I asked Tom about the twelve people who got hung before he turned up, couldn’t he have hurried up and maybe saved a few? Tom, chomping the birds between his teeth, says he done what he could, but it warn’t no consequence, they was all probably guilty of one hanging offense or nuther, just like the rest of us. Tom’s teeth was still strong and mostly all there. I calculated that before I was forty I wouldn’t have none, so, with the teeth I had left, I chawed the wee crispy creturs more cautious and slow. “It don’t matter, Huck. It really don’t. It was only the end a their stories, which probably warn’t exceeding good ones anyways. Ourn may be better, but they’ll end, too, and probably just as nonnamous.”
Tom had took a bath in the crick and washed his wounds afterwards with whisky. He was still bare-chested, oozing blood from the X the Cap’n had drawed there, but, like Becky, he also seemed to judge that air-baths was good for a body, and says he don’t want to leave the wounds to fester inside a shirt or bandages. Folks was still crowding round the gallows, telling each other about what they seen. They turned and hoorayed Tom from time to time, and he smiled like a bishop and waved back at them.
“But our stories ain’t over yet, Hucky,” he says, using a tiny bird’s leg bone for a toothpick. He’d already et a couple a dozen birds, and he might a et more but the neck gristle was getting in his teeth. “We got a monstrous big day a-rolling up next month, the first sinteenery of the American Revolution! It’ll be a hundred years to the day since our rapscallion founding fathers let rip their Declaration and kicked all them royalist butts OUT a here! With their get-up-and-go owdaciousness, them young scoundrels got theirselves planted forever into the history books.”
Old Deadwood was down in the street in his union suit, bouncing about, popping his fob watch open and snapping it shut. His union suit was more or less the color a the street. He spied Tom and come a-running towards him, his limbs flying in all directions, and then he seen me and scrambled away again, the trap door of his union suit flapping.
“And now, a hundred years on, where can the sivilizing consequences of such get-up-and-go Americaness be most best seen? Why, right here in the Gulch, Hucky! We ARE America, clean to the bone! This is where the wonderfullest nation the world has ever seen is getting born! I BELIEVE that! It’ll be GREAT! A new land of freedom and progress and brotherhood! A perfect new Jerusalem right here on earth! And you and me are PART of it! It’s US that’s making it happen! That being so, we are obleeged to throw the best damn sinteenery party in the nation, which these Territories is directly going to be a natural part of! They call us outlaws because they say we’re on tribal land, so we got to show our amaz’n American PATRIOTICS! These lands is rightfully OURN and we’re going to set up a Liberty Pole and raise the American flag on it to PROVE it! I aim to have a parade and fireworks and rifle squads banging away all through the night so’s Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse and all their dumb savages can hear it plain. Maybe we can even run a circus. I can rescue back your horse from the injuns and you can show off your bareback riding and your shooting and roping. They say Wild Bill is on his way here. If he gets here in time, maybe we can get him to do some fancy pistol tricks. I can’t manage all that by myself. I need you to help me, pard!”
I told General Hard Ass a stretcher about Wild Bill so’s to save Tongo. If them two turned up here at the same time, I was in even more desperater trouble, if that was possible. “You got all them friends you come with. Ask them. Ask Bear.”
“Bear ain’t got over the pison arrow jimjams. He’s out hugging trees again right now. And the others ain’t friends. I’m making them rich. When I can’t do that, they’ll find somebody else. It ain’t like you’n me, Hucky. We’re real pards. We can count on us, no matter what.” The cookie had brung us bowls of wild razberries in fresh cow milk, still warm from the udder. Tom lifted his bowl to his mouth, et it all down. “First of all,” he says, licking his moustaches off, “we need the best shooter in the Hills to lead our new Black Hills Brigade, and I allow that should oughter be you.”
“LISTEN to me, Tom! General Hard Ass is left Fort Lincoln by now, and him and his army probably ain’t a day away from here. If he comes here and finds me, he HANGS me. I GOT to GO!”
“Confound it, Huck, you shouldn’t never’ve got in trouble with that general in the first place.”
“Couldn’t help it. He asked me to do things I warn’t able to do. I just ain’t fitten for the army life.”
“All right, but keep your britches on. I know that jackanapes personal. His vixenish young wife has him wrapt round her little finger. He got court-martialed because he couldn’t stay away from her, the dog, and if I’d been persecuting him, he’d a wound up on the end of a rope. He’s a lecher and a crinimal. But I can manage the bugger.”
“All your generals is the same to me. Ain’t a one a them wouldn’t want to hang me, and with every right to go and do it. I don’t NEED to keep on living, but if I WANT to, I got to get clear of them all.”
“Hang it all, Hucky, it’s just too dangersome. A white man alone don’t stand a chance out there, specially now the Sioux War’s hotted up.”