Huck Out West(9)

“Who’s that big-bug beside you up there, the one been collecting all the cheers?”

“Why, that’s the persecuting lawyer, the one who got over three hundred savages sentenced to death. And they would’ve hanged them all, too, he says, if we didn’t have such a weak injun-loving President. He says the heathen Sioux has got to be slayed to the last man and anybody who’d spare them is an enemy to his race and to his nation. That fellow ain’t had to shoot nobody nor get shot at, but still he’s the famousest hero here today. Ain’t that something?”

“If that’s him, he warn’t nothing fair. Them people was getting badly misused. And they warn’t allowed no lawyers nor no—”

“FAIR! Stuff! You’ve clean missed the POINT, Huck! Ain’t NOTHING fair, starting with getting born and having to die. THAT ain’t fair. But a body can’t do no more about it than them poor condamned injuns can. You can only live out what you got as fierce as you can and it don’t matter when or where it ends.” The prisoners was being marched towards the steps up to the platform. They was still chanting and singing their “hi-yi-yis” and the crowd was still trying to drown them out with whooping and cussing. Some was hollering out church songs. They was all round us and you couldn’t hardly hear nothing else. “Besides, Huck, they’re only injuns, who are mostly all ignorant savages and murderers and cannibals.”

“What? They’re all cannibals?”

“Ever last one of them, Huck. Come on now, it’s—”

“You sold Jim to cannibals?”

“Well, wait, there’s two kinds of injuns, the ones that keep slaves and the ones that’s cannibals.” The prisoners in their white nightcaps was starting up the steps, and folks was growing quiet, letting them sing if they wanted to. “But hurry! This is HISTORY, Huck! You don’t want to miss it!”

“Tom? Huckleberry? Is that you?” It was Becky Thatcher, completely out a nowheres, pushing through the thick crowds. It took a moment to reckonize her because she’d growed up some and warn’t sporting yaller pigtails no more. Tom’s jaw dropped like its hinges was broke, and I s’pose mine was hanging, too. “My laws! How you boys have CHANGED! All that FACE hair! That long stringy beard makes you look a hundred years old, Huckleberry!”

Tom had hauled his jaw back up, but he was struck dumb. He probably hain’t never planned on his audience visiting him head-on. He turned and walked off without nary a word. Up on the gallows they was unrolling them muslin bonnets into hoods that covered their painted faces. Some of them was holding hands.

“Tom! Wait!” Becky called out, and went chasing after him. I should a stayed and watched, like Tom said, but that extra noose and the drumrolls was giving me the fantods.





CHAPTER IV


EADWOOD AND ME hadn’t got to the end of the bad luck fetched up by that consounded rock he found. I told him to throw it away or handle it off to one of them strangers in Zeb’s, but he give a snort and says I must be plumb loco. It was mighty hard to learn him anything. Jim, who knowed most everything about luck, told me that both good and bad luck has a way of smearing itself round in the generl neighborhood, and one of the certainest ways to shut off the good luck is to be too close with what you already got. Like Deadwood in Zeb’s that night with his jug, clinging to it like a cub to its mother. If he’d a showed a little more unstingeableness, maybe things would of turned out different. Of course if he’d let go of it, them scroungers in Zeb’s would of made short work of it, and THAT would of been bad luck, so it’s hard to calculate. I’d need Jim to cipher it out.

I’d come to the Gulch to hide out from that general who was set on stretching my neck, but I judged I was safe in the Hills because the Lakota was after him for all the bad things he done to them—Long Hair, they called him, naming him by the scalp they wanted—and he surely warn’t such a fool as to come back here again. Well, I was exactly wrong, for one sunny morning there he was, sassy as you please, dolled up in his red cravat and silver stars and shiny knee boots. He was riding in with his calvary boys, a whole army of them, their blue coats sliding in out a the deep green pines, fields a flowers tickling their horses’ underbellies.

The general had an Indian brave scouting for him. The brave’s gaze was flicking about, looking for someone. Me. It was Eeteh’s rascal brother. The tribe had throwed him out after his treachery up in Wyoming, and here he was, riding with their worse enemy. I laid low, peeking out through the gaps in Zeb’s plank walls, ready to skaddle if I had to. There was other loafers scrouched down at the gaps, so I warn’t the only one had got on the wrong side of General Hard Ass.

Deadwood’s bragging had spread round. The general says he’d heard about a yaller rock somebody found, and he’d like to see it. A couple of loafers went running off and come back dragging Deadwood who was hollering out all the cusswords he could think of until he seen the general, and then he shut up. The general asked to see the rock and Deadwood says he ain’t got it no more, somebody stole it.

The general smiled down at him under his drooping mous-taches. I reckonized that smile. It was what I seen when he told me what I had to do and what he’d do if I didn’t. All by my lonesome with nobody’s hand to hold. “If you no longer have the rock,” the general says, pulling out his revolver and pointing it at Deadwood’s head, “I have no further use for you. You have exactly one minute to steal it back.” And he cocked his revolver.