“We don’t have no bull pit yet to lock them in,” Tom says with a sadful look. “If they’re guilty, I allow we’ll just only have to hang them.” Everybody says, “Yay!” They was all pining for a hanging. But Eyepatch warn’t of the same opinion, and says so in so many cusswords. He pointed out Zeb’s shack where they’d held me, and Tom put on his boss’s face and give Eyepatch a long look and nodded and posted a guard with a rifle in charge of keeping them all in there. The guard was a big fellow named Bear with thick black brows and a warty nose, and he warn’t the sort that a body’d care to argue with.
The ropes was cut off my wrists and I was helped to my feet. I was wobbledy and my throat hurt. My heart was still a-thundering in my ears. But I was standing in a world that still seemed real, or mostly real.
Then Tom jumped onto the gallows platform direct out of his saddle. He told the crowd his name and they all give off a mighty cheer. He pointed down at me, and, in a big voice so’s everybody could hear, he says, “There stands afore you the daredevilest rider of the famous Pony Express, one of the greatest heroes of all our country’s injun wars, and the best scout and horse wrangler I ever knowed ANYWHERES!” They was whooping at every word he says. “The legendry Huck Finn and me rode together at the battles of Glorieta Pass and Sand Crick, Circleville, Skull Valley and Skeleton Cave, and HUNDREDS MORE! He saved my life I don’t know HOW many times! He was the best pard a body COULD EVER HAVE!” I warn’t none too pleased with his stretchers, but I ain’t never been so happy as I was to see Tom Sawyer again, so I just grinned and let him blow. I was still his pard. He said so. “He has been holing out here in the Gulch because Sitting Bull HIMSELF is after him! And not for no reason! Huck Finn has took more’n three hundred injun warrior scalps, and five of them was CHIEFS!” These emigrants was new arrived and didn’t know nothing, so Tom could say whatever he wanted to. “And that’s NO SITTING BULL!” Tom hollers out. Maybe he didn’t say “sitting.” The miners all roared and hooted and stormed and haw-hawed. It was a first-class show. Nobody could spread himself like Tom Sawyer when it come to unloading a speech in the grand style. “Huck Finn was born modest, so he’ll try to say it ain’t so, but DON’T YOU BELIEVE HIM! Them thieving scoundrels was trying to lynch a NATIONAL HERO! They don’t deserve NO MERCY!”
They cheered Tom and they cheered me, too. He raised up his white hat and waved it at them, winking down at me. He might a been elected king right where he stood, if kings warn’t gone out a style. He held the hat up long enough for the picture-taker to get his photograph. His moustaches was the happy sort and made it look like he was always smiling. When his hat was lifted off his head, I seen his long curly hair was sneaking back on top towards the shiny place at the back of his scalp, and that was a sad thing, to think that even Tom Sawyer was a-growing old.
He declared he was sent here by the govment in Washington as a federal overmarshal with a legal jury’s diction over the whole Territory. I didn’t know what an overmarshal was, but I didn’t doubt but what Tom would learn me. “The United States is a-going to take over this Territory to itself and kick out the blastemous cannibal redskins—who ain’t even completely HUMAN!” he says. “And from here on, the American army is a-going to protect ALL legal emigrants and miners! WHEREVER you want to go!” They was all cheering like crazy. “I tell you, friends, there ain’t going to BE no more injun massacres nor no more mob trials nor lynchings nuther! Everything is going to be LEGAL and on the UP’N UP, accorded to the BOOK! The AMERICAN book! Highwaymen and hoss-tiles and claim-jumpers will be PERSECUTED! Everything’s going to be like it OUGHTER be! We’re making the first ever perfect nation out here and there ain’t no damn injuns going to stand in the way, nor not no kings nor no sentimentery Quaker tomfoolery nor foreign bankers nuther! It’s going to be a paradise on earth where everybody’s RICH and nobody’s trying to take away what’s rightfully YOURN! It’s the new ELDERAYDO!”