The Legend of Bass Reeves (7 page)

The dogs barking made him think of the witch-dog coyote that had spoken to him—was the Mexican war what the coyote had been talking about? That might bring a change. Or the Comanche raid on the Garnetts. A terrible change. Or even coming to Paris and seeing a town for the first time, or shooting the rifle and killing a wild pig, or eating hard candy.

That reminded him that he had the paper sack in his blanket under the seat.

There were four pieces left. Two greens, a red and an orange. He took one of the greens and held it up to his eye and looked at the rising sun through the candy. Once he had done the same thing with a green bottle, but this green was much more intense, almost alive, and he smiled at how pretty it was; then he popped the green piece in his mouth, since he had two of them, and looked through the red and then tried to look through the red and the orange, holding one against the other. He was turned backward in the seat because the sun was coming up in the east and he was heading west when he heard a sound in front; he wheeled around and his heart froze.

Off to the side, a small band of mounted Indians was coming out of a gully. In the first instant, the old fear came back, but he saw that something was different about these people.

They were not all mounted. There were five or six men on horses, and walking in back of them were women and children, a dozen or so. None of them were painted and
they had no visible lances or bows. The horses weren’t painted. Each horse was dragging a pair of skid poles with crosspieces of willow tied in back and bundles wrapped in hide tied on top of the skids.

The horses looked poorly, as did the people. The children especially were very thin, except that their bellies bulged from hunger and many of them, as well as the women, had open sores on their faces and arms. Some held out their hands, begging, and Bass thought briefly of taking some flour and giving it to them. But if the mister awakened while he was doing it, he’d be in trouble, so he looked away.

He hadn’t seen them on the road because they had camped in the gully—now he could see smoke from fires they’d put out. After he’d passed, they pulled onto the road going in the same general direction.

The mules were slow, so that the small band almost kept up with him. After another two hours they were still only a quarter mile in back of the wagon and Bass had stopped watching them—they made him sad—and he was looking ahead, thinking if those Indians could be hidden in a gully, then other Indians could be hidden, when he heard the mister wake up.

“Damn rotgut whiskey,” the mister said, still slightly drunk although sobering fast. “Had everything in it plus rattlesnake heads … who are they?” He had seen the band of Indians back of the wagon.

“I don’t know. They came out of a ditch. They’re starving hungry and held their hands out for food.”

“Creeks,” the mister said. “Or Cherokee. Indians from down south. They’re moving to the Territory. They might
have come all the way from Florida. It’s no wonder they’re starving. …I don’t know how they got this far.” He fell back against the flour barrel and was soon snoring again.

None of it made much sense to Bass. He didn’t know what Florida was, or a territory, but he knew better than to start asking questions when the mister was coming off a bad drunk. And any drunk where he was talking about rattlesnake heads in the whiskey was definitely a bad one.

Besides, the mules sensed that they were getting closer to home. The wagon pulled away from the Indians, and it was a beautiful morning. The green candy still tasted sweet and Bass had saved a red and orange and green to show Mammy when he got home, and he had stories on top of stories to tell her of amazing things he had seen in Paris.

He slapped the reins. “Come on, mules, pick it up. We want to get in before dark.”

The mules pretended to speed up, but then settled back into their normal rhythm, hooves clopping in the dust, and Bass sighed.

They would get there when they got there.

FALL 1840
Running

Some things had changed.

Bass was sixteen now, pushing seventeen. He was as big as he would be when he became a full-grown man, except that his neck and shoulders had not quite filled. He stood six feet, two inches tall and weighed one hundred and eighty pounds. He could lift more than his weight and throw it in the wagon, and once when a mule had acted up, Bass had grabbed it by the halter, twisted its head and thrown it on the ground.

And if he wasn’t quite a man yet in body and mind and knowledge, he had a man’s duties.

The mister had battled the jug for three years and had finally surrendered. He would awaken and have coffee, with a little whiskey in it, walk down and look at the corrals without speaking, then go back into his house and
drink the day away. Now and then a trip to town for whiskey and supplies.

Bass ran the ranch. He gathered cattle, took care of the stock, shoed horses, doctored sick animals. Mammy cooked and took care of the mister and guided Bass when he needed guidance.

If the mister had been sober, he wouldn’t have allowed these things. But as he let go, Bass moved in and began. Like tending the horses’ hooves; they started getting too long and cracked and poorly shaped, so Bass took the hoof rasp and fixed them up, evened the bottoms, cleaned the frogs with a hoof pick. Soon the mister left those jobs to Bass entirely.

Or riding after cattle. One day, Bass was rummaging around in a junk pile in the back of the granary and he found an old Mexican
vaquero
saddle with cracked leather and an open seat.

He took the saddle to the quarters and started to repair it. He was surprised when shade covered him and he looked up to see Flowers staring down at him.

“What?” Bass said.

As usual, Flowers didn’t speak, but he took the saddle and walked back to where he sat to work.

Three days later he gave Bass what appeared to be a new saddle, oiled, with new stirrup straps and a low-style wrapped Mexican horn. Bass thanked him but Flowers said nothing, just returned to patching a harness.

That day, Bass had put the saddle on one of the mules and ridden him down to the mesquite bottoms, then come back and put the saddle on the Roman nose and ridden him down the same way. When he returned the mister was watching him, standing in the door to his house. But he
said nothing, and Bass had been riding ever since, checking cattle, doctoring sick ones, branding the mavericks he caught.

He did not ride the bay, though he wanted to, because he thought of it as the mister’s private horse. But he came to like the Roman nose. The horse was smaller, and jerkgaited, but he was tough and quick, could turn on a dime and was willing to try anything.

One morning, Bass realized he hadn’t even seen the mister in two days, and everything that had been done, he had done himself.

On a Saturday near his seventeenth birthday, the mister came to the door of the house and motioned for Bass to come inside.

“It’s time you learned how to play poker. Sit at the table.”

Bass had only been in the mister’s house four times, to help Mammy move furniture. Going inside to play cards was strange, almost spooky. Had the mister gone crazy?

“He’s just sick of sitting alone,” Mammy told him that evening as they ate. “He don’t go to town anymore, but he wants to play a little cards, it ain’t going to hurt. Just make sure you lose most of the time.”

Bass knew nothing of cards and couldn’t read or write numbers or letters, though he could count cattle by fives, and then fives of fives. He had to memorize the face cards and aces and count the spots on the numbered cards. Then he learned the rules, what beat what, and all this took a month, playing two or three times a week with a grubby old deck.

They would play for lucifer stick matches. They played five-card stud, one card down and four up, betting on each
card—the mister said it was the only true kind of poker. After the strangeness of the situation had worn off, Bass found that he actually enjoyed it.

Cards came easily to him, especially poker, because he was observant and alert to changes in the mister’s manner. After a time he could read the mister’s playing.

Soon he had to force himself to lose once in a while, especially when the mister was drunk and sloppy about his cards.

At first the mister was content to play for matches or colored pebbles. But after a couple of months, he wanted to play for something more valuable.

The problem was that Bass owned nothing. Not a thing in the world belonged to him, not his clothes or even his own body, so how could he play for something of value?

So the mister “loaned” him some money to start— twenty-five pennies—and they began playing five-card stud for pennies.

It seemed silly to Bass, who thought of the pennies as no more than lucifer sticks or pebbles, which they kept in a jar in the main house. The pennies remained in two jars, one for him, one for the mister.

Bass didn’t think of himself as owning the pennies. He won slightly more than he lost and didn’t try to win a lot— as Mammy had advised him—but even so, in a couple of weeks he had nearly forty cents in his jar.

It still would have meant nothing to him, except that the mister decided to harness the mules for one of his rare trips into Paris and take Bass with him. Before leaving, Mister took out twenty-five of Bass’s pennies and gave them to him. “Here. You can spend this in town.”

Bass was stunned. He knew nothing of money, and he talked to Mammy about it before they left.

“Well, things cost money. Those candies you brought back that time might have cost a penny for five of them.”

“So with twenty-five pennies I could buy …” He trailed off. The number eluded him, but he knew it was huge. “A whole big bag of them.”

“Yes. Or you could buy sugar and cinnamon, and I could make you some sweet cakes to take with you on your cattle-gathering rides.”

And that was what Bass had done. He had spent five of the pennies on candy—they were three for a penny—and bought a bag of sugar and some cinnamon. He had sweet cakes when he did the long rides.

And he understood what money meant.

Which made him play harder and win more. That was when the mister increased the limit of their play to a nickel instead of a penny, and soon Bass had more than a dollar in his jar.

He knew a nickel was five pennies, knew it was a great amount of money for him, but did not quite understand how it fit in with the rest of the world. He did not know that a good man could be hired for fifty cents a day, that much of the land in Texas could be bought for twenty and even ten cents an acre or that he was worth eight or nine hundred dollars because he was young and strong. When he was worked out—which happened to many slaves by the age of twenty-five—the rate would drop drastically. Most masters would then sell field hands “down the river,” down the Mississippi to the sugarcane plantations in Florida, where they would be worked to death in a year.

He knew only that he had a dollar, which he could use to buy more sugar and spices for cakes. All he had to do was win the money at poker.

So they began playing for a nickel.

And then ten-cent limits.

And then twenty-cent limits.

Bass’s jar had more and more money sitting on the shelf in the main house, and he told Mammy that he was getting rich. She shook her head. “You got to be careful, real careful. He’s still the mister. It’s all his money. And if he gets down on you, it can all go bad.”

“I let him win most hands.”

“Still, how can you win so much of the time?”

“Just watch his eyes. They get big when he has a good hand and little when he has bad cards. Ain’t nothing to it.”

“You watch yourself.”

“Well, he tells me to play, I got to play, don’t I?”

And so they did, once or twice a week for a year, until Bass wasn’t sure just exactly how much money he had in the jar, but the mister said it was more than thirty dollars. They were playing for fifty-cent limits by then.

And now, Bass thought, sitting on the Roman nose about a mile from the Comanche crossing, now the mister wanted to bring the limit up to a dollar.

Bass watched as a group of Indians gathered around a wild cow he had tangled the day before. It was caught and cornered on the edge of the mesquite along the stream. They used spears and arrows and the cow died slowly, weaving to jab at them with its horns until it was too weak to fight. One of the braves reached in and cut its throat.

They all jumped in then, women and children, and began cutting the cow open, eating the liver and heart,
cutting pieces of meat to eat bleeding and raw. They were starving and wolfed down the meat, not caring that Bass sat less than fifty yards away.

They were not Comanches but had come up from the South like so many he had seen of late, family groups walking. He asked the mister about why the Indians were marching north.

The mister looked up from his cards. “They’re Indians from the South, driven out and up into what’s being called Indian Territory. North of us. Set aside just for Indians. It’s a wild place, full of fugitive Indians and …” He looked at Bass and didn’t finish.