“I know it. I do wish I had somebody to travel with, but I don’t, so I ain’t got no choice.”
“Well, it’s too bad about your Lakota friend, but, honest, Huck, I didn’t have nothing to do with that. Peewee got killed, too. I loved Peewee like a brother and I’m mighty afflicted by what happened. Nobody had no idea your friend was in there. You should a told us. But you can’t go now. Here, me’n you are together, and together we can lick anyTHING and anyBODY. It just don’t make no sense to go off on your lonesome and get scalped.”
“I been out here on my lonesome for a stretch now. I got learnt a few western trades I can follow, and I can palaver a bit with some a the tribes. There’s a couple a fur trappers you and me used to know down a-near the Indian Territory. If I can get that far, maybe I can ride with them.”
“But you’re going to be one a the richest men in the WORLD! You can BUY the blamed general! You can’t believe how RICH we are, Hucky! You’re my pard, I’m sharing EVERYTHING with you, just like we always done.”
“Being rich don’t work for me, Tom.”
“That’s plain stupid,” he says, getting mad.
“Give it to Becky or Deadwood.”
“You don’t give Deadwood money now. He don’t even know what it is. You just take care of him. I’m doing that. And I don’t need to give nothing to Becky, she’s grabbing all she wants. She’s aiming to turn the whole Gulch against me, if I don’t do like she says.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Well, the Gulch is a dangersome place. If she ain’t careful, she may have an accident.”
The Chinaman cookie brung us some whisky. Tom drank his down the same furisome way he chawed up the burnt birds. I passed him my glass. He looked me over. “You’re still yallerer than our cookie. Ain’t the janders over yet?”
“Comes and goes. I feel dog-tired all the time.”
“Well, that’s another reason you can’t go. You ain’t healthy enough.” He drank down my whisky and rose up, causing a stir out in the street. “Come along now. I got a surprise for you.”
As we stepped down off of the raised sidewalk, Tom was surrounded by grateful survivors of Cap’n Patch’s rain of terror. Some of them slapped his bare back or punched his arm, while others took off their hats and bowed their heads at him like he was the Awmighty. One a the new prostytutes who’d got horsewhipped by Eyepatch come over and give Tom a hug and kissed the X on his chest and says she’ll pray for him every night at bedtime, even if that’s at six in the morning. He was welcome to visit her any time at no charge once her awful wounds has healed, or even before if he wanted to see what that horrible pirate man done to her complexion.
Deadwood come staggering and loping towards us, his broke jaw set on a lopsided grin. Then he seen me with his crossed eyes and fell over in the mud in his anxiousness to get away. “That old sourdough has a new yarn about how he got that way,” Tom says as we slopped along. “He says whilst he was taking a squat in the woods, there was a giant powder explosion that near busted his eardrums, and drove the shit right back up his arsehole. Says he ain’t had no relief since. The blast throwed him all the way here into the street, where this stinking muck saved his life. It was the dynymite done all the bone-twisting, he says. Falling into the mud was like landing on a pile a feathers.”
“Glad to hear it’s good for something. Sure ain’t no joy in tracking round in it.”
“We’ll have to lay in some brick streets,” Tom says. He had lots of plans like that. Gas lamps on poles. Hitching posts. A newspaper. Stables to get the animals off the street. Tom can’t get up and NOT go. We passed a new brewery which he says he had some money in. “Also I’ve cleaned up the old whisky-maker’s copper worms and pot, so’s to try to still up a fresh batch from that yist mash you rescued. You got to admit, Huck, the Gulch is a better place now’n it ever was before.”
Remembering what Becky told me, I asked him whatever become a my treasure money that I left with the judge, and he says, “I got it with me. Just tell me when you want it.”
“I’ll take it now, then. See if I can’t buy me a train ticket to Mexico.”