WALKED UP TO the cave through the rain the next day to look around. Wyndell tried to stop me, but I pushed him away. Tom once said I knowed how to cuss and fight, but not how to get mad. Maybe he was learning me. The preacher had a grumpy look on his goggled face. He probably wanted to go report on me, but there warn’t more’n one a him, so he only could follow me along. It seemed like it rained every day in the Hills. It was always sloppy and uncomfortable. It was like a wet picture of my squshed-down miserableness inside.
Before he left crickside that morning to go make himself richer, Tom says he’s sorry to tell me, but he’s afeard my friend is fatally expired. At the cave, Bear says the same. Him and a couple of others was trying to move the rock pile, but he says it was a most nation hard job, and they don’t know if they can do it. Bear showed me a beaded buckskin vest, torn and bloodied, that they found under the rocks. Eeteh’s. He says it was near some body bits, which was probably once part a him. “We ain’t struck no more heads yet, only Peewee’s, but me and the others’re still looking. Don’t hold much hope, but it don’t matter. Jest only an injun. He prob’bly won’t mind being buried right where he’s at.” He give me the vest when I asked for it. “Nice beadwork,” he says. “Needs cleaning up, but it should fit.”
If the body was dug out, I reckoned I’d put it in a tree in the tribal way. Bodies are set in trees so their souls can fly straight off to the next world without nothing to get in their way. In Eeteh’s Coyote world there ain’t nothing next and no souls neither, only a few comical ghosts, but I’ll do that for him anyhow. We both been good at pretending. I was pretending now, jabbering in a quiet way with Tom and Bear, tolerating Wyndy.
Whilst I walked sorrowing along, heading back crickside because I don’t know where else to go, I passed a small horse-drawed buggy, and the person inside called out, “Huckleberry! Huckleberry FINN! Is that YOU?” It was Becky Thatcher! “Get IN!” she says with a happy laugh and opened the door for me.
She give me a big kiss when I squeezed in and laughed again. There was a pretty smell about her and a most wonderful softness. “Tom ain’t here,” I says.
“I KNOW that, Huckleberry! It’s YOU I want to see! It’s been so LONG!” I asked if she warn’t the person I seen, dressed up so pretty, in that saloon up in Wyoming a few years ago, and she says, “Aw, Hucky, those were my working clothes. I HATE them. Yours are prettier. I LOVE that vest, though it needs a washing. I was still chasing after Tom back then, and I was working that trail, waiting for him to show up on it. I supposed most everybody would, sooner or later. And there was no shortage of customers. Cowboys get lonely.”
When she says the word “lonely,” I felt the hurt of it and my throat thickened up. “You was riding with cowboys?”
“Oh, Huckleberry . . .” She sighed and touched my cheek. “I’d just started up my new profession. Cowboys are mostly only little boys, their pants full of ignorant excitement. If they also got money in their pants, I can generally do something about the excitement, and about their ignorance, too. I GUESS you could call it riding with them.” She laughed and clapped her hand on my leg and I jumped. “Aren’t YOU the ticklish one!” she says with a tittery little laugh. “All right. Let me tell you flat out, Huckleberry. Tom left me in St. Petersburg more’n a dozen years ago when I was six months heavy with our baby. I lost it and, when I stopped crying, I came west looking for him. A girl’s not supposed to DO that, but I did. Sometimes I got close, but it was like he’d always catch wind of me somehow and move on. I ran out of money and hope and finally I met Dorie and started doing what I HAD to do or starve. I was just only coming to work that day when you saw me. I didn’t want Tom to know, and I was afraid he might be with you. If he did turn up, I didn’t know if I’d hug his feet or shoot him.” She sighed. “Now, it don’t matter anymore.” She slumped back in the seat like she was thinking over about what she just said. “So, where’ve YOU been, Huckleberry? Did you come here to the Hills with Tom?”
“No, been here for a time. The Gulch was a most lazy and tolerable place till people like Tom come’n ruined it. Me and a Lakota friend helped an old whisky-maker trade with the tribe and move his goods, and we helped him drink them up, too. I was happy as I ever been. Then a crazy old prospector found a yaller rock and everything changed. Tom he come and saved me from a lynching, but he made a mess out of everything else. Me and my friend was fixing to leave for Mexico or somewheres, anywheres, just so’s we was away from here, but I got sick with the janders. Now, all of a sudden, he’s dead.” I took a deep breath. “Got dynymited.”
“Oh! Last night! I HEARD it!” Her voice was like a sad little girl’s. “Is that his vest? That’s blood on it, isn’t it?”