Huck Out West Read online

  “Don’t give two hoots who or what they’re fur,” Zeb says, seeing through me like everybody else done. He pocketed the pouch without looking inside it. “Jest need the money t’set up a new still somewheres.”

  “How many will that buy?”

  “All of ’em. Any left, they’d jest git stole anyways. If it warn’t fur Abaddon, they’d awready got stole back. And I don’t want no extry guns layin’ about tonight when the craziness sets in.”

  As we was piling the weapons into grain sacks, I told Zeb about my “brother Jacob” so’s he don’t blunder up my story, and Zeb says somebody asked about him last night. “Feller with an eyepatch.”

  “You didn’t tell him nothing?”

  “Don’t know nothing.”

  We settled the sacks over Tongo’s back, and him and me set off downslope to the tepee, easing wide round the hanged man, floating there like a creepy shadow in the darkness. It was still nightish, but not like pitch no more. There was just enough dismal light to make a body feel they might was being watched. Through a gun sight. To get to Zeb’s in the old days, you had to walk through a woods. Now there was only a couple of lonesome trees still standing, leaving his shack set out on a wide muddy clearing clogged up with emigrant wagons, parked higgledy-piggledy. The bodies laying in the muck was starting to stir, cussing and snorting and trumpeting out their backsides. Some warn’t getting up, and didn’t look like they probably never would.

  Down at the crick, there was a scrawny young prospector in a round stiff-brimmed black hat hammering a stake into the shore below my tepee. I didn’t say nothing, I just walked towards him with my rifle cradled in my arm. He had a few black hairs blooming on his upper lip like he was thinking about growing a moustache but couldn’t made up his mind about it. Under it, he muttered something that warn’t American, pulled up his stake, and planted it further upstream. I fired a shot off into the air, and he picked up his stake and moved further on. I warn’t about to shoot nobody over land I was fixing to leave behind, but I couldn’t allow nothing to bother getting the guns to Eeteh, so’s we’d be freed up to go.

  In the tepee, I dug a shallow hole next to the fire and laid in it the guns, still in their grain sacks, covering them over with an old tribal blanket Eeteh give me. I cooked up some fish for breakfast, then I scattered a few fishbones and ashes from the fire on the blanket so’s it’d look like it’d always been there. With charred sticks from the fire, I drawed a skull and crossbones on the tepee hide outside, and wrote POX! PISON! above them and CONDAMNED! below.

  By the time I was done, the sky was commencing to lighten up and a ceaseless commotion of banging and yelling was a-rumbling down from above again. I let out my emigrant owl hoot and heard what might a been an answering hoot somewheres far off, or maybe I only wanted to hear it. The day was still just a-dawning, but prospectors was already swarming up and down the crick shore and through the hills, staking claims, fighting with each other. Sometimes a gun went off.

  To give Eeteh time to collar the weapons, I hiked Tongo back up to the emigrants’ camp, where things was so thickening up, there warn’t hardly no room to pass through. More covered wagons and overloaded freighters and prospectors on horseback was still stampeeding in, there was a long line of them out into the hills far as a body could see, and new shanties and lean-tos was cropping up like cheatgrass. There were streets now of a sudden, though there warn’t no pattern to them, lined out any which way by the tramping boots and hoofs and the wagon tracks. Storefronts with signs on them was raising up at the edges of the tracks, most of them without nothing behind them yet but gumbo. If them emigrants had come here prospecting for mud, they would surely all been rich.

  Traders sold straight from their tents and wagons or set up rough lumber on barrels and laid their wares out on them in the street, or on the new wooden sidewalks being slung up so’s to be able to move around without sinking knee-deep in the muck. There was everything for sale from shovels and skillets to wooly underwear, picks and tin lanterns. A power of rifles and shotguns and six-shooters was being bought and sold, too, and axes and hatchets and mean-looking knives. That rawbone coffin-maker in the black stovepipe hadn’t stopped sawing planks and hammering boxes together since he got here, and he still didn’t have none left over.

  There was rumors gold had been struck upstream, so regiments of fortune-hunters was charging out to scrouge for it. There warn’t no law about any of what was happening; it was a bully’s game. They was so eager to race out and grab up the gold, they mostly just left their wagons where they stood, offering up vittles and bottle liquor a-plenty for borrowing, and swarms a loafers was sneaking about doing that.

  Others was prospecting for gold off of the prospectors. That fat little dentist-banker with the thick bush of yaller whiskers was now setting in front of a map he’d drawed and was announcing himself as a land surveyor for folks who wanted to know for a dollar where the gold was before they went rattling off into the heathen wilderness. Swarthy fellows was peddling burros and pack horses, herding them through the muddy streets. Sawyers and carpenters and millers hung out their shingles. I heard a baby cry, so families was starting to elbow in, too.

  A beardy slack-jawed chap was pushing the country rube’s ownerless wheelbarrow, offering it up for sale. As he slopped along, somebody thronged a dead body in it. He looked the body over in his meloncholical way, slowly scratching his hairy jaw. Then, when he calculated he couldn’t profit by it, he tipped it out and pushed on again.

  There was a small crowd of loafers a-wanting to get into Zeb’s, being persuaded off by Abaddon. When Abaddon first snarled me up against a wall, I thought I heard Zeb call him a bad ’un, but then I learnt it was the name of some devil, and he did have the snout and temper of one. Zeb didn’t hesitate to sick Abaddon on robbers and vilent drunks, and not every one a them had two working legs afterwards.

  One of the old regulars leaning on a wagon next to the stone path leading up to the shack says he’s heard about a vegilanty gang I was banding up and he’d like to join it if we was passing out guns because he ain’t got his no more, Zeb does. He says he was told that members of the gang got to take a blood oath, and he was ready to stick himself and do that, so I seen Deadwood warn’t only spreading the word, he was tossing in a few of his own. “Tonight, at Zeb’s,” I says, “special vegilanty whisky. For free. Let the others know.”

  Deadwood his own self warn’t far away. He was telling everybody who wanted to listen about his shooting contest with my brother Jacob. “We set out to see how long him and me could keep that silver dollar up in the air by shootin’ at it,” he was saying. “First one missed lost the dollar, though it didn’t hardly look like one no more. More like that chunk a the moon I struck here when I was a young’un, and first got famous.” When he seen me, he took his gold fob watch out of his vest pocket and raised it up and blinked both his crossed eyes like two winks at once. “We didn’t nuther two of us miss,” he says, pocketing the watch and returning back to his audience again. “But ole Jake he finally won on accounts of I run out a dern carteridges.”

  Those rumors of plasser gold in the crick was spreading round, so me and Tongo went where I could keep an eye on the tepee. What I seen was smoke a-pouring out of it. I rode down there with my rifle and pistol cocked: it was Eyepatch and his pals again. Wooden claim stakes was springing up along the shore like jimson weeds, including a new one sprouting in Tongo’s pasture. The smoke warn’t from a cooking fire. They was trying to burn the tepee down.

  Eyepatch snarls for me to get out, I’m trespassing on their claim. “I ain’t making no fuss about that,” I says. I’d helped the army burn down enough native villages to know the lodges burnt slow, but I couldn’t resk losing that hide cover, and I needed to know if the guns was still in there or if these rascals had already smouched them. “Ain’t a prospector, and don’t never aim to be one. But you’d best douse that fire.”

  “We got a ordnance to burn it,” Eyepatch says, “i
t bein’ a mortal hazard.”

  “Who give you that ordnance?” I says, both fingers on triggers.

  “We done.” His gold teeth and the loops in his ears was glinting in the morning light. He didn’t seem to think I’d shoot him and he was probably right.

  “Well, my brother’s buried in there and you’re spreading his pox all over the Hills by setting smoke a-flying out from that sick tent.”

  Pegleg frowned and lifted his neckerchief over his nose. “Why the hell didn’t you tell us that in the first place, chief?”

  The fellow with the scattered brown teeth says I’m a goddam liar and drawed his pistol, so I was obleeged to raise mine and fire off some damage to his hand, adding to all the old wounds he was already wearing like a thief’s campaign medals. The other two’s hands was twitching, but they warn’t taking no chances. “He’s a shooter,” Eyepatch snarls with a mean grin.

  “I’m going to put out that fire and move my brother’s remains off of your claim. Him and me are going to be traveling soon. I’m a-taking him home. If you want to stay and watch, you got to come in there with me and help me dig him up.”

  “If it’s so damn dangerous,” Pegleg says, “why’re YOU goin’ in there?”

  “I got the impunity from tending Jacob. I catched the pox, too, but I only broke out in freckly spots. There ain’t pus leaking out a more’n one or two now. I can show you if you ain’t scared of drawing too close.” They didn’t show no signs of wanting to do that, so I says, “Zeb’s stilling up a special whisky to welcome folks to the Gulch tonight. It’ll be for free, so they’re already getting in line. Maybe I’ll see you up there later.”

  “Awright, you carry on, chief,” Eyepatch says, holstering his pistol. The one who drawed on me was still moaning and cussing and clutching his wrist. “C’mon, Bill, le’s go git you doctored up.”

  “How you going to do that?” whined Bill. “There ain’t no doctors.”

  “There’s a dentist turned up. He prob’bly can do it. Git them bones shifted, chief. Pronto. We’ll be back.”

  I watched them move up the slope till they was near out of sight, then ducked inside. It was all tore up in there. I grabbed up the blanket to beat out the fire, and I seen that the guns had been took. It was just what I was afeard of. Eyepatch and his gang had got to them first. Our plans was ruined.

  But then I seen the eagle feather.

  CHAPTER XVII

  HEY WAS ALL having a grand time up in Zeb’s that night. Pap would a felt right at home. It only took one swallow of Zeb’s special brew to melt a body’s brains and knees, and two was good enough for delirium tremens. Of course Pap would a got in a fight with everybody, even if he couldn’t get his feet under him, but that was part a the revelment for Pap, maybe the importantest part—and it was just the sort of climacteric Zeb was aiming at that night so as to make our escape from the camp without resk of nobody on our tails. Zeb’s mastiff Abaddon was penned up and mighty unhappy about it, growling out something betwixt a snarl and a whimper all night, but Zeb didn’t want the dog to chase nobody off before he’d soused them up.

  That yaller-whiskered banker-dentist turned land surveyor was there and he was the most popular man in the shack. Zeb’s bar was just a plank set on two hogsheads, and Yaller Whiskers was standing there, alongside of a chinless character with long droopy moustaches spread round a set of mule teeth. Mule Teeth was showing off a speck a gold, which he says he come on that day by following a map he bought off of the surveyor. The speck probably warn’t worth ten cents, but you’d a thought the fellow was become a millionaire, and now everybody wanted to buy a five-dollar map from Yaller Whiskers. There was some who’d already bought maps who hadn’t struck nothing. “They warn’t maps, they was more like newspaper cartoons,” one of them says, and Yaller Whiskers spit through his bushy beard and says, “Well, you prob’bly warn’t readin’ ’em proper, son, so you messed out the punchline.” They asked the millionaire over and over where he’d staked his claim, and he smiled round his big teeth like a king and slurped and unloosed a handsome heap a lies.

  Some was complaining to Zeb about that hanged hayseed still blowing in the wind out a-front the shack, saying it warn’t an eddyfying sight and couldn’t be no good for business. Zeb says business right now was most all he could handle, but they was free to go cut him down if they warn’t afeard a being ha’nted by him after. Several was willing, saying ghosts don’t scare them none, except maybe spinster ghosts who was knowed to be the vilest sort, but they didn’t want to lose their approximity to the free whisky whilst it lasted, undrinkable hellbegot bomination though it was.

  One of the emigrants fetched along a homemade fiddle and he was a-ripping away on it, yelping out songs he’d thought up about the awful Silver War and about lonesome, whooping, dogie-driving, and dying cowboys. Some a the drunks was yelping and yuppeeing along with him and some was bawling and some was cussing the memory of their trail bosses and the wretchid lives they had. I remembered the lonesome part, but the rest was mostly sentimentery hogwash. I wouldn’t be unhappy to go back to the cowboying trade, but I wouldn’t be specially happy nuther.

  Then the chap got to singing about young women in calico frocks and Sunday bonnets, and that got the drunks to hooting and hollering and in generl misabusing theirselves. One of them tied the sleeves of a sheepskin jacket round his back to make a kind of skirt out of it, and he commenced to prance around like a prairie nymph and then strip himself off one thing at a time, like I seen the ladies do in saloons down in Abileen. They was all awful excited. If a real woman had turned up, she wouldn’t a stood a chance. All the loafers was roaring and clapping and haw-hawing until the dancer was start-naked, and then they booed him and asked him when’s the last time he washed that nasty thing.

  “When I felled in a river,” he says, “back in ’68.”

  Eyepatch crept over through the crowd, stepping on the bodies that had already got knocked down by Zeb’s vegilanty whisky, his earrings and gold teeth a-glinting in the lamplight, and asked me with his everyday snarl if my brother was moved away yet. I says that Jake was out a the ground and laying down there in the tepee under a blanket. His two pals was watching me from across the shack. Pegleg was chawing a plug, and nuther him nor Bill was drinking. “I promised to help out Zeb tonight, and when I’m done I mean to pack Jake off to a proper burial back home. Him and me’ll be gone by noon.”

  Eyepatch says they seen an injun sneaking around down there.

  “Yes. He’s watching over the body so there don’t nobody come too close and catch the pox off it.”

  “Ain’t the bugger apt to catch it hisself?”

  “Probably, but he’s only an ignorant savage. He don’t know nothing about poxes and I ain’t telling him.”

  Eyepatch and his pals was too sober, and I knowed we’d have to keep a sharp lookout for them when we pulled out with Zeb. When I says so to Zeb, he says I should take care. “Them rapscallions is afeard a you’n yer gun, and there ain’t nothing more dangersomer than a skeered killer.”

  Deadwood was uncorking his stretchers in the middle of the shack for any loafers tight enough to listen at him, and showing his fob watch at most every opportunity, popping it open and closed, though now there warn’t no point. He was presently telling about when he scouted for Louie Clark. He says Louie asked him to bed down a princess name of Porky-Hauntus to have her learn him the secret tunnel through the mountains to the ocean. “She took me in thar and showed me more’n I never wanted t’see, and when I come out I was ten years younger, boys, but limp as a dern noodle till I’d growed back them lost ten years.”

  Zeb had richened up his brew with a gallon of homemade black rum donated from one of the emigrant wagons I passed by earlier, plus some store hair slick, a bowkay of chili peppers, a pot of crabapple jam, some powder that Zeb tasted and said was most like rat pison, and other useful rubbage that had turned up in prospectors’ wagons and saddlebags. One of the drunks says he reckonized the s
weet muddy taste as out’n his own rum jug that was stole that day whilst he was off staking his claim, and before I could move, he’d drawed his pistol on Zeb and says he was going to kill him dead, and other guns come out round the room. But the drunk had been sampling Zeb’s mulekick all night and his eyes rolled back of a sudden and his pistol dropped and he stiffened up and keeled over, and everybody put their guns away again.

  But it was a sign of how the party was hotting up. There was knife-throwing games and rassling and fancy shooting contests that could easy turn vilent. A bespectacled chap in a black derby hat had borrowed an old army drum from somewheres and was a-beating on it, adding to the racket. Some of the boys, wearing scraps and tatters of blue and gray uniforms, was already doing some pushing and shoving and cussing out each other’s generals. It wouldn’t take long. That long bony coffin-maker come through the door, took one look around, and went back to hammering boxes together.

  I’d been thinking about our leaving all day and couldn’t hardly wait to get started. I had loved the Gulch, but it was most ruined now by this plague a grabby emigrants. As a haven for loafers, it warn’t one no more. It was time to go.

  Eeteh he was ready, too. He was down at the tepee, hiding out from all the Indian-hating emigrants and watching over our goods, waiting for Zeb and me. I’d left Tongo with him and I was glad of it, seeing how ugly things was turning in the shack. Everything except the lodge-skins was packed up down there and ready to be grabbed on the run. The reward for killing Indians was rising up every day, so Eeteh was restless that we had to wait for Zeb, but he was happy about traveling with the old whisky-maker and his magical mother, who he said Coyote was planning to marry. He says the tribe was proud about what we done and they maybe warn’t happy we was going, but they wouldn’t try to stop us. They might even give us an escort if we asked them. He says they wished I was the chief of my tribe, though they knowed my tribe was too stupid to think of that, and I says, yes, they was stupid, but I ain’t the chief a nothing and won’t never be, and he nodded at that and lighted up his pipe and I lighted up mine.