The gallows out a-front the shack was bigger’n when I broke it in. There were nooses now for three necks and Tom says they may need more. The sad truth, he says, is that these new emigrants warn’t all decent citizens, come to get rich in honest hardworking American ways. Fact is, many of them was right down thieves, swindlers, highwaymen, rabble-rousers, crooked gamblers, gunslingers, thugs and murderers, and they had to be weeded out like the hateful pests they was. “I can see where this country is going,” he says, proud as pie, “and I can help it get there.”
I asked him how many he’d hanged so far, and he says only about four a day, though some days was busier than others. I asked him if he thought they all qualified, and he says there might a been an exception or two, but he was pretty sure most of them did. “Anyways, Huck, EVERYTHING’S a hanging offense. Being ALIVE is. Only thing that matters is who’s doing the hanging and who’s being hung.” The judge and Eyepatch warn’t yet amongst the hanged pests. I could see them peering out Zeb’s door over Bear’s shoulders, Yaller Whisker’s two eyes wide open and panicky, Eyepatch’s one eye full of dark fire like a wild animal’s.
We slopped over to the claims registry and Tom told Caleb and Wyndell to shut down till the meeting was done. Their pine table was moved out a-front the ghost-town scavenger’s generl store onto a new wooden sidewalk hoisted up three feet off of the gumbo and the horse and ox muck. The store had a shingle front now and a new sign. At first, it was stocked mostly with secondhand goods left from disappeared miners, but now there were saws and hammers and guns and boots carted in from outfitting towns around. They fetched a camp chair out from the store and set me on it, and I was grateful for that. I was tired all the time now and the climb up from crickside had clean wore me out.
The raised sidewalk was high enough it give me a view of a sea of dilapidated hats. I couldn’t hardly reckonize the place. It was becoming worse like a town every day. Now there were assay and law offices and grocery stores and tin shops and liquor dealers and a brewery and market stalls in the streets. Along with their fly-spackled meat, butchers was selling little leather sacks for gold dust. They was more expensive’n the meat on account of there was only two per cretur, and sometimes none.
The streets was mostly filled with men, young and old, skinny, bearded, dressed in black jackets and vests, dirty white shirts, wrinkled pants, but a few women now, too, spruced up in flouncy calico gowns. They warn’t nothing to look at, but they was getting a power of attention. Their pretty clothes remembered me of Becky Thatcher up in Wyoming. I warn’t sure she was doing what these women was doing, but I judged she probably was. I was feeling sadful and it made me feel more sadfuller.
Tom set at the table with his fancy white hat and wire-frame eye-glasses on, along with Caleb and Wyndell and two or three others picked out by Tom, and the folks out front give them a big cheer. The picture-taker come and made everybody set still for a picture. Tom took off his spectacles, stroked his bushy ear-to-ear moustaches, and raired his shoulders back for the photo, then he put his specs back on, banged on the table with a wooden hammer and says they’re all there to talk about the latest Sioux peace offer.
That set the crowd to hooting and cussing and shouting that it was time to kill all them filthy lying heathens, they was a tarnal nuisance, le’s go do it now! “God give us guns, and we should use ’em, praise the Lord!”
Tom held up a white-gloved hand and says he understood their feelings, they was mostly his feelings, too, but peace warn’t all bad, Jesus spoke pretty good about it, and they should at least give a thought to it. “You all know Huck Finn here as a famous Pony Express rider and one of the greatest injun fighters of all time, with more scalps than most of us got hairs on our heads!” Tom took off his white hat and patted his bald spot and the crowd broke out in whoops and guffaws and applauded all my scalps. “Out on the trail, Huck was our main bullwork against the savages till he catched a fever, and it’s only since he’s been laid low that things has got so worse out there. As a legendry scout he has considerable experience of the tribes. He has lived in their mist and has got to know their peculiar ways and he truly believes that they are pining for peace. He reckons it might save a lot of people from getting scalped and tomahawked if we can custom ourselves to the idea, so long as they don’t want nothing else of consequence.”
A stormy howl went up that peace was only another injun word for meanness and trickry. They was treacherous animals, the crowd yelled, who don’t have no more idea what peace was’n a pack a wolves! “Look at the turrible mischeevousness Setting Bull and Crazy Hoss was up to right now! We ain’t got no time for pap-sucking Quaker poltroons! Everybody should ride straight over to their dad-fetched camp and shoot ’em all, afore it’s them that’s swarmed up and done the killing!”