Sam Bass (28 page)

“Mary?” Sam replied. “Is that you?”

She rose and moved toward him.

“You know each other?” I asked.

The negress wheeled, fear and anger in her eyes.

“It's all right, Mary,” Sam said. Then to me, “Yeah, I know her, Dad, but she don't know who I am.”

The negress remained tense and poised, like a cat about to spring, until Sam repeated, “It's all right, Mary. That's Dad Egan. I've knowed him a long time.” The black muscles relaxed then. She sat down on the side of the bed and looked at the bloody hole in Sam's belly.

“God, Samuel!” she moaned. She covered her face with her hands, as if about to cry, but she didn't. She sat like that, still and quiet, until Major Jones and the doctor returned. It was so quiet I heard the high, clear voices of nigger children playing somewhere and the murmur of the crowd outside the yard.

Major Jones wanted to question Sam immediately, but the doctor wouldn't let him. The major and I paced the room while Dr. Cochran and the negress cleansed the wounds and tied clean bandages on them. The doctor gave Sam a draught of something, and the negress removed his boots and fluffed his pillows and

“That's right. I don't remember.”

“Jackson rode with you a long time.”

“He's a good friend of mine,” Sam said.

“But he didn't commit any robberies?”

“It's against my profession to blow on my pals, Major. If a man knows something, he ought to die with it in him.”

The major gave me a look of exasperation and licked his pencil. “How did you start on such a life, Sam?” he asked. “Sheriff Egan says you were a good man when you worked for him.”

“I started sporting on horses. It just went on from there. Let's stop now, Major. I ain't feeling too good.”

Major Jones stood up and closed the notebook. “Would you like me to get a preacher for you?”

“No. I'm going to hell. I got lots of friends there.”

Major Jones shrugged. “Come on, Dad. Let's get some rest, too. We'll come back in the morning.”

The crowd outside the yard had gone, but the major instructed two of the Rangers who were standing on the porch to sleep there. I turned for another look at Sam, perhaps the last I would see of him alive. I was shocked. The negress was bending over him and seemed to be kissing him.

The hotel was full of newspaper correspondents and other lovers of misery who had been arriving on every train since the fight at Koppel's store was telegraphed through the state. They circled in the lobby, very like buzzards, but noisier, shouting questions and passing rumors. They swarmed at us when we entered, but two of Major Jones's men pushed them aside, uttering threats. The Rangers stopped at the foot of the stairs and blocked them while the major and I climbed to his room. One of the Pinkertons from Dallas was there, sipping a glass of the major's whiskey. I had met him before, but I didn't remember his name. He didn't offer it, since Major Jones apparently knew him, too. “Make yourself at home,” the major said sarcastically, pouring himself a drink. He waved the bottle toward me, not expecting me to accept, and I didn't.

The Pinkerton gave us a supercilious smile. “What did you get?” he asked.

The major pitched him the notebook. He read through it quickly and said, “Not much.”

Major Jones breathed a weary sigh. “No, not much.”

“Maybe I'd better question him,” the Pinkerton said.

“It wouldn't do any good,” I said. “He'll probably be dead by morning, anyway.”

The Pinkerton reached for his hat. “Then I'll go now.”

“
No
!” Major Jones's voice filled the room. The Pinkerton gave him a look of pure hatred, but removed his hand from the hat. “Let the poor devil go in peace,” the major said.

The Pinkerton smirked again. “The man's a criminal, Major. It's my duty to recover at least some of that money.”

“He hasn't got a dime,” the major said.

“What happened to it?”

Major Jones waved his arm in a half-circle. “Scattered all over Texas, sir. If he had any left, he gave it to Jackson.”

“Where's Jackson?”

“Read the notebook, damn it.”

“Well, I'm going to ask.” His hand moved toward the hat again.

“My men won't let you in,” the major said. “They'll kill you if they have to.”

The Pinkerton glared at me. “Sheriff, do you support Major Jones in this?”

“Absolutely,” I said.

He grabbed his hat then, and jumped up. “Rebels!” he shouted. “Every stinking one of you!” He left and slammed the door.

Major Jones gave me a tired smile and raised his glass. “I wish you were a drinking man, Dad,” he said.

Major Jones and Dr. Cochran and I rode out to the shanty in the doctor's hack. The morning was already blistering hot, but country folks were arriving in their wagons and buggies, wearing their Sunday best. They gathered in knots in the hotel lobby and on the sidewalks, exchanging news and gossip, pointing at Koppel's store and up the road toward the niggertown. “I guess he hasn't died,” the doctor said. “Nobody came for me.”

The crowd outside the fence was larger now, with more white faces. The two Rangers who had slept on the porch were lounging there, smoking, gazing without interest at the people beyond the fence. They stood up when they saw us. “I'll relieve you in a little while,” Major Jones told them.

Sam was sitting up in bed. The negress was bending over him, feeding him broth. “What day is it, Dad?” he asked. His voice was as weak as before, but his face had a little color.

“Sunday,” I said.

“Of the month, I mean.”

“The twenty-first of July.”

“Important day, Dad. Remember?”

“No.”

“Mrs. Egan used to fix me all the pancakes I could eat.”

“Your birthday!” I said, and he smiled. “How many?”

“Twenty-seven. Twenty-seven years old today.”

I nearly wished him happy returns, but caught myself. He looked younger and smaller, so pale on that nigger bed, than he had so long ago when he rode into the Denton square, determined to be a cowboy. The doctor grasped his wrist and felt his pulse, counting it on his watch. Then he dropped the wrist and shook his head.

“How am I doing, Doc?” Sam asked.

“You're dying, son. Why don't you tell Major Jones all you can while you've got the chance?”

“I ain't dying,” Sam said calmly. “Old Dad'll have a chance to hang me yet, if he can hold onto me.”

The negress took the bowl away and went to work with her laundry. The irons clattered on the stove. She burned herself and muttered something and sucked her finger. Dr. Cochran checked the bandages but didn't change them. He gave Sam some liquid in a cup, and Sam made a face as he swallowed it. Dr. Cochran closed his bag and left. Major Jones sat down in the only rocking chair and started rocking. The rockers creaked on the loose floorboards. I sat down in one of the chairs at the little table. “Sam,” the major said.

“I got nothing to say.” Sam closed his eyes and went to sleep, I thought. No children were playing outside. The crowd had gone. Over the creak of the rocker I heard the irons moving on the cloth, making a kind of whispering noise, then there would be a clatter when the negress laid down a cold iron and picked up a hot one. She came to me once and asked, “Does you want something to eat?” I shook my head, and she went back to the ironing board, her bare feet scratching softly on the bare floor. We sat there a long time, I think, for I heard the church bells once and wondered whether they signaled the beginning of the service or the end. I took out my watch and saw that it was noon and wondered why I hadn't heard them earlier. Maybe the bells ring only at the end in Round Rock. Then Sam awoke with a kind of weeping noise. “Oh, God, I'm hurting!” he said.

Major Jones rose and went quickly to the bed. “Sam, you've done much wrong in this world,” he said. “You now have an opportunity to do some good before you die by giving some information which will lead to the vindication of that justice which you've so often defied and the law which you've constantly violated.”

The speech surprised me. I wondered if he had composed it as he rocked, or had he spoken it many times to dying outlaws?

“No. I won't tell.”

“Why won't you?”

“I done told you. It's against my profession to blow on my pals. Get the doc. I'm hurting bad.”

The major stood up and slapped his legs in disgust. He picked up his hat and stomped out the door, and I took his place on the bed. “Are you dying, Sam?” I asked.

“Yes, Dad. Let me go.”

He closed his eyes, but I still heard his breathing. Then he opened his eyes and said, “Water.”

I waved at the negress., She was standing motionless beside the ironing board, staring at us. She stooped and dipped a cup into the water bucket, and Sam said, “The world is bobbing around.”

The negress brought the water, splashing a little on the floor in her haste. She sat down on the bed beside me and lifted his head and moved the cup to his lips. Sam drank, then closed his eyes. In a moment they opened again, wide, and he stared at the negress as if recognizing her for the first time. “There's a horse for you in the corral,” he said.

And she said, “Thank you.”

Author's Note

It's the hope of the historian to dig into a legend and find facts. It's the hope of the novelist to take facts and mould them into some personal version of truth. For the facts, I've depended heavily on four writers—an anonymous author (presumably T. E. Hogg) who published
Life and Adventures of Sam Bass, the Notorious Union Pacific and Texas Train Robber
in 1878; Charles L. Martin, whose A
Sketch of Sam Bass, the
Bandit appeared in 1880; Walter Prescott Webb's classic
The Texas Rangers: A
Century
of Frontier Defense
, first published in 1935; and Wayne Gard's equally classic biography,
Sam Bass
, first published in 1936. Because of their efforts, more facts are known about Sam Bass than most of the notorious Western outlaws, and my debt to them is great.

Although I've taken care not to contradict historical testimony, I haven't hesitated to bend the facts and invent situations and personal histories and descriptions when the needs of my story required it. That's why this book is a novel.

Afterword

All the world loves a villain. We have our own clusters of heroes, to be sure, and some of them are genuine. These are the folk we look up to, the ones we cite as inspirations or guides in the shaping of our lives. We admire their actions, we respect their values, and we embrace their ideas as we develop our own. They are the Good Guys, and we're proud to be seen in their company.

When push comes to shove, however, it's another story entirely, for it's the villains of the piece that we really look up to. They are, after all, the ones who supply the tantalizing, raffish counterpoint to the goodness of the heroes, and they're almost always more seductively intriguing than the square'jawed, clear-eyed folk they oppose. Where, after all, would Faust be without Mephistopheles? Jim Hawkins without Long John Silver? Sherlock Holmes without Moriarty? The Virginian without Trampas? Luke Skywalker without Darth Vader? It's the dark side of the force that, if we're honest with ourselves, we find the more appealing, and, good citizens though we may be, we deep down harbor a hankering to be, just once, a villain for a day.

This itch for irresponsibility is particularly strong when the villain is portrayed as an outlaw. The very term,
outlaw
, resonates with possibilities, for it implies a person who's not necessarily a bad sort, but who has somehow, whether by choice or by circumstance, found himself at odds with the larger dictates of the prevailing law. If the break with legality has come about by circumstance, we sympathize with the poor soul—think of Josef K. in Kafka's
The Trial
, who can never find out why he's been arrested—and cheer on his efforts to get satisfaction from, or revenge against, the faceless, unfeeling minions of society.

If the break comes by choice, though, a whole new realm opens up. We can ask, legitimately,
why
has the person broken with conventional morality and opted for life on the fringe? It can't be natural depravity, for that's what generates criminals. It may be a desire to challenge a grasping, repressive society (as in Robin Hood's taking from the artificially maintained rich to give to the unfairly downtrodden poor), or it may be a more generalized, often inarticulate, determination to set things right. The textbook example of this latter motivation appears in John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee. McGee, who's fond of saying that there are countless ways of separating a person from his property that are entirely legal and wholly immoral, makes a career as a “salvage expert,” retrieving that property and restoring the balance of the world while he turns a tidy profit. It's a desire, in short, to do what's right, whether or not it's legal.

Because “right” and “legal” aren't always synonymous, this distinction creates a moral gray area in which we like to think the outlaw may be working. The person's actions may be at odds with statutory law or social convention, but they're committed for reasons that are higher than just being anti-social. The motives may be an effort to achieve some kind of personal satisfaction or fulfillment, or a conviction that some things exist that can't be dealt with through conventional means. Either way, the individual stands out, and we're drawn to him because he speaks and acts in ways we understand and empathize with, yet can't bring ourselves to adopt.

This character, nominally outside the law yet reflecting a considered individualism and embracing a closely held set of beliefs, we've come to call the
antihero
. Unheroic by any conventional standard, this person nonetheless has a core of sufficient principle that we
want
to like him, we quite irrationally
trust
him, and we're confident that, at the crucial moment, he'll automatically do what's right. He may be thoroughly unwholesome by every criterion (the major characters of Sam Peckinpah's
The Wild Bunch
come immediately to mind, as does Clint Eastwood's Will Munney, from
Unforgiven
, a “known thief and murderer, a man of notoriously vicious and intemperate disposition”), but we sense the nucleus of essential morality that's present, we eagerly wait for it to come to the surface and take over, and we're rarely disappointed.