Huck Out West(65)

I drawed in some smoke, tasting the sweetness of it, my fingers wrapped round the warm horse head, and says I had a dream last night about Tongo. “Anyways, I think it was a dream. He come into the tent and nuzzled me to wake me up and says he wants to keep running like we done that first time, and never stop. He says a body is free till it don’t want to be, and he ain’t got to the not-wanting time. He says he hopes he dies before he gets there.”

“Me, too,” Eeteh says.

“Tongo announced some more things that don’t make no sense, like freedom IS power, but he was jabbering in Lakota and neighing at the same time, I couldn’t hardly understand half of it. Then Tom’s big stallion Storm come in and says freedom without power is only a pretend freedom, and don’t amount to beans, or horse words to that effect. Storm talked more like an emigrant. He says if you ain’t got the power to hold on to freedom and use it, it ain’t no bigger’n what a prisoner’s got on his way to the gallows. Power IS freedom, he says. Tongo he snorted and says Storm should talk about freedom when he ain’t hitched to a saddle. He says power don’t help a body keep freedom, it only knows how to keep’n make more of itself. When a body is trying to hang on to power, he ain’t free to do nothing else. Storm got mad and dumped a golden load out his rear end and says THAT’S what your FREEDOM is! Tongo done the same and says THAT’S your POWER! Tom come in by and by and drunk some whisky and give me some advice and I told him to watch out for the horse dung. He thought I was talking about his advice and says if I warn’t so sick he’d go find some horse dung and make me eat it. Everything was ordinary except that Tom was laying about six inches above his cot. I reckoned he was just showing off.”

Eeteh laughed and says he don’t know who’s Tom, so I remembered him that Tom Sawyer was the friend I first come out west with, but hadn’t seen in all these years after he went home to get married. I says how Zeb’s killers catched me and tried me and was just hanging me from the new gallows, when Tom he come a-galloping in out a nowheres and shot the rope and the hangman as well. Eeteh whooped like it was the wonderfullest thing he ever heard, and then he says how scared he was when I got catched. I never answered his owl hoots for a whole day, and when I did it was mixed up with other hoots. Then he didn’t hear nothing at all, except somebody trying to imitate me. When his brother come back from the powwow after the wagon train attack, he says I warn’t in the camp no more. “He say Hahza dead.”

He raised the bottle, shook his head and laughed. “TOM!” I clicked my pipe bowl on his raised bottle and says, “TOM!” right back and we both laughed and I took a deep puff to Eeteh’s swallow. The bats was growing restless above us. “Me and Tom was boys in the same town, we played bandits and pirates together, run away together. There ain’t nobody alive with more brains and gumption and plain level-headedness than Tom Sawyer. People love him wherever he goes and want him to tell them what to do, and so he does.” I blowed more sweet smoke up at the fluttery bats. “Tom he wants me to stay now and help him run the camp. He says he can keep me safe from General Hard Ass. I ain’t so sure about that, but even if he could, this place is plumb ruined for me. After my fever’s gone, there ain’t nothing to keep me here except Tom Sawyer himself, and I’m hoping I can push him to go with us.”

Eeteh says it’d be an honor to ride with such a great shootist, though he hoped he’d make up his mind fast. Then he stared at me for a moment, and turned back to look through the chink in the wall again. “Who send tu’wayuh?”

Down below, Oren was moving his overalled belly from tree to tree. “I don’t know. Tom probably. He’s the boss now. He’s off chasing a claim and, whilst he’s gone, he’s probably worried about me.”

“Scout follow you, find me,” Eeteh says. “Maybe try kill me.” He didn’t say nothing for a moment. He warn’t smiling. “Tom . . . He bad man in white hat?”

“He does wear a white hat,” I says. Tom led an attack on the tribe in that hat, I’d forgot that. Eeteh was the best friend I had for years. I felt like I already knowed him better’n I never knowed nobody else. But Tom was my pard, always had been. I didn’t want to leave neither of them behind. “Tom makes up adventures like he reads out a books, though he ain’t scrupulous about the consequences, and he maybe does some things he oughtn’t, but he ain’t really bad inside. Life by itself just ain’t enough for Tom. It ain’t got no point and the way it ends makes him mad. So he contrives up these adventures to get him through it.” I told him about the meeting yesterday, how Tom wanted peace with the tribe, but all his best pals was against him. “I never seen them buck him like that before.” Eeteh nodded, thinking about that. He says he understands. He says his friend who got scalped by white emigrants warn’t perfect, too.

There was so much we needed to talk about, but Oren was a-scrambling up closer. Eeteh says he needed to go where the spy couldn’t find him, and he asked me to set outside to keep him busy while he slipped away. He handled me the whisky bottle. “Take it, Eeteh,” I says. “It’s yourn.” He shook his head. He says the tribe expects him to tell them everything, so he don’t want them to know we even seen each other. “I’ll leave it here in the cave for you, then. I ain’t s’posed to drink with what I got, so if they ask, I’ll tell them I come up here to sneak a swallow now and then.”