Sam Bass
Sam Bass
Books By Bryan Woolley
NONFICTION
Texas Road Trip
Where I Come From
Generations
The Bride Wore Crimson
The Edge of the West
Where Texas Meets the Sea
The Time of My Life
We Be Here When the Morning Comes
FICTION
Sam Bass
November 22
Time and Place
Some Sweet Day
FOR CHILDREN
Mr. Green's
Magnificent Machine
Home is Where the Cat Is
Sam Bass
Bryan Woolley
Dzanc Books
5220 Dexter Ann Arbor Rd
Ann Arbor, MI 48103
www.dzancbooks.org
Copyright © 1983 by Bryan Woolley
All rights reserved, except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher.
Published 2015 by Dzanc Books
A Dzanc Books r
E
print Series Selection
eBooks ISBN-13: 978-1-941531-40-2
eBook Cover Designed by Awarding Book Covers
Published in the United States of America
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author
.
For my sons
Bryan and Patrick
in memory
of the summer of â78
Contents
Sam first came out to Texas, a cowboy for to be; A kinder-hearted fellow you seldom ever see.
âThe Ballad of Sam Bass
1878
Great God! what a fearful calling was theirs. How the angel mother of Sam Bass, from the battlements of Heaven, must have wept as she looked down upon him in his degradation and infamyâ¦
Charles L. Martin A
Sketch of Sam Bass, The
Bandit
1880
⦠this ubiquitous wraith, this knight of the road, this generous and open-handed highwaymanâ¦
Walter Prescott Webb,
The Texas Rangers
1935
Dad Egan
He had seen the dream many times before. It was night, and a horse of some dark color was galloping along the ridge of a long, flat mountain. The mountaintop was strewn with small boulders. Bushes and small trees grew everywhere. The horse's iron shoes struck fire from the rocks sometimes, but it never stumbled.
He was the rider, but he also was standing on the mountain and watching the horse's run, in that way that dreams have of letting you be in two places at once, both doing the thing being dreamed and seeing it done at the same time. As the rider, he felt his hair blown back by the wind of the horse's passage. He felt the wind against his cheeks, too, and in his eyes. He rode bareback and felt the movement of the animal under his legs and the coarseness of its mane between his fingers. The rhythm of the horse was very smooth, and the rocks and the brush seemed to offer no impediment at all to its progress along the ridge. The iron shoes striking fire from the rocks made no sound. As the watcher, he saw the rocks and trees and fire and the horse running. The animal had one spot of white on it, a stocking leg, the left hind one. It glowed in the moonlight as it moved across the ground like a small ghost. He saw his own face, too. It was as pale as the horse's leg and was smiling a smile of such abandon as to suggest madness.
Suddenly the horse would approach a cliff, and instead of stopping or turning aside it would plunge into the void. Not downward, as if falling, but straight out into the darkness, like an arrow, until the horse and rider were swallowed by the gloom.
The dream came to him years ago, when he was a boy on his uncle's farm in Indiana. It had appeared to him many times since then. It never varied in any detail.
It was always followed by another dream, or a second part of the same dream, that also was always the same.
It was still night in the same hilly country. But now the horse was standing in a corral. It was standing quietly, making no sound at all. Its stocking leg still glowed in the moonlight, and its chest and withers and flanks were flecked with foam. The rider was outside the fence now, gazing at the horse. He was tired. Then he noticed the dark shape of a small house next to the corral. A light was glowing behind a curtained window. The rider thought he had never been in that place before, but he walked to the house and opened the door without knocking, as if he knew he was expected there. He entered a narrow hall, longer than such a small house could have contained. The hall was dark, except for a light at the far end. Standing in front of the light was a woman. He couldn't see her face. Only the black silhouette of a woman wearing a long, straight skirt. “There's a horse for you in the corral,” he said. And she said, “Thank you.”
That was all. It wasn't particularly unusual, as dreams go. I've dreamed stranger dreams myself. During the war, I dreamed terrible dreams that made me sweat and wake up screaming. Sam's dream wasn't at all frightening. The first part, the running of the horse, made him feel light and free, he said. And the second part made him feel calm.
Sam told me about the dream not long after he arrived in Denton, before he went to work for me and came to live in my house. I was the first person in Denton to meet him, I guess. It was dusk, in the early fall of 1870, and I was sitting on the steps of the courthouse, taking the air. The courthouse was closed at that time of day, of course, but I liked to put the town to bed before I went home. I would inquire politely about the business of any strangers I found and make an early round of the saloons. Not to drink, you understand. Drink is the most dangerous thing an officer of the law can do. Liquor impairs a man's wit and strength when he needs them most, and in a place like Denton, where the forces of decency and the forces of perdition are so delicately balanced, a whiff of whiskey on the breath can destroy a sheriff at the polls as well. The law is the heaviest weight on decency's side of the scale, and the odor of sour mash on the breath of the law inspires a fear in decent people that the scale is tipping against them. In that dark time, only five years after the death of the Confederate States of America, when we were still trying to free ourselves from a carpetbag governor in Austin and a thuggish state police that poured salt into our wounds at every opportunity, it was especially important that the local law be decent and upstanding.
Beyond these professional and political considerations, I abstain from alcohol because I'm a family man, a man of property and a Christian and try to be a friend and worthy example in my own home and in the town and county. And I'm proud that although I was only thirty-six years old at the time, even older men chose to call me “Dad,” in place of my Christian name, William. That may be why Sam was so drawn to me. He hadn't called any man “Dad” in such a long time.
Anyway, I was rising from the courthouse steps, about to commence my round of the saloons, when a wagon entered the square. I knew the driver. He was Bob Mayes, who used to run a livery stable in Denton. He had given it up in a fit of homesickness two years before and had gone back to Mississippi. Now he had returned. His wife was on the wagon box beside him. Their sons, Little Bob and Scott, had shot up like saplings since they left. They had the appearance of men now, slouching in their saddles. I didn't know the third rider, a young man about Little Bob's age, eighteen or nineteen. I stepped up to the wagon and shook Bob's hand and welcomed him back to Denton. While Bob climbed down and I helped Mrs. Mayes, the boys dismounted and tied their horses to the courthouse hitching rail. Bob said, “Dad, meet Sam Bass. He's come from Indiana to be a cowboy, and he kept an eye out for Indians all the way across Arkansas.” He winked at me.
The lad grinned sheepishly as he shook my hand. He was slightly built, five-foot-eight or so, and stood with a stoop that made him look even smaller. He was wiry, though, and although he didn't grip my hand hard, I knew he was strong and used to hard work. His high cheekbones and black hair and eyes made me think that if he wanted to see an Indian, he should look in a mirror. I welcomed him and told him he had come to the right place to be a cowboy, for Denton is a sort of border between the farming country to the east and the cow country to the west. And if he wanted to see Indians, I said, he could ride on west and find plenty.
The boy didn't reply, and I turned back to Bob and his family and the kind of chat that old acquaintances get into when they haven't seen each other for a long time, inquiring after the health and prosperity of each other's families, comparing carpetbag governments and nigger problems in Texas and Mississippi, and things like that. I remember saying that so few men in Denton County had taken the oath of allegiance to the government in Washington that it was hard sometimes to find twelve white men for a jury. And he said the same was true in Mississippi.
Sam Bass stood listening for fifteen or twenty minutes, shifting from one foot to the other and looking at the ground. Finally he said, “Sheriff Egan, where can I go to get a job on a ranch?”
“Just stay in town and talk to the ranchers when they come in,” I said.
“I ain't got the money to hang around,” he said, “or the time.”
“Well, ride that way in the morning, then,” I said, pointing to the road westward out of the square, “and stop at every house you come to. They're far between, but you'll find somebody who can use you.”
“Thank you,” he said. “I'll start now.”
“You won't get far before dark,” I said. “You'd better stay the night here and leave in the morning.”
“No, I'll go now and get a jump on the day,” he said. He shook hands all around, thanked Bob for letting him ride along with him, and promised to look up Little Bob and Scott the next time he came to town. Then he mounted his little buckskin horse and rode out.
“That boy,” said Bob, watching him. “He's going to amount to something real fast, or he's going to bust a gut trying.”
Sam was hired by Bob Carruth, fourteen miles west of Denton, and I must have seen him sometime during that fall or winter, but if I did, I don't remember it. Maybe I didn't. Some of the cowboys stay on the ranches for months at a time without coming into town, especially those who want to keep their pay for a while. I wish they all would. The town needs their money, of course, and I guess we'd be pretty bad off if they just stayed out on the range or went elsewhere for their good-timing. But I dread seeing them, especially when they arrive in bunches. They get drunk, and then start playing cards. Men who gamble are fools, and men who gamble while drunk are bigger fools. They forget the value of their money while they're losing it, but when it's gone they remember how hard they worked for it and resent the ease with which it's taken from them. They get mad and fight. Sometimes they kill, and then head into the cross-timbers or light out to the west, where, likely as not, their scalps wind up in the belts of the Comanche or the Kiowa. There's no telling how many men in Denton have been wasted on whiskey and cards, some slowly, over a number of years under their awful influence, and others extinguished suddenly in the violence inspired by them. “Wine is a mocker,” saith the Lord. And whiskey is worse.
Sam had been drinking when I saw him next, and he had won a few dollars at the card table. He didn't look happy, though, when he sat down beside me on the courthouse steps. “Well,” I asked, “how do you like being a cowboy?”
He was rolling a cigarette, and he licked the paper and stuck it down and twisted the ends before he answered, “I don't.”
“What's the matter?”
“The hands at my uncle's sawmill in Indiana told stories about Texas,” he said. “So did the river men in St. Louis and the boys at the sawmill in Mississippi. They all made it sound like heaven, and said they was coming here someday. But Texas ain't nothing but a barren place where everything bites, and cowboying ain't no more fun than standing in a fire.”