So I become a highwayman and me and Ben Rogers rode together for a time, working the Platte River emigrant trails with his Missouri Piker gang, and I helped hold up the sort of wagons and coaches I used to ride shotgun for. Ben and me talked about the fun we had in the old days back on the Big River, and he told me all his adventures since then, saying I should maybe be writing some of them down whilst he could still recollect what he just said. He says he lost the eye when an old prewar pistol backfired on him, but I could say it was because of a fight he got into with a hundred Mexican bandits along the Rio Grande. He says he ain’t never been there, but he heard it was as mighty as the Big River and twice as muddy.
I ain’t had no adventures since Tom left, so I told him about me and Tom riding the Pony Express, which made Ben whistle out his beard and say it was the most astonishing thing he ever heard in all his born days. I told him about the Fighting Parson’s righteous slaughter of the tribes and about riding northards in the winter with Tom to see all them poor Santees get hung. Ben says he wished he’d seen that, and I says I most wished I hain’t.
One evening, when the Pikers was holed out on a woodsy island in the middle of the river, me and Ben moseyed off a few miles away to a saloon that I knowed from the Pony days to have a drink and buy some bottle whisky for the others. There was thousands a birds a-fluttering through the twilighty air, making a body restless, and fish was a-jumping and plopping in the still river like they wanted the birds to pay them more mind. The saloon was fuller of loose women than I recollected, and Ben, scratching his black beard, says he had a weakness for their kind and he warn’t leaving till he’d got close acquainted with at least six of them. Serviceable ones ain’t easy to come by out in the wilderness, he says, so a body had to store up a few extra to fill in for the off days.
We had a good time that night and was tolerable tight when we rode back, Ben personating a Big River steamboat and its bells, making wide turns on his horse and singing out a load a ting-a-ling-lings and chow-ch-chow-wows, the wolves and coyotes yipping and howling along with him, elks blowing their whistles. On the island, though, there warn’t nobody singing, nor howling nor whistling nuther. All Ben’s gang had been murdered by a rival gang. The rivals was called the Boss Hosses and all the corpsed bodies had horseshoe nails hammered into their chests or backsides. Ben cussed and wailed and fired off shots into the trees around. Then we left the island and went back to the saloon because Ben says he has to dunk his sorrows. One of the two rival gangs was Union, t’other Confederal. I disremember which was which, but it probably don’t matter none.
We still had some swag left, and Jim had been worrying my mind, so I sejested we go see if we can buy him back from the Indians who bought him. Ben didn’t know who Jim was and, when I told him, he says he ain’t going to resk his neck for no dad-blame nigger slave. I says it was Tom’s idea of a bully adventure, and maybe we might could even turn a profit off of him. Ben still warn’t convinced, but he finally agreed when I told him how friendly the Cherokee maidens was. Mainly I s’pose he was scared and sadful after the massacre of his gang by the Boss Hosses, and just only didn’t want to be left alone. I reckoned after he met Jim, he’d like him like I liked him and would forgive him and wouldn’t want to sell him back into slavery again.
Ben Rogers warn’t no cleverer at hanging on to money than what I was and by the time we fetched up at the border of the Cherokee Nation, we only had two dollars left. We spent one of them on a bottle a whisky to carry along like a gift, and that left us just a dollar. Ben says it warn’t near enough and he wanted to go spend it on more practical things like women, but I reckoned a dollar might buy us an elbow or an ear and they could maybe borrow us the rest.
The Cherokee Nation warn’t a tribe a feather-headed natives in wigwams. They was all Southern gentlemen, living very high off of the hog. They wore puffy silk cravats and stiff high collars and growed magnolia trees and tobacco and had slaves picking cotton in their fields, though I couldn’t spy Jim amongst them.
The chief come out from his white mansion in his creamy pants and black frock coat, and I raised my hand and says, “How!” and give him the bottle a whisky. He took one taste, spit it out, and throwed the bottle away.
Ben yelped in protest and run to pick it up. “Tarnation! Who the blazes does that dang barrel organ monkey think he IS?” he roared. I tried to shush him up, but he went right on cussing and hollering and calling that Indian every name he could think of.
I didn’t know no Cherokee, so I says to them as clear as I could, “Me looking for slave negro name Jim.”
They all busted out laughing. They took my dollar and passed it around like a joke, give it back to me. “We only accept Confederate money here,” the chief says, gripping his coat lapels in both hands and peering down at me like a judge. “You boys abolitionists?”
“No, sir! That slave belonged to my family back on the river, but he run off on us. My pap and uncle sent me and my cousin out here to try and hunt him down.”