Eeteh was having about the same kind of trouble with his tribe as I was having with mine, so him and me got on and we traveled together after that whenever we could. That’s how it was that when the tribe, in their hunt for the disappearing buffalo, ported their lodges up into high Wyoming Territory, not far from the wagon trail where I’d met Dan, I trailed along, even though I knowed it was deathly bad luck to return to where a friend had got murdered. And it was. Because of Eeteh’s turncoat Lakota brother, that ornery fancypants general found me up there again. General Hard Ass is what his soldiers called him, or else General Ringlets for his long curly hair which he lathered with a cinnamon oil that smelt a mile away. He was really only a colonel, but everybody called him general, because he wanted them to. He was on the warpath against the Lakota for what they done to some of his soldier boys and he wanted me to set a trap for him. Maybe I should a done, but I didn’t.
If the general asked you to do something and you warn’t of a mind to, you was inviting yourself to your own hanging party, specially if you messed his plans. So I followed Eeteh’s sejestion and busted straight for the Black Hills, where I knowed the general was less than welcome. Hanging was as good as I deserved for the wicked thing I done, it was an out-and-out doublecross, but I was already black with sin, so I seen no reason not to add one more wrongfulness to the list and skaddle out of the hangman’s reach. The Black Hills was sacrid to the Lakota, but Eeteh says the only Great Spirit that could be found there was what was stilled up by an old hermit whisky-maker residing in the Gulch, and that’s where he’d look for me.
When I rode Ne Tongo into the little hid-away cluster of unpainted broke-down shanties and raggedy tents at the edge of Deadwood Gulch, nigh to cricks too fast and shallow for rafting, but prime for fishing—there was even a patch of sweetly clovered meadow beside the crick for Tongo to graze on—I knowed I was at home. A place I could take my boots off all day long. It was the rainy season, so him and me settled into a comfortable cave in the hills above the crick, shooed the bats away, and waited for Eeteh.
This was a few seasons back, before everything got so lively, when there warn’t no town, just the Gulch, not no saloons nor churches nor women, nor not no gold, nothing to trouble the peace, only a few hairy old bachelors, one of whom, old Zeb, cooked up home whisky and sold it by the ten-penny glass in his front room which was the only room his dirt-floor shack had, except for a little tack-on shed where he kept his still and yist mash. His shack was the X on the map Eeteh drawed me. Zeb was the only body in the Gulch actuly producing anything, the others mostly living off of hunting and fishing and fruit and the few vegetables they growed or dug up. “Most a these lunkheads ain’t producin’ nothin’ except what drops out their rear ends,” Zeb says.
Zeb hailed from somewheres further down the Big River from me and Pap. He might not a been all white. He come west with only his old rags, his copper worms and pot, and a dona jugful of his pappy’s yist mash, stirred up in buckets on his pappy’s back porch, a stinking muck Zeb loved so much he called it his mother. Zeb was not a vilent man though he was said to have shot a few fools reckless enough to mess with her, and he kept a fierce mastiff named Abaddon who would chaw a body’s leg off if Zeb give him leave. Zeb was a loner who didn’t hardly talk to no one and then it was most like Abaddon’s growl, but he was proud of his whisky like a fiddler is of his music. He didn’t have no upper teeth, so his white-bearded lower jaw with its yaller teeth poked out under his nose like a cracked plate for it. He limped round like one peg was shorter’n t’other. Zeb’s local clients was mostly luckless prospectors, chasing doubtful dreams like gamblers do, their profession one I’d never took to heart on account of it being such pesky hard work.
The prospectors warn’t legal nuther, but there warn’t many of them and they was tolerated by the Lakota on account of Zeb’s whisky. They was all crazy about it. They mostly got sold by white traders a rubbagy whisky made out a black chaw, red pepper, ginger, and molasses, but Zeb never done that, and they appreciated it, Eeteh specially. The whole name they give Eeteh meant Falls-on-His-Face, and he always done his best to live up to it. He rode a piebald pinto the tribe give him. It had a peculiar hip wiggle the tribe thought was funny, though it could still outrun most a their other horses. Because of the pony’s comic walk and pied colors, Eeteh called him Heyokha, which meant Clown, or Thunder Dreamer, in the Lakota tongue.
When he found me there, he fetched along my buffalo-hide lodge-skins and pipes and what-all else I’d left behind when me and Tongo took to our heels. We cut and trimmed some lodge-poles and hoisted a tepee by the crick, leaving the cave to the bats, and set down to enjoy Zeb’s brew. Eeteh told me the treacherous brother who’d set General Hard Ass on me had got throwed out a the tribe, but that might not a been a good thing, because the rumor was he’d took up scouting for the general.