Huck Out West(62)
The raised sidewalk was high enough it give me a view of a sea of dilapidated hats. I couldn’t hardly reckonize the place. It was becoming worse like a town every day. Now there were assay and law offices and grocery stores and tin shops and liquor dealers and a brewery and market stalls in the streets. Along with their fly-spackled meat, butchers was selling little leather sacks for gold dust. They was more expensive’n the meat on account of there was only two per cretur, and sometimes none.
The streets was mostly filled with men, young and old, skinny, bearded, dressed in black jackets and vests, dirty white shirts, wrinkled pants, but a few women now, too, spruced up in flouncy calico gowns. They warn’t nothing to look at, but they was getting a power of attention. Their pretty clothes remembered me of Becky Thatcher up in Wyoming. I warn’t sure she was doing what these women was doing, but I judged she probably was. I was feeling sadful and it made me feel more sadfuller.
Tom set at the table with his fancy white hat and wire-frame eye-glasses on, along with Caleb and Wyndell and two or three others picked out by Tom, and the folks out front give them a big cheer. The picture-taker come and made everybody set still for a picture. Tom took off his spectacles, stroked his bushy ear-to-ear moustaches, and raired his shoulders back for the photo, then he put his specs back on, banged on the table with a wooden hammer and says they’re all there to talk about the latest Sioux peace offer.
That set the crowd to hooting and cussing and shouting that it was time to kill all them filthy lying heathens, they was a tarnal nuisance, le’s go do it now! “God give us guns, and we should use ’em, praise the Lord!”
Tom held up a white-gloved hand and says he understood their feelings, they was mostly his feelings, too, but peace warn’t all bad, Jesus spoke pretty good about it, and they should at least give a thought to it. “You all know Huck Finn here as a famous Pony Express rider and one of the greatest injun fighters of all time, with more scalps than most of us got hairs on our heads!” Tom took off his white hat and patted his bald spot and the crowd broke out in whoops and guffaws and applauded all my scalps. “Out on the trail, Huck was our main bullwork against the savages till he catched a fever, and it’s only since he’s been laid low that things has got so worse out there. As a legendry scout he has considerable experience of the tribes. He has lived in their mist and has got to know their peculiar ways and he truly believes that they are pining for peace. He reckons it might save a lot of people from getting scalped and tomahawked if we can custom ourselves to the idea, so long as they don’t want nothing else of consequence.”
A stormy howl went up that peace was only another injun word for meanness and trickry. They was treacherous animals, the crowd yelled, who don’t have no more idea what peace was’n a pack a wolves! “Look at the turrible mischeevousness Setting Bull and Crazy Hoss was up to right now! We ain’t got no time for pap-sucking Quaker poltroons! Everybody should ride straight over to their dad-fetched camp and shoot ’em all, afore it’s them that’s swarmed up and done the killing!”
“Also they’s a crick over thar and it might have gold in it!”
It was his own complice Oren who first raised the howl and that surely must a nigh froze Tom, but he only took his spectacles off so’s he could see better and says it was easier to holler for war than to stop it once you cranked it up. “We thought that hellish conflictation twixt the States was cooled down ten years ago, but NO! It’s still a-blazing away!” That shut up some a them because they was all strangers and couldn’t be certain who was standing next to them, but others started cussing and bellowing like as if to set off the war again. People was listening to local ways a talking and was moving about, lining up sides like before a ballgame. Somewheres that fiddler had struck up “Dixie,” and the drummer was bashing his drum and blowing on a juice-harp, trying to drown him out.
Tom stood up and slapped his hat down and they all quieted down some. “Yesterday is dead as a coffin nail, my friends!” he shouted. “Let the past bury its own dang dead, whilst we bury the bloody hatchet and act, act in the living NOW!” He started getting applause again. “We got to toil upwards in the night together through the mud and scum of things without no fear and with a manly heart! No damn ifs, ands, or buts ABOUT it!” They was all making a racket and cheering him on, though it warn’t clear what he was talking about. Something he read in a book, maybe. “PEACE! There ain’t nothing preciouser even if you got to go to WAR to land it! Ain’t no man alive more keen on peace than me! Huck Finn KNOWS that!” He pointed at me and I jerked my head back like I’d been poked and everybody laughed and cheered again.
Caleb raised his hand. “Everybody here believes in peace, Tom. Jest look round. Them white folks out there is the most peace-loving people on earth. But how you going to git them bloody injuns to lay off massacreeing them?”
“Well, I s’pose, on account of it’s their land, we could offer them to share out the gold as, you know, a kind of levy.”
“But this AIN’T their land, Tom!” Caleb says above the loud boos. “It’s GOD’S land! And we’re God’s PEOPLE, ain’t we? We shorely ain’t obleeged to share out our rightful wealths with no godless savages!”
Tom did look like he just took a punch to his soler plexus. Even Caleb! Just when he was finding his old voice again! “Of course, I ain’t saying it wouldn’t be a damn sight more peaceful if there warn’t no hoss-tiles around,” Tom says, “but—”