Huck Out West(7)

One a the Union colonels was a hardshell parson who carried such a strong conviction about the afterlife that he believed in shipping all his prisoners off there to populate it, sending along with them all their ponies, mules, grub, garb, weapons and wagons, just so’s they’d feel at home when they got there, he says. He needed plenty of shooting and burning for this holy work and we was volunteered to supply it. Tom was a good soldier and done as he was told. I warn’t and didn’t always and didn’t then. So I was oftenest in trouble while Tom palled around with the bosses. And it was while he was setting down with the parson over fresh roasted horse meat and the colonel’s private sin supply, as he called his jug of whisky, that Tom learnt that they was laying out intentions up in Minnysota to hang more’n three hundred Sioux warriors, all at the same time. The parson thought this was the splendidest notion since the Round Valley massacres and Tom says it was something he had to see.

Tom loved a good hanging, there warn’t nothing that so lifted his spirits, and he never missed one if it was anywheres in the neighborhood, not even if it was an out-and-out lynching, which he says was only a kind of participatery democracy. I warned him about getting too close to them things, some day they may decide it’s his turn, and he says, “Well, if that happens, Huck, I’ll only be sorry I can’t watch.” And then he grinned under the new moustaches he was growing and says, “But you’re invited, Huck.”

The notice of that quality hanging party up in Minnysota had Tom so feverish he couldn’t set down, lest it was in the saddle heading north. “Just think of it, Huck! Over three hundred injuns all swinging and kicking at the same time! It’d be something to see! You could say you was THERE!” I druther be able to say I warn’t there. Gallows always make me feel powerful uncomfortable and clumsy, like I might stumble and fall into one of them scratchy loops by happenstance. But Tom, like always, had his way, and soon Jackson was saddled up and we was making the long trek north.

Tom was afraid we’d be late and miss everything, so we clipped along at a fair pace, but it warn’t nothing like galloping across the plains. Winter was a-coming on, there were north winds and snow, worse weather than I ain’t never struck before nor since, not even in the Black Hills. We heaped blankets on us and on our horses and shoved our chins out and blowed up at our noses to keep them from freezing and dropping off. The days was ever shorter and seemed like nights, even at noon, and we didn’t always know, famous scouts that we was, where we was or where we was going.

The people along the way was good to us, though. They fed us and our horses and let us sleep in their barns and pointed us towards the hanging grounds when we was misdirected. They all said they wished they was going with us, and told us horrible stories about what them filthy heathens had done to them and to people they knowed, and some of the stories was maybe true. They was all good Christians and said they prayed they’d hang every last one of them red hyenas, they was just pisoning the earth.

Then come the bad news. They was only going to hang thirty-nine of them; the President had let the rest off. The people was madder’n blazes. The President and his spoilt wife was living high and mighty off in the east somewheres and couldn’t understand the feelings out here. They said they ought to make room on the gallows for that ugly string a bones. They was sorry they had voted for him. He had let them down and ruined their Christmas.

It was Tom’s opinion that the President was a bumbler who ain’t got the brains nor the guts for the job and who was only against slavery because it won him votes. And now that he’d stumbled the country into a war, he was too dumb to know what to do next. When I says that it seems like everybody wants to shoot him, and that’d be a pity, Tom says, “Well, that’s just what makes this country so exciting, Huck. Just like in the time of King Arthur, and all them kings in the Bible.”

“Was that the same time?”

“Almost. We was born too late, Huck. This is what we got.”

I agreed it warn’t much and sejested we turn back and go where it was warmer, but Tom wouldn’t have none of it. It was still the biggest hanging ever and he wanted to be there, though you could see he was awful disappointed.

When we finally rode in, the sun was already gone down. Tom trotted us straight into town, afeard we might a missed it. A monstrous big gallows stood plumb in the middle of an open square betwixt the main street and the river, and there were crowds with lanterns milling about it in the dark, but the saloons was all closed and everything was stiller’n it should oughter be. There were candles in some of the windows. People was dressed up in their Sunday best and some of them was singing happy church songs, but we was pretty sure it warn’t a Sunday. Tom was anxiouser than I’d seen him since we left the New Mexico Territory. He was sure we’d fetched up there too late and he was pegging at me for always moving too slow. “You don’t have no respect for the BUSINESS of the world, Huck,” he says. When he asked if the hangings had already happened, though, they called him a damfool and said you don’t hang even injuns on Christmas Day. Christmas Day! We didn’t know that. “Happy Christmas!” they said, and we said it back. Tom looked mighty relieved. “After sun-up tomorry,” they told us. “We’re stayin’ up all night to git the best places.”

We was most about starved, cold to the bone, and dog-tired. We couldn’t a-stayed up all night if we was ordered to nor else face a firing squad. Tom was carrying a letter for the preacher of a church in that town, signed by THE FIGHTING PARSON, which described Tom as a hero in the noble battles against Rebs, Savages, and Unbelievers, and me as his stable boy, and the preacher welcomed us and fed us a hot stew with something like meat in it and blessed us and prayed over us in his quavery way and let us sleep under our blankets on church pews. He lived in a little room off of it. It was my first time in a church since I was held captive by the Widow Douglas and her sister Miss Watson, churches comforting me about the same as gallows do, though I felt a surge a spiritual gratefulness when I was able to stretch out at full length for a whole night. It warn’t unlike the widow’s notions of salvation. Tom stayed up to write another inmortal tellygram for Becky Thatcher by lamplight, but without no help from his stable boy.