Sam Bass

by Bryan Woolley

  “Maude? I knowed a Maude, but that was way up north.”

  Barnes nodded. “She’s the one.”

  “Son of a bitch! Joel’s girl!”

  “She’s working in Norene’s house on Main Street,” Barnes said.

  Sam laughed for the first time in a long time. He slapped my shoulder. “We’re ready, pard!” he said. “You find Jim and stock this place with all the grub and oats and ammunition he can rustle. When I get back, we’re going to work on the railroad!”

  “Back from where?” I asked.

  “Dallas!” he said.

  While Sam was whoring, I found Jim at his Cove Hollow house. He left immediately for Denton and returned two days later on a wagon laden with sides of bacon, flour, coffee, tobacco, whiskey, beans, dried fruit, rifle and pistol ammunition and oats for the horses. We transferred it all to two pack horses Jim kept at his place and moved it up to our cabin. It took us several trips. Spotswood and Barnes and I slept at Jim’s house that night, and the next morning he headed back to Denton, and we rode up Clear Creek to the cabin. Sam showed up about sundown, grinning. “Well, we’re ready to move,” he said. “What’s it to be?” I asked.

  Sam was full of excitement. “The Houston and Texas Central’s Number 4 train. The Nebraska train was Number 4, so this one ought to be lucky, too.”

  He had done some long and careful thinking while he was with Joel’s woman. The Houston and Texas Central passed through Collin County just east of the Denton County line. It was the nearest railroad to Cove Hollow, and we could have the cover of the cross-timbers and creek bottoms almost all the way to its tracks. Sam had learned that the Houston and Texas Central connected with the Katy for St. Louis, and it stood to reason that it might carry a bit of Yankee money. He had decided to strike the train at Allen, a tiny prairie station twenty-four miles north of Dallas. “The southbound is due there about eight o’clock in the evening,” he said, “so we’ll have the darkness working for us. We can hit it and be back in the bottoms before anybody knows what happened. Frank and Seab will rush the locomotive and put the engineer and the fireman under their guns. Me and Tom will tap the express car.”

  “What about the passenger cars?” Barnes asked.

  “Forget them. It would take too long to search everybody, and some fool might try to make a fight of it.”

  We fed the horses well and let them rest that night and all the next day and the following night. Shortly after noon on the next day we packed a few supplies and rode down Clear Creek single file. We rode in silence over the rough Cove Hollow terrain, but when we cleared the hollow and passed Jim’s house we left the woods and rode abreast, following the course of the creek. Just northeast of Denton, where Clear Creek and Little Elm Creek flow into the Elm Fork of the Trinity River, we moved into the river bottom and turned southward, riding single file again. A couple of miles south of Hilltown Sam called a halt, and we pitched camp in the bottom. “The rest is open prairie,” he said. “We can make it fast when the time comes.”

  The next day, George Washington’s Birthday, 1878, Sam told Spotswood to ride into Allen and check out the situation. I thought Tom was a poor choice, because his gray horse and his yellow hair and glass eye made him the most conspicuous member of our band, but I said nothing. “Take your time,” Sam told him. “Don’t waste your horse. Find out if there’s anybody there that might give us trouble, and ask what time the train’s due, just to make sure I’m right.”

  Tom gave Sam a mock salute and spurred his gray up the river bank. Fog lay in the Trinity bottom that morning, and we quickly lost sight of him.

  The fog lifted later in the morning, but the day remained gray and misty. We spent a great deal of time straining our eyes toward the east, looking for Spotswood’s return long before he could have ridden to Allen and back. He emerged out of the mist about midafternoon. “Easy as pie,” he said. “Not a lawman in the place, and the train’s still due at eight o’clock.”

  We cooked the last of our food and ate every morsel, since it likely would be our last meal until we returned to Cove Hollow. In late afternoon we headed toward Allen. Not long after dark we arrived at the edge of town and dismounted. Tom pointed to a lighted building and said, “That’s the station.” He swung his arm northward. “And the train will come from there. If it was daylight you could see the tracks. We’ve got a good view here.”

  I looked at my watch. It was fifteen minutes until eight. Sam touched my wrist. “Don’t pull that out again till we’re out of here,” he said. “We don’t want nobody remembering the music.” We sat down under a tree and Sam took out his own watch and laid it on the ground in front of him. We could hear its ticking, and although we couldn’t read its hands in the darkness, we kept staring at it as if mesmerized. I felt tension building in us. Barnes, sitting beside me, drew a long breath and expelled it in a great rush. Spotswood fooled with the rowel of one of his spurs. Sam picked up his watch and held it close to his face. “It’s eight o’clock,” he said. “The train’s late.”

  I strained my eyes toward the station, half entertaining the foolish notion that the train had pulled in without our seeing or hearing it. But the station and the village around it were quiet. The tension grew even faster now, for we had no idea how long our wait would be. My hands were sweating and beginning to tremble. I grasped one with the other, trying to hold them still. Every few minutes, Sam would announce the time. “Eight-thirty.” “Twenty till nine.” “Fifteen till nine.” I didn’t see the point of it, since we had no way of knowing when the train would arrive, and his announcements were adding to my nervousness.

  Then suddenly it was there. The headlight cut through the misty darkness, and the whistle shrilled. Without a word we jumped to our feet, lifted our masks and sprang into our saddles. We dashed pell-mell across the stretch of prairie separating us from the station, reined in sharply at the platform and swung down with guns already drawn. Two men standing together on the platform stared at us, surprise and terror in their faces. “Oh, my Lord!” one of them said.

  “Move and you’re dead!” Sam cried.

  Amidst plumes of smoke and steam the locomotive moved slowly alongside the platform, its bell clanging. Its headlight was bright in my eyes, but I could see its big wheel, and when it stopped turning I screamed, “Now!” In a flash Seab and I were up the engine steps and had our gun muzzles under the chins of the engineer and the fireman. The firebox door was open, and the dancing lights and shadows created by the flames made hellish imps of the men, who raised their hands above their heads. Four terrified, white eyes stared out of their sooty faces, and little streams of sweat coursed down the hard muscles of the fireman’s bare chest. “Don’t move!” I said and poked my gun closer to the engineer’s face. My gun hand was steady now. With my left hand I drew my knife and cut the bell rope. I heard Sam’s voice: “Throw up your hands and give us your money!” Then came a shot, and then another.

  “God!” said the engineer.

  “Shut up!” I said.

  I heard three more shots, then one, then three more, then Sam’s voice, but I couldn’t understand his words. Seab’s eyes, shiny in the firelight, shifted quickly to me, then back to the fireman.

  “Pard! Back it up!” Sam shouted. “We’re going to uncouple!” I waved the engineer to the controls with my gun. “You heard him. Do it.”

  The engine chuffed, and the shock of the cars slamming against each other almost knocked me down. Barnes waved the fireman toward the steps. “Go uncouple it behind the express car,” he said. “Don’t do nothing funny. I’m right behind you.” A few seconds later his masked face appeared at the bottom of the steps. “She’s uncoupled,” he said. “Take her up.”

  “You heard him,” I told the engineer. He moved the locomotive forward. When we had moved sixty or seventy feet I said, “Stop. Shut her down.”

  I heard more shouts from the express car, then silence. The engineer and I gazed at each other, both of us listening, trying to figure o
ut what was happening behind us. Then spurred feet were running, and Sam said from the bottom of the steps, “We’ve got it, pard. Bring him down.”

  I herded the engineer into the small cluster of men standing on the platform under the guns of my companions. Sam and Tom clutched large parcels to their chests with their left hands. Seab was searching the men. Shouts and screams issued from the passenger cars farther down the track. “They’re clean,” Seab said.

  “All right,” Sam said to our prisoners. “Stand where you are till we’re out of sight. Otherwise, you’ll die.”

  We mounted and rode out fast. When we were beyond sight of the train and the station and Allen we halted, and Sam said to Tom, “Did he get a good look at you?”

  “I don’t think so. I got it back up pretty fast.”

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “Tom’s mask fell down when he jumped into the express car,” Sam said.

  “Damn!” I said.

  “Well, we’ll hope for the best,” Sam said. “We made a good haul, I think.” “What is it?” Seab asked.

  “Silver, mostly. Some greenbacks. Quite a bit, I think.” “What was the ruckus?” I asked.

  “The bastard in the express car cut loose on us. He hid behind the boxes, and we had to shoot back to keep him down. I finally told him if he didn’t give up we’d set fire to his car, so he come out.”

  We camped in the Trinity bottom again. Sam brought the parcels to the fire, opened them and counted the silver and the greenbacks into four equal stacks.

  “Are you just taking an equal share?” Spotswood asked him.

  “Yes. We all did equal work.”

  We got three hundred and twenty dollars apiece.

  The morning was cold, and since we hadn’t waited to eat or even make coffee, we were a groggy, cranky crowd, not fit company for each other. Spotswood’s mood was the worst. He complained in his sing-song way of aches in his joints from sleeping on the damp ground, of hunger, of the long ride, of anything that came into his mind. The rest of us made no replies, but each was miserable in his own way, and I, at least, had no desire to have Tom’s unhappinesses heaped upon mine. I wasn’t sorry when he pulled his pacer to a halt and announced he would go no farther. “I’ve had enough cold camp,” he said. “I want my woman and a good dinner, and I’m going to go get them.”

  “All right.” Sam’s voice had a little anger in it.

  Spotswood’s departure called to my mind Henry Underwood’s Christmas visit to Denton, and I said, “Family men. They aren’t very reliable, are they?”

  “Tom’s all right,” Sam replied. “He just ain’t cut out for being rich.”

  “It was his mask that fell down,” Barnes said. “He might be trouble. Maybe I should go get him.” “And do what?” “Make sure he don’t talk.”

  What he was suggesting was murder. Sam studied Seab’s face. “No,” he said. I was relieved.

  We arrived at our cabin late the next afternoon. After we took care of the horses we flopped on the bare stone in front of the fireplace and slept for hours before we mustered energy enough to eat. Seab, as it turned out, was a decent cook, and he fixed a meal of beans and bacon and stewed apricots and biscuits and coffee. Then we unrolled our blankets and slept like babies until well after daylight.

  I got up before the others and went down to the creek and plunged my face into the cold water. While lying on the bank, I heard a woodpecker working. I looked around until I spotted him not high up on the trunk of an old acacia. I eased my hand down and unbuckled my spurs and then grabbed my hat. I tiptoed to the tree as quietly as I could, careful to keep out of the bird’s line of sight, and slapped the hat down on top of him. Barnes was stumbling down the slope, yawning and rubbing his eyes, and I said, “Seab! Guess what I’ve got under this hat.”

  “A buffalo,” he said.

  “A woodpecker. I caught him.”

  “What the hell for?”

  “Come help me get him.”

  He made a face and stumbled on down the slope, and I said, “Stick your hand under there and grab him.” “He’ll peck the hell out of me,” he said. “No, he won’t.”

  “I’ll hold the hat, and you stick your hand under there.”

  The bird did peck me pretty hard, but I held him. The pecker was a big one. His yellow-and-black eyes glared at me. He raised a terrible fuss and kept trying to get at me with his beak.

  “Now what?” Seab asked.

  “Get something to tie him with.”

  Seab went to the cabin and returned with an empty coffee sack and a piece of twine, and I dropped the bird in and tied it shut.

  Seab grinned. “You ain’t nothing but a kid.”

  “Well, how many people you know have caught a woodpecker?”

  “Don’t know none that wanted to,” he said. “I caught me a jay once. He flew in the house, and I slammed the door and chased him around till I stunned him with Mama’s broom.”

  “What did you do with him?”

  “Made me a cage out of sumac sticks. Kept him for some time, too, before he died.” “Let’s do that!” He laughed.

  “It’ll give us something to do.”

  “It’s your woodpecker.” “Will you help me?”

  He raised his hands in an expression of helplessness. “All right.”

  Sam thought we both were crazy, and Seab tried to lay off all the craziness onto me. “If I don’t help him, he might get dangerous,” he said. But I knew he was enjoying my childish idea as much as I was, and we set about constructing the cage with enthusiasm and care. Seab and I went back to the creek and hacked down far more young, flexible sumac whips than we needed and shaved the bark off. I rubbed the strips of bark into several strands of crude string, while Seab gouged holes around the edge of a shingle that had blown off the cabin, to serve as the floor of the cage. We poked the ends of the sumac whips into the holes and tied them together at the top to form a sort of dome. Then Seab wove thinner branches in and out among them and lashed them with my string, leaving no opening big enough to allow the woodpecker to escape. He even made a small door and lashed it on. Sam sat ridiculing us while we worked, but I enjoyed it. It was the first careful work I had done with my hands since leaving Ben’s shop, and it felt good. Maybe the potter in Seab felt the same way, for he stopped saying “he” and started saying “we” when responding to Sam’s rawhiding. He even winked at me a couple of times, and a bond grew between us that never really broke. From then on, in any arguments or discussions, Seab was always on my side, except for one matter farther down the road.

  We worked on the cage all day, and it was with a great deal of pride that we released the woodpecker into it and hung it from a rafter with the twine that had held it in the sack. The bird raised a ruckus, flapping about the cage, blinking at us with those yellow-and-black eyes. I don’t know whether dumb animals feel hatred or not, but those eyes looked like they were full of it.

  After all the work was done, Sam became interested in the bird, too, and would stick his finger between the bars and withdraw it when the woodpecker attacked it. “Does he have a name?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Honest Eph.”

  Sam laughed, and Seab asked, “What does that mean?” “We used to call our chief that when he grubbed brush for Dad Egan.”

  “That ain’t no good,” Sam said. “Honest Eph won’t never be behind bars.”

  The name stuck, anyway. And during the long days of nothing that followed, that bird was a godsend. “What do woodpeckers eat?” I asked, and Seab said, “Bugs, I guess. That’s probably what they’re looking for when they hammer the trees.” So he and I spent hours crawling along the banks of the creek, looking for the few bugs to be had at that time of year. Maybe we were crazy. I don’t know. I even tried to teach the bird to talk once, and realized how foolish I was when I saw my friends looking at me as if I were a freak.

  When we had been in the hollow about a week, Jim Murphy rode up with the Dallas newspaper
s of several days before. We had created a sensation. The papers said several posses had gone to Allen but failed to pick up our trail. The Texas Rangers were investigating, and everybody was offering money for our scalps. The governor had posted a reward of five hundred dollars per man, which was matched by both the railroad and the Texas Express Company. “Fifteen hundred apiece. That almost makes it worth my while,” Jim said. “Two thousand for you, Sam, counting Nebraska.”

  “I reckon nobody wants it,” Sam said. “I ain’t seen nobody coming to get it.”

  “They ain’t identified you,” Jim said. “But life’s getting livelier. They picked up Spotswood yesterday, and the express messenger identified him. They just walked up to his wagon and arrested him. His little boy was with him, too.”

  We were too stunned to speak. We glanced nervously at each other and at the ground until Jim said, “I wish I hadn’t sent him up here. I didn’t do nobody no favor.”

  “Did he have the money on him?” Seab asked.

  “Just twelve dollars.”

  “Well, they’ll never convict him on just the messenger’s say-so,” Seab said. “It was dark.”

  “Maybe. You never can tell about juries.”

  After Jim left, the three of us sat around the cabin, saying nothing. We were scared, I guess, and I was empty inside, without hope and angry. In a fit of rage I grabbed a stick and jumped up and jabbed it between the bars of the woodpecker’s cage, trying to hit the bird with it. “Hey, Honest Eph! You damn train robber!” I yelled. “Stand around there, boy! Stand around there, son! This is what Dad Egan’s going to do when he catches you!”

  Sam leapt up and jerked the stick from my hand and whipped it across my belly. The stick broke, and a piece of it flew across the room and almost hit Barnes. Sam’s hand was trembling. He flung the other half of the stick out the door and made a fist in my face, his eyes black with fury. “Don’t never say that!” he screamed. “You’ll be in hell before they put Sam Bass behind bars!” Then he grabbed the cage and tried to yank it down. The twine held, but a couple of the bars broke, and the woodpecker was out and gone in a flash of red and blue.