All of a sudden, whilst I was still studying over my perdicament, Deadwood set to whooping and hollering in the cave. I was afraid he might a found a bear, or a bear found him, and I was on my feet, ready to tear, but he come out a-dancing with a big potato sack. “Looky here, looky here! Better’n gold! Money! Heaps of it! And other stuff, too! Look at this gold fob watch!”
“I know,” I says, though it was news to me just like the rock was. I warn’t the only body who’d holed out in that cave. “I seen all that. But it warn’t mine, so I only kept the rock. Robbers, I reckon. Better leave it be.”
“Ef they’re robbers, they’re most prob’bly hanged by now. I say, finders keepers. I’m a-goin’ to buy me a jug from ole Zeb to celybrate. Ef you tote the poke, I’ll ’low you t’come along.”
CHAPTER II
O WE DONE that, Deadwood not losing the opportunity at Zeb’s to show off his rock to all the loafers there. How did he find that when nobody else had, they wanted to know. “Cuz I been here since afore time begun,” says he, “and I knowed where it got hid.” They asked him if he’d struck a seam, and he squinted, his eyes closing down on his nose, and says, “Yup, but I ain’t talkin’.” Though of course he warn’t doing nothing else. After a few more swallows from the jug, that lode would be solid gold a mile wide and long and a hundred fathoms deep, but strangers and greenhorns couldn’t see it if they was standing on it. For the price of a jug, he wheedled Zeb out of his raggedy old black vest so’s to have a pocket to plunk the fob watch into. Deadwood says the watch was give him by the owners of the Pacific Rileroad. “I was out thar to show ’em how to spike up them rile things and they gimme it in reckonition.”
“That must of been that golden spike I heerd tell about,” Zeb says with a wink to the others. “You prob’bly stole that, too.”
“Maybe. I ain’t sayin’,” Deadwood says, looking mysterious, and they all laughed at that.
Deadwood couldn’t never resist a good brag. He liked to say he’d helped old Dan’l Boone, who’d got lost, find his way into Missouri, had learnt Jim Bowie how to handle a knife, and when he was just a pup, had went surveying with General Washington. “They credited him, but I done all the dern work.” When I said I thought that gent lived in the last century, he said then maybe it was his younger brother. That lady liar Sarah Sod who Tom was always going on about couldn’t hold a candle to Deadwood.
The only person could match him lie for lie was my Lakota friend Falls-on-His-Face. Eeteh was mostly a happy loafer like me with a particular hankering for Zeb’s whisky and a generl dispreciation of the harsh ways of his tribe which, to hear Eeteh tell it, was nigh as ugly as the sivilization I’d lit out from. They got a Great Spirit that bullyrags them worse’n Moses and sets down what fundamentals they can and can’t do, mostly can’t. Eeteh says he never paid no attention to none of it, he couldn’t see no advantage about it, and for that he took a power of whalings until Coyote learned him how to act a fool. Everybody laughed at him now, and they was always playing mean jokes on him, but they never whipped him no more.
You don’t cross Moses and his holy gang without you get a hiding or struck with leppersy, but the Great Spirit hadn’t no choice, he had to live with Coyote and his mischief. It was more fair. I ain’t never seen him, but Eeteh says he has been to hell with the tricksome cretur to gamble with the dead, has helped him build a fire in a river bottom so as to catch cooked fish, and has walked the sky with him. The stars up there, Eeteh says, are like stones in the river and you have to hop from one to the next. It’s scarier than a river, though, because if you slip you fall up into the black night and never stop falling. The tribe don’t know whether to believe him or not, but just like the folks back in St. Petersburg living their own crazy lies, they’re afraid he might be right, and so they give him his space and some attention. Deadwood warn’t so lucky.
To be sure I couldn’t butt in on his claim, Deadwood left me out of his yarns, which I took as a good thing because I didn’t want no share of the trouble his crowing was bound to land him in. Our old neighbors was used to Deadwood’s stretchers and was mostly too muddled up with Zeb’s brew to be a worry, but rumbustiouser elements been moving into the Gulch who didn’t know him. Some of them was there in Zeb’s shack that night and they was already closing in on Deadwood in their grim friendly way. It looked like getting out might be a sight more harder’n getting in was.
I laid my rifle across my arm like I was thinking about maybe shooting somebody just for the heck of it and said we had to get back to the fort whilst there was still enough light to follow the mountain trail. I asked Zeb for some feed for the panther so’s it don’t bite my head off when I get back. Zeb was feeling flush with the windfall the barter of his antique vest had fetched him, so besides the feed sack he throwed in a couple of lumps of sugar. Deadwood was having a grand time and warn’t easy to shift, but I remembered him not to forget what Dan’l Boone once told him, and that confused him enough to stumble out after me with his jug and gunny sack.