Sam Bass

by Bryan Woolley

  They didn’t say nothing for the longest time. Sam just slumped there holding his reins. Jackson and Barnes, still holding their guns, didn’t move a muscle. It was so still I could hear a mockingbird in one of the oaks. Finally Jackson said, “Jim, I would’ve done the same thing myself.”

  “No!” Barnes screamed. “It’s too goddamned thin! How does it sound to you, Eph?”

  Sam pushed his hat back and scratched his head. “I don’t know how to fix that up under my hair. What do you say, Frank?”

  “You and me have knowed Jim a long time,” he said. “Sometimes he’s been the only friend we had. I just don’t think he’d give us away.”

  “I think he would!” Barnes said. “And we’d best kill him while we’ve got the chance!”

  Sam looked me straight in the eye and said, “All right, he goes.”

  Jackson aimed his gun at Barnes’s chest. “Well, he don’t go. You ain’t killing Jim without killing me, too. We talked him into leaving his home and coming with us, and I’ll be damned if I’ll let you kill him. He’s been like a brother to me, and we mustn’t hurt him.”

  “Well, I don’t trust my brother no more,” Barnes said.

  “He’s been a brother to all of us,” Jackson said.

  “Hell! Hell! Blast the brother!” Sam was in a rage like I’d never seen. “I got no brothers! I don’t need no brothers! They’re just brothers for my money!”

  Jackson said quietly, “I’m your brother, Eph.”

  There was a spot of spit at the corner of Sam’s mouth. He wiped it away. “Yeah, Frank, you’re my brother,” he said. He looked down and didn’t say nothing for a long time, like he was studying his saddle horn. Then he looked at Jackson. “If you say Jim’s all right, then he’s all right with me, too.” He turned and started down the road.

  Barnes cussed and uncocked his gun and rode to catch him. Jackson stayed beside me like he was protecting me. In a few minutes we rode into a dark bottom, and I become alarmed. I thought Sam and Barnes might turn around and shoot me. Jackson must’ve noticed my fear, for he said, “Don’t worry. I won’t let them hurt you.” Then he said, “But it was nearly hell, wasn’t it?” He leaned to me and whispered, “If you ever do lay a plan to catch anybody, you’ll have some place for me to get out, I know.”

  I didn’t know whether he meant it or was trying to trick me. I said, “I don’t want to catch any of you.” “Of course not,” he said.

  We traveled into the dismalest swamp I ever seen and was too busy looking out for snakes and bogs and fighting off the mosquitos to worry much about the fate of Sam Bass, or Jim Murphy, either. I don’t know why Sam led us into such a place. The thickets and vines was thicker than in the bottoms around Denton, and the ground was so wet and soft our horses tired quick, fighting their way over it. Sometimes we was in black water up to our stirrups, and cattails and long, sharp-bladed grass growed all around. We couldn’t see nothing ahead but more of the same, and I was afraid a water moccasin was going to take a nip at one of the horses, then we would be in a fix. It was the evilest place I ever seen. We was still in it when darkness fell, and we stayed in it so long I figured Sam must be lost.

  Sometime after midnight we rose up on high ground again and stopped. I was bone tired and didn’t get a wink of sleep. I laid there slapping at the mosquitos and thinking back on the day. It’s a terrible thing not to be trusted. It was the first time I could remember not being trusted, and the showdown on the road filled my mind with fear. I thought of Daddy in his bed in Denton County and could hear him coughing, and I dearly wished I was with him. I cussed the day I met Sam Bass and swore to Almighty God that if I lived to get out of the mess I was in I’d live an upright and decent life and choose my friends with more care. I wished I could fulfill my bargain with Major Jones and begin that new life right now. But till Sam give me some idea where we was going and what we was going to do, I had no message for June Peak or Dad Egan and no way to send one. I was stuck. Maybe Sam had a plan that everybody knowed but me, but I doubted it. We seemed to be wandering without no aim at all, and I couldn’t believe there was a point or purpose to the hours we’d spent in that swamp. I knowed we was somewheres east of Dallas, and that was all I knowed. We was leaving Sam’s old stomping grounds and headed God knows where, while the Rangers and Dad Egan’s men was camped miles and miles away. At times that night I wished I was dead, but the memory of Seab Barnes’s pistol aimed at me always drove that thought away.

  The others must’ve had an easier night than me, for they was in fine fettle when we got up. Barnes was quiet and still sullen from our set-to the day before, but Sam and Jackson laughed and joked as we saddled up. “Well, boys, it’s time to go down the country a ways and cash in these old pistols of ours and get us a good roll of greenbacks,” Sam said. “Seab, how much you reckon your old pistol will draw?”

  “I don’t know,” Barnes muttered. “About ten thousand, I guess.”

  “Hell! I want at least twenty thousand for mine,” Sam said.

  And Jackson said, “Well, if you scrubs can get that much, I figure Jim and me can draw at least fifty thousand apiece, because we’re the best looking. The old banker won’t be afraid to trust us.”

  Sam laughed. “What do you reckon that old banker will say when we tell him we want to cash in these old pistols?”

  “Don’t know,” Jackson said. “What will he say?”

  “Well, when I drop mine up to his ear, he’ll throw his old top to one side and wall his eyes like a dying calf, and he’ll say, ‘Well, here’s the boys! They want a little money! The damn old express company can’t furnish enough for them, and I guess I’ll have to give them some.’”

  That convinced me all over again that Sam did have some plan in mind, so as I rode alongside Jackson all day I tried in roundabout ways to find out what it was. But either there wasn’t no plan or Jackson was cagey enough to figure what I was up to, for he told me nothing. It was a spooky day. Sam always rode just ahead of us by hisself, and Barnes rode always behind Jackson and me. I glanced over my shoulder at him from time to time, and he was always looking straight at me. I knowed he was watching every move I made and listening to every word I said. I knowed he was looking for an excuse to kill me, and if he found one maybe he’d shoot first this time and consult with Sam and Jackson later.

  We pushed on toward Rockwall, and when we sighted the town Sam sent Barnes ahead to buy some canned fruit and eggs and canned salmon and a bottle of whiskey. “We’re cutting south from here,” he told him, “so just ride south when you get the goods, and you’ll find us. We’ll camp early, so it won’t take long.”

  I was glad to hear him mention early camp, for it was beginning to drizzle, and I knowed it would be a dark night. If we wasn’t in camp by sunset we’d probably spend another night lost and wandering. We pulled off the road a couple of miles south of town and settled on the bank of a little creek. Jackson and me rushed around trying to grab enough firewood before it got too wet, and Sam was trying to get the fire going. I’d just dropped my load of wood by the fire, and Jackson was walking toward Sam and me with his own when he stopped stock still and stared and said, “Look!” He dropped his wood and pointed, and Sam and me looked. Rising out of the bushes, hard to see in the mist, was two tall beams with another beam fixed across them.

  “What is it?” Sam said. We went over by Jackson and stood staring at the thing. Then Jackson walked toward it, and we followed after him. We pushed our way about forty yards through the wet bushes, and then we seen what it was. It was a gallows. I knowed that as soon as I seen the platform and the trap door hanging open like a tongue lolling out of a mouth. It was an old one. Its heavy timbers was dark, almost black in streaks where the water was running down them. But hanging from the beam that was fixed across the uprights was a brand new rope. About two foot of rope was hanging there, and the end looked like it’d been cut. Drops of water dripped from it through the open trap door. That gallows had been used, and not long a
go.

  We gawked at it for the longest time, not saying nothing. Sam stared at it real solemn, his mouth hanging open like the trap door. It was raining harder, and water was dripping off his hat-brim and soaking the back of his shirt. Just then, Barnes hollered, and Jackson yelled, “Over here!”

  Barnes was saying something while he was coming through the bushes, but none of us was paying attention. And when he seen what we was looking at, he gawked, too. I knowed every man of us wasn’t thinking on nothing but the man that had swung there, maybe only a day before, and how he felt while he swung, and what his last thought might’ve been. And what happened after that thought. “Don’t unpack, Seab. We’re getting out of here,” Sam said. We pushed our way back through the bushes and packed what we’d unpacked and killed our fire. Without another word we climbed on our horses and headed south toward Terrell without another glance at that gallows. But the horrible sight stayed in my mind, and I guess it did with the others, too, for none of us said nothing at all. The rain was blowing, and lightning was cracking around us, and we didn’t stop for nothing till we was three or four miles on down the way.

  It was useless to try to find dry wood, and none of us seemed in a mood to eat. Barnes fetched the jug, and we set in a little circle under two blackjack trees with our blankets draped over our heads like tents, and passed the jug around. After three or four pulls on the jug I was sleepy, so I wrapped my blanket close around me and laid down where I was and put my hat over my face to keep out the rain. I heared Jackson say, “We’ll be lucky if we don’t all get the croup,” and then I dropped right off.

  I don’t know how long I slept or what woke me. Maybe it was the rain when it stopped, or the voices. I heared the voices for some time, I think, before I realized what they was saying. And Barnes was saying, “It was a sign, Sam, I tell you, Murphy’s a Jonah.”

  “It was a sign, all right,” Sam answered. “I knowed soon as I seen it. But that don’t mean old Jim had nothing to do with it.”

  “It was a warning, Sam, and if we don’t do nothing about it, we’ll die. It’s plain as that. We got to kill him now.”

  “Yeah, you’re right.” I heared a click then, and knowed somebody had cocked a pistol. They say in moments like that your whole life passes in front of your eyes, but all I remember is the stink of my wet hat over my face, and I closed my eyes real tight, waiting for the bullet.

  “If you kill him, you’ve got to kill me, too.” That was Jackson. No bullet come, and nobody said nothing else. I would save Jackson, I thought, if I could find a way.

  After breakfast Sam and Jackson rode to Terrell to look at the bank and see if it was worth our trouble. I wasn’t tickled to see them go. I thought Barnes might murder me while they were gone, then make up an excuse to tell them when they returned. Also, if we was to rob the Terrell bank, I would be in trouble with Major Jones, for I hadn’t had no chance to telegraph him, and he’d think I welched on our deal and joined Sam’s gang in truth.

  I tried to strike up talk with Barnes, thinking if I showed him I was friendly he might decide I wasn’t such a bad egg after all. Of course I didn’t let on that I’d heared his talk the night before. I played like everything was fine and that I was pleased to be on the scout with him. But he didn’t bite. He answered with grunts, and then stopped answering at all and walked off to the horses. He curried his, the one we’d stole from Bill Mounts, and then set down on the ground and tinkered with his rigging, making some little repair or other. I knowed he was just keeping as far from me as he could, so I set down by the fire and drunk coffee and whittled on a cedar stick.

  Sam and Jackson was gone a couple of hours, and come back with crackers and canned peaches and clean shirts for everybody. Jackson was wearing a new low-crown black hat. He called it a “doctor hat,” and it looked good on him, wearing it the way he did, cocked over one eye. He was a handsome boy in spite of his dirty clothes and the stubble of whiskers he had, but he didn’t look like no doctor. A gambler, maybe, or a whorehouse piano player. “They got a bank?” Barnes asked.

  “Yeah, but it ain’t much,” Sam said. “We’ll look for better.”

  Barnes asked a couple of questions about it, but Sam answered in a vague way. I figured he was still spooked by that gallows and wanted to get as far away from it as he could before practicing his trade again, and that was fine with me. So after we ate we rode off to Kaufman.

  We went into camp in the early afternoon, and Sam sent Barnes and me into the town to look for a bank. I was tired of being in Barnes’s company by myself because of the bad feeling he had, and as we was riding along I said, “Seab, I sure wish you wasn’t so down on me. I’d like to be your friend.” But he just looked the other way and said nothing.

  We looked around the town, but didn’t find no bank. So we put our horses up in the livery stable and went to the barbershop and got shaved, then found the biggest store in town and bought new pantaloons and coats to go with the shirts Sam and Jackson had brung us. I wrote my name on a slip of paper with a pencil I had and put the paper in the pocket of my old pantaloons and left my old clothes in a pile in the little room where I put on the new ones, hoping it would serve as a clue if the Rangers come through looking for our trail.

  The man that sold us the clothes was old and shriveled and bald and white all over, except the green eyeshade and red sleeve garters he wore. He was so rickety you could knock him down with a feather. When he taken our money and went into a little room behind the counter, he left the door open, and we seen him taking our change out of a safe in there. It was a big safe, and I figured maybe that was where the town kept its money, but I didn’t say nothing to Barnes. But he figured like I did, and when we got back to camp, the first thing he did was tell Sam about the safe.

  “Well, I reckon we better go back and look into that,” Sam said. So next morning him and Jackson and me went back to Kaufman, leaving Barnes alone at the camp. Jackson and Sam went and got a shave, then I showed them the store. The same old man was behind the counter, and he sold Sam and Jackson some new clothes, too. When he taken their money he said to me, “Wasn’t you in here yesterday, young man?”

  “Yessir,” I said.

  “Well, you left your old clothes here. Do you want them?”

  “Nossir.”

  “I’ll throw them out, then.”

  I knowed if the old man found the paper with my name on it, it wouldn’t mean nothing to him. So there went my clue.

  The old man taken the money from Sam and Jackson and stepped into the little room. This time he opened the safe door wider, and we got a good look inside. When we left the store, Sam said, “Well, boys, there wasn’t much in that safe but dust. That old man barely had enough to give us our change. Blast this country! It ain’t worth a fig!”

  So we set out for Ennis and camped that night between Chambers Creek and East Fork, then headed for Trinidad Crossing, where there was a ferry across the Fork. But the water was as high as it was upriver a few days earlier, and the ferryman told us his cable across the river was broke and the boat wasn’t running.

  “We’ll just swim it, then,” Sam said, and he headed his mare into the water. We swam about a third of the way across, and then the horses turned downstream. We turned them back against the current again, but they turned downstream again. The ferryman stood on the bank, laughing at us thrashing around out there and getting nowhere. “We got wet for nothing, boys,” Sam said. “If Jenny says it’s too strong, then it’s too strong.”

  So we returned to shore and went looking for a grassy spot where we could lay back in the sun and dry off. We passed a farmhouse close to the road, and there was a pile of watermelons under a tree in the yard and a lot of people setting in the shade eating them. “Some party!” Jackson hollered at them.

  “You bet!” said a big man I taken to be the owner of the place. “Come join, us!

  “What’s the celebration?” Jackson asked.

  “Why, man, it’s the Fourth of July!”<
br />
  So we got down, and Sam introduced us around as cattlemen from Wise County.

  “Wise?” the farmer said. “Ain’t that up in Sam Bass country?”

  “That’s right.”

  “They caught that boy yet?”

  “Not that I heared,” Sam said.

  The man handed us hunks of watermelon and said, “Well, he’ll make another strike soon. I don’t give a damn how many trains he robs, just so he lets the citizens alone.”

  “From what I’ve heared,” Sam said, “I don’t reckon he bothers nobody but them Yankee railroads.”

  We set under the trees with the farmer and several other men that I taken to be brothers and sons and talked cattle and ate watermelon. There must’ve been two dozen kids around the place, running races and playing tag, and a bunch of women on the porch that giggled and talked in low voices except when they was hollering at the kids. It was a pleasant afternoon. Jackson beat four of the young men in a watermelon seed spitting contest, and him and Sam laid aside their weapons and coats and rassled some of the kids, taking on three or four of them at a time. I didn’t see how they could do it, having ate as much as they did, but they laughed and hollered as much as the kids. Towards sundown some of the kin loaded their younguns and wives into their wagons and taken off, but some was going to spend the night. “I ain’t got no room in the house,” the farmer told us, “but you’re welcome to spread your blankets under the trees. It’s going to be a hot night, anyhow.”

  We accepted, and he brought out the whiskey jug and passed it around amongst the men that was left. Before he taken his first swig he raised the jug and said, “Well, here’s to the Republic. I wish to God she was the Confederacy.”

  We all said, “Amen!” and then drunk a while and had supper and talked cattle and politics some more. Then the farmer and the other men invited us to stay for breakfast in the morning and went inside. While we was spreading our blankets, Sam said, “I hope them kids knows someday that they was rassling with Sam Bass hisself.”