“We may face danger out there, but we are well equipped for action.”
“Hope he brings along a pot to shit in when he sees them Injuns,” says a trooper out the side of his mouth.
“No need,” says another, talking soft. “He’ll make sure we never come in sniffin’ distance of ’em.”
“This will be a seven-day foray, maybe longer,” says the colonel. “It will be hard on man and beast alike.…”
“How about colonels? They ain’t neither,” whispers the trooper, and a couple more tittered.
“… But with superior weaponry and tactical judgment we will prevail.” He gave a nod to the captain who give a nod to a lieutenant who give a nod to a sergeant who hollers:
“Move out!”
Which they done, with the colonel mounted up and in the lead. The whole caboodle went once around the quadrangle then out the gates and off over the horizon in a cloud of dust. Andrew come up to me and says:
“What a stirring sight, men at arms galloping off to make war with the enemy in his lair.”
“I hope they don’t find Standing Tall’s tribe. They never done nothing that warn’t justificated.”
“Fear not for your noble red friends, Huckleberry. Colonel Beckwith has a reputation for steering a wide path around any kind of trouble.”
“You mean if bravery was dollars he’d be the poorest man in town?”
“I mean precisely that. I have it from the horse’s mouth, if Lydia will pardon the equine metaphor.”
“She told you?”
“Indeed yes.”
“She don’t set much store by the colonel, do she?”
“Naturally. She is a woman who demands the utmost from life and from men. The colonel lacks the former and barely qualifies as the latter.”
“You mean …”
“I mean, Huckleberry, if potency were water the colonel would be a desert.”
“Did you make up your mind about things?”
“I have, and you’ll be happy to learn we’re leaving this very morning.”
“You ain’t joshing me are you, Andrew?”
“Not I, young friend. Here, take these to Jim.”
He give me a little bag and inside there’s a shaving mug and a canteen of water that’s warm to the touch and soap and a razor and a mirror.
“What’s all this for?” says I
“What it appears to be for, shaving. Jim must shave his beard completely, but his hair must be left long.”
“Why?”
“Never mind why. Saddle up your horse and take Jim’s along too. I’ll join you presently.”
“You got some kind of plan, Andrew, I can tell.”
“I have, and all will be revealed when I join you. Now run along.”
I warn’t none too happy with the arrangement but I done it anyway, hoping it ain’t going to be something harebrained and foolish. I took the horses and went out to Jim and he used the shaving stuff till his face was smooth and black as marble. All through it he asked questions but I never give him no answers, not having none.
Then come the sound of horses getting nearer and I figured Andrew must of brung along a spare, but when he come in sight I seen he’s brung along a pack horse loaded with supplies all right, but he’s brung along Lydia and Jupiter and Romulus and Remus as well. It’s too late for Jim to hide so we just stood there not believing what we seen, and I give Andrew a silent cussing with the briskest kind of language I can lay hands on.
“Dis parter de plan, Huck?” asks Jim.
“I reckon so, and I ain’t disposed to like it.”
They reined in and got down off their horses and the dogs come sniffing around me and Jim friendly-like and poking their noses between our legs.
Mrs. Beckwith says:
“Good morning, Huckleberry. Good morning, Jim.”
Jim give a strangled kind of grunt. I never made a sound, too busy trying to figure out how I can best kill Andrew.
“Well, no doubt you’re both surprised by all this,” he says, smiling.
“You could put it stronger than that,” says I.
“Huckleberry, Mrs. Beckwith is an essential part of the plan. Without her it will not work. I had to reveal your secret to her. It would not have been fair to include her in our party otherwise.”
She give me a smile and says:
“May I say, Huckleberry, that I believe wholeheartedly in your innocence. Andrew has told me of your efforts to save those aboard the Nicobar, and I would consider it an honor if you were to regard me as your friend.”
“Thank you, ma’am,” says I to her, and to Andrew, “What plan?”
“It’s quite simple. Lydia must be given the credit for it. Jim, please retire behind cover and put this on.”
He hauled a dress and bonnet out of a sack and handed them over. Jim looked at the dress, then at me. Lydia says:
“If Jim passes himself off as my nigger maid no one will question his presence. He will be as invisible to your pursuers as you, Huckleberry, in your Sioux costume.”
“I got to put de dress on, Huck?”
“It ain’t a bad idea at that, Jim.”
He took himself away with his bottom lip stuck out to show he ain’t happy. Andrew says:
“I take it, then, that you have fallen in with our scheme?”
“Drug in is more like it. Ma’am, are you headed for California too, I mean, all the way?”
“I am. I trust you do not object to the presence of a woman among your party, young man.”
“I ain’t particular, just so long as we move fast.”
“Neither I nor Jupiter will hold you back.”
“Well, all right then, but we’re in deep trouble when the colonel gets back and finds you ain’t here no more.”
“We will have one week’s start on any pursuit party, quite enough in my opinion.”
“If you say so, ma’am.”
“I do,” she says, final-like.
Jim come back and stuffed his britches in his saddlebag. He’s the biggest nigger maid I ever seen, and he can’t button the dress up the back on account of he’s too wide in the shoulder and deep in the chest, so Lydia give him a shawl to hide the big split down his back. He had to keep his own boots on too, which looked peculiar, but there ain’t a way around it when you got feet that big. We mounted up and started off in a wide circle that takes us around the Injun camp and the wagon train and the fort so no one can be a witness to the direction we took, and an hour later we’re following wagon ruts a few weeks’ old west toward the Rockies.
Andrew and Lydia rode in the lead with me and Jim a little way behind, and them two looked across at each other so much I seen more of the sides of their heads than the backs, and they laughed and carried on and was forever reaching across to touch each other. Romance is powerful stuff if it makes full-growed people act that way, and I’m glad I ain’t inclined to get mixed up in such foolishness, not now or ever. Jim stayed grumpish all through the afternoon and never spoke a word, just pushed that lip out and kept it there, and I see he’s humilerated to be wearing a dress.
“It ain’t nothing to be ashamed of, Jim,” says I. “Did you forget how I wore a dress after Fort Kearney?”
“You only wore dat dress a week, Huck. I got to tol’rate this’n till we gets to Californy, an’ das a long ways off yet.”
“It ain’t nothing new for men to wear dresses. Why, look at all them folk in the Bible, they never wore no britches for thousands of years. I seen a Bible with pictures in it and the men wore dresses same as the women. Even Jesus wore a dress, Jim. Remember that picture of him on the side of the McSweens’ wagon? What was that he had on if it warn’t a dress?”
“It were a man’s nightshirt, Huck. Dere’s a heaper diff’rence.”
“Well, I reckon you’re just going to have to put up with it, or else stand out like a naked man in church and get us both captured.”
“I ain’t sayin’ I won’ do it, Huck, I’se jest sayin’ I ain
’t about to get no pleasure from it.”
“No one’s asking you to do that, Jim, and I appreciate the sacrifice you’re making.”
But he never come out with another word that day, and when we made camp for the night he stayed quiet so I let him be. Wearing ladies’ duds takes a heap of adjustment. The lovebirds was billing and cooing away in the firelight and it’s enough to make you sick, all them words and looks thick as molasses and sweet as honey. When they ain’t looking adoring at each other they’re spouting poems by the yard and jawing about how Andrew is going to make his fortune with his book of poetry which he aims to call In Search of El Dorado. Lydia says she’ll be so proud and maybe she’ll put out what she calls a slim volume of her own spouting, and it’ll be called Leaves from the Woods of Remembrance—A Collection of Poems and Essays from the Pen of a Frontierswoman, a fair mouthful, I reckon.
When it come time to sleep they started yawning and Andrew says:
“I believe I’ll turn in. It’s been a fatiguing day.”
“I agree,” says Lydia. “The smell of freedom is heady wine to the newly initiated. I feel quite drowsy in fact.”
“Huckleberry, perhaps you and Jim would care to place your blankets on the far side of the fire, over by that rock, for example.”
“What rock?”
“That one over there. It’s enormous. You must be able to see it against the stars.”
That’s the only way you could of seen it, because it’s so far away the firelight don’t reach it.
“We’ll be cold way over there,” says I.
“Nonsense, it’s a warm night, and I’ve been told it is common practice among trappers and so forth to sleep as far from the fire as possible to present a less visible target to prowling marauders.”
I ain’t a moron. I seen what he wanted and why, so Jim and me took our blankets right around the other side of the rock to give them all the privateness they needed, but even that distance never stopped them keeping us awake with all kinds of moaning and yelping. Jim says:
“Cain’t she bite a stick or somethin’? I’se gettin’ mighty res’less, Huck. De noise puts me in minder dat Injun gal I had back wid de Sioux.”
“You never told me much about that at the time, Jim.”
“You kinder young to be knowin’ ’bout dat stuff, Huck, but dere’s a hunker advice I kin give an’ dis here’s it. When de time come for you to get close wid a woman jest make sure an’ not marry no one till you at leas’ twenny-five. I ain’t sayin’ it hurts to tie de knot, but it means you got to give up a whole heaper freedom, in fac’ thirty-five be closer to de mark lessen de woman starts gettin’ fat in de belly, den you ain’t got no choice, not lessen you wants to run.”
I told him I warn’t attracted to fat ladies anyway, and we went to sleep, but not before Andrew and Lydia quit racketing.
The night after was the same, and the night after that and so on. Jim and me took to sleeping further and further from the fire just to get a full night’s sleep. I had dark circles under my eyes and I reckon Jim had them too, only on him it’s hard to tell. He says:
“Dey ain’t goin’ to keep it up much longer, Huck. De human body kin stan’ jest so much den it gets tuckered out an’ exhausterated, ’specially a man, an’ dat Andrew, he’s kinder skinny an’ puny lookin’ so he ain’t goin’ to las’ de distance.”
But he did, and Jim and me practickly had to set up a separate camp each night. The plains was well behind us now. The country around is hilly and there’s some pine and cedar, mighty reliefsome to the eye after all that rolling flatness since Missouri. We had to cross over the Platte where it turns south to the headwaters, and it’s running swift here on account of the narrowness. We all of us had to get wet by crossing over hanging onto the horses’ tails. The dogs swum it easy under their own steam but the pack horse had trouble with all that load on his back and was almost swept away, but he landed safe further down and I rounded him up. We had the flour and such on top of the load so there’s only a little of it spoiled by water, and we aimed to eat them portions first before it rotted anyway.
We stripped off to dry out, Jim and me in one place and the lovebirds in another, and we heard noises that warn’t birdcalls coming from their direction so they never got bored while their clothes dried. I done some wandering through the trees with Romulus and Remus, stark naked except for the rattlesnake charm around my ankle. I come across a little grave dug by the river and there’s a moldering wood cross stuck in one end with words burned on it that reads:
Here lyes Otis Buchanan
age 14 yrs 11 mths
Drownded in river
June 12, 1841
RIP
I squatted down next to it, feeling sad. He must of been with the pioneers and come all this way full of the adventure spirit, and then he drowned when he’s near the same age as me. I felt like it’s Huck Finn under that cross, just a skellington by now, with a family far off in California or maybe Oregon that still remembers me. I could feel Otis Buchanan’s ghost beside me all mournful and forlorn on account of missing out on a whole life. I got the shivers, or maybe it’s just water drying on my skin, but I left there in a hurry and never told the others what I seen. It’s just between me and Otis and the dogs.
Jim and me figured seeing as the lovebirds had a pecking match in daytime they’d be quieter come nightfall, but no such luck. I reckon you could spend a peacefuller night lying in a pond with a million bullfrogs, so next morning I warn’t in the right temper to see what I seen, which is a hoofprint a little ways off the trail next to a pile of turds. The print has got a cross on the heel so it’s Pap’s, and likely the turds too.
I never told no one about that neither, but I spent considerable time wondering just how far ahead him and Morg is, and if there’s a chance us four is going to catch them up. When we left Fort Laramie I was in a powerful rush, but not now.
Two days later we come to Independence Rock, which is biggish and stands out some, but not so much as Chimney Rock back on the plains. It’s covered in scrawl with names and messages from pioneers and forty-niners, writ in tar or chipped right into the rock. We stayed awhile to look them over and I seen three names I knowed from the Naismith train. The first two is Duane and Hewley Peterson and the third is Grace, writ neat with chalk, so it ain’t going to last longer than the next rain. It brung back memories of how we was friends, then enemies, then friends again, and how she got me free that time. I had a mind to put my name next to hers, but it ain’t wise, not if your name’s Huck Finn and you’re wanted for murder, so I never done it. Andrew and Lydia was all for chipping a poem in the rock but we never had no chisel, only my knife and I warn’t about to get it busted on such a useless thing, so Independence Rock got left the way we found it.
A few mile on we come to what Lydia’s map that she stole out of the colonel’s desk calls Devil’s Gate, and it’s where the Sweetwater River goes churning through a gorge heading east to meet up with the Platte. We stayed awhile there too, just admiring the grandness of it. The sun got low and we made camp above the gorge, and the river made so much noise me and Jim never heard the lovebirds and slept like drunks, which was a tonic.
Further on up the trail the cliffs give way to a valley and we followed it another three days, the ground rising steady all the time and the hills turning gradual to low mountains, the first I ever seen, till finally we come to South Pass in the Wind River Range, the easternmost part of the Rockies. I was kind of expecting a narrow little gap with sides that run straight up and down, but it warn’t nothing like that, just a wide valley real nice to look at. Beyond the pass we seen real mountains, tall and grand and awesome. Andrew run out a poem to celebrate, spouting it out from the saddle loud and clear.
“Glad of heart, intrepid bands
Of pioneers from eastern lands
Have passed this way with heads held high
Beneath the all-encircling sky,
For here revealed before their gaze
Upon the slopes that greet the eye
With gently rising majesty,
A prelude to the peaks beyond,
United there in rocky bond,
A sweeping vista, rugged, bold,
The contours of these mountains old,
Standing mighty, proud, serene,
Like landscape dwelt upon in dream,
Enchanting with their distant crowns
The ondrawn traveler; hope abounds
Within his breast and carefree heart,
Halfway to rest from journey’s start.
Forward, let the wagons roll
Into this land that stirs the soul
Of all who see her silhouette
Of lofty peaks; the journey yet
To come will weeks entail, but see!
Ahead’s the trail of destiny!”
Lydia give him a round of applause and Jupiter lifted his tail to leave his mark on the enchanting landscape. Romulus and Remus nosed it to make sure it’s the right kind of mark and give it their approval by lifting their legs and we set off into the Rocky Mountains.
The going was easy for a day or two seeing as we’re on horseback, but it warn’t no picnic for them ahead of us with wagons on account of it’s all uphill. We come across the proof of it in piles of stuff throwed out to make them lighter, stoves and trunks and tables and chairs and even a patent gold-washing machine like the ones I seen them selling back in St. Joe. We followed a river called the Big Sandy on Lydia’s map, and the higher we went the colder it got, even if it’s summer. There was lashing rain on the third day that soaked us through and washed all the poetry and caterwauling out of Andrew and Lydia, which was the only comfort it brung. We made camp that night under a rocky bluff with plenty of trees around and done our best to dry out, but it was miserable and we never slept. In the morning Andrew started sneezing and says he’s catched cold, so no poems today neither I reckon, but I would of listened to a whole bookful in preferment to what happened around midmorning.
We was ambling along easy when we hear a shout behind us, and turned and seen four men on horseback and a pack horse coming along behind.
The Further Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Page 30
