Huck Out West(83)

Tongo left the ground all of a sudden and up we rose onto the raised wooden sidewalk, the loafers setting in chairs up there leaping off into the mud not to get killed or worse. Tongo pranced down the boardwalk, stepping high as if to bang it louder, and neighed like he was blowing a trumpet. Tom busted out a the claims office as we passed it, a fat seegar poking out under his moustaches, Caleb and Bear right behind him. He says something to them and they all three went a-running.

Then off we jumped at t’other end, me most desperately hugging Tongo’s neck, my heels flying. Tongo went galloping through the screaming and yowling crowd again, heading down crickside. Shots was ringing out behind us. I hadn’t no cause to s’pose this was going to end well. When we passed Tom’s big tent, I did wish we could stop to pick up a couple a bottles a whisky and a hambone off one a the wild pigs a-roasting on the spit, but Tongo he was in a mighty hurry. We splashed through the crick, knocking over plasser miners and sluce boxes, and kept right on going.

When at length we reached the old Lakota camp, Eeteh was a-waiting for us by the filled-up eagle pit, dressed in the dead miner’s raggedy black clothes. Everything was packed already and loadened onto Heyokha. I slid off of Tongo, my knees feeling warped and custardy, my hands raw from gripping onto the thong. Eeteh says he was wondering where I’d went, and I says I was wondering the same thing. I told him about racing all the way to the sunset and finding the tribe, bloodied up from scalp harvesting, then tearing back at dawn to the Hills and dancing on the wooden sidewalk, but I says I was mostly just hanging on, not able to get down off of Tongo’s back without massacring myself.

Tongo was thirsty and hungry and wheezing like a fat man, so I took the thong out of his mouth and uncinched the lodge cover. Whilst he went down to the shore to drink and stir up the waters round old Shadrack, patiently panning away, I mashed up some corn and pine nuts and honey, and had a quick chaw myself. I was ever so hungry. Tongo come back and nuzzled me and et up the corn-mash and whinnied like he was happy all over. Then he turned and trotted away, his head high, tail swopping the air. By and by, he broke into an easy run. The lodge-skin flew off of him. It was the sadfullest thing I ever seen, that tattered pelt raising up as he galloped away, and falling with a plop like a period after a sentence. This time, I knowed, Tongo warn’t a-coming back.

Even as I was watching him disappear into the timber, Tom come riding in on Storm. He was wearing his white hat and white gloves and the red bandanna round his throat, so he warn’t Tom so much as Tom’s fancy of Tom. “You and your horse is under arrest, Finn,” he says. “Your assault on our town was a most reckless and unsivilized act.” Tom’s pals rode in behind him whilst he was unloosing his declarations, Caleb and Wyndell, Oren, Bear, Pegleg Molly, and fifteen or twenty others, including toothless Mule Teeth and his fat yaller-whiskered boss who used to be a judge, but was now promoted to saloon-keeper. Eeteh was standing alongside of his pinto, and now he pulled his black derby brim down over his eyes and stepped around behind him, peeking out at Tom over Heyokha’s withers. “I judge it’s most likely a hanging offense for you and we’ll have to shoot your crinimal horse, but first we’ll give you both a fair trial like always.”

“The crinimal horse ain’t here no more,” I says. Tom’s posse was all carrying guns, except for the lantern-jawed picture-taker, who was just arriving on foot in his mucky frock coat, but without no camera, looking mud-faced and grumpy. The Amaz’n Tom Sawyer didn’t have nobody to take his picture today, though he still set his saddle straight up with his hat on like in the photograph the picture-taker showed me. Probably he couldn’t help himself. He gazed around like he suspicioned we was hiding the horse somewheres. “Can’t say where he’s took off to,” I says. I was carrying my rifle in one hand like a pistol and had my finger on the trigger in case anyone drawed. Tom seen that, and I hoped the others did, too. “I reckon he was plumb sick a the Gulch and the people in it and run away in disgust.”

Caleb was sore offended at that and, bellowing out some cusswords, come galloping at me with his Colt drawed. I whipped up my rifle, but Tom swung his and knocked Caleb off of his horse. He hit the ground hard and his orange too-pay fell off and his gun went off, making everybody duck. Then they all laughed. The laughing raised Caleb’s dander even higher up, and he stalked away, shaking his too-pay at them and sending everybody to hell.

“We believe in the law here in Deadwood Gulch,” Tom says after him. “It ain’t let us down yet.” Tom looked like he was grinning, but it might a just been the way his moustaches curled up from his mouth to his ears. He turned back to me. “But you have, pard. No matter what I done for you, it warn’t never enough. You’re the most leather-headed dispreciative saphead I ever struck. It ain’t my druthers to hang a pard, but you can’t say you don’t deserve it. You got no respect for the law nor not your old pard nuther. You’re running away from the grandest idea what’s ever been thought up by the human species just on accounta you ain’t got the guts to stay and defend it. You’re a coward and a traiter. You and that dark ugly varmint in the derby hiding behind the horse. Ain’t that your rogue injun pal?” I didn’t say it warn’t, and Tom says, “How the heck did he get out a the cave?”

“He didn’t. It’s his ghost. You killed him. That’s the suit they buried him in. Most folks can’t see a ghost. I’m surprised at you having the knack.”