“Well, you’re out of luck,” the chief says. “We judged he was a runaway and there might be somebody like you turning up to claim him, so we sold him to some white bounty hunters, and they put him in chains and carried him off east.”
A little Cherokee girl about twelve years old was smiling up at Ben from behind one of the tall white pillars of the chief’s big house. “Hah!” Ben says. “There’s one!” She squeaked in fright and run away and Ben went a-chasing after. I yelled at him to come back, we was going now, but he cocked his good eye at me over his shoulder and shouted, “You can see how spunky she is, Huck! Won’t take me a minute!”
“You’d better rein in your cousin,” the chief says coldly, fingering the little gold cross hanging round his neck.
“That won’t be easy,” I says. “He suffered a dreadful head wound at Vicksburg a-near where our families’ plantations is, and he’s been crazy like that ever since. You can see how he was half blinded by it. I hope, sir, you can forgive him his trespasses.”
“I can, but her father probably cannot.”
He couldn’t. He clove Ben’s head in with a tomahawk. They brung the body, throwed it over his horse, and chased us out of there with war whoops and horsewhips and gun shots.
So I rode out in the desert and dug a hole for Ben’s remainders and told the hole I’d let everybody back home know about the Missouri Kid. If I ever got there. Then I rolled him into it and kicked some dirt in to cover him up and went back to killing buffalos and guarding wagon trains. My bandit days was over.
CHAPTER VI
OOKIE TOLD ME about the bad man whilst we was taking a bath. Baths warn’t something I was partial to, but she done things with her spidery fingers that made them more favorable. It was like sometimes she had an extra pair of hands. Maybe she used her strange unregular feet with the wiry little toes. She could do most anything with them, including licking them like a cat or lacing them behind her neck. But they warn’t so good for walking. I done more baths with Nookie than all the rest a my life piled together. I knowed they could do a body harm, so I been cautious to mostly stay away from them, but I ain’t sorry for the ones I had with Nookie.
Her painted tin tub was just big enough to stand or set in, with a little ledge on one side. I never seen nothing like it before, generly using rivers and rain to get wet in. Nookie would squat at the edge with me raired up on my knees in the tub and sponge my backside with a soft squshy soap she made herself, and then she would crawl in at my feet when it was the other parts’ turn. She made a whiny sound whilst she done it, which was maybe Chinese singing. She says she was muddytating. The tub was made for one body to set in, but we was so skinny there was room for both of us, so when she poured warm water over me to wash off the stink of the soap, she got in, too.
Then it was Nookie’s turn. Helping Nookie soap herself was one a the comfortablest things I ever done. The Widow Douglas always used to learn me that it was better to give than to receive. You couldn’t credit nothing the widow said, but it was maybe true about baths. Of course, there warn’t much of Nookie to wash, we was both slathering up skin stretched tight like wet wrapping paper around bones, and hers was most like bird bones. If she’d been bigger, maybe it’d seemed less agreeable. “You rike my bluzzer, Hookie,” she says, looking sorrowful at me. “He skinny, too.”
When Nookie called me Hookie, it sounded like cookie, both our names did the way she said them. She says it was the bad man who named her. She told him her real name, but he couldn’t never learn it. He told her Nookie was what her name meant in English or some other language. “He say, I am Rooskie, you are Nookie. Is only time I hear he laugh. Zen he hit me. Har-r-r. Like he mad bout sumssing.” She says Nookie was sort of like her real name, but when she told me the real one, it warn’t nothing like. It was more like a bee in her nose. I couldn’t learn it neither.