit a seam, Huck!” He pulled his arm out and held up what he found in there: Eeteh’s soft leather money pouch, even fatter’n when Eeteh give it to me! “Filthy LOO-ker,” Tom howls with a moustachioed grin, his seegar bobbing.

“How’d you ever think to poke around in there?”

“Well, I asked myself what I’D do if I was being chased by robbers and wanted to hide my goods. I s’posed they’d take my horse and everything else, except maybe this old rackabones, and there warn’t many other places I could hide nothing on or in him.” There was a small crick down there, and Tom scrouched down and washed the bag and his arm off in it. “You’d have to be crazy to dig for treasure up a packhorse’s arsehole,” he says, and winked up at me again. He says he don’t think Sarah Sod ever thought of that one.

When we crawled back on top, we seen that Bill’s mule had somehow kicked free of his hobbles and was meandering sluggishly on down the trail into the dimness. Bill, still bound, was pushing the mule on with desperate grunts and humpings. I felt ha’nted again by Abaddon and seemed to hear him snarling like he done before he took a chaw on a body’s leg. Tom was counting through the money in Eeteh’s pouch as if he didn’t care no more about Bill. Maybe he was letting him go free. No, he warn’t. Without really looking at him, Tom turned and shot him, then swung up on his big white horse and begun to head back to the camp.

“Wait!” I says. Bill was a-laying still and lonely on the trail, the loop of rope loose round his neck, his arms tied behind his back. Abaddon’s ghost had stopped snarling, though my neck rope burns was itching again. “Don’t you want to see if he’s dead or not?”

“He’s dead.”

“But why’d you have to do that?”

“DIDN’T have to. But he was stealing our mule. Better’n taking him back and hanging him for it, ain’t it?” Tom was watching me, a sad smile on his face. “He’s a hard case, Huck. He tried to lynch you. And he’d do it again if we give him half a chance. We ain’t doing that.”

“But you said everything was going to be LEGAL now and on the UP’N UP!”

“And so it is and will be, Huck. Now, if you want to help, you can go get that mule. We’ll lead him back where we borrowed it.”

The mule was wandering on down the twilit trail, but I give a pull on his bridle and he swung back to go our way without no fuss. Bill was facedown with his hands tied behind him and a hole in the back of his head. I picked him up and slung him over the mule’s back. Tom don’t say not to. He only says to untie him.

“Let me tell you a story, Huck,” Tom says on the way back to the camp. “There was an injun tribe in a mining town down in the southwest where I was working like a lawyer. The injuns warn’t doing nothing, except just being ugly to look at. They didn’t belong. So a few local business fellows hired up a mob of Mexicans to go with them to the injun camp and kill them all. It was a dreadful slaughter, mostly of women and little boys and girls. You may a read about it. They clove their heads open with machetes, emptied out their bellies, shot all their animals, burnt their tepees, stole their julery, and peeled off scalps to sell in the market. Baby scalps was specially profitable. The businessmen come home to the mining town, bragging about the killing they done and showing off their scalps. They got arrested and charged with organizing the massacre, so’s, you know, everything’d be on the up’n up.” Tom’s seegar had went out, so he lit it up again. “I got hired as their lawyer and it took some smarts, but I got them all off scot-free.”

“But warn’t they guilty?”

“Of COURSE they was guilty, Huck. You ain’t paying ATTENTION! I’m telling you about the UP’N UP. The law is amazing. Like magic. I was famous for what I done. They made me a judge after, and one a them business fellows he become a govner or some such crinimal.” He seen me shaking my head, and he shook his and says, “Trouble is, Huck, you never growed up. You’re still living in some dream of a world that don’t exist.”

Jaws was dropping and everybody was staring when Tom rode back into the camp with all them scalps dangling from his saddle. When people asked, Tom didn’t say nothing, he just pointed at me. He walked Storm over towards the picture-taker, smiling steady, and waited for him to get his camera ready and take his photograph.

We left Bill and the mule off with Bear and, on the way down towards where my lodge was, we stopped at Deadwood’s shack to give him back the fob watch. Deadwood set to crying, he was so happy.