And now the battle begun in earnest. There was a grand battering of steel on steel, Tom and the Cap’n a-growling and a-grunting, ducking and swinging, their hairknots flying. The emigrants was all yowling, nor else standing spillbounded with their jaws gapping like in Tom’s Sarah Sod stories.
Then all of a sudden Cap’n Patch stumbled on his wooden leg and fell into the mud! He was at Tom’s mercy! But Tom backed off, used his cutless blade to bat the Cap’n’s weapon over where he could reach it, waited till he was up on his peg and foot again, and then they went at each other like before. First, one of them was near killing t’other, then it was t’other way around. People was whooping and screaming. Tom and the Cap’n was staggering about in the mud, cussing, flailing, their blades flashing about. Both of them was leaking blood variously. Sometimes they slapped down into the mud, but they always sprung up again with cutlesses clanging and with throaty growls.
Then Tom fell and lost his cutless. The Cap’n growled and grinned his gold-tooth grin and stood over Tom. Tom reached for his cutless and the Cap’n kicked it further away, stomped on Tom’s arm, raired up his own blade in both hands. People was reaching for their weapons. My own hands was twitching. But Bear fired off a shot into the air, so we all done just like Tom says, even though things was going badly for him. People was scared. I was scared. The Cap’n drawed an X on Tom’s chest with his cutless blade, then set to plunge it in where the lines crossed. It was all over for Tom! People cried out. Even Bear looked nervious and uncertain. But all of a sudden Tom twisted and grabbed the Cap’n’s ankle with his free hand and upended him, snaggled his cutless back out a the mud, wiped it off. The Cap’n, covered now in mud and blood, scrambled to his foot and peg, took up his cutless again, and unloosed a mighty swing, just as Tom’s own blade sliced clean through his neck. There warn’t no change in the Cap’n’s expression. It was like the blade had passed straight through without touching him, the way magicians do it in the circus sideshows. He still had a snarl on his face and was gripping his cutless with both hands. Then his head dropped off. The headless body took two steps and fell over, laying on the cutless.
At first, nobody says a word. We was all staring at the head, laying in the mud, its one eye still blinking. It seemed to be grinning, but it probably warn’t. Then they all commenced to roar and shout out Tom’s name. The picture-taker come over and took a photograph of Tom, all smeared with mud and blood, with his boot on the headless body and holding the head up by its hairknot. Zeb’s bear-claw neckless fell off into the mud and Tom picked it up, lifted it high like a trophy. The picture-taker took another photograph. “Prepare the Cap’n for burial,” Tom declares. “And save the wooden leg for Doc Molligan. He’s going to need it.”
CHAPTER XXX
“ATCH WARN’T SMART enough to practice proper like I told him,” Tom says, “but he had a natural talent.” We’d just been to the Cap’n’s funeral and the burying of the dozen emigrants he’d hung before Tom got there. Wyndy was doing the preaching, which was probably still going on. Tom had draped the Cap’n’s coffin with his pirate flag, though he says he might go dig it up later, he hates to lose it. The box was too small and the Cap’n’s head had to be set between his legs like it was being born there. The gold ear loops was gone, and his mouthful a gold teeth, too. A body couldn’t hardly reckonize him. Bear had made a wooden grave marker that said CAP’N PATCH. CUTHROTE PIRATE. HE HAD STILE. Tom says he’s going to have a proper gravestone carved out of Black Hills granite. The others was all buried together in a deep hole. They learnt the first names of four a them and made one name out a the four.
We was setting on the raised wooden sidewalk a-front of the claims office eating little wrens, finches, and bluebirds, sparrows and sapsuckers, grilled up for us by the grateful Chinese cookie Tom rescued from a hanging, who was also famous for buffalo-hide steaks and fried mud-rats. These birds was so small, they was skewered six at a time and held over the fire to burn the feathers off and roast the nubble of meat, then dipped in a sauce of honeyberries, chokecherries, and molasses, toasted again so’s to blacken the molasses, and finally et entire, heads, bones, feet, and all. The emigrants seemed to need molasses in and on everything, and it was mostly what you tasted. Lakota cooking’s a sight better. I was missing it.