Once, whilst we was still humping mail pouches back and forth across the prairie on our ponies, I come on a rascally fellow named Bill from a-near where we hail from. He was also keen on adventures and he was heading back east to roust up a gang of bushwhackers in our state to kill Jayhawks over in the next one. The way he told it, he had a bunch of swell fellows joining his gang—that Jesse in Deadwood’s yarn was in it, and Jesse’s brother and some others—and he wondered if Tom and me might be interested. With the war betwixt the states starting, there was gangs forming up and making sport a burning down one another’s towns, which seemed like sure enough adventures, not just something out of books, so maybe we was looking in the wrong place. But when I told Tom about it the next time we crossed up at a relay station, he says he allowed he’d just stay out west and maybe get up a gang of his own, because he couldn’t see no profit in going back. But I knowed that warn’t the real reason. The real reason was he couldn’t be boss of it.
It was while we was on one of his adventures in the New Mexico Territory that Tom got the notion to go watch the hangings in Minnysota, a notion that would change everything. The Pony Express company had suddenly gone bust the year before when the cross-country tellygraph come in. We never even got our last paychecks, so we paid ourselves with ponies and saddles, which was how I got old Jackson, who warn’t old then, but still young and fast.
We was both broke, money just falling out of my pockets somehow, whilst Tom was spending his up shipping long tellygrams back to Becky Thatcher. He wanted all his adventures wrote down like the ones he’d read in books and she knowed how to read and write and was the sort of body who would be impressed by his hifalut’n style and not have nothing else to do, so she got elected. She couldn’t write back to him because there warn’t nowheres to write to, but that warn’t no matter, there warn’t nothing she’d have to say that would interest him.
Riding, wrangling and shooting was what we done best and our backsides had got so leathery toting mail a body could strop razors off of them, so we hired on to guard wagon trains and run dispatches and handle horses and scout for whichever armies and exploring parties we come upon, and we had a tolerable good time of it. Back home we was Rebs, I guess; out here we mostly worked for the Union, though we warn’t religious about it. Fact is, that time back in the New Mexico adventures we started out scouting for the Confederals, who was trying to cut a route through the Territory to California to get at the gold and silver; but we got misdirected and ended up scouting for the Union army instead and having to shoot at our most recent employers. Tom thought that improved the adventure considerable, adding what he called a pair a ducks, which Becky, if he wrote to her about it, maybe understood better’n me.
One a the Union colonels was a hardshell parson who carried such a strong conviction about the afterlife that he believed in shipping all his prisoners off there to populate it, sending along with them all their ponies, mules, grub, garb, weapons and wagons, just so’s they’d feel at home when they got there, he says. He needed plenty of shooting and burning for this holy work and we was volunteered to supply it. Tom was a good soldier and done as he was told. I warn’t and didn’t always and didn’t then. So I was oftenest in trouble while Tom palled around with the bosses. And it was while he was setting down with the parson over fresh roasted horse meat and the colonel’s private sin supply, as he called his jug of whisky, that Tom learnt that they was laying out intentions up in Minnysota to hang more’n three hundred Sioux warriors, all at the same time. The parson thought this was the splendidest notion since the Round Valley massacres and Tom says it was something he had to see.
Tom loved a good hanging, there warn’t nothing that so lifted his spirits, and he never missed one if it was anywheres in the neighborhood, not even if it was an out-and-out lynching, which he says was only a kind of participatery democracy. I warned him about getting too close to them things, some day they may decide it’s his turn, and he says, “Well, if that happens, Huck, I’ll only be sorry I can’t watch.” And then he grinned under the new moustaches he was growing and says, “But you’re invited, Huck.”
The notice of that quality hanging party up in Minnysota had Tom so feverish he couldn’t set down, lest it was in the saddle heading north. “Just think of it, Huck! Over three hundred injuns all swinging and kicking at the same time! It’d be something to see! You could say you was THERE!” I druther be able to say I warn’t there. Gallows always make me feel powerful uncomfortable and clumsy, like I might stumble and fall into one of them scratchy loops by happenstance. But Tom, like always, had his way, and soon Jackson was saddled up and we was making the long trek north.