So that was how it was I first come to the Hills, which for me, till now, was more like home than home was. Soon as Eeteh got nearby, he brung me my lodge-skins and helped me cut some poles and set up my tepee and move down out a the bat cave where I’d been living. Tepees are the changeablest kind of a layout for living in. They make a body feel at home wherever they are. I’d stayed with the tribe for a few years, moving round, and could a gone back with them again, but they seen I was a Hard Ass magnet, and was afeared a me being too close. I was also a little wearied of them and their peculiars, so both Eeteh and me was agreed it was best to abide in the Gulch on my own.
When old Zeb first seen me and Eeteh together, he hired us to do his trading with the tribe, and that made it easier for Eeteh to come and go when he wanted to. It was the best time of my life, and of Eeteh’s, too. The Indian-hating emigrants hadn’t arrived yet, and we could set around in my tepee and drink and jabber the night through. Zeb needed grains for his whisky-mash, and meat and fish for himself, turnips, hog nuts, berries, whatever other food the tribe gathered, and he also traded for things he could sell to emigrants passing through. All in all, Zeb was doing tolerable well, he was the richest man in the Gulch, though back then that warn’t saying much. Now, everybody was going to be rich in the Rush and old Zeb maybe the richest of them all. I worried Eeteh’s money pouch wouldn’t mean beans to him.
It was a cold damp morning and I had my chin tucked down in my buckskin shirt. It was too dark to see nothing, but I could hear the noises of others up sneaking about, stumbling over the bodies lying in the cold mud, cussing back whenever one of the bodies got stepped on and let out a nasty bark. There was an awful stink like everybody was just dropping their pants wherever and doin’ their producin’, as Zeb would say, and it made me push my nose deeper into my shirt.
Then, just as me and Tongo was pulling up to Zeb’s shack, somebody kicked me in the head and knocked me slap off of the horse into the mud. I sprung up and swung my rifle round in the dark, trying to see who done that. And how. The emigrants in their sivilizing fever had chopped down most of the trees thereabouts, but one out a-front of Zeb’s was still rairing up, and something long and lumpy was a-hanging from it. It was so dark, I had to get right under the muddy farm brogans to see that it was that country jake in the floppy straw who come to the camp with just only a pitchfork and a wheelbarrow. I judged it must be desperate bad luck to get kicked in the head by a dead man, specially one who was wearing your own hat, and I begun to feel worried and shaky about the rest of the day ahead.
Abaddon, Zeb’s cantankery mastiff, was a-guarding the door, but him and me was old pards, so he only wagged his tail and grinned his devil grin whilst I scratched his pointy ears. Inside, Zeb was already set to work by lamplight on a new batch of liquor. His shack was always in ruins, but it was ruineder than ever. Them strangers piling in last night had wrecked everything that could still be wrecked. “It got purty mean,” he acknowledged, scratching his chin. There was a heap of rifles, pistols and other goods like saddles, spurs and even britches and boots, over in a shadowy corner behind the plank bar, things Zeb had took in exchange for whisky. There was also blood on the dirt floor. “Year’s wuth a whisky. Swallered in a night. Tried t’shut the shack down afore that happened, but they shoved a gun in my face.”
“I’ve had trouble down at the tepee, too.”
“Some tough-lookin’ jackasses come askin’ to buy up my stock’n close the place permanent, sayin’ they’ll be tearin’ my old shack down t’build somethin’ fancy with whores’n gamblin’, and I kin work fur ’em. But I ain’t stayin’. I don’t work fur nobody. And after yestidday’s rush, I ain’t got no stock left to sell. Jest the mother. They ain’t gettin’ that over my dead body,” he says, jutting his jaw further out under his nose like he was daring a body to argue with him, his yaller bottom teeth showing like scattered nuggets.
I asked him about the tree decoration out front, and Zeb says, “Shootout over the last jug a whisky. One of ’em killt t’other one like usual. Committee formed theirselves up, mostly stewed pards a the loser who was a-layin’ there with his mouth open. They poured some whisky in it, and when it only filled up like a cup, they says the winner’d committed murder, which they declared t’be a hangin’ offense. They was generous, though. Let the feller have a slug a the whisky he’d fought over afore stringin’ him up, then drunk the rest to his mem’ry.”
“It was too dark to see clear, but it looked like he still’s sporting his old straw hat.”
“Heerd one of ’em sayin’ that accordin’ to the laws back home, where they had hangin’s ever week, it was reckoned the most sivilized thing t’do.”
“All this sivilizing is too many for me and Eeteh,” I says. “We’re moving on, too. If you want, we can scout for you. We’re a-going to Mexico, and we’d be happy to have you and your mother as company all the way, if you wouldn’t care to join along.”
“I’m headed thataway, but I’ll prob’bly jest go on back home on the river, now the war’s over,” Zeb says, staring off like he was already a-pulling in there. “But I could use a coupla guns breakin’ out a this hellhole’n some help totin’ the provisions.”