When he left, I carried on like before, hiring myself out to whosoever, because I didn’t know what else to do, but I was dreadful lonely. I wrangled horses, rode shotgun on coaches and wagon trains, murdered some buffalos, worked with one or t’other army, fought some Indian wars, shooting and getting shot at, and didn’t think too much about any of it. I reckoned if I could earn some money, I could try to buy Jim’s freedom back, but I warn’t never nothing but stone broke. The war was still on, each side chasing and killing t’other at a brisk pace clean across the Territory, and they both needed a body like me to scout ahead for them, watch over their stock at night, pony messages to the far side of the fighting, clean their muddy boots and help bury the dead, of which there warn’t never no scarcity, nuther boots nor dead.
Out in these parts both armies warn’t tangling so much with each other as they was with the natives, who kept getting in their way like mischeevous rascals at a growed-ups’ party. I was riding generly on the Northern side because that was where I found myself. They called theirselves abolitionists and what they was mostly abolitioning was the tribes. Every time they ruined a bunch of them, they ended up with herds of captured ponies, and somebody had to put saddles and bridles on the ones that warn’t summerly executed and break them in the white man’s fashion, and I could help do that. I s’pose I was having adventures like before, but without Tom to make a story out of them, they didn’t feel like it. They was more like a kind of slow dying, and left me feeling down and dangersome.
Fetched low like that, I fell in with a band of robbers, though I didn’t want for nothing to rob, except maybe a shot a whisky or a beer. I’d been hired on to guard a stagecoach from the east on its way up the Oregon Trail to Frisco, hauling a load a mail-order brides for gold miners who’d struck it rich out there, but I fell dead asleep just when the coach was set upon by a masked gang. When the shouting and hallooing begun, I couldn’t hardly think where I was or even who I was. The bandits yelled out they don’t kill women, it ain’t in the books like that, so everybody could just leave their money and julery and weapons and run away and tell everybody they’d been robbed by the Missouri Kid and his murdrous gang, the Pikers, though if anybody wanted to stay and get shot, they could do that.
Whilst the Pikers was busy collecting their riches, I mounted old Jackson, ducked my head, and slid in with the others, but the ladies was mad at me for not trying to save them and they give me away. The bandits grabbed me off of Jackson and tied me up, and when the others was galloped off, they begun arguing about what to do with me. Some of them wanted to write a direful warning on my backside with their sheath knives and hang me from a tree for a lesson to passing strangers, others wanted to ransom me for money. “He won’t ransom for two cents,” one of them says, “and his butt ain’t big enough to carve even half a cussword on it. I move we jest shoot him.” They was all finally agreed that was the best way, and the Missouri Kid he cocked his pistol and asked me what my name was so’s they’d know what to write on my gravestick.
When I told him, the others all laughed because of how long it was and hard to spell, but the Kid he staggered back like he’d been smacked in the jaw and says, “HUCKLEBERRY FINN! I cain’t BELIEVE it! Is that really YOU behind that raggedy beard, Huck? This is MOST AMAZ’N!” He pulled off his mask to show me a gashly face with a broke nose and one eye whited over and a thick black beard sprouting round a loose scatter a chipped teeth. “It’s ME, Huck! BEN ROGERS! Don’t you ’MEMBER me? We was in Tom Sawyer’s robber gang together, back when we was jest mean little scamps!”
He untied me and give me a happy punch on the arm. Ben Rogers! It did feel good to find someone I knowed out in all that miserable wilderness, even if he was a bandit and a body couldn’t hardly reckonize him. “Gol DANG it, Huck!” There was tears in Ben’s good eye. He says he’s been so horrible lonesome for me and Tom and all the others from back home he most couldn’t stand it, and he begged me to travel with him and his boys for a spell. He says the Pikers only rob from the rich and give to the poor, specially poor orphan children, but they don’t know nobody poorer’n what they are and they ain’t met up yet with no orphans before me, so they mostly give it to theirselves so’s not to waste it. “C’mon, Huck! It’ll be jest like old times!” Ben says I don’t must do nothing I don’t want to, except promise to bury him if he gets killed and be sure to tell everybody back home about the Missouri Kid and what all he done. He says I can add a few stretchers if I want to, and I says I could do that.