SPRING 1841
Killing Men
That first fall and winter, Bass lived like an animal. He had plenty of money, a good horse, a decent small mule, a good revolver and a good rifle. And all of those things put him in grave danger.
He was a fugitive from the law as a runaway slave, perhaps one who had even killed his master, for Bass had no way of knowing if the mister had died or not. Right or wrong, he had become a lawbreaker, and as a fugitive slave had an automatic price on his head. The amount varied from one to five hundred dollars, but either number was enough to make him a target.
Add to that the fact that he had guns and money and a horse, in a country where a man might die simply because another man wanted his hat. He might as well have worn a target on his back.
He took Flowers’s advice to heart and became adept at working below ridgelines, avoiding high places where he could be seen from a distance and staying away from welltraveled trails or tracks. When he had set out, the mules and bay had followed him a good distance, but eventually one mule and the bay headed back to the ranch. Strangely, the second mule—a little female named Bertha—kept up with him. He used Flowers’s horsehair lariat to lead her. She didn’t have a packsaddle, but Bass had nothing much to carry—Mammy had loaded his bedroll with cornmeal and a pan to cook in, and he had ammunition and powder for both the rifle and the revolver.
Days fed into weeks. He worked his way up through Comanche country without seeing any Indians except the scant few traveling along the trail.
He avoided contact with people, which meant that he rode well off to the side of the trail, and because of that, he saw more game than he would have if he’d been moving where it was better traveled. He managed to kill deer whenever he needed to, and twice in the first year he took buffalo, which stood like cows to be slaughtered. As the first winter began, he also killed some wild longhorns for meat.
The country was rough, broken with stony gullies and little bluffs. When it grew too cold to travel, he picked a short canyon with a rocky back wall and made a crude shelter with downed wood and sod pieces he cut from the dirt with his knife. He left room at the top for smoke to get out and covered the roof with deer hides, used two stiff buffalo hides for a bed, and wintered there, rationing the cornmeal and eating deer and buffalo half raw. He missed Mammy and even Flowers and would have felt sorry for himself except for the knowledge that bad as it was, fugitive that he was, cold as he sometimes got, hungry as he sometimes became …
He was free.
Whenever he began to well up with self-pity, he said out loud, “No man owns me or will ever own me again.” Sometimes he thought about that witch dog talking to him years ago. “Things will change.”
He was living a new life now.
The winter passed without much snow and without his seeing a single other soul. This wasn’t strange to him, because he knew that in the wilderness no one traveled much in the winter.
He passed his time tending to the horse and the mule and found them good company; they listened to him make plans for hunting and keeping warm, and the sound of their breathing comforted him throughout the long, dark nights. He spent hours remembering his life back at the mister’s ranch with Mammy and Flowers, although he avoided thinking about what might have happened to the mister. He spoke to Mammy as if she could hear him and found it easy and pleasant to imagine her responses. All in all, he was not as lonely as he might have been in his solitary condition.
By spring, the horse and mule looked poorly, all winter having eaten only dry grass they managed to scuff up. But when the grass came green, they seemed to eat twenty-four hours a day, and by the time Bass was ready to leave, they looked healthy enough to ride.
That winter he had made a mental list of things he needed if he could find some kind of a store, and if he dared to head in to buy things: needles and heavy thread, canvas and wool to make clothes. A pair of boots would be wonderful. He’d run off barefoot, and had made a pair of exceptionally crude moccasins out of deer hide and rawhide lacing, which were only slightly better than nothing. In the middle of winter there were times he thought he would lose his toes or feet, and the only thing that saved him was the firewood he found in thick stands of low brush and cottonwood around his camp.
That first spring he worked his way east and slightly north until he started to run into more heavily traveled trails. Most of them seemed to head toward the east and he followed them, until at last he came up on a rise and saw below him, about a mile ahead, what passed for a settlement.
Five small huts arranged in a row along one side of the trail.
He moved back off the rise, tied the mule and horse and watched the settlement for two and a half days. There was a fairly steady stream of travelers going by—some on horse, many on foot—and mostly Indians, although he saw a few who might be white men. It was hard to tell at that distance, though he was fairly certain he had seen some black people too.
They’d stop at the center hut. Bass moved closer and saw that they came out carrying sacks and bundles.
“A store of some kind,” he murmured. Just thinking about it made his stomach rumble.
He watched another day and decided he would have to be very careful and try not to attract any attention. He would move the horse and mule back into the brush and leave them. Then he’d take the tow sack Mammy had sent with him and go down on foot, pretending to be a servant or slave sent from a camp by his master to fetch some supplies. He would wait until close to dark, and as soon as he got his goods he would vanish into the darkness and nobody would be able to follow him.
It was a simple plan, and to his surprise it worked perfectly.
He waited until the sun was below the hills. He left most of his money with the horse and mule and took four five-dollar gold pieces—he had learned the denominations while playing poker—and shuffled down onto the trail in what Mammy had once told him was the “darky shuffle,” which made whites ignore you. There was no traffic on the trail and he made his way easily, thinking of what he would buy.
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.
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.