Huck Out West(72)

“No. Don’t matter.”

“Tom always said giving money to you was just a waste.”

“He’s mostly right. Your pap probably says the same.”

“Pappy’s not doing well. His mind’s jellying up. The village idiot is smarter’n him nowadays. He still thinks Tom is the prince of princes. Tom couldn’t stand him and cussed him behind his back, calling him a pompous old fart, and sometimes to his face when he seemed blanked out. Tom never ever got his law degree. He was too impatient. And he didn’t really need it. He’s smarter’n most lawyers anyways. He took one of my pappy’s diplomas and doctored it up and, next thing I knew, he was gone. He’d got tired of me right away. He liked Amy Lawrence better and saw more of her than me, though he had to pay for it with her. He said I was boring in bed and scared me with the things he wanted me to do. Now I do them with everybody.” She took my hand and squeezed it. “But you know what? I don’t specially like the life I’ve got, but I think I’d like housewifing Tom even less.”

“Life don’t rarely turn out like you think it might,” I says.

“No, that’s right. I’m hoping Tom’s don’t turn out like HE thinks it might,” she says with a wicked little grin. “I’ve hired me a real lawyer, a client who favors the rough stuff in bed and on the street, too, and we are going after Tom’s gold. I still got the marriage license. Either he shares up or we’ll expose what a fraud and liar he is. When all them claims he’s granted are shown to be worthless, the poor boy will have his hands full, without he does what I say.”

“He told me a story one night about killing his own pap. It happened after he left you and he was out here scouting on his own. He says he found the old man over in Baker City, a sick muddled-up drunk, worse off’n a beggar. Tom was shamed of him. When he told his pap that his mam had died, and desperate poor, too, the old fellow busted out bawling and blubbering, and Tom was so disgusted, he shot him.”

“He told ME about killing his pa, too. It was on our wedding night up in Minnysota, when we were both wide awake, and still grabbing at each other by candlelight, and he told me the story to fill in the recess gaps. Says it was while you two were scouting somewheres down south and you got set upon by a gang of snarly bandits. You got scared and ran away, but he stood his ground, he said, and it was a dreadful battle, but he somehow managed to kill them all. When he took their masks off was when he discovered that the bandit chief was his own pa. He was carrying a tintype of Tom’s ma in his breast pocket, and the bullet he’d killed his pa with went clean through her nose. Which story you think was true?”

“My Lakota friend would a said both at the same time.”

She laughed, sighed. “You were born melancholic, Hucky. Me, I’ve had to grow into it.”

Wyndy was standing over us, wailing about sin. “I must’ve left the back door open,” Becky says. “Shut up, Wyndy. Take your clothes off and come on in. It’ll raise the water level.” Wyndy never stopped preaching, but he done what she told him to do. It was getting crowded, but me and Wyndy was both pretty skinny, and Becky had a way of making a body feel comfortable.





CHAPTER XXIX


FTER HER WATER-BATH, Becky wanted to take an air-bath, which she says a famous French doctor specially sejested as a wholesome practice for young ladies of a sensitive nature like herself. The sun finally come out so she allowed she’d take her air-bath out-of-doors, and she invited us to join her and maybe have a picnic or a mud-fight. But Wyndy says he had to get back and take me with him, so we put our clothes on and clumb up on his horse. She come out, all plump and rosy, to start her air-bath, and I says we might not see each other again for a time. Without Eeteh, I didn’t know where I’d go or what I’d do, but General Hard Ass was a-coming, and I had to get somewheres he couldn’t find me. If I need money, Becky says I better not take any off of Tom, even if he tried to give me some, because he’ll just chase me down and say I stole it. “That boy don’t give nothing away without he calculates how to get it back again.” She says she’ll go get some of her own to give me as a bone voyage, but I told her there warn’t nothing I needed except somewheres to go. I says I might try to get back to St. Petersburg and go look up Amy Lawrence, and she says don’t you dare.

The slow jog back to the Gulch took less’n an hour, but it was mighty uncomfortable on the backend of Wyndy’s horse, and me and the horse had to listen the whole time to Wyndy whining religious songs about sinners and what awful things land on them in this world and in others. I’d been sinning up a storm, so I reckoned Wyndy’s singing was one a them awful things and I had to bear it, though it warn’t fair to the horse. The sun was a-blazing away so bright it dazzled my eyes, but the ground below was still wet and soggy, slow going for the horse.

We’d just reached one a the hills leading into the camp, when we was set upon by a crowd a wagons and animals and people coming up t’other way in a mighty hurry, Caleb and Oren among them, yelling that Cap’n Patch and his pals had took over the Gulch and was unloosing a rain of terror. “Don’t GO there!”

“But where’s TOM?” Wyndy cries out.

“The Cap’n says his scouting party was ambushed by the redskins!”

“They’re all DEAD!”