Sam Bass

by Bryan Woolley

  Sam said, “If enough of them posses get together, they might come right up the creek and in the front door.”

  “A lot of them would die,” Seab said.

  “Yeah, but they might do it. Or they might just squat in the mouth of the hollow and starve us out.”

  “I wonder if those Rangers were regulars or Junius Peak’s bunch,” I said.

  “What’s the difference?” Arkansas asked.

  “A lot of difference.”

  “I’ll say!” Henry said.

  “Let’s get out,” Sam said. “Tonight.”

  We toted our remaining supplies up the slope and buried them under rocks at the foot of the bluff. We packed little to take with us. Henry said, “Wait a minute. I ain’t going to waste all that venison.” He went down to the creek and returned a few minutes later with the backstrap of the deer. He wrapped the meat in a flour sack and rolled it up in his blankets.

  We rode silently in the darkness, alert for sight or sound or smell of a posse’s camp, but there was none. Jim Murphy’s house was dark, but the black forms of several horses moved about the corral. We dismounted and left our horses with Arkansas and moved quietly to the fence and examined the beasts, to make sure they weren’t a posse’s mounts. We recognized them all as Jim’s. “Remember them,” Sam whispered. “We might need them.”

  Henry insisted on seeing his family before we went wherever we were going, so we headed over to Henderson Murphy’s place, keeping to the roads. We felt sure the people in the few lighted houses along the way would assume we were a posse heading home from the hunt. When we reached Henderson’s house Sam took some gold from his belt and gave it to Henry. The two of them dismounted and walked toward the house. A lamp shone through one of the two front windows.

  “Who is it?” The voice came from the shadows in the yard. It coughed a hard, rattling cough.

  “Sam Bass, Mr. Murphy. And Henry.”

  “Step into the light.”

  The old man came around a bush, bearing a shotgun under his arm. He stopped and coughed long and hard into a large handkerchief. “Hello, Sam,” he said. “Hello, Henry.”

  “We’re getting out, Mr. Murphy,” Sam said.

  “Don’t blame you. Three posses passed today. Where you going?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “No, I guess you can’t.”

  “Henry wanted to see his family.”

  The old man’s face was dark and wrinkled, framed by a mop of white hair that glowed in the yellow light from the window. His stoop was worse than Sam’s. His chest seemed caved in. “The kids is asleep,” he said. “Sarah!”

  The door opened immediately, and a tall, skinny woman came down the steps. Her face was as wrinkled as the old man’s, but pale. Strings of hair hung down her forehead. Without a word she hugged Henry and kissed him. They spoke in low voices, and Sam and Mr. Murphy walked away from them, to us. “Evening, boys,” the old man said. He looked us each in the eyes. “Ain’t met this one,” he said, indicating Arkansas.

  “Arkansas Johnson, sir.”

  “Ah, yes.” He laid his hand on my stirrup. “How are you, Frank?”

  “Fine, Mr. Murphy.”

  He nodded at Barnes. “Seaborn Barnes, right?”

  “Yes, sir, Mr. Murphy,” Seab said.

  Mr. Murphy nodded. “Be careful, hear?”

  Henry kissed his wife again and laid the gold in her hand. “Thank you, Sam,” she called.

  “Henry earned it, ma’am,” Sam said. He and Henry mounted, and we trotted away.

  Instantly I knew it was a gun muzzle against my cheek. I reached for my pistol, but the cold metal pressed deeper into my skin, and the quiet voice said, “Don’t.” I moved my hand away from my gun, and the cold metal left my cheek, and I turned my head on my blanket. His face, hideous, was grinning. Hair almost white hung to his shoulders. His short beard across his broad chin was whiter. Only three teeth, all of them brown, all in the lower jaw, rose from red gums that glistened wetly in the early sun. One eye squinted, yellow as a cat’s. The other was gone, its socket covered by a greasy black patch. A Confederate infantryman’s overcoat, too warm for the season, sagged from his narrow shoulders. The heavy shoe near my head was split just above the sole, and I saw the pink toes. Where the other shoe would have been, a homemade wooden peg stood. The grimy hands held a double-barrel shotgun inches from my eyes. “Morning,” he whispered. I moved my head carefully, looking for my companions. “They’re asleep,” he whispered.

  “Who are you?”

  “Wetsel. This is my place.”

  Now I saw the tiny log cabin fifty yards behind him, and a barn farther back, unnoticed when we unrolled our blankets, too tired and wary to build a fire or even eat. “Who are you?” he asked.

  “Rangers. Looking for the train robbers.”

  “Ah.” His yellow eye moved to our horses, still saddled, tied in the woods, and my companions, motionless under their blankets.

  “Where are we?” I asked.

  “Bottoms of Little Elm. Wake the others. We’ll have breakfast.”

  I started to pick up my pistol and put it in my belt, but he said, “Leave it.”

  I moved from Sam to Seab to Arkansas to Henry, nudging them with my toe and saying quietly, “Don’t go for the gun. I’m covered.” They rolled out, confused. “This is Mr. Wetsel,” I said. “He says he doesn’t mind Rangers at his table.”

  Wetsel shook our hands, grinning. “Don’t get many visitors. Come up to the house.”

  “You fixed breakfast yet?” Henry asked.

  “No, but it won’t take long.”

  “We got venison. You want it?”

  The yellow eye widened. “Ah. Bring it along.”

  Henry picked up the backstrap and got his pistol, too, and stuck it in his waistband. Wetsel saw him but didn’t object, so the rest of us got our guns. We walked slowly up the gentle slope, keeping pace with the old man. I noticed a plowed field behind the cabin and asked, “How do you follow a mule?”

  “With a deal of difficulty and a lot of cussing,” he said.

  “The war, I guess.”

  “Yep. Vicksburg. Grant’s grapeshot blowed it clean away.”

  “The eye, too?”

  “Nope. A knife done that.”

  The cabin reeked of smoke and rancid grease. A yellow cat lay on a straw mattress in the corner. “The coffee’s done already,” Wetsel said. He served three tin cups, and poured for the rest of us into chipped china bowls. He laid the backstrap on the rough table, sliced thick chunks with a Bowie knife and slapped them into a skillet on the stove.

  “Been here long?” Seab asked.

  “Since right after the war. Drove an ox wagon all the way from Alabama. Ever been to Alabama?”

  “No.”

  “Well, don’t bother. Nothing but carpetbaggers and scalawags. Worse than here.” He poked the hunks of meat with a long fork. “I hope you don’t catch that Bass boy. He’s just doing what the rest of us would do if we had the gumption, getting back at them Yankee railroads. Wouldn’t mind doing it myself.”

  Sam smiled. “It’s against the law.”

  “Yeah. I ain’t blaming you. But it’d be funner than hell, hoorawing them Yankees. You caught sight of him yet?” “Not yet.”

  “Well, I hope you don’t. I hope he gets richer than Midas. Somebody ought to get rich down here, other than carpetbaggers and scalawags. I hate to see the Rangers on their side.”

  “Well, he’s giving us a run,” Sam said.

  “I hope he runs clean away. I sure do.”

  Wetsel had only chair, so we ate outside on the ground. The venison was tougher than the old man’s shoe, but he seemed to chew it without much difficulty. The cornbread and molasses were good, and the morning was cool and bright. We ate quickly, then Sam stood up. “We better move. The state pays our meals, Mr. Wetsel. How much we owe?”

  “Nothing. But if you see that boy, just ride the other way.”

  Sam handed
him a double-eagle. “That seems a fair price.”

  Wetsel stared at the coin, then squinted at Sam. “Ah. I figured.”

  “Don’t say what you know, Mr. Wetsel.” Wetsel grinned, showing the three teeth and the wet gums and tongue. “You bet I won’t. Don’t forget your meat.” “You keep it.”

  “Well, much obliged, then. Stay clear of trouble, hear? Keep all your legs and eyes.”

  We watered the horses in the Little Elm. The old man watched from the slope below his cabin, his brass buttons gleaming.

  The next weeks are only a blur in my mind. We were in the saddle constantly, riding through the swamps and jungles that are the bottoms of the Little Elm, the Elm Fork of the Trinity, the Clear and the Hickory. Sometimes days passed between our glimpses of real daylight, so closely did we stick to the dank and gloomy woods. The posses pursuing us were large and numerous. One, hot on our trail, would cross the trail of another whose tracks in the spongy ground obliterated our own. Sometimes one posse would follow another for a day or more, believing their fellow hunters to be us. They weren’t working together on a plan to capture us, I guess. Each group seemed to be wandering alone, intent on winning the reward and the glory before their competitors could get them. All we had to do was stay out of their way. It wasn’t long before we knew the bottoms as well as each other’s faces, and sometimes we would sit quietly and watch a posse pass within yards of us, Sam leaning over Jenny’s neck, peeking through the leaves and grinning like a fox.

  One day Dad Egan himself passed within forty yards of us in the company of only one other man. “Why, it’s my old pard, Army,” Sam whispered.

  Seab pulled his rifle from the saddle boot. “Let’s take them.”

  “Go ahead,” Sam replied. But as Seab raised the rifle to his shoulder, Sam laid his hand on the barrel and said, “No. There ain’t no use.”

  “If it was the other way, he’d cut you down,” Seab said. “Well, it ain’t the other way.”

  So we watched them ride slowly on, Dad sitting his horse erect as a soldier, and Army, a poorer horseman, waggling his feet in his stirrups as if they didn’t fit him right. They looked clean and fresh, and probably hadn’t been on the trail long. I envied them that. I hadn’t been out of my clothes for weeks. They stuck to my body. My beard itched on my cheeks and neck, and I constantly scratched it. If old one-eyed Wetsel hadn’t been fooled into thinking we were Rangers on that morning that was now dim past to me, it was a cinch that no one would think us anything but desperados now.

  But those times when hunger forced us to risk a stop at some country store, we learned that if we had no friends we also had no enemies in that region except the posses. The storekeepers, careful to show no signs of recognition, would mention casually the passage of other horsemen on recent days, tell us how many they were and where they seemed to be going, and would offer bits of news they had gathered from them when they stopped. “Billy Collins was arrested the other day,” they would say. “Looks like they’re picking up everybody who’s ever knowed Bass. Glad I ain’t seen him.” Some even hinted that their hearts were with us. And in that way that country people have of repeating each other’s best phrases, those we had robbed had acquired a name. They were the “high-and-mighties,” fat, rich men who were thought responsible for the poverty of the farmers and the storekeepers. As with old Wetsel, they were considered Yankees and scalawags who were plundering the broken South, and the veterans of the Lost Cause and their children weren’t at all unhappy that the “high-and-mighties” had become the victims for a change. They accepted Sam’s gold without question or complaint.

  Soon Sam began to see himself as they saw him. He spread his money around more and more lavishly, as if our robberies hadn’t been for our own gain but part of a campaign to seize wealth from the enemies of the people and return it to its rightful owners. He hadn’t thought it through that far, of course. He just liked to be called “generous,” and had forgotten that our attacks on the trains hadn’t made us rich and that his Union Pacific gold wouldn’t last forever.

  When it appeared that horsemen were multiplying like flies in the Little Elm country, we moved back northwestward, toward the Hickory bottoms. We stopped at a store near Bolivar, owned by a man we knew, and bought enough provisions to last several days, and some cooking utensils. We picked a campsite in a ravine on Hickory. Seab and Arkansas and Henry were so famished that they decided to gather wood and get the cookfire going before they tended their horses. Sam and I unsaddled and laid our saddles and saddlebags under a tree and led my bay and Jenny to the creek, then tied them on the bank. We were about to return to the fire to help with supper, but Sam said, “What the hell. Let them do it.” We lay down on the grass to enjoy the last rays of the day’s sun. Henry stooped to put the pot on the fire. Seab was cutting something. Arkansas was coming out of the woods carrying firewood. They had unrolled their blankets, but their horses stood saddled just beyond the fire. Henry looked at us and said something about loafing. Seab laughed.

  Then came a voice from the woods: “Throw up your hands! This is the law!”

  Henry dropped to one knee, drew his pistol and fired twice toward the voice. Arkansas threw down his firewood and sprang for his rifle, which was on his blanket. Seab was lying belly down by the fire, looking. “Jesus! There’s dozens!” he shouted.

  The bullets raised puffs of dust around Seab and Henry. One hit the fire and toppled the pot. Arkansas bolted for his horse and mounted. Seab ran for his horse, too. They rode to Sam and me and stretched their arms to us, lifting their feet from their stirrups to let us mount behind them. Henry fired two more shots, then mounted and rode past Seab and me. My bay and Jenny were whinnying in panic.

  A mile or so into the brush, we stopped and listened but heard nothing. “We’ll wait a while, then go back and have a look,” Sam said.

  “I think we better keep going,” Henry said.

  “No. I want Jenny back.”

  We waited for two hours by my watch, then rode back, listening. A hundred yards from our camp we dismounted and took off our spurs and crept forward, our pistols drawn. Our fire had been scattered, but the coals still glowed. We heard not a sound, and crept to the very edge of the brush, then into the open. Our horses were gone. So were Sam’s saddle and mine, our blankets and provisions. Everything was gone except the pot that had been on the fire. It lay on its side among the scattered coals. Then I realized I had lost my medical saddlebags, and I walked away from the others into the woods and almost wept. I must have stayed for some time, for Seab came looking for me. “Sam feels bad, too,” he said. “He lost Jenny. We all feel bad.” He steered me back to the campsite. Henry and Arkansas were talking to Sam, but he wasn’t listening. “Come on, let’s go,” Henry was saying.

  “Yeah, that posse’s out there somewhere,” Arkansas said. Sam looked at me and said, “Our luck’s turning, pard.” Seab said, “Well, it’ll turn even more if we don’t get out of here.”

  We had to travel slowly, despite the posse at our heels. We didn’t talk much, and I kept thinking of what Dr. Ross had written: I’ve given you all you need to be a physician in this wild land. All except a cool, comforting hand (which you may have already) and a beard. And, O yes, a black coat, which I urge you to purchase….

  It was all gone. Even the coat. Even my hands were cracked and calloused from weeks of clutching the reins and pushing thorns and branches away from my face. All I had was a stubbie of beard, which itched. But I tried hard to put those things out of my mind, and may even have slept. I remember my head on Seab’s shoulder and my hands pressed against his hard belly, and his warmth.

  When the first thin line of dawn was on the horizon we arrived at Henderson Murphy’s. The house was dark and, still skittish from our night’s trouble, we left the horses with Arkansas and approached on foot, guns drawn. Seab and Henry hunkered behind the horse trough, and Sam and I climbed the steps. He knocked, but no one answered, so he knocked again. There was movement insi
de, and a woman’s voice faintly called, “Who is it?”

  Sam hesitated, then replied, “Sam Bass.”

  Mrs. Underwood opened the door. “Where’s Henry?” I motioned for Henry and Barnes, and they joined us on the porch. “Thank you, Jesus!” She embraced her husband.

  “Is Mr. Murphy here?” Sam asked.

  “They taken him away, Sam. And Jim, too. They said it was for helping you.”

  Sam’s small body seemed to shrink. “When?”

  “Yesterday. They was taking them to Tyler, they said.”

  “Who taken them, Sarah?”

  “Dad Egan. And that brother of his, Army.”

  Sam glanced at Seab, who stared back at him very steadily.

  “Lord, Henry, what’s it coming to?” Mrs. Underwood groaned. Henry patted her shoulder but said nothing.

  “Is there any horses, Sarah?” Sam asked.

  “No. They taken them, too.” She wiped her eyes with her hands. “You boys come in. I’ll fix you a bite to eat.”

  “We better not,” Sam said, “but if you got a bit we could take with us, we’d be obliged.”

  Mrs. Underwood and Henry went into the house and closed the door. They returned in a few minutes, Henry carrying a lumpy cloth sack and a skillet. He kissed his wife without a word, and we returned to Arkansas and the horses. “More trouble?” he asked.

  “More trouble,” I said.

  We rode on to Jim Murphy’s place and cleaned him out, taking the seven horses in his corral, two saddles, a pack saddle, three good rifles, several boxes of ammunition, blankets and quite a bit of food. “Old Jim must have knowed we was coming,” Henry said. We loaded a packhorse with all he could hold, and Seab and Arkansas switched their saddles from their worn-out mounts to fresh ones after Sam and I had taken our pick of the bunch. Riding up Cove Hollow well mounted and armed, I felt we had regained some control over our lives, although Jim’s unknowing hospitality hadn’t really made up our losses.

  The tiny corral at the cabin wouldn’t hold ten horses, so Sam decided to keep five saddled at all times and tied in the woods near the door. “Last night ain’t going to happen again,” he said.