Sam Bass Page 6

  “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.

  When all was wrapt in dark midnight

  And all were fast asleep,

  In glided Margaret’s grimly ghost

  And stood at William’s feet.

  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.

  And thrice he call’d on Marg’ret’s name,

  And thrice he wept full sore;

  Then laid his cheek to the cold earth,

  And word spake nevermore.

  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 bu
t 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.