She says her brother was “a Chinaman coo-leee,” which seemed mostly a way to die before you catched old age. She says all the men in their village come to America on the same ship they did. Things in China was “so-o-o ba-a-a,” she says. “Many trub-oh.” Women was s’posed to stay back to take care of the old people, but their mam and pap was killed in the troubles, and her brother didn’t want that to happen to her, so he brung her over with him. Girls warn’t allowed on the ship, so she had to pretend she was his little brother, though she was older’n him, and she worked alongside of him in the mines and on the railroad till they found her out, and since she warn’t legal, they done with her whatever they wanted to.
She says when her brother asked for water one day and got hanged as a troublemaker, the rail boss took her away and misused her every which way he could think of, then handled her over to the bad man who was working for him. The bad man horsewhipped her naked just for fun till she thought she was going to die, but he didn’t have nobody else to beat on so he kept her alive in a box in his lean-to and fed her potatoes and berries. She says he warn’t American, but wanted to be, so he joined the army to become one. Also it suited him. He liked shooting and hurting people. He dragged her along with him on his way to the war the first day or two, but she slowed him down, so he unloosed his orneriness on her till he was wore out and then he left her there to die on the trail. She hoped he’d get killed in the war, but now it was ended, she was afraid he might come back looking for her. “If I scleam at bad man, Hookie, don’ come herrp me!” she says. “Lide way fast an’ don’ come back!”
I was mighty surprised. “The war’s over? I didn’t know that,” I says.
“Rong time yestidday,” she says. “That nice plesident, man kirr him, too.”
I warn’t paying much mind to the rest a the world after I buried Ben Rogers. Except for saloons, I didn’t need the world and it didn’t need me. For beer money, I hired on with emigrant trains and wagons, taking on work wherever I could find it, me and Jackson drifting generly northards, and it was up a-near the Oregon Trail where I found Nookie, or she found me. Chinese ladies warn’t in much demand, but she’d struck a little abandoned sod cabin to move into and, like me, she didn’t have many wants. I seen her setting cross-legged outside her cabin in the sunset and she seen me and motioned me over and give me something to eat and we started having baths. She said she asked me because I was so skinny, but she was skinnier.
Her telling me the war was over made me think of Jim. Nookie didn’t know who won the war, and when I asked others, they just laughed at me or punched me if they thought I was making fun. Which was how I calculated the North must a won. So I reckoned maybe Jim was free now. This cheered me up some when nothing else did, except maybe Nookie’s baths.
Then one day I come back from leading some people in funny hats over to the Mormon Trail junction and found her cabin all busted up and Nookie gone. She’d left her tin bathtub behind. I waited two or three days, but she never come back, so finally I washed myself in the tub one last time, thinking how she done it, and struck out for the Bozeman trailhead to look for work as a scout and guide. There was forts being built along the trails up there to protect the cows and emigrants rumbling through, and it didn’t take me long to know the trail and the tribes along it. The worst was the Lakota Sioux. It was like they was born angry. I was deathly afraid of them. Them and snakes.
It was in one of the forts I met Dan Harper. Dan was a Union soldier, a Jayhawker from Kansas who had volunteered for the army in a fit of patriotics, but the war betwixt the States was over before he got to kill nobody, so they sent him out west to destroy Indians instead. He was lonely like I was, so him and me we spent a good while just setting over our pipes and jawing. I told him I knowed a Harper back in St. Petersburg who wanted to become a robber but who probably took up loafing like everybody else, and Dan says he might a been a relative, it was a sizable clan, but he’d only been to Missouri once and that was to burn down a town full of Rebs. He says it was fun at the time, but he didn’t know what good it done. He hoped I didn’t have no relations there, and I says I didn’t have no relations nowheres.
I told him about Tom Sawyer and Ben Rogers and Nookie and her muddytatings, and he told me about a fat lady in Fort Laramie who could crack nuts with her bottom. I says I didn’t believe that, and he says he don’t neither, but that’s what they say. When I told him about Jim, he says he ain’t never knowed any Negro people up close like that and warn’t sure he wanted to. They didn’t have none in the town where he growed up, even though they was abolitionists. I said about Nookie’s brother stopping work to ask for more water and getting strung up with five other Chinamen as a warning to the rest of them, and how white folk come and cheered the hangings and shot the dead bodies for sport.