The Legend of Bass Reeves (4 page)

One, all the tracks on the trail that came through the mud from the north to the south were horse tracks.

Two, none of the tracks showed horseshoes. All the hoofprints were bare hooves.

For almost a minute he was excited. There were wild horse herds just as there were wild cattle. He hadn’t seen them but he knew they existed. If this was a place where wild horses crossed, he might be able to use a rope to
make a trap, catch a young horse and break it to ride. Would the slave laws apply if a slave actually captured a wild horse and tamed it for himself? Then he remembered that Mammy had told him that no slave could own any property. It always belonged to the mister, so even if he captured a horse and broke it, in the end the horse would belong to the fat drunkard.

He stopped thinking when he heard a strange sound. He had been in the willows and mesquite so long now that every motion, every sound, was familiar. This was new, something hitting metal. It came from the north on the trail. He had a sudden thought that this wasn’t a wild horse trail at all, but one used by ridden horses, and that some men were coming, perhaps Texas Rangers. He knew how rough these men were, especially with Mexicans or slaves, and he moved back into the mesquite. Then, in the same thought, he remembered that all white men rode horses that had been shod.

These were tracks without horseshoe prints.

Only Indians rode horses without shoes.

And the only Indians to come into this country were Comanches. He had never actually seen a Comanche, but he had heard tales of what they did and none were good.

He moved further back to crouch in the shadows. He held his breath and waited. Whoever it was, he prayed that the horses wouldn’t smell him and alert the riders.

Minutes crawled by like hours. Bass realized he had been holding his breath and he let it out slowly, took another. Back in the brush he heard no further sound. He was on the edge of thinking he had been wrong when he saw it: a splash of red moving past a small opening in the leaves. Just there, and gone.

He lowered his head to the ground to a spot where the brush hadn’t grown, and he saw it.

It was a white Indian pony with a bright red hand about twice life-size painted on its left front shoulder. Sitting on the horse was a Comanche warrior, painted for war with black stripes on his upper body and black and white stripes on his cheeks and around his eyes. He carried a small shield made of buffalo hide with the same red hand painted on it, and he held the shield and a killing lance in one hand and a rope rein tied to the horse’s jaw in the other. Except for leather leggings and a breechclout he was naked, with his shoulders and arms greased to keep flies and mosquitoes away. Across his back was a small quiver with eight or ten arrows and a short bow.

He stopped in the middle of the little creek and let his horse drink. In spite of the heat it did not take much water. It turned its head and seemed to look directly at Bass. Then it turned away, slobbering water to cool its lips and mouth.

Bass knew he should be terrified—Comanches were said to eat the hearts of their victims, cutting them out alive—but he could not feel any fear. That would come later.

Instead there was almost overwhelming awe. He felt like he was looking at some … some wild being that had never been broken, never been tamed.

Never been owned.

A wild thing that was and had always been free.

Free.

The Comanche turned and looked around carefully, stopping Bass’s heart as his eyes swept over the hiding place. When his head turned, Bass saw he had a long black
braid down the middle of his back. One perfect eagle feather was tied into the braid.

He’s an eagle, Bass thought, an eagle flying free.

Nobody could tell this man whether he could own a horse or not, where he could sleep, what he could eat. Somebody might come along and kill him, or he might kill them.

But they’d never own him.

The Comanche raised his hand, signaled forward, then pulled his horse’s head up out of the water and moved out of sight. There was a moment of silence, then more horses and warriors appeared.

There were eight, all dressed for war with decorations on their horses. They looked as wild and fierce as the leader, and when they had watered their horses and moved on and left Bass sitting back in the brush, when they were gone, Bass felt the first jolt of numbing fear.

Comanches. A raiding party of Comanches dressed for war, and Bass had heard many tales of what such a war party might, would probably do. They were heading south. Mammy and the homestead were to the northeast, at least seven miles in what should be a safe direction.

But the raiding party could loop north, and there wasn’t anything to stop them but Mammy, old Flowers and the mister, who couldn’t hit a barn wall.

Bass set off at a run to warn them, knowing that it would take him nearly an hour to get there.

An hour of not knowing, not seeing, not hearing as he ran, barefoot, eyes down to watch for snakes and cactus. He ran at a dead lope for over a mile until his wind gave out; then, a fast trot.

He had to warn Mammy.

SPRING 1836
Blood Moon

Now he had a gun.

When the mister heard about the raiding party, he was so afraid that he even gave a little shooter to twelve-year-old Bass. It was a .36-caliber percussion-cap muzzleloading rifle with a barrel almost as long as Bass was tall. The mister showed him how to pour a little measured powder from a powder horn down the barrel, then take a small piece of rag for a patch across the muzzle, then a round ball, and use the ramrod to slide it down onto the powder.

He showed Bass how to take a cap from a tiny metal box, put it on the nipple, cock the hammer back, aim at a piece of firewood on the ground about thirty feet away and pull the trigger.

There was a crack, a mild punch against Bass’s bare
shoulder and a great cloud of smoke. When it cleared, the firewood had been knocked over and there was a rip down the side where the ball had torn the wood.

“You ain’t never shot before?” the mister asked, casting a skeptical eye at the gouged wood. “When I wasn’t around?”

“No sir, Mister. First time.” But not, Bass thought, the last. I get me one of these and we’ll eat like those kings in the Bible Mammy is always talking about. I’ll be able to kill anything that walks, crawls or swims.

“Might be you’re a natural.” Mister shook his head, not believing it. He knew the slaves lied to him. All the time. He saw Mammy talking to the boy sometimes and when he came up they would quit and make up something to be busy about. “If the Comanche come, you wait until they’re really close, and I mean so you can see the spit when they scream like they do when they hatchet people. Then you aim at the biggest part and pull the trigger. Then reload as fast as you can, if you can, and shoot again. Keep shooting until they kill you. You work from the quarters. I’ll be in the main house.”

With that he went into the main house and closed the doors.

“I ain’t never seen Comanches,” Mammy said, “but I knew a woman who said she saw a white family lying by the road with so many arrows in them it looked like hair.”

She was at the pump filling buckets. “You take these into the quarters. Should they come, we’ll need water. Flowers! Come haul buckets.”

Flowers ignored her, and Bass took the water into the quarters. Whoever had built them had understood the
need for safety and there was only one door, made of thick boards of cottonwood. The three small windows had heavy wooden shutters that could be closed and barred from the inside.

It was early evening when they got all the water and a full ham from the smokehouse into the quarters. Then they sat.

And waited.

And waited.

Into the dark night, sitting awake until the moon came up. Flowers went to bed. Bass wasn’t sure that the man even understood what they were waiting for. In any event, he didn’t seem to care and was soon sound asleep.

Bass and Mammy sat on the bench by the door in the dark, now and then sipping cool water and whispering.

“Why are the Comanches so mean?” Bass asked. “We never done anything to them.”

“Not the colored. It’s the whites they got a mad on for, near as I can figure. But we belong to the whites so they kill us, too, I reckon. Like they kill the whites’ horses, cows, pigs. They even kill chickens. Then they burn everything.” She shook in the darkness. “They say they burn folks as well, burn them alive just to hear them scream. That’d be terrible, just terrible.… Listen, you got to promise me one thing.”

“What, Mammy?”

“If they come and it looks … bad, looks like we ain’t going to come out the other side … promise me you’ll run.”

“Run where?”

“Away. You either go on foot and hide or you take one of the mister’s horses and you ride away as fast as you can
and you don’t look back and you don’t listen back. Just cut and run. Get away.”

“I ain’t leaving you!”

“You have to. Worst thing for a mother to know is that her chirrun die before she does. Don’t do that to me. You get away. Run north, south, wherever you can. But you run. Promise me.”

He was silent.

“Promise me now or I’ll thump you.”

“Mammy, if it looks like we can’t fight them, I’ll run.”

“Promise. Cross fingers and spit on the ground promise.”

And finally he did. But even with the cross fingers and spit promise he thought, I will stay. I got me a gun now.

All through the long night they waited. Finally they dozed, until daylight, when the mister came out and ran to the side of his house and puked whiskey, and Flowers came out and sat down and started working on leather.

The Comanches didn’t come. Not then, and not the next night or the next, and finally on the third day, they let down their guard.

That night the riders came.

Not Comanches, but white men. There were twelve of them, about half of them Rangers, hard men riding lathered horses. Bass saw two black men riding with them. Both the black men were carrying rifles but riding plow mules. The mules were so foamed up they looked like they were covered in soap, and when they drank they almost staggered to the trough.

A tall, thin man with a thick mustache pulled his horse in front of the main house. “Come out, Murphy!”

The mister came to the door, clearly drunk. “What do you want?”

“The Alamo has been destroyed, every man killed! We’re going against Mexico! Bring your stock and your coloreds.”

The mister stood staring at him. “What’s the Alamo?”

“God, man! Where have you been? This is war! We’re fighting for the Republic! Santa Anna is on the march and we have to fight him.…”

He trailed off because the mister turned away and went back inside the house. The man whirled, looked at Bass and Mammy and Flowers, started to say something, then shook his head, swore and rode off. The rest of the men followed and the blacks on the mules weaved and staggered as their exhausted mounts responded to kicks and whips.

Bass felt a strange excitement that he didn’t understand. “What’s the Alamo, Mammy?”

“I don’t know.”

“What’s Mexico?”

“It’s a place south. They eat beans and some kind of flat bread made with corn flour ground fine. I don’t think those people get this far north very often.”

“Are we going to have a war?”

“I don’t think so. Wars are mostly what white folks do when they want something. Or that’s the way it looks to me. All I know is that the Comanches didn’t come, and the mister is too drunk to cause trouble or take you off to fight, and for that I thank Moses on the Mountain and God’s little boy Jesus. …Now, etch wood and we’ll cook up some food and then get some sleep. We been three days without sleeping in our beds.”

That night Bass dreamt in swirls of action and color. There were Comanches with eagle feathers, and the men
on sweaty horses and the black men with rifles all shooting at each other, falling as bullets hit them, only to stand up again.

He awakened before daylight and went outside, listening. There was nothing but the normal early-morning birdsongs. He took a piece of corn bread with bacon grease from the quarters stove, and the rifle and a small sack with the powder horn and some extra balls and caps, and tiptoed out into the dawn. It was good that the Comanches seemed to have gone on in some other direction, but they still bothered him. He decided to head back down to the creek where the crossing was to see what he could find.

Could he take a horse or a mule? The mister was so drunk he wouldn’t know. But Bass was going to take the rifle, and keep it until told to give it back, and if the mister did wake up or come outside and saw both a horse and the rifle gone, he might act up.

So Bass went on foot. It was a cool morning and the rising sun felt warm on his back as he jogged along. He was there in just over an hour. He had run up alongside the willows and mesquite to stay out of the thickest part, and when he approached the crossing, he moved back into them, slowed, and came up on the crossing easily, trying to be quiet.

There were horse tracks in the mud, going the other way, the same unshod hooves. The Comanches had come back in the last three days. He stood, looking at the track, wondering what they had done, what they had seen, which ranches, if any, they had attacked and burned.