When he’d swallowed enough a Doc Molligan’s tea to ca’m down for a spell, he says that just THINKING about shooting that owl must a fetched him the bad luck. He swore never to think bad thoughts about owls again. He’d just quietly kill them all till they warn’t no more. Doc come every day to what he called the camp horse-pistol and fed us both thin brothy soup. I hoped there warn’t nobody’s remainders in it. Doc warn’t the only visitor. We warn’t never lonesome. There was a passel a folks living down by the crick now, and one or t’other of them was dropping in on us most all the time, mostly to sample Tom’s whisky. The crick was swoll up with the spring rains and getting harder to work.
One day when Bear was out rassling with the trees again, Tom comes in and sets on my cot and says he had more to say about Jim. “We was having such a good time that night, I didn’t want to spoil it,” Tom says. “But one day Jim’s rain dance worked TOO good and the tribe got flooded. They warn’t dressed proper and some a them drownded. They thought Jim may a done it a-purpose and that made them mad, so they sold him off to some missionaires passing by. Them holy rollers believed in saving souls by whopping folks and busting their teeth out. Jim got saved and become a preacher and they respected him like they ain’t done before, but all he could eat afterwards was flapjacks and biscuits.” Tom must a been half-awake behind his snores that night. He was telling awful lies again, but I let him.
The picture-taker come to see me after Bear’d got better and moved out. Somebody told him I was dead. When he seen I was still blinking, he says he already wasted a glass plate on me when I was on the gallows, so this time he’ll wait. “I ain’t feeling so good,” I says. “Hang around ten minutes and see what happens.” He drawed close to squint into my eyes and trace the rope burns. I opened my mouth and he peered into it and shook his head gloomily. “Meantimes, help yourself to a glass a Tom’s whisky,” I says. It was what he was waiting for. He was one a them lantern-jawed fellows whose grins split their faces. He set down with just such a grin breaking his face in two and turned his billed cap backwards and poured himself a glassful. “How long you been traveling with Tom?” I asks him.
“Since Yankton.” He swallowed the whisky, poured himself another. “My workshop’s thar. Mostly I done pitchers a dead people. Tintypes a dead babies is my famous speciality. If I get the little tykes quick enough, I prop them up like they was still alive. I keep straw dolls in the workshop to stick in their tiny fists. Old folks is mainly easier if they ain’t got stiffened up, but they ain’t as purty. I made pitchers a live people, too, but they warn’t so popular.” He showed me a photograph he’d took of Tom in his all-white rig with his hand tucked in his shirt, setting Storm like a general. He tucked a cheroot in his wide lips, lit it and smiled. “The Amaz’n Tom Sawyer he come’n found me there, and I been out on the trail with him ever since. I take his pitcher wherever he goes, fighting injuns and highwaymen and injustice and hunting for gold and hanging crinimals, but mostly when he’s having a rest on his horse in his white hat and doeskins. He’s the Sivilizer of the West, he told me so. He’s making a famous book about hisself.”
“When did he find out I was here in the Gulch?”
“Don’t know. Since before I was with him.”
I laid there, thinking about this. I remembered now that the picture-taker was there at the gallows that day setting up his camera, before Tom come a-riding in. “Why didn’t he try to find me sooner? Why did he wait till I was most dead?” Well, I knowed why. It was how the story went.
“We was here in the neighborhood a couple a times,” the picture-taker says, and helps himself to more whisky. “But I think he was aiming to surprise you.”
“He surely done that. But he only give himself one shot. What if he missed?”
“Well, I’d of got my pitcher,” he says with a thin wicked grin. He plucked some grains a tobacco off his tongue. “But it warn’t likely. He’s the Amaz’n Tom Sawyer, ain’t he?”
A couple of nights later, Tom come back from working his claim and we set up smoking and jawing into the night again like we done before I got the fever. I was glad he was back because, when I was alone in it, the big tent give me nightmares. Sometimes I propped the bedclothes up to make a little tent inside the big one, and I slept better.