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.
He felt safe, high in the sky on the bluff, and would sometimes find himself looking down on eagles and hawks flying beneath him. He started calling the bluffs by name based on what he saw. One was Torture Bluff, another Eagle Bluff, a third Bather’s Bluff, where he saw six or seven children by a homestead jumping around in a pond.
He began to know the country. He found good grass, good water, well-traveled trails and places where people seldom went. He found pockets of game, buffalo, deer and rabbit, where he knew he could find game when his meat ran low.
He came upon scores of small farms and ranches scattered throughout the territory, and would lie overlooking some of them for days, wistfully remembering Mammy and her cooking and love.
He also knew where there were gang hideouts. Usually it would be an older farm or ranch, poorly maintained. Perhaps just a sod hut with a pole corral. There would be few cattle and many horses and men, sometimes a dozen or more.
Even from a distance he could see these were hard men who were always heavily armed, like the two he had killed, and he kept well away from such places, certain that the moment anybody saw him they would begin shooting.
So he kept riding, walking, hiding by night and mostly by day, until weeks turned into months. As he moved, he learned.
Bass was illiterate, and written maps meant little to him. But his inability to read had a benefit. His memory became truly phenomenal. When he saw a special canyon or watering place, or a hideout he needed to avoid, he would kneel in the dirt and draw a picture of the place in the dust, how it looked from above, from the side. He’d look at it for a moment, then erase it.
It was all in his mind now. The Territory was not really that large, perhaps one hundred fifty by two hundred miles, and he covered over seventeen hundred miles that summer, back and forth, up and down, zigzagging to avoid people—and learning, learning, filing everything in a steeltrap memory.
Soon he knew every nook and cranny, every watering hole, every hideout and potential hideout, each of the four “stores,” almost every shack or overhanging cave shelter. He felt sure that unless he was taken completely by surprise, it was almost impossible that anybody could capture him. He wasn’t cocky, or even overconfident. It was just that he knew all the places he could go to avoid people.
There was no way in the world he could have expected to run into a little girl named Betty.
Bass had discovered a six-mile trail leading from one small homestead to another. It was about fifteen miles from the well-traveled trail to the store where he’d bought supplies. He decided to visit a different store on his next supply run; the two men he’d killed might have been known at the first store.
He needed to cross the trail that ran between the two ranches and then head north, because in the south there were groups of heavily armed men riding back and forth.
He came to the two homesteads with the trail between them. They were six or seven miles apart, with stands of short brush and woods between them where he could pass without being seen.
Generally, he didn’t like to get this close to ranches. There could always be riders out working stock, or somebody returning home.
But to go out and around would add maybe fifteen miles to his journey. He wanted to get north as soon as possible, so he decided to take the risk.
He was cautious. He stopped for over an hour on a rise and studied the trail, looking for movement. Nothing. Then he moved closer, until he was less than a mile from the trail, and did the same thing.
Nothing.
So he decided to make his dash across. No sooner had he started forward at a run than a paint pony came galloping out of the brush on the west side of the trail.
The pony had a little girl riding it and was going hell for leather, well beyond the girl’s ability to control it. Bass thought at first that the pony was a runaway—which was bad enough—but as it came closer, he saw it was being chased by three wolves.
When it was less than two hundred yards from Bass, the little girl lost her grip and fell off the back of the pony. The wolves attacked her instantly.
Bass had seen wolves kill buffalo calves and deer. Without thinking, he wheeled the Roman nose and kicked his ribs so hard, the horse blew snot out of his nostrils.
The Roman nose leaped forward into a dead run, but even so, by the time Bass came up to her, the little girl had been bitten on the arms, and two wolves were trying to drag her away.
“Get away!” Bass flew off his horse and into the wolves, kicking at them. “Get away from her!”
One wolf snapped at Bass and ripped his leg down the left thigh, a deep six inches from top to bottom. He didn’t feel anything, but he took his Colt out. He killed two of the wolves before the other one ran off, and then he turned to the little girl.
She had several deep bites on her arms and legs that were bleeding, but the wolves had not ripped her face. Bass picked her up as gently as possible and carried her to his horse and swung up. Then he noticed his left leg. Blood poured from the wound, but there was nothing he could do about it now. He rode with the little girl in his arms.
He could not guess her age. Four, five, six, clearly Indian, with long black hair and almond eyes. She looked up at him with a fearless gaze, and though he knew she must be in considerable pain, she was absolutely silent in his arms.
From the way the pony had been running, he figured she had come from the western homestead, so he heeled his horse into a run. Bass looked back once. To his surprise, the little mule was following at a wild gallop.
It would not take long to get to the homestead, and that was good, because Bass was losing blood rapidly. The movement of the horse worked the wound in his thigh, and blood poured down his leg. He had three miles to go, and within a mile he felt dizzy; in another half mile he was faint and hanging on to the saddle horn with one hand while keeping a tight grip on the little girl with the other.
He wasn’t going to make it.
He’d never make three miles. He was starting to lose the ability to think straight, and he thought he should stop soon before he fell or dropped the girl. Then everything swam in front of his eyes, and all he could think was he had to hold on, hold on, hold on.…
He thought he felt the horse slow—though he kept kicking it to run—and then maybe stop; he thought he heard voices, but they were speaking in some strange tongue and he tried to fight through them; then there was a kind of warm cloud coming down and he thought, This isn’t so bad, dying isn’t so bad, not so bad at all, and then he was gone.