Huck Out West(55)

“That old slant-jawed sourdough looks part injun to me, Huck,” Tom says as we continued on down to the crick, and I says, “We’re all mixed breeds, ain’t we, one kind or nuther.”

Tom raired his head and scowled down at me in an unpardlike way. “I ain’t,” he says.

Whilst we was gone, Tom’s pals had pitched up a large army tent for us where my lodge-poles’d stood. It was big as a horse shed. There were cots and blankets in it and mirrors and washstands and even a bottle a prime saloon whisky from the States setting on a table like a little soldier at attention. “It’s very grand,” I says, and Tom he shrugged and says he favored a hotel better. I favored my tepee better and was lonely for it, but I didn’t say so. It wouldn’t a fit Tom’s style.

Outside, there was a fire snapping away with an antelope spitted over it. Hog nuts, prairie turnips and wild onions was slow-roasting in the coals. Tom fetched the whisky along, took a long pull, and handled me the bottle. It warn’t the equal of Zeb’s home brew, but on a day that seemed’d never end, it was most welcome. Bill laying there on the trail with a hole in his head and Tom’s story about the up’n up was still festering up my thoughts, but the whisky eased them away. The sting of the rope burns, too. The birds was doing their day’s-end bragging and, far off, a body could hear coyotes howling in their soft sadful way. It was nigh as peaceful as rafting down the Big River. I felt like Deadwood felt—like I’d got my fob watch back.

Down by the shore, near some smaller canvas tents that Tom’s pals was living in, there was a couple of fellows working a big sluce box to pan for gold. When Tom went down to talk to them, I judged he was aiming to chase them off, but he offered them a swig from the bottle and waved me to come on down. “Show him what you got there, Peewee,” he says. “See them specks there in the drag?” With the night settling in, it was hard to see nothing at all, but the specks did let off a peculiar spark. “Them’s colors. Plasser gold. Might be the richest gravels in the crick. You may be a millionaire, Huck.”

“I’m sorry to hear it,” I says. I grinned back when they all laughed, but it warn’t a joke. Them gold specks was telling me that the day’s good luck might be fixing to change back again.





CHAPTER XXIII


HAT NIGHT, ME and Tom laid in our cots smoking and sipping bottle whisky by lamplight and gabbling for hours. We talked about when we was boys on the Big River and all the mischief we done, about the ha’nted house and the graveyard and the awful things we seen there, about our adventures when we run away to ride for the Pony, then everything we done since. It was just like old times and we was both feeling mighty happy. “This is great,” Tom says. “Everything’s going to be just like before, Hucky! I promise!”

Tom told me about how St. Petersburg was emptied out now, leaving only the losers behind. “Ain’t nothing happening there,” he says. “The place is dead.” I says that sounds perfect, and told him about the lonely cattle trails I rode after he was gone and about the wagon trains and the hellion and the bullwhacker. Tom roared with laughter and says, “I’d of liked to’ve had THAT gal working for ME!”

Tom wanted to know everything about this place he was now mayor-govner of, and I told him what all I could think of, but there warn’t much left that hadn’t lost its trueness. Most people in the Gulch had only just got here a day or two before, and more wagons was rolling in every minute, erasing everything that used to be. But Tom wanted to hear it all: about old Zeb, the pioneer miners and the Lakota tribes, about Deadwood, General Hard Ass, the yaller rock. “Warn’t worth shucks,” I says. “Felt more like a cork ball than a stone.”

“Blossom rock, Huck. They call them floaters because you throw them in the water and that’s what they do. Sure-’nough sign a gold ore.” Tom always knowed things I never heard of. Eeteh had a story about Coyote throwing a rock into the water and saying if it didn’t sink, everybody’d live forever. Too bad Coyote didn’t know about floaters, he could a saved the whole world. “I bet when the colonel come and took the rock from the old cross-eyed sourdough, the first thing he done was heft it.”

“That’s right. He done that.”

“Where there’s a floater, there’s a seam. Ever hear of somebody finding one?”

“People’s scratching about for something like that, but I never seen it nor went looking. I s’pose a seam’s something like a stitch in the ground?”

“Well, you could say so. Though sometimes it’s more like a stitch in the side.”

“I know what you mean. That’s what all these emigrants piling in has been like for me.” I told him about finding Eyepatch and his two pals in my tent that first morning and how I chased them out with a story about a brother who died in there from the pox. I says I was trying to think up the sort of lies Tom Sawyer might a told. Tom laughed and says I ain’t never been a slouch at stretchers myself. The Cap’n was one a the low-downest bad men he ever struck, he says, as mean and ornery as they come, but what he had was STYLE. “It’s there or it ain’t, Huck, you can’t grow it.” He says he made him think of river pirates back home, though he couldn’t name none who actuly had an eye patch, so maybe he was only thinking about pirates he’d read about from books.