The Legend of Bass Reeves (10 page)

It wasn’t much of a store, just a shack with some crude shelves filled with sacks and small boxes. He went inside into darkness. When his eyes adjusted, he saw that the proprietor was an Indian wearing a white man’s suit, and the second thing he noticed was that, sitting on a barrel in the back corner to the right, another Indian dressed in white men’s clothing held a large-bore, double-barrel shotgun aimed dead into the middle of Bass’s stomach.

Neither Indian said anything. They sat watching Bass become more and more unnerved.

“I need … I need to get some things for Master.” He went to the counter and put the twenty dollars in four small five-dollar gold pieces on the rough wood. “Tell me when I spend that.”

Neither Indian said anything or moved while Bass went from sack to barrel and back to sack again. There was no candy, which was just as well. He’d been thinking about it all winter and would probably have bought too much and drawn attention.

They sat there and let Bass get a seven-pound slab of bacon. He found some smaller cloth sacks on a shelf and used them to hold twenty pounds of cornmeal, rock sugar and salt. He spied a box of percussion caps that worked for both the rifle and revolver. He felt naked without his firearms, especially when he watched the barrel of that shotgun follow him around. He picked out a cooking pot with a lid, a one-pound tin of black powder and a small block of lead. Both the revolver and the rifle were .36-caliber and he had a small mold and ladle to melt lead.

Each time he put another item on the board counter, he would look at the Indian in the suit and the man would say nothing, so he kept going. Two blankets, a short length of canvas, a twenty-foot length of soft rope, a box of lucifer stick matches, a packet of needles and a roll of heavy thread, and a coarse steel hoof rasp. While there were no boots or shoes, there were knee-high moccasins. He took two pairs down that looked big enough and put them on the counter, and the Indian finally said:

“That’s enough.”

He nodded, put everything into the tow sack he had brought and staggered out the door.

Outside it was near dark and there was still nobody moving on the trail, although there were some children playing near a hut. He walked a short distance out of the settlement, and when he was sure nobody was following him, turned off the trail and headed into the brush toward his horse, mule and gear.

He was lugging a fair load and it was hard dark. It would have been nearly impossible to find the animals, but they smelled him. The Roman nose whickered to him and he followed the sound.

There was no moon, but at least there were no clouds. He decided against a fire but he could see stars, and he put one blanket on the ground and another on top and rolled them up and slept under the tied horses, luxuriating in the feel of the soft wool, a dead sleep all night.

The next morning he saddled the Roman nose and made a blanket-roll packsaddle, which he put on the mule, to carry what he’d bought. He headed northwest, almost directly away from the trail.

He rode slowly but steadily until he was at least five miles from the trail and had seen no other tracks. There he found a narrow, shallow canyon that went back a mile, with water and good grass coming green, and he set up camp and made a fire. He cooked bacon and made some corn dodgers from cornmeal first soaked in water and salt, then fashioned into patties and fried in bacon grease.

He ate until he was nearly sick, licking his fingers carefully to savor every last morsel and picking the crumbs off his lap. He almost groaned aloud at the delicious taste in his mouth and felt a sudden sharp pang of loneliness for Mammy and her fine cooking.

By then it was midafternoon and he set to work.

He had gone all winter and early spring without a rasp and the animals’ hooves looked terrible, with broken edges and cracks. He’d tried to treat them with his knife, and that had gotten him through the winter. Now he tied the animals to a tree and rasped their hooves even and clean with rounded edges.

He wished he had shoes for them, but there had been none in the store, and without a forge to shape them they might not have stayed on long anyway. And besides, anybody who saw his hoofprints now would think he was
another Indian; if he had shod hooves somebody might think he had money. Worth following.

He knew little about the Territory as yet, but that shotgun barrel that had followed him around the store told him there must be a serious worry about violence or theft.

In any event, he was a fugitive, and he didn’t want anybody thinking he was worth following. For any reason.

He stayed in the canyon for two weeks, cooking on small dry-wood fires that made almost no smoke, eating corn bread and bacon, and venison from a deer he had shot. He was very nervous about the shot, which echoed in the canyon walls. But it was his one shot in the two weeks, and when nobody showed up for two days he assumed nobody had heard it, or if they had, they hadn’t thought it was worth investigating.

Being alone with the horse and mule and the animals around him in the trees made him very aware that they could see and hear and sense things that he could not. Through the winter it had not mattered so much. But now the trees were filled with different types of birds, and they sang almost all the time. He learned that if they suddenly grew quiet, it meant that something was moving near them, a coyote or bobcat; when he walked into the trees, they grew quiet then, too.

So he listened and watched the horse and mule, because they could hear and smell better than he could. One morning as he sat on his blanket eating a corn dodger and cold venison from the night before, he looked at the horse and mule, tied nearby, and saw them looking up at the east ridge of the canyon, ears perked forward and nostrils flared to get the scent of something.

At the same time the birds grew quiet.

The hair went up on Bass’s neck. It could be a coyote or a bobcat or a cougar. Even a bear or a buffalo. But for some reason this time seemed different. Bass belted his revolver around his waist, took his rifle and stood up.

No sound. Nothing to see.

Then he felt a low drumming of hooves, and, a half mile away, on the low eastern edge of the little canyon, where there was a slope instead of a vertical drop, a buffalo came thundering over the edge and down into the canyon.

He was pursued by two men on horses, one riding on each side. The buffalo came straight at the camp until he was two hundred yards away, then veered and headed out the mouth of the canyon.

The two men saw Bass. They headed for him, firing at him as they rode.

Their shots missed, but one ball passed close enough for him to hear the wind whistle.

Without thinking, he raised his rifle, aimed at the closest man, squeezed the trigger, and saw him throw up his hands and somersault off the back of his horse.

The other man kept coming. He pulled a revolver from his belt and fired at Bass.

Close now, very close, and Bass pulled his revolver, aimed carefully and squeezed. He missed the man but caught the horse in the forehead, and it went head over heels, throwing its rider down so hard, Bass could see the dust thump off his dirty clothes. The horse was killed instantly. Neither man moved.

Bass took half a minute to reload his rifle and put a cap on the nipple—a lesson from the Comanche warrior with
the spear—then, careful, walked up to the man who’d been thrown by the dying horse.

He wasn’t breathing and his head was twisted sideways at a strange angle. Bass decided the fall had broken his neck. He looked young, not much older than Bass, and seemed to be a white man. He was so dirty it was hard to tell.

Bass walked to the other body. There was a clean hole through the man’s chest that must have hit his heart and killed him instantly. He was also fairly young, but an Indian, although he was dressed in wool trousers and a cotton shirt with a wool jacket.

Both of them were almost indescribably dirty, with dirt caked in the folds of their necks and smoke grime on their faces.

Bass stood for a moment wondering that he felt nothing in particular. It had all happened so fast, he’d had no time to feel anything, no time to do anything but react. He stood, wondering what to do next.

This feeling only lasted seconds. Then came an avalanche of thoughts: These men might not be alone, might be part of a larger group sent to chase and kill the buffalo. The rest of the group might be nearby and have heard the shots and might be riding toward him at this moment, and if they caught him in the open, standing, having killed their companions …

He had not a second to waste. He looked at their gear and found a double-cinched working saddle in good shape even though it had been slammed on the ground by the dying horse. His own saddle was beginning to fall apart. He stripped the saddle and the blanket off the dead horse
and put them on the Roman nose. He strapped his own saddle on the mule to use as a packsaddle. Frantic, he rolled his gear in blankets and tied it on the mule. At any moment, he expected to see riders come thundering down.

The other horse had kept going in the same direction as the buffalo. Gone. Bass was starting to ride away when he looked at the bodies again.

Both men wore boots.

He stood down and ran to the first body, but the boots were too small. He had luck on the second one—they were much larger. He jerked the dead man’s boots off and, carrying them as he remounted his horse, he headed out of the valley with the mule in tow, running up and over the west edge, using a gully to get over the canyon wall.

He was tempted to stop on the edge and see if anybody was coming, but uneasiness drove him on. He’d gone five miles and had stopped to let the horse and mule drink at a creek, when he realized he’d made a mistake. Both men had revolvers, rifles, ammunition—and he’d left it all there and only taken an old pair of boots.

Just plain stupid.

“Too late now,” he said aloud, feeling the horse jump beneath him with the sudden sound of his voice. “They’re gone forever.”

He rode up the creek for a mile, hoping the running water would obliterate any tracks, but the mule kept moving off to the soft mud above the water, leaving marks, so it probably wouldn’t work.

He thought of stopping, but twice he thought he heard pursuers and kept moving. He was wrong both times, but it didn’t matter. He was starting to think of what he had done.

Man killer.

If somebody found the bodies, they wouldn’t know he’d shot the men in self-defense. They’d see only the two bodies, unburied, still with their weapons, as if they had been defending themselves, and not the other way around.

He was not only a fugitive slave now but also a man killer.

If there was law out here, its men would hunt him down and not return him to the mister but throw a rope over a tree limb and hang him outright. Mammy had told him what they did to man killers. Hanged them and let the dogs tear at their legs while they died. She had seen it once in New Orleans.

It was bad enough before, thinking he had maybe killed the mister when he cracked him with the jug. Now he was a killer sure, at least as far as the law was concerned.

He had to keep moving.

Wander forever in this godforsaken land.

Like Mammy’s Moses on the Mountain, wandering in the wilderness.

Except that he wasn’t like Moses.

He had shot men dead.

FALL 1841
Wolves

Bass felt lost throughout that summer, and he did wander. For two months, he let fear take him, and he never spent more than one night in any camp, often camped cold. When he did make a fire, he kept it very small and dry and would cook enough for three or four days. One meal a day, if a corn dodger and cold meat could be called a meal.

He saw things he did not believe. In his wandering, he ended up back down near the southern edge of the Territory. He didn’t know it, but he was getting back into Comanche country.

He lay on a bluff one night, attracted by screams he could not identify as human, horrified to find they were indeed human and that a small party of Comanches below the ridge had captured a freight wagon and were torturing the driver by skinning him alive and burning him in turns.

There were men Bass hated. The mister was in that category. But Bass could not understand torture—the need for it, the desire—and he thought of trying to help the driver. But even if he got one or two Indians, the rest would surely kill him—or worse, do the same to him as to the wagon driver. In the end he moved off the ridge and rode back north, away from the Comanches. But the screams followed him, for weeks, and he could not stop thinking about the Garnett girls and what they must have gone through before death finally released them.

He learned that bluffs were a good place to spend time. He would get on top of them, tie his horse and mule in the middle so they couldn’t be seen from below, crawl to the edge, and watch. Often he could see for miles around and remembered that the mister had had a small telescope. He wished he had taken that as well—they could not hang him any higher for adding to his crimes. But even without the telescope, his vision was almost unlimited.