Sam Bass (7 page)

He smiled. He watched the horses grazing quietly just beyond the small circle of firelight. He waved his cigarette toward them. “That Jenny. She's to thank for it. Without her I'd still be freighting for old Dad. That ain't no life for us, Frank. It's no better than being a nigger. That ain't no life at all for the likes of us. The world belongs to them that grabs onto it and pulls, and that's what we're going to do, ain't it, Frank?”

“Yeah, Sam, that's what we'll do.”

“Lord, Frank, you sure are quiet tonight. You ain't saying nothing.”

“I just feel quiet. You know.”

“Hey, old Henry's going to be glad to see you.”

“I'll be glad to see him, too. It's been a long time.”

“Remember when we used to go to the track together? That was good times, wasn't it? We'll do that again one of these days, to watch old Jenny make us rich.”

“Yeah. But what are we going to do now?”

“Well, we're going to see Henry.”

“And after that?”

“Well, we'll sit down and decide what to do next. Maybe find us a couple more good men.”

“And then?”

“Well, a stagecoach, probably. I've did them before. They're easy. Give you a chance to learn the business.” He held out the bottle against the firelight. The whiskey was nearly gone. He handed it to me. “Finish her, and let's turn in.”

I killed the bottle and threw it into the fire. We unrolled our blankets, arranged our saddles for pillows and threw two logs onto the flame. When we were bedded down Sam said, “Dream of gold, Frank.”

Lying there, I began to miss Dr. Ross and my room back home, and even the tin shop. I couldn't sleep, despite the whiskey, and Sam couldn't either. I heard him get up very late, when the fire was low. He pulled on his boots and walked out beyond the firelight to where the horses were. He spoke quietly to Jenny, and she snorted. He talked and talked. He was still talking when I fell asleep.

The morning was chilly. Sam poked at the embers, and soon a small flame flared. I fed it dry grass and twigs until it was strong enough to take a few small logs and make enough heat to drive the night cold from our bodies. As we hunkered there, I saw we were in a jungle. Most of the trees and bushes were bare, but grew so thickly they almost blocked out the early sun. I had seen such thickets, but had never ventured into one for fear of tearing myself and my horse on the sharp branches and the almost certain presence of snakes. It wasn't a large wood, not more than a hundred yards across, with Hickory Creek running down its center. But I supposed it stretched as far as the creek did, a vein of marsh and jungle winding across the dry, brown prairie where nothing grew but grass, a testimony to the difference water makes on the face of the land.

“Learn this place,” Sam said. “You'll be seeing a lot of it. Only a fool would come in here after an armed man.” He took a hunk of jerky from his saddlebags and sliced off several slivers with his knife and passed them to me. “It's all I got.”

“No coffee?”

“No, but old Henry's got the pot on the fire.”

“Let's move, then,” I said. “Morning's a grim time without coffee.”

We bridled the horses and led them to the water. We lay on our bellies on the bank, sucking at the water with the horses, trying to moisten the dry, hard meat in our mouths. Then we led the animals back to the fire and saddled them in its warmth, scattered our embers and kicked dirt over them and mounted. We picked our way through the brush more quickly than we had in the darkness, and soon we were on the prairie, and the sun was full on us and warm.

We rode in silence in the pattern we had established the night before. Trot, gallop, trot, walk, trot, gallop, trot, walk. The rhythm of it took over my body, and as we traveled across the empty prairie I began to think of myself as a small boat, drifting on an ocean. If I had been in Denton at that hour, I would be fixing breakfast for Dr. Ross and myself, and the changeless pattern of my days would be beginning again. After breakfast I would wash the dishes and harness the doctor's horse, then walk to the tin shop and do again what I had always done. But here I was, drifting on an empty ocean of grass. Not drifting, really, but moving toward the young man's adventure that Dr. Ross wished he had had, a memory to store up and bring out again before the fireplace of Dr. Frank Jackson, an old man.

It was freedom I was feeling. A young man's freedom, which is the absence of responsibility and the prospect of unlimited possibility. And danger! I was riding with a man who owned ten thousand dollars, taken at gunpoint from a Union Pacific train. A man who had tended animals at a hotel and grubbed brush, but who now was considered dangerous because he dared take what others wanted to keep. I liked that. I didn't think of that as a crime, nor did many others. I had read in a newspaper that the Texas government had compiled descriptions of more than forty-five hundred men in the state who were wanted by the law somewhere, and almost a quarter of the counties hadn't even filed reports. Oh, many people railed against the “lawless element,” I guess. But I venture to say that those who railed were rich, or had arrived in Texas with prospects of getting rich. Yankees, most of them, who hadn't suffered the war and its humiliation or the carpetbaggers. Some had even profited from our misery. And many of those on the state's list had got there for trying to keep what was theirs or regain what was taken from them. There were many others, weaker or more timid than they, who had suffered their losses silently, but cheered on and protected those willing to “grab onto the world and pull,” as Sam had put it. A man who had nothing to pull but a gun and who took only from those who had plenty was considered a criminal only by those who had plenty and feared for it. Believe me, there weren't many of those in Texas in those days. Not in the countryside. So as Sam and I rode across the prairie in silence, dreaming our dreams, I felt like an outlaw but not like a criminal, and the beauty of the day and its freedom filled me.

When the sun was almost straight overhead we entered a thicket very like the one we had left in the morning. It, too, was bisected by a creek, which we began following upstream. This one was even more overgrown than the other, full of walnuts, oaks and acacias and thick tangles of vines and brush. High walls rose on both sides, not far from the banks of the stream. Large outcroppings of limestone gleamed white near the tops of the walls, shading caves and crevices whose depths I couldn't determine. “Cove Hollow,” Sam said. “It runs about six miles up yonder, but we don't have to ride that far.” We dismounted and led the horses to the creek and dropped the reins. The horses, their necks extended, their noses close to the ground, sniffing the water, stepped gingerly down the bank, found firm footing and dipped their muzzles into the stream. Sam and I flopped on the grass. He took off his hat and rubbed his sleeve across the sweat and dirt of his brow. “Welcome home, Frank,” he said.

When we were refreshed we remounted and picked our way up the creek. I could see that Cove Hollow was ideal for our purpose, but it struck me as an unpleasant, unhealthy place. The ground was spongy under our horses' hooves. Clear Creek, as it was called, was dark and sluggish, and our course along its bank stank of rotting vegetation that had collected in numerous stagnant pools. Miasma and fever and snakes displaced freedom and adventure in my thoughts.

We had ridden about two miles into the hollow when a high, rasping voice screeched: “Throw up your props!” Sam halted his mare and raised his hands above his head. I looked around me, confused. I could see no one. The voice came again: “Throw up your props, Frank!” I did, and the voice laughed. “Can you see me?” it asked.

“No,” Sam said. “Come on out.”

Henry Underwood rode out of the shadow of the limestone outcropping above us, disappeared into the trees, then emerged on the creek bank only a few feet ahead of us. He carried a new Winchester rifle across his lap. “I've had you in my sights for fifteen minutes,” he said. “Hello, Frank.”

I had lied when I told Sam I would be glad to see Henry. I didn't like the man and didn't trust him and didn't understand Sam's affection for him. His eyes were the meanest I've ever seen, little round dots of blue ice that squinted from under heavy red lids. If snakes had blue eyes, they would be like Henry's. If snakes had eyelids, they would be like Henry's. His skin was florid and scaly, his hair long and rusty and matted, and so was his beard, which was streaked below the corners of his mouth with the tobacco juice he drooled when he spoke. He drooled now as he squinted from under the droopy brim of his dirty black hat. He wore no shirt. Dirty suspenders crossed the shoulders of his dirty red underwear, and a pistol butt protruded from the unbelted waistband of his dirty brown pantaloons. His squint, amused and curious, was directed at me, and I knew why. He had returned to Denton months before Sam had, but I had avoided his company, for his company meant trouble. He had made part of his living as a bill collector among the nigger part of Denton's population. Merchants who had trouble collecting from nigger customers would set Henry on them. They never inquired about his methods, and he always collected. He was a brutal, treacherous man, feared by many, and I could never abide his company outside of Sam's presence.

Sam said, “Let's go.” Henry turned his horse and headed up the creek, with Sam and me following single-file. About a mile farther up the stream he turned into the woods, and we began climbing toward the limestone outcropping near the ridge. It was a tough climb, and the horses lunged, grabbing for footholds, kicking small stones down the slope behind us. Soon we came to a small level place, a sort of stone porch jutting from the base of the limestone, and in this place someone long ago had built a tiny log cabin. It leaned a bit, and most of the chinking was gone from between the logs. There were holes in its rough shingle roof. A small fire burned outside the low door, and as Sam had predicted, the coffeepot sat on a bed of coals near the blaze. Beside the cabin was a limestone cave, shallow, but large enough to shelter the horses. A crude corral had been built across its mouth. The rails, held in place by piles of stones, were newly cut, and their ends glistened yellow in the sun.

“Jim Murphy brought us to this place,” Sam said. “It's on his daddy's land.”

“Why doesn't Jim come with us?” I asked.

“He's worried about what his daddy would think. But he's promised to help us on the sly. I guess old Jim has something of a yellow streak.”

Henry laughed harshly and spat a stream of tobacco juice into the fire. I resented their belittlement of our old friend, who had shown no sign of a yellow streak during my acquaintance with him. I would have preferred his company to Henry's any day, but I said nothing.

We dismounted and unsaddled the horses and turned them into the corral. Sam handed me a tin cup, and I poured myself some coffee and hunkered by the fire, settling myself into the bandit life.

We played cards on a blanket spread by the fire in the daytime and moved the blanket into the cabin at dark. The nights were getting cool, and I guess we were lucky to have that cabin, but I hated it. The chimney, or what was left of it, didn't draw well, and the place stank of smoke even when no fire was in the fireplace. When there
was
a fire we almost choked. But at night the fire and the walls offered some semblance of a real dwelling place, and the soft yellow light of the lantern on the edge of the blanket where we played created a certain intimacy among us that I needed and welcomed.

Sam and Henry talked endlessly. Sam described his Nebraska robbery in detail. How he and Joel and the others attacked the train. How he had discovered the forty thousand dollars in newly minted gold by accident, by kicking a wooden crate in the express car. How he and Joel and the others divided the gold, then split into pairs to make their getaway. How he and a man named Jack Davis bought a hack and stashed their gold under its seat, and how that sedate means of transportation had fooled the posses that pursued them. How he and Davis, posing as cattlemen, had driven part of the way to Texas in the company of a troop of soldiers who were searching for them. How he and Davis had split in Fort Worth, with Sam returning to Denton and Davis making his way toward New Orleans. Frankly, I found some of it hard to believe, but Sam told it with such detail and conviction that I didn't challenge him.

Henry's tales were less exciting and not as well told. They were about petty cattle thefts, scrapes with vigilantes, his escape from a doctor's office where he had been taken after he was wounded by a posse that proved too merciful. If he had headed up the posse, he said, he would have strung up the thief, meaning himself, on the spot, wounded or not. I silently agreed with him. Why anyone would be merciful to Henry was beyond me. Just the odor of him day and night for weeks on end was enough to plant thoughts of murder in my mind. But among his wretched tales of barroom knife fights and nights in jail, drunk and puking, there were also warm references to his long-suffering wife and his two children, a boy and a girl whom he loved deeply. I couldn't imagine Henry as a husband and father. How a woman or child could bear to embrace that filthy body or kiss that brown, juicy mouth was beyond me. But they did, and I envied Henry for that.

I had nothing to contribute to all the boasting, and one night I got bored and pulled Dr. Aiken's book of songs out of my saddlebag and stretched out on the blanket by the lantern.

“What the hell you doing?” Henry asked.

“Reading.”

“What is it?” Sam asked.

“Songs. Poems, really. There isn't any music with them.”

“Read out loud,” Sam said.

“Why?” Henry said.

“Quiet,” Sam said. “Read, Frank.”

I opened the book at random and began reading.