Huck Out West(77)
He grunted, looking around. “I thought I heard an owl up here.”
“There’s an old hoot owl lives in the crotch a that old Ponderosa over there,” I lied.
Tom took aim and fired and a darkness left the crotch and a big old bird come crashing down, wings beating at the air. “Well, it won’t hoot no more,” he says, but he sounded disappointed. I reckoned Tom was as surprised as I was. It just showed, some stretchers can turn out true. “Becky’s turning mean, Hucky,” he says. “I just found out she’s trying to take the mansion away from me and it ain’t even builded yet! She wants to use it for a dad-blamed WHOREhouse! So I’m on my way back to the claim to talk it over with my consortium. I mainly clumb up here to tell you that. Wyndy’ll be looking after you. Whatever you want, just let him know. When I get back, we’ll talk more about our plans for the sinteenery.” It was like he hadn’t heard a thing.
I give Tom time to clear out and then, while there was still enough light in the sky to see by, I stumbled back down the hill to our empty tent, feeling as condamned as when I was on the gallows with a rope round my neck. Couldn’t stay. Couldn’t go. Never felt so desperate ornery and low down.
Peewee’s pards was still plasser mining down crickside. They warn’t just only swirling gravels round in a pan now, they’d contrived up an amazing rig of waterwheels and pumps, ditches and dams, flumes and sluce boxes. All for a few specks a trouble.
Wyndy was posted outside the front flap like usual. He was into one of his mistical fits, so he must a been chawing or smoking something local. Talking with him was like talking with a wound-up music box. “The end is a-coming!” he was chanting in a singsong voice, his glazed-over eyes aimed up at the dimming sky. “The light’s a-going out! Repent! Repent! Whilst still you can!”
I tore half a thigh off of the remainders of a young elk spitted over the fire and took it in the tent with me. I reckoned I was well enough to wash it down with samples from Tom’s new brewery which was setting about, so I laid down with the elk thigh and the beer and set to worrying over my perdicament. I only had a few hours before General Hard Ass might show up. I had to decide now what I was going to do. Maybe I should just give myself over to the general, I thought, and let him end my miserableness. I tried to think what Coyote would do or say, but then I remembered he warn’t no more, he was just a bunch of exploded new worlds scattered around out in the sky. Of course, he never WAS, but I knowed what I meant. I needed his advice and I warn’t going to get it. Whilst I was dreaming away about the Coyote who warn’t there, I seemed to see Snake grinning in a corner. But maybe not a corner in the tent, maybe a corner in that house Tom was a-building, nestling in the foundations. Snake laughed and says I’m a saphead, a numskull. I could hear the ghost of Coyote somewheres afar off, arguing with him. He was hooting at Snake like an owl, playing the fool. I heard the hoot again. Far away. Then again. I was wide awake. Warn’t Coyote! It was Eeteh!
CHAPTER XXXI
UTSIDE THE TENT, Wyndell was still wailing along about the Pocky Lips. He says everything was a-going to end by fire, nor else by floods, he couldn’t make up his mind. I pulled Eeteh’s ruined buckskin vest over my shirt, packed up in a saddlebag what was left of the roasted elk, a bottle of Tom’s whisky, and what traps and tinware and ammunition I could grab up, and slung it over my shoulder, my rifle and revolvers, too, took up a candle lantern and pocketed some matches and extra candles. Wyndy was most likely staring half-blind at the starry sky and I could foot it right past him, but I couldn’t resk him following me, so I used my old way of sneaking into circuses, squeezing out betwixt tent stakes at the back.
It was a long ways to where the hoots was coming from, a different direction and further up into the Hills. The yaller janders didn’t make it no easier, but at least, once I got clear a the camp, I could hoot back to let him know I was coming. I followed the rattling rain-swoll crick, keeping my head down. Owls warn’t much for eating, but that didn’t stop people from shooting at them. When you got a gun, you use it on whatever chances by. It was a dangersome place at night, busy with drunks, thieves, and murderers, and they all had guns. A body could hear gunshots and cussing right up to the dawn racket, when the sawing, hammering, and shouting got too noisy to hear nothing else.
It was ever so lonely out along the crick in the dark and it got more lonelier the further a body tracked it, but Eeteh’s hoots cheered up the empty night. I was moving fast as I could towards them. If it warn’t for the janders and the darkness, I’d a been heeling it flat out. When I seen other lanterns in the hills moving through the trees like lightning bugs, I allowed I could light my own from time to time to show Eeteh where I was.
Where I was was a most peculiar and unnatural place, and the further I got from the mining camp, the peculiarer it become. It didn’t seem like a place so much as a kind of time with stuff in it, stuff that kept on changing whenever a body looked t’other away. I can’t say where such scary thoughts come from, they warn’t common to me, maybe it was only because I was alone and afraid, but they made me wonder if that warn’t why folks fancied gold so much. Gold didn’t have no time lodged in it, it was just only what it was. But though it was a dead thing, the deadest thing of all, it acted like it was the livest thing of all, changing everything and everybody, and that was ever so peculiar, and scary, too. Living in the Gulch was like living in a wizzerd’s den.