Sam Bass (8 page)

Her face was like an April mom

   
Clad in a wintry cloud
,

And clay-cold was her lily hand

   
That held her sable shroud
.

“What the hell's going on?” Henry asked.

“Hush,” Sam said. “Read, Frank.”

Well, it was a long poem about the ghost of a woman who comes back to haunt her lover, who has been unfaithful to her. Most of the verses are her cussing him out, and he, of course, is scared almost to death. When morning comes and the ghost leaves, William jumps out of bed raving mad, runs to Margaret's grave, throws himself on it, and promptly dies.

Well, I guess he dies. Either that or he's struck dumb. Either way, it's a good poem, and Sam liked it. “A ghost,” he said. “Just like them stories you used to tell me. Do you believe in ghosts, Henry?”

“Hell, no,” Henry said.

My reading became a part of our daily entertainment, and from time to time Sam would ask me to read about Margaret and William. Whenever I did, Henry would get up and walk out of the cabin. He believed in ghosts, all right. So did Sam.

From time to time we would ride down the creek to a little frame house that Jim Murphy had not far from the mouth of Cove Hollow. Jim would meet us there and bring us groceries and whiskey from town, and we would sit around all evening and drink. I liked Jim, and I enjoyed those times. Jim's house was more comfortable than our cabin, and his conversation, full of gossip from town, was a nice relief from the tedium of our camp.

Some bandits we were! I had been with Sam for almost a month, and we had done nothing but sit on our behinds. “Sam,” I said one day, “you promised me a hundred dollars a month, and so far I haven't seen a nickel.”

He pulled out several double-eagles and tried to give them to me, but I refused them. “I don't work for wages anymore,” I said. “I just want to
do
something.”

“All right,” he said. “We'll go to Fort Worth and have a party.”

That wasn't what I had in mind, but I was ready for anything that would get us out of Cove Hollow. So we rode to Fort Worth.

I hadn't been there in years, and the town had changed a lot.

The railroad had reached it, and it had boomed as Dallas had a few years before. Sam got us rooms at the El Paso Hotel, which was new then and had gas lights and carpets. Sam and I spent three days bathing, getting shaved, drinking, playing cards and dancing with the ladies in the saloons. Sam's gold was welcome everywhere. He also bought me a new rifle like Henry's and a new suit of clothes, including a long black coat like Dr. Ross's. He would have done the same for Henry, but that savage had different fun in mind. As soon as we hit Fort Worth, he ducked into a dance hall, grabbed himself a whore, took her with us to the hotel and disappeared into his room with her. Neither emerged until the morning of the fourth day, when Sam banged on his door and told him we were leaving.

“I'm ready for that!” the woman replied.

While we were at the livery stable saddling up, I said to Sam, “Before we go home, I think we ought to do some business.”

He stopped his work and glanced across at Henry in the next stall. “What do
you
think?” he asked.

“I think Frank's right.”

As we led our horses out of the stable, Sam asked the hostler, “What time is the Fort Concho stage due?”

We rode toward Granbury, the last stop of the Fort Concho stage on the road to the city. The sky was gray and the sun so dim that we cast no shadows, but we were in a jolly mood. Sam talked and talked as we rode along. We were in no hurry. The stage wasn't due in Fort Worth until evening, and we had nearly all day to find a place to lie in wait for it. Even Henry wore what may have been a smile, and from time to time he let loose a screechy “Hee, hee!” and spat and wiped his mouth with his sleeve. His laugh seemed to have nothing to do with what Sam was saying. Maybe he just felt as I did, light-bodied and light-headed at the prospect of ending our long idleness and acting. Yes. The long, dreary month was ending, and my new life about to begin in truth. Somewhere along this road I would start to make my fortune. On this very day! It was a fine feeling, and not dampened at all by the likelihood that we were about to get rained on. The sky in the west was getting darker and darker, and the wind was rising, but we didn't care.

Nine or ten miles out of Fort Worth the road curved around a low hill with a small grove of live oaks at its foot. Sam decided this was the place to do the deed, that we would wait in the grove and step into the road when we heard the stage coming. The driver wouldn't see us until he rounded the hill, so we would have a good drop on him.

We tied our horses in the grove. A large flat rock lay under one of the oaks, and Henry flopped there with the whiskey bottle and a deck of cards. We drank and played penny-ante poker for I don't know how long, for the-clouds hid the sun, and we couldn't judge the time. As the thunderheads kept building and building in the west, I took off my new black coat and rolled it into my blankets. At what would have been sundown, maybe, if there had been a sun, a bolt of lightning lit the landscape. Thunder cracked and rolled, and raindrops hit us like stones. The horses nickered in panic, and I dashed into the grove. Sure enough, we had almost lost them. Sam's mare had freed her reins from the tree and was backing away, about to sprint for the open country. I grabbed her reins and untied the other horses, which were kicking and rearing, too. I led them out of the grove, and Sam ran to help me with them while Henry chased his cards, trying to save them from the wind and water. “Mount up, Henry, or you're going to lose this horse!” Sam hollered.

Henry looked at him, open-mouthed and frowning, then recognized the situation and hurried to claim his horse from me. We mounted and quieted the animals, then just sat looking at each other in the flickering lightning. The rain had plastered our clothes to our bodies and was pouring off our hatbrims.

“Them cards is ruint,” Henry said, and for some reason, maybe the whiskey, that seemed funny. We laughed until tears mingled with the rain in our faces. If the stage had come at that moment, the driver would have thought us lunatics and whipped his horses past us so fast that we wouldn't have known he had come and already gone. Then Henry remembered why we were sitting in the storm, and he said, “Hey! Where's that damn coach?”

“Maybe it's held up by high water,” Sam said.

“Well, hell, it might not even come tonight!”

And suddenly we were miserable. The idea of sitting on the prairie, wet to the bone and waiting for the lightning to strike us while those we had hoped to rob were warming themselves in Granbury didn't appeal to us at all.

But the wind finally blew the storm on by, and our spirits improved. The moon, high and silver, encouraged us to believe the coach would be along, after all. We secured the horses again, and Sam handed us each a large white handkerchief. We folded them corner-wise and tied them around our necks. And as we sat talking and smoking through what must have been the early morning hours, Sam suddenly raised his hand. The jingle of trace chains was on the wind.

Silently we raised the masks over our faces, drew our pistols and stepped into the road. My breath came fast and heavy through the handkerchief. I wasn't scared. It was a delicious excitement that I would feel many times after that night, but never as wildly and acutely as I did then.

The coach rounded the bend. It was only a two-horse hack, moving slowly through the mud. When the driver saw us and pulled on the lines, in that instant when he had to decide whether to stop or whip his tired team past us, Sam presented his pistols and shouted, “Throw up your props!”

The driver held onto the lines but raised his hands above his head, and Henry grabbed the nose band of the closest horse and aimed his pistol at the man's head. “You got a gun?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Pull it out easy and throw it down.”

The man did as Henry told him, and Sam and I dashed to the coach and raised the side-curtains. Two men, both well dressed and middle-aged, sat inside. One looked scared, the other disgusted. “This is outrageous!” the disgusted one said.

“Shut up,” Sam said.

My man, the frightened one, was unarmed and carried only six dollars in greenbacks. “This bastard's almost broke,” I said to Sam. “How about yours?”

“Five dollars,” he replied. “God amighty, they're letting white trash ride the stage now. You fellows was heading to buy Fort Worth, lock, stock and barrel, wasn't you? You oughtn't travel with your whole fortune, though. No telling who you might meet on some dark road.”

“And who
have
we met?” asked his man, the disgusted one.

“Why, General Robert E. Lee,” Sam said. “And this here's President Jefferson Davis.”

“Those gentlemen didn't hide behind masks,” the man said.

“Well, I apologize,” Sam said, “but me and Jeff s trying to keep our whiskers out of the rain. Please be our guests for breakfast.” He handed each man a silver dollar. “We recommend the El Paso Hotel. Please climb aboard our carriage, and our man will take you there.”

The men returned to their seats, and I lowered the side-curtains. “All right, drive!” Henry said. The driver slapped his lines on the horses' backs, and the wheels of the hack spattered mud on our boots and pantaloons as they turned down the road much faster than they had arrived. We stood watching until our victims disappeared into the darkness, and watched the spot where they had disappeared until we no longer heard the wheels and the harness and the cries of the driver. Henry lowered his mask. “All this for just three dollars each,” he said.

“Don't fret,” Sam said. “This was just something to do. Just a start. The big one's coming.”

We divided the money and mounted and headed northeast at an easy gallop. The wind dried our clothes quickly, and the prairie smelled clean and alive, and the soft, wet sound of the horses' hooves in the long grass was soothing to the spirit. We skirted Fort Worth close enough to see its lamps, and by daybreak we were well on the way to Denton. “Hey, you know what today is?” Henry asked.

“What day?” Sam replied.

“Christmas Eve. Tomorrow's Christmas.”

Sam said nothing, and neither did I. Henry's words had turned us lonely, I guess, and we rode for some distance in the private company of our thoughts. Then Henry said, “I'd like to spend it with my younguns, Sam.”

“Then do. Just be careful.”

“Just Christmas Day,” Henry said. “Then I'll come back.” He reined his horse toward Denton and spurred it into a run. He waved goodbye without looking back.

Sam said, “You got any place you want to be, Frank?”

“No.”

“Good,” he said.

Christmas never meant much to me. In Ben Key's house we had a noon meal on that day that was more than we had on other days, but that was the sum of our celebration. Dr. Ross observed it by drinking a toast to the Christ Child early in the morning and then forgetting it. I don't know what the day meant to Sam, but it couldn't have been much, and our edginess that day wasn't because of Christmas. It was because a face that we were accustomed to having around was missing, and Sam and I had only one face each to look at and nothing else to do but look at it. It was bitterly cold. The wind howled around the corners of the cabin and whistled through the holes like a pack of wild, insane animals. We kept the fire burning in the fireplace, and its smoke almost choked us at times, and we had to wear our coats all day. We finally gave up our attempt to play cards because our hands were so stiff we couldn't shuffle well. So we quit and kept our hands in our pockets and sat and stared into the fire. From time to time one of us would get up and grab a stick and poke at the fire and then sit down. We fried bacon and made biscuits and coffee, and that was our Christmas meal, then I grabbed the water bucket and worked my way down the slope to the creek, just to get away for a while. The creek wasn't frozen, but its water seemed to flow even more sluggishly than usual, and the wind whipped the bare branches of the trees in a dance as wild and insane as the animal sound at the cabin. I stood staring into the water until I couldn't stand the cold anymore and dipped the bucket into the stream and climbed back up the slope with it. When I stepped through the door Sam said, “I guess I'll check the horses,” and
he
left. That's how the day went.

So we were glad when in the late afternoon we heard a voice drifting on the wind from below, shouting, “Sam! Sam Bass!” It was Jim Murphy, and Sam and I ran out of the cabin, waving our arms and calling back to him. Jim worked his horse up the slope and dismounted and took a quart of whiskey from his saddlebags. He handed it to me and said, “In honor of the day, from the Murphy family and the Parlor Saloon.” His face, what I could see of it between his hatbrim and his turned-up collar, was red and not at all cheerful. He led his horse to the corral and turned it in and walked back to us, rubbing his hands together. “The law's got Henry,” he said.

“What for?” Sam exclaimed.

Jim waved us toward the cabin, and we followed him inside. He stood in front of the fire, his back to us, warming his hands. “It's colder than a witch's tit out there,” he said. “Let's have a drink.”

“Damn it, Jim, what happened?” Sam said.

Jim drew the cork and took a long pull on the bottle. He coughed quietly. “It was Pinkertons,” he said. “They kept saying Henry's name was Nixon and that he was with Joel Collins in Nebraska. Them and Dad Egan surrounded his house last night and kept hollering for him to give hisself up. And Henry kept hollering back that he ain't been out of Denton since summer. Hell, Dad knowed that.”