One of the emigrants fetched along a homemade fiddle and he was a-ripping away on it, yelping out songs he’d thought up about the awful Silver War and about lonesome, whooping, dogie-driving, and dying cowboys. Some a the drunks was yelping and yuppeeing along with him and some was bawling and some was cussing the memory of their trail bosses and the wretchid lives they had. I remembered the lonesome part, but the rest was mostly sentimentery hogwash. I wouldn’t be unhappy to go back to the cowboying trade, but I wouldn’t be specially happy nuther.
Then the chap got to singing about young women in calico frocks and Sunday bonnets, and that got the drunks to hooting and hollering and in generl misabusing theirselves. One of them tied the sleeves of a sheepskin jacket round his back to make a kind of skirt out of it, and he commenced to prance around like a prairie nymph and then strip himself off one thing at a time, like I seen the ladies do in saloons down in Abileen. They was all awful excited. If a real woman had turned up, she wouldn’t a stood a chance. All the loafers was roaring and clapping and haw-hawing until the dancer was start-naked, and then they booed him and asked him when’s the last time he washed that nasty thing.
“When I felled in a river,” he says, “back in ’68.”
Eyepatch crept over through the crowd, stepping on the bodies that had already got knocked down by Zeb’s vegilanty whisky, his earrings and gold teeth a-glinting in the lamplight, and asked me with his everyday snarl if my brother was moved away yet. I says that Jake was out a the ground and laying down there in the tepee under a blanket. His two pals was watching me from across the shack. Pegleg was chawing a plug, and nuther him nor Bill was drinking. “I promised to help out Zeb tonight, and when I’m done I mean to pack Jake off to a proper burial back home. Him and me’ll be gone by noon.”
Eyepatch says they seen an injun sneaking around down there.
“Yes. He’s watching over the body so there don’t nobody come too close and catch the pox off it.”
“Ain’t the bugger apt to catch it hisself?”
“Probably, but he’s only an ignorant savage. He don’t know nothing about poxes and I ain’t telling him.”
Eyepatch and his pals was too sober, and I knowed we’d have to keep a sharp lookout for them when we pulled out with Zeb. When I says so to Zeb, he says I should take care. “Them rapscallions is afeard a you’n yer gun, and there ain’t nothing more dangersomer than a skeered killer.”
Deadwood was uncorking his stretchers in the middle of the shack for any loafers tight enough to listen at him, and showing his fob watch at most every opportunity, popping it open and closed, though now there warn’t no point. He was presently telling about when he scouted for Louie Clark. He says Louie asked him to bed down a princess name of Porky-Hauntus to have her learn him the secret tunnel through the mountains to the ocean. “She took me in thar and showed me more’n I never wanted t’see, and when I come out I was ten years younger, boys, but limp as a dern noodle till I’d growed back them lost ten years.”
Zeb had richened up his brew with a gallon of homemade black rum donated from one of the emigrant wagons I passed by earlier, plus some store hair slick, a bowkay of chili peppers, a pot of crabapple jam, some powder that Zeb tasted and said was most like rat pison, and other useful rubbage that had turned up in prospectors’ wagons and saddlebags. One of the drunks says he reckonized the sweet muddy taste as out’n his own rum jug that was stole that day whilst he was off staking his claim, and before I could move, he’d drawed his pistol on Zeb and says he was going to kill him dead, and other guns come out round the room. But the drunk had been sampling Zeb’s mulekick all night and his eyes rolled back of a sudden and his pistol dropped and he stiffened up and keeled over, and everybody put their guns away again.
But it was a sign of how the party was hotting up. There was knife-throwing games and rassling and fancy shooting contests that could easy turn vilent. A bespectacled chap in a black derby hat had borrowed an old army drum from somewheres and was a-beating on it, adding to the racket. Some of the boys, wearing scraps and tatters of blue and gray uniforms, was already doing some pushing and shoving and cussing out each other’s generals. It wouldn’t take long. That long bony coffin-maker come through the door, took one look around, and went back to hammering boxes together.