I asked him what he done with the gold fleck the yaller-whiskered land surveyor helped him find. “I give it back to him,” he says. Yaller Whiskers was setting up a table in the street and there was already a line of emigrant prospectors waiting to buy one of his hand-drawed survey maps. “The judge only borry’d it to me to set out his bonyfydies, as he called ’em, so’s he’d fetch a fair price for his maps.” Yaller Whiskers was drawing pictures fast as he could, but new-comers was rolling in by the minute, he couldn’t keep up. He was finally only putting a few marks down on each page, and yelling cusswords whenever a body complained.
Meantimes, the tree with the rube still hanging in it got cut down and dumped upstream in the Gulch where all the other dead trees was. The coffin-maker had already built sections of the new gallows, and now he set to hammering it all up together where the tree had stood. A lantern-jawed picture-taker in a billed cap and black frock coat was setting up his camera in front of it.
The bran-new street out a-front was so packed with emigrants, wagons, horses and oxen, you couldn’t hardly move. The men was all excited and grinning ear to ear about the chance of watching a body get stringed up. Fingers was pointed at me in Zeb’s shack. They didn’t know who I was nor what I was s’posed to be hanged for, but that warn’t no matter. Eyepatch was right: the gallows was going to make the Gulch more sivilized-looking.
A preacher come to see me about my soul, and how I could save it by fessing up to murdering old Zeb even if I ain’t done it. It was that chubby land surveyor-banker-dentist-judge Yaller Whiskers again, only now he was a preacher. There warn’t nothing that fellow couldn’t do if he set his mind to it. He was wearing the hanged man’s floppy straw hat which was the same color as his bushy whiskers. With his dusty clothes, he made a body think of a small round haystack with eyes. He wanted us to pray together to some of the same dead people the Widow Douglas and her sister Miss Watson was always carrying on with, and see if we couldn’t strike a deal with the Lord about my soul before I danced the hempen jig, as he called it, and flew off to Providence, or some place even more unpleasanter.
“Praying ain’t never worked for me, Reverend,” I says, “and I ain’t got no soul to barter with. Maybe I used to have one, but if I did, it got drownded on the Big River, nor else it was stole by a couple a royal bamboozlers like yourself who didn’t have none a their own.”
The preacher he got a little hot under the collar then like he done when he was a judge and says he won’t be talked at so disrespectable. He says he should a sentenced me to a hundred lashes besides only getting hanged—he would a gratefully laid on the lashes himself, before, during or after the hanging. He was going to go right now and fetch his horsewhip to the ceremonials, in case he got a chance to use it, and, given my rascally nature, he allowed he surely would.
The more Yaller Whiskers carried on, the madder he got. He remembered me of old Pap when he went to ripping and cussing like all fury, swearing to cowhide me directly as he got sober, and that made me smile, which made Yaller Whiskers so sore, he whiffed his pudgy fists around a-front my face till his cheeks was red and he throwed the rube’s straw hat at me and kicked at my knees and yelled, “What’re you laughin’ at, you goddam sneak-thief injun-lover?”
Then he ca’med down and picked up the straw and set it back on, saying he was sorry, and he went back to being a preacher again. Sin always got him riled up like that, he says, he just didn’t have no tolerance for it. But he had to learn himself more Christian forbaring, it went with being a man a the cloth, he says, though he probably didn’t know no more’n I done what cloth he was talking about.
It was nigh noon. Yaller Whiskers and Mule Teeth tied my hands behind my back and took me by the elbows and walked me out to the gallows, tromping through the gumbo and the thickening crowds. All the busy hammering and sawing and hollering stopped when we stepped out a the shack, and people begun running towards the gallows, pushing and a-shoving to get the up-frontest places. I warn’t customed to being much noticed of a rule, but they was all gaping at me and didn’t want to look at nothing else. Some was laughing or shouting out cusswords, but most was only staring with their eyes wide open like they was trying to eat me with their eyes.
That army drummer was at it again, banging out a march, and we was stepping along to it, the crowds opening up as we come on them. Eyepatch was a-waiting for us by the gallows in his black shirt, his black bandanna knotted round his head, his gold teeth and earrings and tin star glinting in the midday sun. He looked like he might a washed his hair for the grand occasion, nor else he only greased it. His pals Pegleg and Bill was standing longside him, Bill with a nasty three-tooth sneer on his face.