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.
It had growed ever so still. In the silence, the revolver click was like a mountain cracking. There warn’t nobody breathing. Maybe they was counting. It was like that moment of the three drum beats up in Minnysota just before the floor of the platform dropped away. Probably less’n a minute went by, though it seemed like a century before Deadwood finally reached into his pants pocket and pulled out the rock. A soldier pried it out of his gnarly fist and handled it up to the general. The general holstered his revolver, hefted the rock to judge its weight, and showed it to his officers. They nodded and the general dropped it into a leather pouch hanging from his saddle.
“That’s MY rock!” Deadwood yelped. “I found it! I own it!”
“You own nothing,” the general says softly. Everywheres there was the smell of cinnamon. “Not even your poor sad arse.” The old prospector stared up at him defiantly and the general, still smiling his sorrowful smile, stared back, until Deadwood, cussing to himself, turned and stamped away. One of the troopers shot his hat off, and they all brayed like mules. He’d at last took my advice—or had my advice took for him—and had passed the bad luck on, but he hadn’t got shut of all of it. There was worst to come.
The general was right to want to hang me. When you done something as wrong as I done, you can’t expect no better. A body who hires himself out to generals has a bounden duty to do what he’s asked, even when it ain’t his druthers. Dan Harper, that young soldier I met on the wagon trail, learned me that, though I most likely already knowed it. The general had trusted me and I let him down. I won’t say it was the shamefullest mistake I ever made, I made so many there ain’t no smart way to rank them, but it’s clean at the top for the troublesomest. When I done it, I set myself up for everlasting ducking and running, and what was worst, it was probably a mistake I couldn’t stop making over and over. Can’t you never learn nothing, Huck? Tom would say. The years rolling past just seemed to pile on more stupidness.
When I turned my back on Tom and history all them years ago, I seen the Minnysota River a-front of me, and it called me down to walk it a stretch like rivers do. It still warn’t yet noon and, soon as the hangings was over, I was aiming to saddle up and light out whilst there was still daylight, but Tom was having a high time and I misdoubted he’d want to leave till he’d lined out a few more adventures.
I felt comfortabler down by the shore. A river don’t make you feel less lonely but it makes you feel there ain’t nothing wrong with being lonely. The Minnysota was a quiet little wash, near shallow enough to walk across without getting your knees wet, but a flat-bottom steamboat run on it, and it was setting out there then with a passel of whooping gawkers on it, watching the hangings through spyglasses. It had started freezing up at the shore, and soon walking across it would be all a body COULD do.