“Let me tell you a story, Huck,” Tom says on the way back to the camp. “There was an injun tribe in a mining town down in the southwest where I was working like a lawyer. The injuns warn’t doing nothing, except just being ugly to look at. They didn’t belong. So a few local business fellows hired up a mob of Mexicans to go with them to the injun camp and kill them all. It was a dreadful slaughter, mostly of women and little boys and girls. You may a read about it. They clove their heads open with machetes, emptied out their bellies, shot all their animals, burnt their tepees, stole their julery, and peeled off scalps to sell in the market. Baby scalps was specially profitable. The businessmen come home to the mining town, bragging about the killing they done and showing off their scalps. They got arrested and charged with organizing the massacre, so’s, you know, everything’d be on the up’n up.” Tom’s seegar had went out, so he lit it up again. “I got hired as their lawyer and it took some smarts, but I got them all off scot-free.”
“But warn’t they guilty?”
“Of COURSE they was guilty, Huck. You ain’t paying ATTENTION! I’m telling you about the UP’N UP. The law is amazing. Like magic. I was famous for what I done. They made me a judge after, and one a them business fellows he become a govner or some such crinimal.” He seen me shaking my head, and he shook his and says, “Trouble is, Huck, you never growed up. You’re still living in some dream of a world that don’t exist.”
Jaws was dropping and everybody was staring when Tom rode back into the camp with all them scalps dangling from his saddle. When people asked, Tom didn’t say nothing, he just pointed at me. He walked Storm over towards the picture-taker, smiling steady, and waited for him to get his camera ready and take his photograph.
We left Bill and the mule off with Bear and, on the way down towards where my lodge was, we stopped at Deadwood’s shack to give him back the fob watch. Deadwood set to crying, he was so happy.
“That old slant-jawed sourdough looks part injun to me, Huck,” Tom says as we continued on down to the crick, and I says, “We’re all mixed breeds, ain’t we, one kind or nuther.”
Tom raired his head and scowled down at me in an unpardlike way. “I ain’t,” he says.
Whilst we was gone, Tom’s pals had pitched up a large army tent for us where my lodge-poles’d stood. It was big as a horse shed. There were cots and blankets in it and mirrors and washstands and even a bottle a prime saloon whisky from the States setting on a table like a little soldier at attention. “It’s very grand,” I says, and Tom he shrugged and says he favored a hotel better. I favored my tepee better and was lonely for it, but I didn’t say so. It wouldn’t a fit Tom’s style.
Outside, there was a fire snapping away with an antelope spitted over it. Hog nuts, prairie turnips and wild onions was slow-roasting in the coals. Tom fetched the whisky along, took a long pull, and handled me the bottle. It warn’t the equal of Zeb’s home brew, but on a day that seemed’d never end, it was most welcome. Bill laying there on the trail with a hole in his head and Tom’s story about the up’n up was still festering up my thoughts, but the whisky eased them away. The sting of the rope burns, too. The birds was doing their day’s-end bragging and, far off, a body could hear coyotes howling in their soft sadful way. It was nigh as peaceful as rafting down the Big River. I felt like Deadwood felt—like I’d got my fob watch back.
Down by the shore, near some smaller canvas tents that Tom’s pals was living in, there was a couple of fellows working a big sluce box to pan for gold. When Tom went down to talk to them, I judged he was aiming to chase them off, but he offered them a swig from the bottle and waved me to come on down. “Show him what you got there, Peewee,” he says. “See them specks there in the drag?” With the night settling in, it was hard to see nothing at all, but the specks did let off a peculiar spark. “Them’s colors. Plasser gold. Might be the richest gravels in the crick. You may be a millionaire, Huck.”
“I’m sorry to hear it,” I says. I grinned back when they all laughed, but it warn’t a joke. Them gold specks was telling me that the day’s good luck might be fixing to change back again.
CHAPTER XXIII
HAT NIGHT, ME and Tom laid in our cots smoking and sipping bottle whisky by lamplight and gabbling for hours. We talked about when we was boys on the Big River and all the mischief we done, about the ha’nted house and the graveyard and the awful things we seen there, about our adventures when we run away to ride for the Pony, then everything we done since. It was just like old times and we was both feeling mighty happy. “This is great,” Tom says. “Everything’s going to be just like before, Hucky! I promise!”
Tom told me about how St. Petersburg was emptied out now, leaving only the losers behind. “Ain’t nothing happening there,” he says. “The place is dead.” I says that sounds perfect, and told him about the lonely cattle trails I rode after he was gone and about the wagon trains and the hellion and the bullwhacker. Tom roared with laughter and says, “I’d of liked to’ve had THAT gal working for ME!”