Sam Bass (19 page)

“Tell Dad he can't steal nothing from us that we can't get back,” Henry said.

We galloped out the Bolivar road. Mr. Work was shouting, “Sam Bass! Sam Bass!” behind us, and I knew the law would be after us soon, but we made the edge of town without trouble and rode by a group of white tents that I assumed housed Rangers. A man stood in the door of one of the tents, pissing, and I waved; at him. He waved back. I guess he thought we were a posse getting an early start. As we passed Dad Egan's house we saw a boy and a girl taller than he walking from the house toward the barn. To my surprise, Sam split away from us and rode toward them. We followed. The children stopped. The lad was Dad's son, John. “Hello, John,” Sam said.

The boy smiled into the dawn. “Hello,” he said.

“Remember me?”

“Yeah. You're Sam.”

“That's right. I used to carry you on my back.”

“Yeah.”

“I used to call you ‘Little Pard.' Remember that?” “Sure do.” His voice was high and sweet. “Who's your friend?” “Hired girl.”

“Hired
girl!
You mean Dad filled my place with a girl?” The boy laughed, and the girl, her brown hair done up in tight pigtails, grinned self-consciously. “I reckon so,” John said. “Well, you tell old Dad I don't like that a bit, hear?”

“All right.”

“Where
is
Dad, anyways?”

“Asleep.”

“Asleep?
What's that old rascal doing asleep? Why, the sun's already up!”

“He was up late. Mama told me not to wake him.”

“And what was the old rascal doing up so late?”

“He was looking for you.”

“Looking for me? I been all over Denton this morning, looking for him.”

“He's up at the house. Maybe Mama will wake him for you.”

“Naw. Let him sleep. You just tell him Sam Bass come by looking for him, hear?”

“All right.”

“But if anybody
else
comes by here looking for me, don't tell them you saw me. I want Dad to be the one to find me. All right?”

“All right.”

“Remember now, Little Pard. I just want to see old Dad. Nobody else.”

“Yeah, I'll remember.”

Sam leaned from his saddle. “I got a present for you, Little Pard.”

“You do?”

“Come here, and I'll give it to you.”

The boy walked shyly toward the mare, and Sam bent down and handed him a double-eagle. The hired girl smiled stupidly, maybe hoping he had a present for her, too, holding her milk bucket with both hands. “Put that in a safe place and hold onto it,” Sam said. “And don't tell old Dad I give it to you. He might not let you keep it.”

“All right.”

“But remember who give it to you, hear?”

“Yeah.”

“And who give it to you?”

The boy smiled. “Sam did.”

“Your old pard, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Remember that, John. Remember I used to be your pard.”

“I will.”

“We got to go now.” Sam waved and turned the mare, and John and the hired girl waved back.

It was as easy as that. The newspapers called it one of our most daring adventures and made us out to be as bold as Jeb Stuart's cavalry, but it isn't hard to ride into a sleeping town and steal a couple of horses, no matter how many Rangers are snoring in their beds. The timing's everything. An hour later and all those Rangers and deputies would be up and dressed and full of coffee, and it might have been a different story. I still regret hitting Charlie McDonald that morning. There was no reason for it, and it marred an otherwise peaceful visit to my hometown. We had been friends, too.

Dad Egan and Junius Peak considered our raid a personal insult.

By the middle of the morning it was raining hard, but the rain couldn't dampen our spirits. Sam and I were complete again, he astride The Denton Mare, and I with my books and instruments and vials and black coat tied behind me. We welcomed the rain. The water would wipe out our trail. We traveled fast, to cross as many creeks as we could before the water rose, and we saw no law that day.

Next morning, we weren't so lucky. We headed toward Cove Hollow and soon encountered Dad and two other riders. They gave chase, although they were outnumbered, and we ducked into the bottoms of the Elm Fork of the Trinity and lost them and switched back to Pilot Knob, where we bought some canned meat at a store. That was a mistake, I guess, for within an hour we spotted two posses on our trail. We gave them a run. Their mounts tired faster than ours, but the rain that had befriended us had gone, and our tracks were plain as painted signs on the soft earth behind us.

Denton Creek was swollen with brown, rolling water, but Sam and Jenny didn't hesitate. Sam pulled his rifle from the saddle boot and raised it high above his head, and the mare plunged into the stream, the rest of us behind them. The posses dismounted on the bank, dropped to their knees and fired, but none carried rifles, or were too excited to think of them, and we made the far bank and dashed into the woods.

Wet to the skin and caked with mud, we pushed on to Hardy Troope's store, not far from Davenport's Mill. The others stood guard while Sam and I went in. The storekeeper was showing two women a bolt of cloth. Sam called to him, and he replied, “In a moment, sir.”

Sam shouted, “I'm Sam Bass, and in a hurry! You wait on me, by God!”

“Certainly, sir,” the man said. “Excuse me, ladies.”

We bought some more canned meat and coffee and a coffeepot and headed southwestward toward Tarrant County, hoping to find a secluded place to rest our horses. But another small posse saw us and blazed away. We had a long start on them and shook loose, but I felt like a dog tormented by a million fleas. When full dark came we doubled back and headed for Denton County and Hickory Creek. Our horses lifted their legs as if they were lead, and we were damp and miserable and hungry. Yet I hoped for more rain, for our trail was plain behind us, and I knew Dad Egan wouldn't give up this time. It was near midnight when we reached the familiar bottoms of Hickory Creek. Afraid to make a fire, we had no coffee and ate our canned meat cold and crawled into our damp and stinking blankets.

“Why do you think they're trying so hard, when they didn't seem to care much before?” Henry asked.

“Four reasons,” I said. “Money, money, money and Dad Egan. They think the railroads are going to win, and they don't want to be on the losing side anymore.”

It didn't rain.

A posse was trying to charge our camp, but was held back by the undergrowth. We grabbed our guns and fired a volley into the woods and received a sharp reply. Arkansas grabbed at his neck, but ran for his horse. Henry's horse was tied on the other side of our campsite, and he started toward it, blood blossoming on his left sleeve. Seab, already mounted, yelled, “Grab on!” and Henry grasped his hand and swung up behind him. We broke onto the prairie and headed at a run toward a farmhouse a quarter of a mile away. A horse stood tied to the fence in front. The rest of us kept riding, but Seab reined in, and Henry jumped down and untied it. “I'm borrowing your pony for a while!” he shouted at two terrified boys on the steps. We cut northeastward, passed behind the farm, and then were safe in the timbers and swamps of the Elm Fork.

The whole week was like that, a crazy, blind game in which we, our pursuers and Mother Nature all had our moves. We dashed about the points of the compass, with Denton as the center, holding nothing in our minds but safety. Rain would fall and wash away our tracks. We would lose the posse behind us only to pick up another when the rain would stop and leave our hoofprints branded in the prairie grass and the mud of the creek banks. We had no idea how many men were after us or what their strategy was, if they had one. We rode three days and nights without a wink of sleep, nourished only by what little food we could grab at country stores and eat in the saddle. We talked little, and when we did we whined.

Arkansas had only been grazed in the neck, but Henry's wound was more serious. The bullet had passed through the flesh of his upper arm, but had missed the bone. He was in pain and couldn't use the arm well, but there was little I could do but keep the wound clean and bandaged. Playing fox in the woods had lost its charm for all of us.

The people in the countryside, who had been friendly to us for so many months and had accepted Sam's gold so willingly suddenly were hostile and frightened. Once after a heavy rain that we thought should protect us for a while, we stopped at the store in Bolivar, where we had traded many times, and Sam and I went inside. But the man stood motionless behind his counter. “Ain't you going to wait on me?” Sam asked.

“I don't want to go to Tyler with the rest of your friends,” he said.

Sam stared at him a moment, then began walking around the store picking up things and setting them on the counter in front of him. I stood in the middle of the store with my hand on my pistol butt, to make sure no hands disappeared under the counter. The man reached for nothing, not even a pencil to tally our bill. Sam laid a thousand rounds of ammunition in front of him, then a sack of flour, then several sacks of coffee and a stack of new, dry shirts and pantaloons. “How much?” he asked.

The man didn't move. “I ain't selling you nothing,” he said.

Sam pulled a pistol and cocked it and held it under the merchant's nose. “Then I'm going to blow your head clean away,” he said.

“Forty dollars.”

Sam laid the money on the counter, and we picked up the supplies. “If any of them posses comes through, tell them to leave us alone,” he said. “I'm tired.”

We rode into the woods and found enough dry wood to build a small fire and had our first coffee in days, and cold canned fruit with it. We changed into our new clothes and left our wet, mud-stained, blood-stained rags in a stinking pile on the creek bank and laid a rock on top as a kind of monument.

“Why don't we ride to Cove Hollow and get some sleep?” I asked.

“Because that's where they think we're going,” Sam replied.

I really had ceased to care. The thought of death as a long sleep had begun to hold a certain appeal. But we rode northward, out of the frying pan and into the fire.

June 13, 1878. It's a painful day to look back on. We were lounging in the brush on the bank of Salt Creek, trying to rest. I was lying on my back, my hat over my face. I was just beginning to doze when the shots and shouting came. I sprang up and fired my pistol before I even saw the huge party of men on the opposite bank. There must have been seventy or eighty of them. They were watering their horses when they noticed us, I guess, for all were dismounted, and several were lunging toward their saddles to get their rifles.

Arkansas, who had lain beside me on the grass, jumped erect, then started to fall. Something wet hit my cheek, and I glanced down. A piece of bone lay at my feet, bits of skin and hair still clinging to it. Half of Arkansas's face was gone. I was mesmerized by the awful sight, but Seab grabbed my arm. “Henry's got the horses!” he said. “Let's go!”

I ran into the trees, then turned and fired again. The men across the creek were mounting and plunging their horses into the swollen stream. I ran again. Sam and Seab were ahead of me, and in the dark shadows I saw the horses. I stumbled and fell. I had tripped over the dead foreleg of the pony Henry took from the boys. Sam and Seab were grabbing at their reins, which were looped over the low branches of a tree. I grabbed my own and jumped for the stirrup. “Where's Henry?” I cried.

“I don't know!” Sam replied.

Sam urged Jenny through the thickest part of the undergrowth. Twigs and thorns tore at my arms and legs and face, and I plunged ahead in panic, my horse as desperate as I. No gunfire sounded behind me, but I knew the posse was swimming the stream and would be on me soon. My back expected their bullets. Something did hit me, and I thought, Oh, my God, I'm dying, before I realized it was hailing. Hailstones the size of marbles pelted me and leaves and twigs fell around me. I prayed, actually prayed, that our hunters would drown.

But there was shouting behind me now. Some of the riders had made it across the water. Sam must have heard them, too, for he cut toward the creek, and the mare plunged into it, and Seab and I followed. I thought we were doubling back across the creek, but Sam held Jenny near the bank and let her swim downstream, and we followed. I looked behind me and saw we were downstream from the posse, and a bend in the creek and the trees on the bank had put us out of sight of our hunters' watering place. It was strange, lying on my horse's neck, hearing nothing but the rush of the water, feeling nothing but its wet and the movement of the animal's shoulders, as if trotting slowly, dreamily, with nothing for his hooves to touch.

At a place where the bank was high and the stream had cut a cavelike depression into the earth, Sam headed for shore, and we followed. The cave was scarcely large enough to hold the three of us and our horses, but we huddled there, holding our hats over our beasts' muzzles to muffle any signal they might nicker to the horses behind us. The earth above, held in place by dead and gnarled roots that hung around us like grotesque moss, gave us some shelter from the storm. But I knew that if any of our pursuers had remained on the other bank and decided to ride downstream, we would be visible to them and naked to their fire.

We stood for what seemed hours, listening for sounds of men or animals amidst the thunder and the rushing water and the crash of hailstones into the woods above us. Before our itching eyes the grass on the opposite bank turned white, as if it had snowed, then green again as the hail stopped and the pelting rain melted the stones. I kept wanting to look at my watch, to guess how long we had been there, but I was afraid to risk its music. At dusk a man walked on foot down to the edge of the creek, about a hundred yards upstream. I dropped my hat and raised my rifle. “Shall I kill him?” I whispered.