It didn't take the sheriff but a second to figure out what he had done wrong.
"Why, Seth, I never supposed you'd want to join a posse," he said.
"For fifty dollars I'll join it and enlist Shay and G.T. too," Uncle Seth said. "The boys will work for nothing, of course."
That remark startled me so that if I had been sitting on a fence I expect I would have fallen off. Ma wouldn't hear of our fighting in the war, though plenty of fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds did fight in it; and now Uncle Seth, with no discussion, was offering to trot us off to Stumptown to take on the notorious Miller gang, an outfit filled with celebrated killers: Cut-Nose Jones, Little Billy Perkins, and the four violent Millers themselves.
The sheriff didn't immediately respond to Uncle Seth's offer, but he didn't immediately reject it, either.
"If I had you and Hickok and the two boys and myself, I don't suppose I'd need much more of a posse," he finally said.
"That's right, you wouldn't," Uncle Seth said. "Here comes G.T., leading Old Sam. Old Sam could pull a house up a hill, if somebody hitched him to it."
8
Sheriff Baldy still looked worried. "There's two problems, Seth," he said. Before Uncle Seth could ask what they were Ma came outside and stuck little Marcy in his arms again.
"You keep running off and leaving this baby," she said. "I can't have a baby around when I'm sharpening knives."
Little Marcy was still in a perfectly good humor.
She began to wave her arms and kick her feet.
"What were the two problems, Baldy?" Uncle Seth said. He looked a little put upon.
"A hundred dollars is a lot to pay for a posse," the sheriff said. "We could build a new city hall for a hundred dollars."
"Yes, but once you got it built you'd still have the Millers to worry with," Uncle Seth pointed out. "What's problem number two?"
"I haven't asked Hickok yet," the sheriff admitted. "That's problem number two."
"Then go ask him," Uncle Seth advised. He strolled over my way, meaning to stick me with Marcy, but I sidestepped him. Marcy didn't like me near as much as she liked Uncle Seth. If I took her she would be bawling within a minute, which would make it hard to listen to the conversation.
"I'm scared to ask him, Seth," the sheriff said. "I ain't a bit scared of Jake Miller but the mere sight of Billy Hickok makes me quake in my boots."
G.T. arrived with Old Sam and I helped him tie on to the dead horse, after which Old Sam dragged the big roan gelding over to the butchering tree, freeing the sheriff's saddle in the process.
"Would you mind asking him for me, Seth, since the two of you are old friends?" the sheriff said.
"'Old friends' might be putting it a little too strongly, but I don't mind asking him to help out," Uncle Seth said. "I'll do it as soon as I can get shut of this baby girl, which might not be until tomorrow, the way things are looking."
"Tomorrow would be fine," Sheriff Baldy said.
3 ONcE we got the carcass of the big roan hitched up to a good stout limb of the butchering tree, Sheriff Baldy threw his saddle on Old Sam and rode back down to Boone's Lick.
"Please don't forget about Bill Hickok, Seth," he said, before he left.
"The Millers ain't getting nicer, they're getting meaner."
Uncle Seth just waved. I don't think he was too pleased about his commission, but I had no time to dwell on the matter. The horse
had just seemed to be a horse when Old Sam was dragging his carcass off, but by the time we had been butchering for thirty minutes it felt like we had a dead elephant on our hands. Ma worked neat, but G.T. had never known neat 9
from dirty. By the time he got the horse's leg unjointed he was so bloody that Ma tried to get him to take his clothes off and work naked, a suggestion that shocked him.
The sight of G.T. shocked Granpa Cracken-thorpe too, when he tottered out to give us a few instructions. Granpa Crackenthorpe liked to comment that he had long since forgotten more useful things than most people would ever know. He claimed to be expert at butchering horseflesh, but the sight of G.T, bloody from head to foot, shocked him so that he completely lost track of whatever instructions he had meant to give us.
"I was in the battle of the Bad Axe River," he remarked. "That was when we killed off most of the Sauk Indians and quite a few of the Fox Indians too. The Mississippi River was red as a ribbon that day, from all the Indian blood in it, but it wasn't no redder than G.T. here."
"That's right," Ma said. "He's ruined a perfectly good shirt. I tried to get him to undress before he started hacking, but I guess he's too modest to think about saving his clothes."
"Ma!" G.T. said--he could not accept the thought of nakedness.
I was put in charge of the gut tubs. It was plain that Ma didn't intend to waste an ounce of that horse--she even cracked the bones and scraped out the marrow. Of course, it had been a hungry month--Ma hadn't even allowed us to kill a chicken.
"A chicken is just an egg-laying machine," she pointed out. "We can live on eggs if we have to, although I'd rather not."