“Lies! Huck, how you talk! I only let them know we was famous scouts and injun fighters from out west and showed them the parson’s letter and I mentioned that you was the legendry H. Finn, breaker of wild horses, and all that was nearly mostly true.”
You could see the prisoners by then, past the caps of the soldiers standing in two lines leading to the gallows. They was tied up and wearing what looked like rolled-up muslin meal sacks on their heads, which give them a comical aspect. They warn’t moving too slow, but they warn’t moving too fast nuther. Their faces was painted and they was singing to beat the band, but you couldn’t hardly hear them because of all the hooting and hollering of the crowd.
“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.