I’d been thinking about our leaving all day and couldn’t hardly wait to get started. I had loved the Gulch, but it was most ruined now by this plague a grabby emigrants. As a haven for loafers, it warn’t one no more. It was time to go.
Eeteh he was ready, too. He was down at the tepee, hiding out from all the Indian-hating emigrants and watching over our goods, waiting for Zeb and me. I’d left Tongo with him and I was glad of it, seeing how ugly things was turning in the shack. Everything except the lodge-skins was packed up down there and ready to be grabbed on the run. The reward for killing Indians was rising up every day, so Eeteh was restless that we had to wait for Zeb, but he was happy about traveling with the old whisky-maker and his magical mother, who he said Coyote was planning to marry. He says the tribe was proud about what we done and they maybe warn’t happy we was going, but they wouldn’t try to stop us. They might even give us an escort if we asked them. He says they wished I was the chief of my tribe, though they knowed my tribe was too stupid to think of that, and I says, yes, they was stupid, but I ain’t the chief a nothing and won’t never be, and he nodded at that and lighted up his pipe and I lighted up mine.
Before I left him to come up to Zeb’s, he told me another Coyote story. There was a time, he says, when things was going poorly for Coyote. He had the earache, the toothache, the bellyache, and monster boils under his tail, but the worse thing was the rash of pustulous sores that broke out in his crotch. His wife was disgusted when she seen them and left him to go live with Snake, but he couldn’t a done nothing with her anyways. A woman come to take care of him, but she pisoned him with an evil potion that left his innards twisted wrongside out, and then robbed him of all his money, tobacco, and spirits. He knowed that Snake had powerful medicines and “speak great wisdom,” as Eeteh put it, so he decided to go visit him. Snake might a s’posed Coyote was a-coming to kill him on account of the cheating wife, but by then Coyote was so sick he could only crawl like a worm (Eeteh imitated this), so Snake laughed and took him in and doctored him and talked to him whilst he was getting cured. The peyote that Snake et give him visions of the beginnings and endings of things, and those visions led him to concluding that nothing mattered in the world no more and everything, even boils and pustules, was funny. Coyote laughed along with him, and then when he was well again, he killed both Snake and his woman and cooked them up with prairie onions, wild mushrooms, and buffaloberries, and et them, saying he hoped Snake got the joke and didn’t take revenge whilst he was passing through. Eeteh was telling me this story in Lakota, and I had to stop him now and again to ask him what some words meant. I had the feeling that whenever I done that, he was changing the story a little.
Things was a-biling up now in Zeb’s shack. Folks was turning testy and old Zeb was nerviouser’n I never seen him. The drummer in the derby was pounding the skin of his insterment like he was trying to bust it, and the fiddler was scratching his strings and screeching away through his nose like something of his’n down below was a-getting twisted. A new emigrant come in wearing a string a black-haired scalps on his belt, some of them with their ears still on. He knocked over a drunken loafer who was in his way and opened up his pants and let fly against a wall. One of Zeb’s regulars took offense at that and was just sober enough to take aim and shoot the emigrant’s pecker off. That crazied the new emigrant so, he fetched out two six-shooters and he might a hurt somebody if the others hadn’t stopped him dead with twenty or thirty shots before he could start blasting away. “Thanks, boys,” Zeb says, crawling out from under the bar plank. “Some people ain’t got no manners.”
With guns going off, them who had give up their weapons the night before was worried they didn’t have nothing to fire back with. They wanted to know when the vegilanties was going to get armed up. Zeb says he put the vegilanty guns in a safe place on account of he didn’t want no more weapons here tonight, but some a them had got stole. Eyepatch’s pal, the one with the scattered brown teeth and bandaged hand, says it must a been the injuns. They was on the warpath and scrouging for weapons. Zeb says maybe, but he don’t think so. “All these here wagons rollin’ in has skeered the breechclots off a them heathens. No, I warrant it was prob’bly somebody in the camp what collared ’em. Somebody maybe right here in this shack tonight.”
The drunks didn’t have much reason left and was most open to sejestion, so they begun staring around at each other in a suspicioning way. Best they COULD stare, for most of them warn’t focusing too good. Some says they reckonized the guns others was carrying as their own, and fights broke out. Some joined in only because they couldn’t get out a the way. Things was a-darkening up pretty quick.