I don’t never cry. But I was crying.
“Oh, Hucky!” She put her arm around me and kissed me again. She was crying, too. “Look! We’re HERE!” The buggy was stopping. I ain’t even noticed we been moving. “It’s where I live. Come in for some real ’buckles coffee and Dorie’s butterscot cookies.”
Whilst Becky was giving the driver some money, I crawled out and wiped my eyes and seen that Wyndy been following us on horseback. He did not look a happy man. “Tom hired him to watch me,” I says. “He don’t give up easy.” She waved at him and invited him in. He hollers out from a ways off on his horse that, no, Finn’s got to go back to the camp. NOW! Becky shrugged and took my hand and led me in, put the latch on the door.
It was the loveliest place I seen since I come west. There was curtains on the windows and pictures on the walls and a cast-iron stove with a big new-fashioned porcelain tub behind it and soft chairs with crocheted doilies on them like in Tom’s aunt’s house. “Old Dorie likes a homey place,” Becky says, stoking up the fire in the wood stove. She poured water in a painted tin coffee pot and set it on.
“Dorie?”
“Hunky Dorie. She’s my business partner. She fixed up this house for us because of all the fat boys here in Leed, but we’re looking for a bigger place where we can hire in more girls. And the fat boys are too tight with their money. Can you imagine? They want to KEEP it! So, we been to Stonewall to look around, Hillyo, Camp Crook, all the new shantytowns.” When the water was a-biling, she throwed in a handful a coffee and took the pot off the fire. “Today Dorie’s over in a new town on Rapid Crick. There’s a lot of quick money in the Hills right now, but you have to grab it as it goes flying past, and it helps if you’re where it first sets off.” She poured me a cup a thick barefoot coffee through a silver tea strainer, and laid some cookies on a little tin plate with painted flowers on it. It was the best coffee I ever tasted. “For me, these mining shantytowns are too wild and scary,” she says, then thumbed some snuff up her nose. “I’d like to be in a civiler place like Cheyenne or Abileen or even here in Leed, but Hunky Dorie loves excitement and hates the law. She says the law don’t mainly favor the profession. And the miners at least are grateful, while the fat boys think they own you.”
“Is Tom one a the fat boys?”
“He’s around. They say he and some other bandits have partnered up, and they mean to grab it all. He pretends he doesn’t see me. Or maybe he’s not pretending.” She sneezed and rubbed her nose. “I was never able to make out how you two got to be friends. He doesn’t have any others. Just only you.”
“I don’t know nuther. I warn’t nobody, just a dumb leather-headed loafer sleeping on the streets. I never done the things everybody else was doing like church or school. They said I warn’t sivilized. But then Tom took me like a pard. That changed everything. All them stories Tom likes to tell, the Sarah Sod ones with the jeanies? It was like that. So, when he asked me to light out for the Territory with him, there warn’t nothing else I wanted to do. Scouting out here with Tom was the most amazing life I could ever imagine. I wished it would last on forever.”
“But then I come along,” she says. A kind of sadfulness slid across her face, but then she smiled and says, “Scouts is what me and Dorie are now. It’s why I was over in Deadwood Gulch. We’re not scouting for Indians and robbers, though. We’re looking for stupid horny boys with little bags of gold dust around their scrawny sunburnt necks.” She giggled sweetly, just like she always done as a schoolgirl, then sniffed. “When’s the last time you had a bath, Mr. Huckleberry Finn? By looks and smell, I’d judge at least a month or more.”
“It’s been some time. Me and my horse used to wash up regular in the crick, but the horse is gone and the crick shore is full of tetchy gold panners who don’t tolerate nobody stirring things around.”
“I’ll hot up some water.”