“Them robbers, you know, they may come back looking for their truck,” I says.
“Well,” he says, “ef they do, maybe we can foller ’em, see where that rock come from.”
“Maybe you should look right where you found it.”
“But you put it thar.”
I’d disremembered that. “Well, you always say I’m lucky, maybe the right place just come to me.”
He pulled the gold fob watch out again to study it. I knowed that watch face didn’t mean nothing more to Deadwood than higher-cliffs, so I asked him what time it was. “I dunno,” he says. “It ain’t that kinder watch. It’s tellin’ me other things.”
“Maybe it’ll tell you where to find the gold you’re looking for.”
“Maybe.” His eyes was sliding together again. “Right now it’s tellin’ me them robbers is all dead . . . or else they . . .” And he fell back on the potato sack like he’d dropped there from a high place and set to snoring. His snores was outrageous loud, but I allowed they’d at least scare the wolves away. There warn’t room for two of us in there, so I went down to the pasture and snuggled up to Tongo.
CHAPTER III
EXT DAY WE found Deadwood’s shack tore up inside and out. It was always a wreck, but now it was a proper first-rate wreck. Them boys had gave it a powerful rummaging, even busting into the walls, and there was a bullet hole in Deadwood’s straw tick where his head would a been. Pretty soon the scene had drawed a pack of loafers, so of course that set Deadwood to telling them all how he beat off a gang of desperados with his bare hands. “I think it was Jesse’s boys,” he says. “I heerd ’em braggin’ about pottin’ Jayhookers.” He showed them the bullet hole in his bunk and they asked him how he didn’t get killed. “Well, I was too dern fast for ’em, warn’t I?” he says. “I ducked, and they only jest nicked me.” As proof, he showed them a scar under his chin where his whiskers warn’t growing, which he once told me he’d got from a Comanche arrow when he was riding with the Texas Rangers.
There’d been some nights at Zeb’s when knives and guns come out during the fist fights, Zeb had to sick Abaddon on a few reckless drunks, and some prospectors had went out in the morning and never come back, but that bullet hole was a dismistakable signal that the sivilizing of the Gulch was hard under way. Soon there’d be more people shooting at each other and then laws and lawmen getting mixed up in it and me and Big River would have to move on again. Tom was just the contrary. The law was like a rousing adventure book to him and he reverenced lawyers so much he went off to become one, even though he hated nothing worse’n doing what he ought to do. Well, he was smarter’n me. He knowed you had to learn the law if you wanted to stay outside it and out of trouble at the same time.
It was up in Minnysota that Tom made up his mind to give over cowboying and take on the law. Becky Thatcher was the daughter of a judge and maybe she give him the idea how to set about doing it. Before that him and me was mostly adventuring around without no thoughts about the next day. We run away from home all them years ago because Tom was bored and hankered to chase after what he said was the noble savages. At first they was the finest people in the world and Tom wanted to join up with them, and then they was the wickedest that ever lived and they should all get hunted down and killed, he couldn’t make up his mind. Some boys in a wagonload of emigrants we come across early on learned us how to ride and shoot and throng a lasso so that we got to be passing good at all them things.
That story turned poorly and we never seen what was left of them afterwards, but ending stories was less important to Tom than beginning them, so we was soon off to other adventures that he thought up or read about in a book or heard tell of. Sometimes they was fun, sometimes they warn’t, but for Tom Sawyer they was all as needful as breathing. He couldn’t stand a day without it had an adventure in it, and he warn’t satisfied until he’d worked in five or six.