Sam Bass (15 page)

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.

“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.

He was stretched on my sheets. His soft, pale body was absolutely still, and our brief exertion hadn't disturbed a hair of his oily, center-parted hair. But for his spent sex lolling against his thigh, you would have thought him dressed and relaxing in an office.

I didn't reply. We hadn't been talking about Sam.

“It's a plot,” he said. “Against the North. The United States.” He smirked, but there was no humor in his eyes. “You Rebs never give up, do you? Bass is out there raising money for another try at us, isn't he? And he's not the only one.”

“That's ridiculous!” I laughed, but he didn't.

“The South is full of men like him. Texas is the worst. Nothing but thieves and brigands from Marse Robert's ragtag mob, hating our guts and waiting for another try.”

I pictured him in some Chicago saloon, his feet crossed on the table, saying these things. “I was at Second Bull Run,” he said. “I've never forgiven them. I never will.”

I got out of bed and started dressing. “It may interest you to know that Sam Bass is a Yankee,” I said.

He cocked his eyebrow. “Oh? Where from?”

“Indiana.”

“There are many Copperheads in Indiana.” He swung his heavy legs out of the bed and reached for his underwear. “A Copperhead's a Northerner who believes in your holy Southern cause,” he said. “In other words, a snake.”

“Sam's too young to be a soldier or a Copperhead or anything else,” I said.

“You called him by his first name.” He was buttoning his collar in front of my mirror.

I felt myself blush. “I've heard a lot about him.”

He said nothing else until he was dressed and had laid his hand on the doorknob. Then he gave me the closest thing he had shown me to a smile. “Do you know what Southern women are?” he asked.

“What?”

“Whores.”

The man frightened me, and when the
Herald
said William Pinkerton, the great detective himself, had come to Texas to capture Sam, I was sure he was my customer with the oily hair and the heavy legs, and I worried that I had told him something important. I told Norene I wouldn't entertain any more Pinker-tons. She was a little angry, for they paid well.

I don't know why the Mesquite robbery upset Dallas so much more than the others. Sam got little out of it. Maybe it was all the gunplay and the wounding of the conductor. But Sam's name was everywhere in the saloons, in the stores and hotels, the livery stables and the streets. The banks hired extra guards, for everybody believed Sam planned to dash into the city and strip us of our last dollar. The newspapers wrote of little else, sometimes spreading the wildest rumors and alarms, sometimes crowing that all the law and guns congregating in the city would bring poor Sam to a quick and bloody end. I figured they might be right. The vision of Joel dead on the Kansas plain with a love poem in his pocket haunted me, and it wasn't hard to substitute Sam's image for Joel's in that scene.

Maybe Major Jones concluded that his Frontier Battalion regulars weren't sufficient to do the job. Or maybe they refused to stoop to pursuit of a train robber. The governor commissioned Junius Peak as a second lieutenant in the Rangers and authorized him to recruit thirty men for a month's service. Cowboys and buffalo hunters and even hotel clerks hurried to enlist, so they could brag forever that they had been Rangers.

I knew June Peak, though not professionally. He had just been elected city recorder, but his past was full of jobs not so meek. He had served in the war with both Morgan's Raiders and Forrest's cavalry and had been wounded twice at Chickamauga. He had been a deputy sheriff in Dallas, and later a city marshal. A few years back, he had been hired to wipe out a ring of cattle rustlers in New Mexico, and had done it. He had hunted the buffalo, too. His face wore a mild smile befitting a city recorder, but he was a dangerous man, and the bankers and merchants and newspapers were pleased with the governor's choice.

A U.S. marshal and a federal district attorney arrived from Tyler and issued a warrant for Sam and Jackson and Barnes and Underwood for the Mesquite robbery. Dad Egan volunteered to serve it. And a Pinkerton was working as a bartender in the Wheeler Saloon in Denton. That I got from Callie, who hadn't stopped entertaining Pinkertons. She liked them and called them “suave.”

One night there was a commotion outside Callie's room, across the hall from mine. My customer covered his head with the sheet, and I opened my door a crack. June Peak himself was standing at Callie's door with a gun in his hand, and two men with him. Norene was with them, too. She saw me and motioned behind her skirt for me to close my door. I did, but put my ear to the wood and listened. “Come out!” June Peak said.

Apparently the door opened, for I heard Callie say, “What is it?”

June Peak said, “We don't want you, ma'am.” Then he said, “Is your name Scott Mayes?”

Some reply was mumbled, and June Peak said, “You're under arrest for harboring Sam Bass. Get dressed and come.”

I learned later that Scott Mayes was one of Sam's oldest friends. They had come to Denton together years ago. But he was no robber. June Peak was just rounding up everybody in Dallas who had ever known Sam. I was worried that it might happen to me, and I asked a lawyer friend if it was legal, and he said it was.

Every morning a bunch of June Peak's greenhorn Rangers left their tents at the Fairgrounds and rode off toward Denton. And the two-bit officers and bounty hunters sat in the saloons and dreamed of their future wealth until they were drunk enough to mount up and try to beat the Rangers to their prey. Denton County must have been full of them.

What the Pinkertons were doing, besides screwing everyone in our house except me and Norene, God only knows.

The news that Union Pacific gold was circulating in Dallas alarmed me. Each time Sam had come to me he had left four or five of the 1877 double-eagles behind. I knew where he had got them, of course, and I had been careful about disposing of them. A friend of Norene's named John McElroy ran a saloon not far from our house. Each time Sam left me, I sent Norene's nigger Willie to McElroy with the gold, and he gave me silver for it. I warned Willie never to tell anyone about the gold, where he got it or what he did with it. To ensure his silence I always let him keep the shiniest silver dollar of the change he brought back. “If you tell, no more money,” I would say.

I never told McElroy the source of the gold, either. Not because I thought he might tell, for John McElroy was no friend of the law. I thought he would recognize the coins and cache them in a safe or strongbox. But the fool had banked them! And it suddenly occurred to me that if only John McElroy was depositing the double-eagles in the bank, and if he was getting them all from Willie, it wouldn't take the detectives long to trace them straight to the top of my bureau.

I folded the newspaper and laid it on the table beside my rocking chair. Norene was playing the piano, and two Pinkertons, both a little drunk, stood at her shoulder, trying to sing the song she was playing. They were waiting for their turn upstairs, and one glanced at me, then whispered something to Norene. “She's got the curse,” Norene said aloud, and he said, “Oh.”

I rocked and listened and worried. One of our new regular customers, a deputy sheriff from somewhere, stumbled down the stairs and tipped his hat to Norene and went out the door.

Beth came into the parlor and took one of the Pinkertons away. The other, who had the better voice, huddled with Norene, flipping through the songbook for a tune he liked. Willie appeared at the door and glanced at them, then at me. “Oh, there you is,” he said. He crooked his finger, and I followed him to the kitchen. “You got visituhs, Miz Maude,” he whispered, nodding toward the back door. “I knowed better'n to show
dem
in.”

I laid my hand on the doorknob and took a deep breath to slow the pounding of my heart. I opened the door only wide enough to slip through into the alley. Sam was in the shadows, just out of reach of the light from the kitchen window. Another man stood deeper in the shadows. Down the alley, two horses stamped and snorted. I ran to him. He said, “What's the matter?”

“The house is full of law. You can't come in.”

“Can't we sneak up the back?”

“No. Pinkertons are everywhere.”

The other man drew a pistol from his belt. Sam said, “This here's Frank Jackson.”

Jackson, still in the shadows, tipped his hat and bowed slightly. “Howdy do, ma'am,” he said. His voice had a sad, musical quality. I stepped deeper into the shadows. Jackson took off his hat then and held it near his waist, over the hand with the gun. His hair was light and curly, his eyes so deep-set I couldn't see them.