By the middle of the afternoon, even with many of the prospectors out digging and panning, the Gulch was filled up to near half as big as St. Petersburg and twice as ugly, and it got ever thicker and nastier by the hour. A body could learn more cusswords in five minutes than in a lifetime back on the river. There warn’t no women around, so the whole camp become a public outhouse. The banker-dentist with the yaller whiskers had set out a plank table and added a new sign saying he was also offering a friendly game of cards. The ghost-town scavenger was nailing up a storefront, startling up all the birds and people was shooting them. Under the falling birds, a long bony man in a black stovepipe hat come riding in with a wagonload of pine boxes which looked like they might probably be coffins, and folks stepped out of his way and let him pass.
Word had got out that General Hard Ass’s famous chunk of ore had been found by Deadwood, and each new arrival dragged the old prospector out to show where he found it, and so he was famous in his way but he warn’t happy. I lettered a wooden sign that claimed him the spot, and most everybody respected that, like enough because they didn’t believe the rock was really born there and he didn’t nuther. Most of them looked up into the hills above the Gulch, trying to cipher out where it might of fell from. Some of them offered him a share of their stake if he could fetch them to the source. One of the old loafers passed by and asked Deadwood with a wink at the others to show them another rock from that giant lode he struck. “No, I ain’t taking no resks,” he says. “I put ’em all where that bandit cunnel can’t find them. I done a good job of it. It’ll take me more’n a week to find ’em myself.”
The sun scrunched down behind the hills like it dreaded to see what was going to happen next, and throngs of prospectors, empty-handed and feeling grumbly, begun drifting back, scowling round to make sure nobody had beat them to a find. It was early spring and still chilling down when the sun dipped. Open fires was built in the streets and birds and small animals was spitted over them. You had to watch where you walked not to stomp on the heads and innards being flung about. The plank bar in Zeb’s shack was crowded round with gruff sweaty men toting picks and shovels like battle-axes, a bonanza for Zeb maybe but not for his old regulars, who couldn’t even squeeze in the door and was apt to get a drubbing if they tried too hard. The prices had shot up, but Zeb, surrounded by ornery bands of strangers fighting each other for custody of his goods, did not look all that happy, even if he was getting rich.
Deadwood was setting on a three-legged stool outside Zeb’s shack, studying his fob watch from time to time in the half-light, popping it open, snapping it shut, and regaling the drunks with his stretchers. Deadwood was about all what they had for entertainment, and sometimes they spotted him a ten-penny glass of whisky or a dribble of whatever they dug out of their saddlebags—“To grease up his wheels,” as they said. As me and Tongo passed by, they was asking him how the hole in his vest got burnt. He says it happened when he was defending the Alley-mo, his gun getting so hot he had to drop it in his pocket to cool it off and it set the vest on fire. But then Davy Crockett sent him off to find Sam Houston and bring back help, which was how him and them other fellers lost the Battle of the Alley-mo and all got killed. “Ole Davy was a passable tale teller, but he warn’t worth a mouthful a cold ashes as a cunnel. He’s got a plague of ornery Messykins flooding over the wall, and what does he go’n do? He sends his best dern shooter off shaking wild gooses.”
“You purty good with a gun, Deadwood?” someone asked.
“I was handy. They useter call me Dead-Eye Deadwood. I got stories wrote in books about me.”
I’d wanted to let him know about my new brother Jacob and his tragic disease so’s he didn’t speak to the contrary, but it warn’t no use, he was wound up for the night. I seen Eyepatch and his two pals looking me over like they was measuring me up for one a them pine boxes, so me and Ne Tongo headed back down to the tepee to see what vittles they might a left us for supper and to consider what we was going to do next. “Tongo,” I says, “we got no place to go and we got to go there.” He snorted like he understood, but like he warn’t no more pleased than what I was.
Who I found in my tepee this time was Eeteh, setting in the shadows and sampling from one of the jugs I’d laid aside for the tribe, his tomahawk in his lap. I was ever so glad to see him and I told him so. I told him I’d went looking for him with that jug and found everybody gone, and he says he was glad I didn’t get there sooner because they was so tore up about all these stampeeding white folks they might have scalped me on the spot.