Sam Bass

by Bryan Woolley

  “Stop it!” I screamed. “We’ll free your goddamn convicts!”

  The guards must have thought there were a lot of us, for they stopped firing. I ran to the door of the express car and yelled, “Hurry! We’ve got a casualty!”

  Sam jumped to the platform. He had a cloth sack in his hand, but Henry and Arkansas were empty-handed. Seab was sitting on the platform, still holding his gun on the prisoners. His pantaloons were bloody in several places. “Can you walk?” I asked him.

  “Help me up.” He raised a hand, and I pulled him to his feet and helped him to his horse. “Hurt bad?” I asked.

  “It’s beginning to.”

  I held his stirrup with one hand and put the other under his butt and pushed him into the saddle. We departed Mesquite at a run.

  I don’t remember much else about that night. We moved fast, afraid a posse would be coming. And for all we knew, the prairie and woods were full of posses still after us for Allen and Hutchins and Eagle Ford. We left the road and galloped, galloped across the prairie for a long time. We crossed a creek. I remember Henry asking, “Are we going to stop?”

  “Not yet,” Sam replied.

  We moved on and on through the night. We crossed another creek, and Seab’s horse stumbled on the rocks. He wailed, “Oh, what shall I do? I can’t stand it!”

  “We’ll stop,” Sam said, “and Frank will fix you.”

  My medical bags were at the cabin, but I took off my shirt and tore it into strips and wrapped them around Seab’s wounds, outside the pantaloons. “Buckshot,” I said. “I don’t think your legs are broken.”

  “They hurt like hell,” he said.

  We stayed at the creek long enough to let our horses blow and drink, then started again at a slower pace. The night was so black I could barely see my companions. We said nothing. Seab groaned with every step of his horse.

  We didn’t reach our cabin until dark the next day. Arkansas and Henry took our horses to the corral, and Sam and I helped Barnes inside and laid him on a blanket near the fireplace. “Give him a bottle,” I said, “and build a big fire. I’ll need all the light I can get.” While we waited for Barnes to get drunk and the blaze to grow, I pulled Dr. Smith’s Minor Surgery from my saddlebags and looked for gunshot wounds. The closest thing I found was “The Extraction of Foreign Matter from Wounds.” I turned to the page and found that the section was only a paragraph:

  Requires the use of forceps which are modified according to circumstances, and generally treated of in the works on Gun-shot Injuries. But when the substance is only particles of dirt, or such fine matter as cannot well be seized by the forceps, the free use of a stream of tepid water, either by means of a syringe or from a sponge, will suffice.

  I cursed Dr. Smith and returned the book to the saddlebags and got out the case of instruments that Dr. Ross had given me. Henry and Arkansas came in from the corral. Henry grabbed the cloth bag we had taken from the train and poured the contents on the floor. He and Arkansas began counting the money aloud. Sam hunkered beside me, watching me. I opened the case. Seab groaned. The fire gave a glow to the green velvet lining of the case. The instruments glinted like treasure. “Do you want me to do something?” Sam asked.

  “Not yet. Let me think.” The fire was hot against my face.

  “A hundred and fifty dollars,” Henry said, and he was through.

  I looked at my hands. They seemed as big as hams, and they were trembling. “Give me a drink,” I told Sam. “And then come hold him.”

  Maude

  It was after midnight, but men were arming themselves. Groups were riding off in all directions, as if to a war. Men and women, some in nightshirts and gowns, ran past our house toward the depot. As soon as my customer left my room, I got dressed and joined them. La! The train was a mess. The sides of nearly all the cars showed splintered places where bullets had hit them. Oil was splashed on the door and wall of the express car. The conductor’s shirt was bloody. Two men were helping him away. The platform was a swirl of people, all babbling at once. “They’ll be in the banks next,” a man said.

  “Four trains in two months, and within twenty-five miles,” said another. “Nobody will want to settle in Dallas.”

  Policemen cleared a path through the crowd for the passengers, who were climbing down from the coaches, women and children in tears, men red in the face. From time to time a hand would reach from the crowd and touch a passenger, then there would be embraces and loud cries.

  I went back to the house and went to bed. About noon the next day Norene knocked on my door and handed me a copy of the Herald. “Your friend’s name is in the paper,” she said.

  “Which friend?” I closed the door and unfolded the paper. They named him, all right, in the sixth and smallest headline at the top of the article:

  Unsuccessful Pursuit After the Eagle Ford Gang—Sam Bass, Underwood and Jackson in Denton County, Where They Defy the Law and Out-general their pursuers.

  He wasn’t named, though, in the account of the robbery at Mesquite. I glanced quickly over the first part of the article, about the train’s arrival in Dallas, and began reading in the middle:

  Mr. Sam Finley and others of the Texas Express Company, although they had just returned from a trip after the Eagle Ford robbers, started in pursuit of the robbers at about half-past two o’clock this morning.

  The number of shots fired could not, of course, be ascertained, for it was almost continual for ten or fifteen minutes, the coaches and express car being riddled with bullets, though fortunately no one was hurt on the train, as far as learned, but the conductor.

  Several have offered the opinion that the robbers were cowboys, headed by a man who is nearly six feet high, with beard all over his face. He had a fine, shrill voice; wore a broad-brim light’colored, low-crown hat; and a slouch coat of coarse texture.

  Great apprehension was felt by people on the streets when the news spread last night that the robbers might make a dash into this city and attempt to rob the banks. Precautionary measures in the shape of shotguns have been prepared for them, however, and a warm reception will be given them if they come this way. The excitement on the streets was intense.

  La! Sam Bass six feet high and with a beard, too! The rest of the story was a heroic tale of a posse crashing about the bushes of Denton County and finding nothing. I dropped the paper to the floor. “Sam Bass,” I said aloud. “You silly little clown.”

  I got up and pulled on my stockings. I wanted to eat before the customers began arriving.

  You may think a woman of my calling never loves anyone, but I did love Joel Collins. He loved me, too, in his way.

  He was a pretty man, over six feet high, slender as a reed and hard as rock. He dressed well, even when he didn’t have much money, and his black hair and heavy mustache were so fine and silky that a woman’s fingers itched to touch them. His blue eyes had the light of the devil in them. It was that light that got him into trouble, I think.

  We met in Deadwood, after he and Sam had driven some cattle there and sold them. They weren’t in a hurry to go home. They owed somebody in Texas a lot of money or had stolen the cattle they sold. Something like that. Joel bought a house on the outskirts of Deadwood. He and Sam called it a ranch, but there wasn’t much land to it, and no cattle. It was really a sporting house, with a bar and a couple of gaming tables in the front and cribs in the back, where they worked four girls. I was one of them. After I became Joel’s woman, I didn’t take customers unless Joel told me to. I didn’t mind. Sam had eyes for me, too. Sometimes we would close the house and have little parties, and all of us would get drunk and dance and laugh. Sam would make eyes at me, and Joel would notice and wave his hand and tell Sam, “Be my guest.” I didn’t mind that either, much. I liked Sam. But I loved Joel.

  Then he closed the house and told me that he and Sam were going back to Texas. Just like that. It like to broke my heart. I didn’t want to go back to work in some Deadwood saloon, or to someone else’s cribs. But I
kept my feelings to myself and said goodbye. I didn’t know he planned to rob a train.

  They had been gone just a few days when I decided to go to Dallas myself. And I did. And went to work for Norene. Then the news came down. I had known them all. Berry killed in Missouri. Heffridge and Joel shot down by soldiers in Kansas without a chance of saving themselves. They had twenty thousand dollars in gold tied up in a pair of pantaloons on their pack horse. And they say that one of the papers in Joel’s pocket was a beautiful love poem. I wish I had it. The newspapers and the rumors said six men held up that train in Nebraska, and I knew one of them was Sam. Joel was like a big brother to him.

  Then Seab Barnes was in my bed. He said he was from Denton. That was where Sam was from, and I asked Seab if he knew him. He said, “No.” I said, “Well, he’s not there anymore. He was way up north when I knew him.”

  A couple of weeks later, I was walking down the stairs to greet my next customer, and there was Sam, sitting on Norene’s horsehair sofa with his hat on his knee and a glass of whiskey in his hand, just as I remembered him. He stood up and gave me a little bow. Beth was in the parlor, too, entertaining a customer, and I didn’t know whether Sam was calling himself by his real name or not, so I said, “Good evening, sir.”

  We went up to my room, and I locked the door. He kissed me on the cheek. “Joel’s gone,” I said.

  “Yeah.” He patted my shoulder. “I hope to run into them that killed him someday.”

  “It was soldiers. We’ll never know.”

  “Well, men get to bragging sometimes. You never can tell.”

  I looked up at him. I didn’t have to look up far, because he wasn’t much higher than me. “Well, let the dead bury the dead,” I said.

  He seemed shy and awkward. Maybe it was because he was in my room without Joel’s permission. I poured two glasses of whiskey from the decanter on the table beside my bed. I handed him his glass and asked, “Do you want me?”

  “Well, yeah.” He laughed nervously.

  I undid my dress and stepped out of it and laid it across the back of the chair. I wore only a chemise under it. I lifted a foot to the chair and said, “Unbutton my boots, will you?”

  His face turned red, but he bent to unbutton the boot. His fingers didn’t seem able to do what he wanted. He fumbled with the buttons and laughed that nervous laugh again, but he finally got the boot undone and did better with the other one. He stepped back and watched me roll my stockings and garters down. I was about to get into bed, and he said, “Take that off, too.” So I pulled the chemise over my head and dropped it to the floor. I lay back on the feather mattress. Sam stood at the foot of the bed and just looked at me. I didn’t mind. I like my body, especially in gaslight. I smiled at him. “Aren’t you coming?”

  He set his drink on the table. His fingers trembled while he unbuttoned his shirt, but he undressed quickly and crawled into bed and took me in his arms and kissed me on the neck, then on my breasts. I’m proud of my breasts. They aren’t too large, and they aren’t too small, and I rouge the nipples nice and rosy.

  “La! You’re trembling all over!” I said.

  “It’s been so long,” he said.

  “We’ve plenty of time.”

  But Sam didn’t want to wait. He made love to me then.

  You laugh when I say “made love”? Well, that’s what he did. I had never before had such a tender time with a man. You may call it what you like, but what Sam did was make love to me. I kept wishing he was Joel.

  Later we sat up against the big feather pillows, and Sam poured us each a drink from the decanter. He rolled a cigarette and lit it and breathed out the smoke in a long sigh. “Your bed smells pretty,” he said.

  “Lavender,” I said.

  We sipped our whiskey slowly and didn’t say anything else. When our drinks were gone, Sam set the glasses on the table and shifted down into the bed and laid his head on my breasts. He made love to me again, and it was longer than before. When he finished he lay quietly inside me for a while. He smelled of old sweat. “You expecting somebody else tonight?” he asked.

  “We don’t make engagements. We just take what comes.”

  “I want to stay the night, then.”

  “All right.”

  I slapped him on the rump, and he moved away. I slipped on my dress and went downstairs barefoot. Business was slow, and Norene was pleased that Sam was staying. I went back to my room and locked the door and took off my dress again. “Turn off the gas,” he said.

  I made his breakfast myself and carried it to him. “Scrambled eggs!” he said. “I ain’t had them in a coon’s age.” I sat on the edge of the bed and watched him. He ate like he hadn’t had anything in a coon’s age. He drank the whole pot of coffee himself.

  “I told Norene you’d be here all day,” I said. “And tonight, too.”

  He smiled.

  “Is that all right?”

  “Yeah.”

  After breakfast I heated the water and poured it in Norene’s big brass bathtub for him. He splashed like a child. “If you get water on this carpet, Norene’ll kill you,” I said.

  He held the soap to his nose and sniffed it. “It’s been a long time. Soon I’ll be rich enough to do this whenever I want to.”

  I lathered his face and sat down on a stool beside the tub and tried to shave him, but he kept moving, like a child. “Get still, or I’ll cut your nose off.” He got still, like a little boy minding his mother.

  That night, long after I thought he was asleep, he rolled over and touched my shoulder. “Maude?” “Hmm?”

  “I want you to be my woman someday. Like you were Joel’s. Would you like that?”

  “Yes. When you can afford me.”

  He was dressing, standing by the door. “How much?” “Nothing for me. It was for old times. But Norene will want something.”

  He laid five double-eagles on the bureau. “Give her whatever she wants,” he said.

  Dallas was like a circus. Every politician was writing letters to the governor, demanding that every resource of the state be slung against poor Sam. They always sent copies to the newspapers, which always published them, along with the governor’s replies assuring us that we wouldn’t be murdered in our beds and that the precious railroads would prevail in the end. That’s not how they said it, but it’s what they said.

  Every tin badge in North Texas was in the city. The saloons and sporting houses were full of sheriffs, deputies, constables, city policemen from burgs I never heard of and farm boys toting old cap-and-ball pistols, who styled themselves “bounty hunters” and bragged that they would soon have the scalps of Sam Bass and his gang, and the reward money in their pockets. A couple of girls in our house received proposals of marriage from those idiots, who thought their prospects of future riches sufficient to buy themselves permanent professional bedfellows.

  There were reporters, too, from St. Louis and Chicago and Baltimore and New York. They were funny men who took themselves very seriously and imagined themselves on a dangerous adventure on the wild frontier. They wrote long, lurid dispatches about the desperate characters they found and interviewed at the bottom of their bottles. I had one of those, a young man from St. Louis. As soon as he finished his puny work on me, he asked, “Have you ever met Sam Bass?”

  “Of course,” I said.

  He jumped out of bed and rummaged through his clothes, his white rump glistening in the gaslight. He found his pad and pencil and climbed back into bed and asked, “What does he look like.”

  “He’s nine feet tall, and his face is blue. He can’t keep his hat on because of the horns on his head.” “Please be serious,” he said.

  “He’s a very large and powerful man. It’ll take a lot of bullets to bring him down. If you go with the posses, I hope you’ll arm yourself.”

  “Oh, I am armed,” he said. He sprang out of bed and rummaged in his clothing again and brought out a shiny little derringer with a mother-of-pearl handle and showed it to me.
<
br />   “How pretty!” I said.

  “My wife gave it to me. She worries about me.”

  Not all who came were fools, though. The governor sent Major John B. Jones, commander of the Frontier Battalion of the Texas Rangers, to Dallas to calm the people and organize the search. He brought several members of his battalion with him, and I feared for poor Sam when I saw them. La! They were tall, hard men who dressed in dark pantaloons and vests and hats. They bristled with pistols and knives, but they walked erect, unburdened by the weight. The weapons were as natural to them as parts of their bodies, and one unarmed would have been incomplete. They rarely spoke except to each other, and they walked with long strides, but the swing of their arms didn’t match their step. Their hands were never far from the sweat-stained wooden butts of their pistols. Their faces were burned darker than even the buffalo hunters’, and their pale eyes moved constantly and slowly, scanning their surroundings with a kind of calm deadliness. The Texas Rangers were older than the Republic of Texas itself and had spent more than forty years killing Mexicans and Indians and Yankees. They had begun hunting outlaws only recently, and the arrogance of Major Jones’s men told Dallas that they considered the job unworthy of them. They never came to our house.

  Some of the Pinkertons came, though. There were about forty, most of them from Chicago, headquartered in the Le Grand Hotel. They worked for the railroads, and had a sleek, big-city Yankee look that made them easy to distinguish from the bumpkins who followed them about, aping their dress and manner. La! One afternoon I saw two hicks in five-dollar suits riding up St. Paul Street. The beard of one of them flew off his face and fluttered to the ground! He jumped off his horse and grabbed it and shook the dust from it and stuffed it in his coat pocket. He heard me laugh and glared at me, then jumped back on his horse and galloped up St. Paul.

  The real Pinkertons were dangerous though. They didn’t have the cool, open deadliness of the Rangers, but they were crafty. When they looked at you, you felt guilty and a little afraid and became more careful in your talk. One, at least, hated all of us. “You don’t believe Sam Bass is just a simple robber, do you?” he asked.