“He does wear a white hat,” I says. Tom led an attack on the tribe in that hat, I’d forgot that. Eeteh was the best friend I had for years. I felt like I already knowed him better’n I never knowed nobody else. But Tom was my pard, always had been. I didn’t want to leave neither of them behind. “Tom makes up adventures like he reads out a books, though he ain’t scrupulous about the consequences, and he maybe does some things he oughtn’t, but he ain’t really bad inside. Life by itself just ain’t enough for Tom. It ain’t got no point and the way it ends makes him mad. So he contrives up these adventures to get him through it.” I told him about the meeting yesterday, how Tom wanted peace with the tribe, but all his best pals was against him. “I never seen them buck him like that before.” Eeteh nodded, thinking about that. He says he understands. He says his friend who got scalped by white emigrants warn’t perfect, too.
There was so much we needed to talk about, but Oren was a-scrambling up closer. Eeteh says he needed to go where the spy couldn’t find him, and he asked me to set outside to keep him busy while he slipped away. He handled me the whisky bottle. “Take it, Eeteh,” I says. “It’s yourn.” He shook his head. He says the tribe expects him to tell them everything, so he don’t want them to know we even seen each other. “I’ll leave it here in the cave for you, then. I ain’t s’posed to drink with what I got, so if they ask, I’ll tell them I come up here to sneak a swallow now and then.”
While Eeteh crawled towards the back of the cave with the bottle, I took my rifle and went out and set on a rock. When Oren seen me, he ducked behind a tree. “Hey, Oren!” I shot a branch off over his head. He made a little squeak like a mouse does when an owl grabs it. “You come to shoot me?”
“NO!” He peeked out with his hands in the air, his rifle pointed up to the sky. “I only come t’say hello.”
“Well, hello, Oren,” I says. “’Bye.”
“Tom sent me to pertect you!”
“From what?”
“Injuns. Bears. Coyotes. Whatever. Kin I come up?”
“I reckon. If you’re careful.” I kept my rifle pointed at him. He set his over his shoulder and clumb on up. He tried to keep his eye on me, but whenever he looked up, he slipped in the mud. His bib overalls was a mess. I wiped the rain out a my face and says, “A body’d have to be pretty stupid to be out in this weather, hey, Oren? Without they got something big to do, like tromping up a mountain to say hello to a sick old trail bum.”
“So what brung YOU up here?” he grunted, pulling up onto the flat space a-front the cave. His muddy overalls was full of heavy breathing.
“Reckon I must be one a the stupid ones.” He stood there, gripping his rifle, studying the cave mouth. Eeteh was right. He was come to kill.
“There’s somebody in there,” he says. “I kin hear ’em!”
“You scared a bats, Oren?”
“Ain’t scared a nuthin!” He gritted his teeth and busted on in, blasting away into the darkness. And busted right back out again, chased by the furisome black flutter of a million squeaking bats. He dropped his gun and went shinning down through the gulch considerable faster’n he clumb it, swarmed about by distressid bats. You could hear him screaming clear to Jericho. There was a yowl and a crash through branches and then it was quiet. He must a struck where the gulch dropped away of a sudden.
Eeteh come out with the whisky bottle and done a wobbly little dance like he drunk too much. I asked him what he’s doing and he says it’s a rain dance. “It’s already raining,” I says, and he says he knowed that, but he don’t trust his luck enough to dance a rain dance when it ain’t.
He squatted by the rock I was setting on and tipped up the bottle. “I thought you was gone,” I says. The bats was wheeling around overhead again, finding their way back to bed. Eeteh wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and says he was thinking about Coyote, how him and Snake was such good friends, had been since they was little tykes, but how a problem was growed up between them. Coyote made the world and all the creturs in it and he judged that give him the right to lay with any woman he wanted to. He could change his shape, so he could try on cougars and beetles, sandhill cranes and porkypines, and he laid with them all and always had a good time doing it. But when he took a turn on Snake Woman, Snake warn’t happy about it, and he come to have a considerable less friendly altitude towards Coyote.