Huck Out West(6)

“Maybe it’ll tell you where to find the gold you’re looking for.”

“Maybe.” His eyes was sliding together again. “Right now it’s tellin’ me them robbers is all dead . . . or else they . . .” And he fell back on the potato sack like he’d dropped there from a high place and set to snoring. His snores was outrageous loud, but I allowed they’d at least scare the wolves away. There warn’t room for two of us in there, so I went down to the pasture and snuggled up to Tongo.





CHAPTER III


EXT DAY WE found Deadwood’s shack tore up inside and out. It was always a wreck, but now it was a proper first-rate wreck. Them boys had gave it a powerful rummaging, even busting into the walls, and there was a bullet hole in Deadwood’s straw tick where his head would a been. Pretty soon the scene had drawed a pack of loafers, so of course that set Deadwood to telling them all how he beat off a gang of desperados with his bare hands. “I think it was Jesse’s boys,” he says. “I heerd ’em braggin’ about pottin’ Jayhookers.” He showed them the bullet hole in his bunk and they asked him how he didn’t get killed. “Well, I was too dern fast for ’em, warn’t I?” he says. “I ducked, and they only jest nicked me.” As proof, he showed them a scar under his chin where his whiskers warn’t growing, which he once told me he’d got from a Comanche arrow when he was riding with the Texas Rangers.

There’d been some nights at Zeb’s when knives and guns come out during the fist fights, Zeb had to sick Abaddon on a few reckless drunks, and some prospectors had went out in the morning and never come back, but that bullet hole was a dismistakable signal that the sivilizing of the Gulch was hard under way. Soon there’d be more people shooting at each other and then laws and lawmen getting mixed up in it and me and Big River would have to move on again. Tom was just the contrary. The law was like a rousing adventure book to him and he reverenced lawyers so much he went off to become one, even though he hated nothing worse’n doing what he ought to do. Well, he was smarter’n me. He knowed you had to learn the law if you wanted to stay outside it and out of trouble at the same time.

It was up in Minnysota that Tom made up his mind to give over cowboying and take on the law. Becky Thatcher was the daughter of a judge and maybe she give him the idea how to set about doing it. Before that him and me was mostly adventuring around without no thoughts about the next day. We run away from home all them years ago because Tom was bored and hankered to chase after what he said was the noble savages. At first they was the finest people in the world and Tom wanted to join up with them, and then they was the wickedest that ever lived and they should all get hunted down and killed, he couldn’t make up his mind. Some boys in a wagonload of emigrants we come across early on learned us how to ride and shoot and throng a lasso so that we got to be passing good at all them things.

That story turned poorly and we never seen what was left of them afterwards, but ending stories was less important to Tom than beginning them, so we was soon off to other adventures that he thought up or read about in a book or heard tell of. Sometimes they was fun, sometimes they warn’t, but for Tom Sawyer they was all as needful as breathing. He couldn’t stand a day without it had an adventure in it, and he warn’t satisfied until he’d worked in five or six.

Once, whilst we was still humping mail pouches back and forth across the prairie on our ponies, I come on a rascally fellow named Bill from a-near where we hail from. He was also keen on adventures and he was heading back east to roust up a gang of bushwhackers in our state to kill Jayhawks over in the next one. The way he told it, he had a bunch of swell fellows joining his gang—that Jesse in Deadwood’s yarn was in it, and Jesse’s brother and some others—and he wondered if Tom and me might be interested. With the war betwixt the states starting, there was gangs forming up and making sport a burning down one another’s towns, which seemed like sure enough adventures, not just something out of books, so maybe we was looking in the wrong place. But when I told Tom about it the next time we crossed up at a relay station, he says he allowed he’d just stay out west and maybe get up a gang of his own, because he couldn’t see no profit in going back. But I knowed that warn’t the real reason. The real reason was he couldn’t be boss of it.

It was while we was on one of his adventures in the New Mexico Territory that Tom got the notion to go watch the hangings in Minnysota, a notion that would change everything. The Pony Express company had suddenly gone bust the year before when the cross-country tellygraph come in. We never even got our last paychecks, so we paid ourselves with ponies and saddles, which was how I got old Jackson, who warn’t old then, but still young and fast.

We was both broke, money just falling out of my pockets somehow, whilst Tom was spending his up shipping long tellygrams back to Becky Thatcher. He wanted all his adventures wrote down like the ones he’d read in books and she knowed how to read and write and was the sort of body who would be impressed by his hifalut’n style and not have nothing else to do, so she got elected. She couldn’t write back to him because there warn’t nowheres to write to, but that warn’t no matter, there warn’t nothing she’d have to say that would interest him.

Riding, wrangling and shooting was what we done best and our backsides had got so leathery toting mail a body could strop razors off of them, so we hired on to guard wagon trains and run dispatches and handle horses and scout for whichever armies and exploring parties we come upon, and we had a tolerable good time of it. Back home we was Rebs, I guess; out here we mostly worked for the Union, though we warn’t religious about it. Fact is, that time back in the New Mexico adventures we started out scouting for the Confederals, who was trying to cut a route through the Territory to California to get at the gold and silver; but we got misdirected and ended up scouting for the Union army instead and having to shoot at our most recent employers. Tom thought that improved the adventure considerable, adding what he called a pair a ducks, which Becky, if he wrote to her about it, maybe understood better’n me.