We was both straining hard and could feel the bone pieces fitting back. There was a little click like maybe the bone ends was coming together and maybe they warn’t. Maybe they was only breaking off worse. Meantimes, Eeteh grunts, reaching for the splint, Time kept stubbornly plodding on, too stupid to be able to change his ways. Like most a the Great Spirits, he didn’t really have no brain of his own. Without Sun and Moon to help, he was lost and fuddled and didn’t know where he was.
It was desperate hard work, but we somehow got Deadwood’s thigh bone put together and the splint tied up and we set to work on the lower part, while Eeteh, stubborn as Time was, kept on with his story. Moon knowed twenty-eight ways of hugging and kissing, Eeteh says, and she learned Sun all of them, showing him a different piece of herself each time to rouse him up, and then she learned him them all again, and all over again, and again, and that was how the stars was born and the year was made. If she’d knowed a hundred ways to do that, then months would have been even longer, and lives, too, Eeteh says, but she couldn’t think up no more. Sometimes she made Sun think up one of his own, and they added that in, but mostly he choosed things he used to done by himself when he only had his own reflection to stare at, and he let her do it to him, and that’s how the Spirit Road got made. “You have better name for Spirit Road,” Eeteh says.
Then one day, Moth was out nibbling at the world like that pest always done if you didn’t watch him, and he et a couple a holes in the curtain. Time seen then who was behind it and what they was doing. He tore up the curtain in a furisome rage and throwed Sun and Moon back in their own lodges. Time was the boss. He was stupid maybe, but he didn’t give nobody no choice.
We didn’t have none nuther. The trees around us was commencing to show theirselves more like pictures than shadows, and that meant that dawn’d be a-breaking soon. We had to clear out before that happened, so what was done was done and we couldn’t do no more for the old man.
We throwed his old rags on top of him, picked up the plank with him strapped on it and scuttled in a hurry down the ravine, alongside of the crick, and up to his shack. The hollering and groaning and gunshots was all stopped. Fog was a-rolling in and, except for the distant rumble of snores, it was so quiet you could hear toads burping and the far-off howls of wolves. The moon was swimming in the fog and glowing in her grievous way, and Eeteh, looking up at her as we clumb, says that after Time broke them up, Moon went on showing herself in twenty-eight ways as a meloncholical rememberer of the beautiful time when they done them all together. Sun could see her from his lodge on t’other side the world and he was grieving, too, though every day he got up and pretended he warn’t, not to give Time no satisfaction. I says I most wished he’d show a little more spine and not get up today.
When we set Deadwood down on the floor, his eyes peeped open in their bruised sockets. Both of them was staring in panic at the mud cast on his broke nose. One of his eyes swiveled round to look up at me. He yelped horribly and passed out again. “He’s a-going to blame us for what happened to him,” I says.
Eeteh nodded, pointed to the old prospector’s head. “Many strange bumps,” he says, pointing.
“Must be where all his lies is lodged,” I says. “You think he’ll live?”
“No.”
“Me nuther. But Deadwood’s got one good advantage. He don’t worry none about it.” I set out Zeb’s rum flask for him and some corn-bread crumbles from my vest pocket, and me and Eeteh struck for the tepee and the horses down below. There was already light leaking into the sky, so we was heeling it as hard as we could put. We heard somebody beating a drum, and we unfurled our heels and run all the faster, trying not to make no noise.
Then I heard people shouting—“Help! It’s old Zeb!”—and my heart jumped up amongst my lungs. I turned and shot towards the shouting without thinking what I was doing. Only that Zeb was in trouble. Somebody hollered out my name, asking for help. Behind me, Eeteh called out: “Hahza! Stop!” Men was riding in on horseback. That chap in the goggles and black derby was slowly banging his army drum. One of the horses was carrying a limp body over its back. With white hair hanging down. His back was full of bullet holes. It most froze me. “It’s Zeb! He’s been murdered!” The man riding in front was Eyepatch, wearing his black headband and raggedy black shirt with a silvry star on it that looked cut out of a tin can. Riding longside him was his two pals and them two pock-faced robber varmints who’d crippled up Deadwood. Flashing his mouth of gold teeth, Eyepatch raised up a finger and pointed straight at me. I turned to run but there was a stampeed of human varmints all round me and they grabbed my beard and hair and throwed me to the mud and give me a most powerful thrashing and there warn’t nothing I could do.
CHAPTER XIX