The lanky coffin-maker in the tall black hat was there, looking monstrous proud of what he’d made. One of his empty body boxes was propped up against the contraption, and the picture-taker was aiming his camera at it. So I warn’t going to be throwed into the Gulch, after all. I was going to be a famous murderer and bandit with white eyes and a stretched neck, laying in a pine box. Maybe they’d even get to see me back in St. Petersburg.
The preacher he says he’ll ask for mercy because of middle-gating circumstances, if he could think of any. Though I knowed it wouldn’t make no matter, I hoped Mule Teeth might furnish some. “We fetched you the prisoner, Cap’n,” Mule Teeth says, and when Eyepatch asks him if I repented of my vilence whilst he was guarding me, Mule Teeth says I did not. “Fact is, Cap’n, he bragged about it, goddamming everybody and you in partickler. He’s a liar and a traiter and he pals around with hoss-tile hucksters. Got a squaw with a business that sucks a body in like quicksand.” That done it. Like my mean old Pap used to say, it’s the ones who talk lazy and drawly you got to watch out for. Eyepatch nodded. It was all up for me.
It was earless Pegleg who took over then and led me up the steps. The drummer had stopped his pounding and was commencing a drumroll. The drumroll was scary, but warn’t near so as the wooden peg knocking loud and hollow up the stairs ahead a me. Whilst climbing them, I recollected that crazy Indian in Minnysota who Tom said dropped his pants and wagged his naked behind at all the gawkers. I wished I could do something owdacious like that, but I was too scared and downhearted. I didn’t never want to die, and now that it was happening I didn’t want it more’n ever.
There was a powerful lot of steps to climb. The picture-taker in the long frock coat had moved his camera on its long skinny legs and was watching me through it. That chap with the fiddle was twanging away sorrowfully and whining through his nose something about jumping off into the other world. I was thinking about Ne Tongo, who won’t understand what happened to me or where I went off to. How do you explain that to a horse?
From up on the platform I could see all the tents and lean-tos, the muddy streets, the half-built shanties and storefronts, the long line of incoming wagons stretching back into the hills. Many of the new-comers was hopping out a their wagons and running towards us with big grins on their faces. Others was galloping in on horses. They didn’t know what was happening, but they didn’t want to miss nothing.
Pegleg stood me onto the trapdoor and fitted the scratchy rope round my neck. “Kin I have the next dance?” he asks with a mean grin. I warn’t able to grin back. I was feeling desperately lonely and wished there was somebody to hold my hand. But I was all alone. Did you ever notice, Eeteh says to me one day, how making a world always begins with loneliness? The Great Spirits could invent all the suns and moons and rivers and forests they wanted, but it warn’t never enough. They was still lonely. There warn’t nobody to talk to and nothing was happening. So, they had to make us loafers to kill so’s to liven up the passing days.
One of the arriving emigrants was galloping in on a high white horse with a passel a friends behind him. He was fitted out in bleached doeskin and a white hat, with white kid gloves and a red bandanna tied round his throat, gleaming silver spurs on his shiny boots. He had big bushy moustaches ear to ear and long curly hair, twinkling eyes. Puffing on a fat seegar. Coming for a laugh. “HANG HIM QUICK!” Eyepatch shouted. Pegleg drawed his pistol with one hand and reached for the lever with t’other and I dropped. My throat got snagged and then there was a shot and I kept on dropping, landing hard on the ground under the gallows. Then more shots, and Pegleg come falling through the trapdoor and landed on top of me. That seegar-smoker must a shot the rope!
Only one man I knowed could do that. He was grinning down at me from his white horse. “Hey, Huck,” he says, flicking some ash off his seegar. It was Tom Sawyer! His own self!
CHAPTER XXI
OM SAWYER ALWAYS did know how to throw on the style. Except for his ear-to-ear moustaches and fancy white duds, he warn’t changed a whit. Eyepatch and Bill broke off on a run, and Tom flung out a rope straight off of his horse and lassoed both of them with one throw and hauled them in. Everybody cheered and howled and clapped their hands like they meant it. The two pock-faced robbers was heeling it out through the crowds with the plump yaller-whiskered judge, but Tom hollered out “GRAB THEM DESPERADOS!” and the emigrant miners snaggled them and rassled them to the mud and give them a few licks just for fun. Then they fetched them up to the gallows, and Tom’s pals tied them up.