Huck Out West(60)

“When did he find out I was here in the Gulch?”

“Don’t know. Since before I was with him.”

I laid there, thinking about this. I remembered now that the picture-taker was there at the gallows that day setting up his camera, before Tom come a-riding in. “Why didn’t he try to find me sooner? Why did he wait till I was most dead?” Well, I knowed why. It was how the story went.

“We was here in the neighborhood a couple a times,” the picture-taker says, and helps himself to more whisky. “But I think he was aiming to surprise you.”

“He surely done that. But he only give himself one shot. What if he missed?”

“Well, I’d of got my pitcher,” he says with a thin wicked grin. He plucked some grains a tobacco off his tongue. “But it warn’t likely. He’s the Amaz’n Tom Sawyer, ain’t he?”

A couple of nights later, Tom come back from working his claim and we set up smoking and jawing into the night again like we done before I got the fever. I was glad he was back because, when I was alone in it, the big tent give me nightmares. Sometimes I propped the bedclothes up to make a little tent inside the big one, and I slept better.

Tom says he may a misguessed the seam by a hundred yards or so. We’ll all still be mighty rich, but probably richer if him and the others form up a consortion. It’s something he knows how to do regular as a lawyer, and his partners all appreciate that. He may make himself president of the consortion. I says what the picture-taker told me, and Tom says, “I heard you was somewheres in this corner a the Territory, and come a-looking, but I couldn’t never find you. Nobody even knowed who you was except one old miner who says, last he seen, you was off hobnobbling with the injuns and living in tepees. I was disappointed to hear that, but I s’posed you must of was scouting for somebody.”

He lit up half a seegar and says he’s been holding talks with the Lakota chiefs. “We smoked peace pipes together and they says we was all children of the Great Spirit, we shouldn’t be killing each other, it warn’t convenient. They fetched in a drag loaded with buffalo hides and says it was payment for the settlers that got killed. They was sorry it happened. They says it was some young bucks done it, boys being boys. They been punished for it. The tribe don’t want to be called hoss-tiles no more, though I says that’s exactly what they was. They says they was a free people living off roaming creturs like the buffalo, and they’d only starve if they was penned up on a reservation, so they can’t go along with that. But they don’t mean nobody no harm and says there’s room in the world for everybody. I says that may be so, but not in these parts. They say this land is sacrid to them, and I says, then maybe they should have a gab about it with their Great Spirits, and see if they don’t have other sejestions.”

Tom picked up the whisky bottle and poured some in a tin cup and come over to my cot to see if I wanted any. I shook my head. “Even your eyeballs is yaller,” he says, and crawled back into his cot. “Before them hoss-tiles left, they asked about somebody named Hahza,” he says, sipping at the cup a whisky, “and finally I allowed they was talking about you. I think they wanted you to be there. I says you was very sick with the yaller janders. They muttered some injun words about that and rode away.” He blowed some seegar smoke up at the top of the tent. “Who is this fellow they call Eat-A?”

“He’s a pard a mine. He’s a loafer and a drunk like me and he don’t fit in with his people no more’n I fit in with mine.”

“I thought I was your pard.”

“You warn’t around.”

“Am now.” He finished off his whisky, stubbed out his seegar, and blowed out the lamp. “Palling around with injuns, Huck, is right down dangersome. You can’t trust ’em. Remember what happened to them poor emigrants we met when we first come out here. You’ll get your throat slit before you know it. And it ain’t right. There’s a war on.”

“We made the war, not them,” I says, recollecting what Dan Harper said. “We been bullying in and taking away everything they s’posed was their’n. They’re only just defending theirselves.”

“Well, from where they set, Huck, they got a point. But we ain’t them. We got to stick with our own tribe, even if they ARE all lunatics. If we don’t, we’ll end up crazier’n any of them. You remember that poor preacher up in Minnysota? Even if he was maybe right, his rebel notions was turning him plumb loco, and in the end they probably got him lynched by his own congregation. These lands is become our lands, that’s the story now, and it’s only got just one ending. There ain’t nothing them hoss-tiles can do about it, nor not you nuther.”

“Tribes,” I says. “They’re a powerful curse laid on you when you get born. They ruin you, but you can’t get away from them. They’re a nightmare a body’s got to live with in the daytime.”

“I ain’t never told nobody this, Huck. I don’t know if I should tell you, but you’re my oldest and best friend.” He was talking in the dark. His voice seemed like different from the rest of him. “When my pa went west, I always s’posed he must of become a famous bandit or bank robber or at least a sheriff. When I was a kid, I probably told you stories about him that I made up. Mostly he got killed in some tragic way. I missed him awful, growing up. I reckoned in spite a my yarns he was still alive somewheres, so when I come west as a lawyer, I went looking for him. I finally found him in Baker City, selling used hats from a little wagon. Some a the hats had bullet holes in them. Warn’t a one of them ever been cleaned. They was full a nasty little varmints crawling round.” Them hats had somehow got in the cot with me. I was all over itching. “He was living with a fat two-bit whore who warn’t no cleaner’n the hats. He warn’t NOBODY, Huck! He didn’t have no STYLE! He says he still loves Ma, and when I told him she was dead, he busted out crying. He was making me sick. I couldn’t stand him. So I shot him. Had to shoot the whore, too, because she was watching. Left town that night. Ain’t been back.”