Me and Eeteh helped Zeb trade his liquor to the tribe for buffalo meat and for the maize and barley he needed to richen up his whisky mash, as well as for blankets, hides, pelts, rawhide rope, pots and pipes, and other goods to trade with emigrants passing through. Zeb shared the meat with me and Abaddon, and he give me stillage for Tongo. The main occupation in the Gulch was lazing around and stopping by the bar in Zeb’s shack every night, nor else a-jawing with Eeteh down at my tepee, smoking our pipes and sharing a jug. The Gulch was mighty peaceful and about as close as one could get in this world to the Widow Douglas’s fancied Providence.
Well, this is a story with a fair number of years and persons in it and I’ve already took a wrong turn and got a-front of myself, so let me go back and tell you about me and loony old Deadwood and his antique musket and that fateful rock with gold in it, and then I’ll try to give out the rest of it. His name was the same as that of the Gulch, but whether he’d got his name first or the Gulch did is in generl disputation. He says his pap, who was a Canuck trapper just passing through, give him his real Christian name which was Edouard, but his mam, who was part Pawnee—Deadwood’s a mongrel, but who ain’t—couldn’t announce it proper. Others say that she changed it a-purpose because she judged that all he had betwixt his ears was like what laid at the bottom of the Gulch, and everybody thought that was comical and it stuck. Which might a gave others the idea of how to name the place, or anyhow that’s how he likes to tell it because he says it gives him first dibs on anything found here, gold or whatsomever.
Well, now he’d found that glittery yaller rock, which I knowed as soon as I seen it was a powerful bad-luck sign, and he had got it in his mostly empty head that I was going to hire me a slick lawyer and steal his claim. To be sure that wouldn’t happen, he’d raised his gun, took my rifle away, and got ready to shoot me, saying he hoped I was all right with Jayzus and all them other holy folks.
“Put that consounded thing away, Deadwood,” I says. “You know I ain’t no prospector.”
“Well, maybe you ain’t and maybe you is, but I cain’t take no resks. I was borned here, ain’t nobody else got rights, everything here is mine.”
“Did I ever say it warn’t?” Deadwood only shrugged his shoulder bones and cocked the musket. I was in a tight place and knowed I had to conjure up something quick like what Tom Sawyer would a done. “Now listen to me, Deadwood. You can go ahead and shoot, but just so’s you’re not disappointed, I’m bound to tell you that I set that rock there. I been feeling sorry for you being so low-spirited, and I done it to cheer you up. I don’t know if there’s more and I don’t care, but if you shoot me I can’t show you where I found it. You need me, and not only for finding gold. If you didn’t have me around, who else would you have to listen at all your bullwhacky?”
“Awright then,” he says with a cross-eyed scowl, lowering the gun but keeping it cocked, “show me. And no dad-burned monkey business.”
At first I couldn’t think where to take him and just set off walking. Then I recollected that old bat cave above the crick where I lived when I first come to the Hills. By luck, him and me was already on the path up to it, and it was fur enough off that I’d have time to ponder my strageties, as Tom called them.
The way the land humped up here was right peculiar, like something inside had tried to shoulder its way out. Back in school they learned us about the jeanie-logical ages. I didn’t much credit it at the time, though when the widow said it went against the Good Book, I thought there might be something in it. I’d seen things hove up out on the desert, naked things carved by the wind into the strangest shapes, but here the hills was smothered over with wildflowers and big trees and was full of flying and scurrying varmints, with lots of dark damp places that smelt full of secrets. As the climb got steeper, the blackjack pines had trouble hanging on, which accounted for all the mortified trees down below us, though Deadwood says it was a mighty hurry-cane done it. He says the hurry-cane picked him up and hoisted him over into the Wyoming Territory, and what with all the buffalo stampeeds and scalping parties he had to fight his way through, it took him nigh two years and a half to get back from there.
“It was in here I struck the rock,” I says when we come to the cave.
“You set right thar en don’t run off,” Deadwood says, thinking my thoughts for me. “Ef you do, I’ll hunt you down’n shoot you, even ef I do find gold in thar.”
I lit up my stone pipe and sunk back on a granite outcrop, outweighing my choices. I didn’t know where that rock he found come from, but not from inside that cave, where there warn’t nothing but a dirt floor carpeted over with bat droppings, so if I wanted to stay I’d have need of a good story, and he might shoot me anyway just out of exasperation. I could run away—Deadwood’s head didn’t work too good, it’s likely he’d forget to chase after—but I’d have to leave the Gulch just as I’d growed customed to it, and I could knock into that general again out there and wind up like all them misfortunate Santees in Minnysota.