Tom wanted to know everything about this place he was now mayor-govner of, and I told him what all I could think of, but there warn’t much left that hadn’t lost its trueness. Most people in the Gulch had only just got here a day or two before, and more wagons was rolling in every minute, erasing everything that used to be. But Tom wanted to hear it all: about old Zeb, the pioneer miners and the Lakota tribes, about Deadwood, General Hard Ass, the yaller rock. “Warn’t worth shucks,” I says. “Felt more like a cork ball than a stone.”
“Blossom rock, Huck. They call them floaters because you throw them in the water and that’s what they do. Sure-’nough sign a gold ore.” Tom always knowed things I never heard of. Eeteh had a story about Coyote throwing a rock into the water and saying if it didn’t sink, everybody’d live forever. Too bad Coyote didn’t know about floaters, he could a saved the whole world. “I bet when the colonel come and took the rock from the old cross-eyed sourdough, the first thing he done was heft it.”
“That’s right. He done that.”
“Where there’s a floater, there’s a seam. Ever hear of somebody finding one?”
“People’s scratching about for something like that, but I never seen it nor went looking. I s’pose a seam’s something like a stitch in the ground?”
“Well, you could say so. Though sometimes it’s more like a stitch in the side.”
“I know what you mean. That’s what all these emigrants piling in has been like for me.” I told him about finding Eyepatch and his two pals in my tent that first morning and how I chased them out with a story about a brother who died in there from the pox. I says I was trying to think up the sort of lies Tom Sawyer might a told. Tom laughed and says I ain’t never been a slouch at stretchers myself. The Cap’n was one a the low-downest bad men he ever struck, he says, as mean and ornery as they come, but what he had was STYLE. “It’s there or it ain’t, Huck, you can’t grow it.” He says he made him think of river pirates back home, though he couldn’t name none who actuly had an eye patch, so maybe he was only thinking about pirates he’d read about from books.
“You recollect how little Tommy Barnes come to your robber gang meeting dressed up like a pirate?” I says. “He had a wire ring in his nose, a birchwood sword, and a paper hat with a skull and crossbones inked on it!”
Tom snorted. “But then the cry-baby wouldn’t prick his dern finger for a blood oath!”
“Ben Rogers said he should oughta walk the plank for that!”
We both laughed, thinking about little Tommy Barnes. Tom drunk from the bottle and passed it across to me. There were wrinkles round his eyes now, and sometimes a kind of sadfulness crept in, even when he was laughing. “Well, Tommy Barnes ain’t no more, Huck. He enlisted into the Union army to get the bonus they was offering, then deserted and volunteered at another recruiting station with a different name for another bonus. He come home to St. Petersburg bragging about that, picking up girls by throwing his extra money round. They pretty soon cleaned him out, though, so he tried to enlist for a third time somewheres else and got caught. They accused him as a deserter and a bounty jumper and shot him with a firing squad.” What I seen in my head was half a dozen leather-headed bullies with field rifles aimed at a little cry-baby in a paper pirate hat who still peed his pants. I felt the jolt of it when they fired and says I was dreadful sorry to hear it and passed the bottle back.
Tom he only laughed again and says that Tommy Barnes was a hero for half the town who thought Yanks and Rebs should both go to hell. He took a long drink from the bottle, and by and by he says, “My old pal Joe Harper, though, he was a genuine hero. The Shucker of Pea Ridge, they called him back in St. Petersburg after he shot a general up there. They made him a corpral major and loadened him down with medals, and then he got killed on Graveyard Road in Vicksburg, leading a ladder assault on a stockade. I allowed all them medals made him slow afoot. I was there when they fetched his body back up the river by steamboat. They raised money in town to make a statue of him. I give them four bits.”
I says that I met up with a young soldier out here with Joe’s family name, and he’s dead, too. All Tom had to say about that was that, if he was dead, he didn’t care to know him, and he handled me the bottle and relit his seegar.