Dad Egan

He had seen the dream many times before. It was night, and a horse of some dark color was galloping along the ridge of a long, flat mountain. The mountaintop was strewn with small boulders. Bushes and small trees grew everywhere. The horse’s iron shoes struck fire from the rocks sometimes, but it never stumbled.

He was the rider, but he also was standing on the mountain and watching the horse’s run, in that way that dreams have of letting you be in two places at once, both doing the thing being dreamed and seeing it done at the same time. As the rider, he felt his hair blown back by the wind of the horse’s passage. He felt the wind against his cheeks, too, and in his eyes. He rode bareback and felt the movement of the animal under his legs and the coarseness of its mane between his fingers. The rhythm of the horse was very smooth, and the rocks and the brush seemed to offer no impediment at all to its progress along the ridge. The iron shoes striking fire from the rocks made no sound. As the watcher, he saw the rocks and trees and fire and the horse running. The animal had one spot of white on it, a stocking leg, the left hind one. It glowed in the moonlight as it moved across the ground like a small ghost. He saw his own face, too. It was as pale as the horse’s leg and was smiling a smile of such abandon as to suggest madness.

Suddenly the horse would approach a cliff, and instead of stopping or turning aside it would plunge into the void. Not downward, as if falling, but straight out into the darkness, like an arrow, until the horse and rider were swallowed by the gloom.

The dream came to him years ago, when he was a boy on his uncle’s farm in Indiana. It had appeared to him many times since then. It never varied in any detail.

It was always followed by another dream, or a second part of the same dream, that also was always the same.

It was still night in the same hilly country. But now the horse was standing in a corral. It was standing quietly, making no sound at all. Its stocking leg still glowed in the moonlight, and its chest and withers and flanks were flecked with foam. The rider was outside the fence now, gazing at the horse. He was tired. Then he noticed the dark shape of a small house next to the corral. A light was glowing behind a curtained window. The rider thought he had never been in that place before, but he walked to the house and opened the door without knocking, as if he knew he was expected there. He entered a narrow hall, longer than such a small house could have contained. The hall was dark, except for a light at the far end. Standing in front of the light was a woman. He couldn’t see her face. Only the black silhouette of a woman wearing a long, straight skirt. “There’s a horse for you in the corral,” he said. And she said, “Thank you.”

That was all. It wasn’t particularly unusual, as dreams go. I’ve dreamed stranger dreams myself. During the war, I dreamed terrible dreams that made me sweat and wake up screaming. Sam’s dream wasn’t at all frightening. The first part, the running of the horse, made him feel light and free, he said. And the second part made him feel calm.

Sam told me about the dream not long after he arrived in Denton, before he went to work for me and came to live in my house. I was the first person in Denton to meet him, I guess. It was dusk, in the early fall of 1870, and I was sitting on the steps of the courthouse, taking the air. The courthouse was closed at that time of day, of course, but I liked to put the town to bed before I went home. I would inquire politely about the business of any strangers I found and make an early round of the saloons. Not to drink, you understand. Drink is the most dangerous thing an officer of the law can do. Liquor impairs a man’s wit and strength when he needs them most, and in a place like Denton, where the forces of decency and the forces of perdition are so delicately balanced, a whiff of whiskey on the breath can destroy a sheriff at the polls as well. The law is the heaviest weight on decency’s side of the scale, and the odor of sour mash on the breath of the law inspires a fear in decent people that the scale is tipping against them. In that dark time, only five years after the death of the Confederate States of America, when we were still trying to free ourselves from a carpetbag governor in Austin and a thuggish state police that poured salt into our wounds at every opportunity, it was especially important that the local law be decent and upstanding.

Beyond these professional and political considerations, I abstain from alcohol because I’m a family man, a man of property and a Christian and try to be a friend and worthy example in my own home and in the town and county. And I’m proud that although I was only thirty-six years old at the time, even older men chose to call me “Dad,” in place of my Christian name, William. That may be why Sam was so drawn to me. He hadn’t called any man “Dad” in such a long time.

Anyway, I was rising from the courthouse steps, about to commence my round of the saloons, when a wagon entered the square. I knew the driver. He was Bob Mayes, who used to run a livery stable in Denton. He had given it up in a fit of homesickness two years before and had gone back to Mississippi. Now he had returned. His wife was on the wagon box beside him. Their sons, Little Bob and Scott, had shot up like saplings since they left. They had the appearance of men now, slouching in their saddles. I didn’t know the third rider, a young man about Little Bob’s age, eighteen or nineteen. I stepped up to the wagon and shook Bob’s hand and welcomed him back to Denton. While Bob climbed down and I helped Mrs. Mayes, the boys dismounted and tied their horses to the courthouse hitching rail. Bob said, “Dad, meet Sam Bass. He’s come from Indiana to be a cowboy, and he kept an eye out for Indians all the way across Arkansas.” He winked at me.

The lad grinned sheepishly as he shook my hand. He was slightly built, five-foot-eight or so, and stood with a stoop that made him look even smaller. He was wiry, though, and although he didn’t grip my hand hard, I knew he was strong and used to hard work. His high cheekbones and black hair and eyes made me think that if he wanted to see an Indian, he should look in a mirror. I welcomed him and told him he had come to the right place to be a cowboy, for Denton is a sort of border between the farming country to the east and the cow country to the west. And if he wanted to see Indians, I said, he could ride on west and find plenty.

The boy didn’t reply, and I turned back to Bob and his family and the kind of chat that old acquaintances get into when they haven’t seen each other for a long time, inquiring after the health and prosperity of each other’s families, comparing carpetbag governments and nigger problems in Texas and Mississippi, and things like that. I remember saying that so few men in Denton County had taken the oath of allegiance to the government in Washington that it was hard sometimes to find twelve white men for a jury. And he said the same was true in Mississippi.

Sam Bass stood listening for fifteen or twenty minutes, shifting from one foot to the other and looking at the ground. Finally he said, “Sheriff Egan, where can I go to get a job on a ranch?”

“Just stay in town and talk to the ranchers when they come in,” I said.

“I ain’t got the money to hang around,” he said, “or the time.”

“Well, ride that way in the morning, then,” I said, pointing to the road westward out of the square, “and stop at every house you come to. They’re far between, but you’ll find somebody who can use you.”

“Thank you,” he said. “I’ll start now.”

“You won’t get far before dark,” I said. “You’d better stay the night here and leave in the morning.”

“No, I’ll go now and get a jump on the day,” he said. He shook hands all around, thanked Bob for letting him ride along with him, and promised to look up Little Bob and Scott the next time he came to town. Then he mounted his little buckskin horse and rode out.

“That boy,” said Bob, watching him. “He’s going to amount to something real fast, or he’s going to bust a gut trying.”

Sam was hired by Bob Carruth, fourteen miles west of Denton, and I must have seen him sometime during that fall or winter, but if I did, I don’t remember it. Maybe I didn’t. Some of the cowboys stay on the ranches for months at a time without coming into town, especially those who want to keep their pay for a while. I wish they all would. The town needs their money, of course, and I guess we’d be pretty bad off if they just stayed out on the range or went elsewhere for their good-timing. But I dread seeing them, especially when they arrive in bunches. They get drunk, and then start playing cards. Men who gamble are fools, and men who gamble while drunk are bigger fools. They forget the value of their money while they’re losing it, but when it’s gone they remember how hard they worked for it and resent the ease with which it’s taken from them. They get mad and fight. Sometimes they kill, and then head into the cross-timbers or light out to the west, where, likely as not, their scalps wind up in the belts of the Comanche or the Kiowa. There’s no telling how many men in Denton have been wasted on whiskey and cards, some slowly, over a number of years under their awful influence, and others extinguished suddenly in the violence inspired by them. “Wine is a mocker,” saith the Lord. And whiskey is worse.

Sam had been drinking when I saw him next, and he had won a few dollars at the card table. He didn’t look happy, though, when he sat down beside me on the courthouse steps. “Well,” I asked, “how do you like being a cowboy?”

He was rolling a cigarette, and he licked the paper and stuck it down and twisted the ends before he answered, “I don’t.”

“What’s the matter?”

“The hands at my uncle’s sawmill in Indiana told stories about Texas,” he said. “So did the river men in St. Louis and the boys at the sawmill in Mississippi. They all made it sound like heaven, and said they was coming here someday. But Texas ain’t nothing but a barren place where everything bites, and cowboying ain’t no more fun than standing in a fire.”

I was amused at the bitterness of his complaint, which he spoke in a high, nasal twang that made him sound even younger than he was. “Most people come here expecting more than there is,” I said, “especially since the war. But they get used to it. Most even like it after a while.”

“Oh, I don’t mind the place so much,” he said. “But I’m a sorry cowhand.”

“Who says?”

“Carruth’s told me I ain’t going on the drive to Kansas. He says I got to learn the tricks before I can be any use on the trail.”

“Well, he’s right,” I said. “If you don’t know what you’re doing, you’ll get yourself killed on the trail. Or get somebody else killed. Be patient, son. You haven’t been here long, and you’ve got all the time in the world to get whatever you want.”

Sam squinted through the smoke of his cigarette. “No, I ain’t,” he said. “What if I spend a year or two learning to rope a cow? What am I then? Just a cowboy. Nothing. Them longhorns ain’t nothing but misery, and I ain’t going to wear myself out on them.”

His face was flushed, perhaps by the alcohol, and I thought he was going to cry. I felt sorry for him, so young and alone. “Why don’t you do something else?” I said.

“I’m going west to hunt buffalo,” he said. “Hides is bringing up to two dollars apiece, and a lot of boys is going out to get them.”

“Are you good with a rifle?” I asked. “Not very good,” he said quietly.

“Have you ever skinned a buffalo? It’s the hardest, filthiest work there is. Worse than working cows. And if you’re not good with a rifle, you won’t get many hides.”

Sam stared at the dust at the foot of the steps for some time, then pulled off his hat and swiped his brow with his sleeve. “Well, Dad,” he said, “is there nothing here for me?”

“Sure there is, son. Maybe something in town. Maybe you could get work in one of the stores.”

He shook his head. “I can’t read or write or do numbers.”

“Well, what can you do?” I asked. “What do you like in this imperfect world?”

“Horses,” he said. Then he told me about the dream.

The Widow Lacy hired him. She ran the Lacy House, the biggest and best hotel in Denton, a two-story, white frame structure on the square. She had a fine well, too, and could water as much stock as you brought, which was one reason her place was so popular. That and her cooking. But she had had a hard time of it since her husband died, and she looked worn down by the worry of it. Business was too good. The inside work kept her hopping, and she was having trouble keeping a man around to do the lifting and carrying and taking care of her customers’ animals. The pay was low and her tongue was sharp, particularly when she was tired, which was most of the time, and no male helper of hers stayed more than a few months, despite her food. I saw her one evening, drawing and carrying the water for the stock herself. Her hair was coming unpinned, and the hem of her skirt was spotted with manure. I hurried to help her, and while I carried the water buckets I told her about Sam. “Lordy, Dad, if he’s got two arms and a back, I’ll take him,” she said. “I won’t even ask for legs.”

They hit it off well. Sam worked hard and didn’t have to be told what to do. He didn’t complain about the work or the wages. The hotel’s customers liked him. Some said their horses and mules looked better after a day or two in Sam’s care than they’d ever seen them before. That was high praise, because animals are important around Denton, and most men consider themselves better than most at handling them and taking care of them. But Sam had such a special way with them that people could compliment him without taking anything away from themselves.

It’s a strange thing. Most people don’t think of cleverness with animals as a gift of God, because everyone has to deal with them in one way or another. But some are so much better at it than others that you have to consider it a special gift. And Sam had the gift. That made him popular with the Lacy House customers, and valuable to the Widow. She knew it, and treated him nicer than she had his predecessors. She would save a piece of pie from supper and give it to him right before bedtime. She would buy him a new shirt or a new pair of pantaloons occasionally, and would fuss when he didn’t wear them. He did look scruffy much of the time, letting his black hair grow almost to his collar, wearing old patched clothes and going for a week without being shaved. “I ain’t no preacher,” he would say when the Widow suggested improvements, and she would shrug and let him go, since his appearance didn’t harm his good standing with her customers.

He was popular in the town, too. Although he rarely spoke and wore a sad, vaguely troubled expression on his face much of the time, people who saw him around the square learned that he wasn’t unfriendly, and after he had a drink or two, he could be congenial. He drank moderately and gambled moderately, and when he lost, he didn’t rail against his own bad luck or curse the good luck of others or mumble of cheating as some did. He accepted his losses with grace, and when he won, he always bought a drink or two for the other players, thus taking some of the sting out of their ill fortune or bad sense. Because of that simple courtesy, cowboys and townspeople sought him out for their games.

And he made three special friends. Frank Jackson, who was about five years younger than Sam, seemed to worship him. To this day I don’t know why. Frank was a tinner, and worked in the shop of his brother-in-law, Ben Key. He was a blond, gentle boy who read every book he could find and said he wanted to be a doctor. In appearance, manner and mind he was Sam’s opposite. Yet he hung on Sam’s every word as if it came from an oracle, and sometimes he even aped the peculiar stoop that made Sam appear to be carrying some invisible burden. I’ve watched them pitch hay and carry water to the Lacy House stock together, Frank babbling of what he had been reading in some book or newspaper, and Sam working silently, maybe listening to Frank’s words, maybe not. Frank was only fifteen or sixteen then and didn’t have many willing listeners to his book learning, I guess. Maybe Sam’s silence was what Frank treasured in him.

The reasons for Sam’s friendship with the others were more obvious. Henry Underwood was from Indiana, like Sam, and had worn the Yankee blue in the war, like Sam’s older brother, who was killed in Kentucky. Maybe he had known Sam’s brother or served under the same commander. I don’t know. Anyway, they had Indiana in common, and strangers in a place are always glad to happen onto someone who shares something of the past with them. Henry was married and made his living hauling firewood and driving freight between Denton and Dallas, but I considered him a shiftless sort. He spent too much time in town, drinking and gaming at the Parlor Saloon, and his wife’s life was a hard one.

The Parlor was run by Henderson Murphy, and it was there that Sam met Henderson’s son, Jim. Although I consider saloon-keeping a questionable way to win a livelihood, no town could ask for a better citizen than Henderson Murphy. He served several terms as alderman, and outside the town he owned even more land than I did. He sired the first white child born in Denton, and several others afterwards. That was lucky for him, for he suffered terribly from consumption and needed all the help he could get to tend his property. And no man could ask for a more helpful son than Jim was, particularly around the saloon. He was blessed with that cheerfulness and gift of talk that makes Irishmen such perfect hosts and a skill with his fists that enabled him to keep order without calling for the law. If the other saloonkeepers in Denton had been as well equipped for their calling as young Jim was, my lot would have been a happier one.

Sam and his friends were an odd bunch. Frank Jackson wasn’t far beyond childhood, hardly old enough to need a razor. Henry Underwood was at least a dozen years older than he, and a family man besides. And Jim Murphy, despite his jolly manner, was a man who took his responsibilities seriously, especially his duty to his father, while the others didn’t seem to have a care in the world. I think if Sam hadn’t been around, they wouldn’t have paid any attention at all to one another. They weren’t really friends of each other. But each, for his own reasons, was Sam’s friend, and whenever he was around, they moved to him like horseshoe nails to a magnet. So the four were often in each other’s company, and the town got used to seeing them together. Sam had a charm of some kind, I guess, but I can’t say what it was, and he lived with me for three years.

He came to work for me very like the way he had gone to the Widow Lacy. Out of pure restlessness. I was sitting on the courthouse steps one evening as usual, and he sat down beside me, just as he had when he was working for Bob Carruth. He breathed a sigh and slumped forward. “Lord,” he said, “that hotel is getting the best of me.”

“The Widow’s getting her money’s worth, is she?” I said.

“She is. I don’t know whether I’m coming or going. And the worse thing is, I’m staying in the same place.”

The remark didn’t make sense to me, and I asked him what he meant.

“I mean I ain’t going nowhere,” he said in that high-pitched twang that he employed when complaining. “I’ve been around that damn hotel all day and most of the night for nearly two years now, and every time I get out of sight of it, that widow woman hollers so loud you can hear her all over the square. She might as well tie me up like a dog.”

“She likes you,” I said.

“But I’m too old for that kind of work now. Hotel work is boy’s work. And women’s. A man’s got to move around. In all the time I’ve been in Texas I ain’t been no farther from this spot than Carruth’s place.” He lapsed into a kind of reverie, just staring into the evening for some time. Then he said, “I shouldn’t never have listened to you. I should have went buffalo hunting.”

“Well, you’d probably be dead now.”

“Dead is better than what I am.”

“Pshaw, Sam!”

“Well, I believe it,” he said. Then he fell back into his silence.

It was full dark when he spoke again, and the saloon lamps were casting an inviting glow onto the sidewalks around the square. “Come have a drink with me,” he said.

“You know I don’t drink, son.”

“Never?”

“Never.”

“Let me drive for you, then.”

At that time, besides being sheriff, I had started a small freighting business. Just two wagons that I ran between Denton and Dallas and Sherman to fetch goods from the railroad depots whenever there was call to. Although I had competitors in Henry Underwood and others, my business was growing, and I employed two teamsters. But I didn’t need another one.

I did need help, though. In addition to the family ranch west of town, where my brothers did more than their share of the labor, and my twelve-acre town place west of Bolivar Street, where my dear wife was too heavily burdened with the care of our large garden and the domestic animals, I recently had bought a hundred-and-sixty-acre place to the northwest that was in need of improvement. As I said, I’m a man of property. But the growth of the town and the troublesome times were demanding more of me than I had expected when I was persuaded to run for the sheriffs office, and I was proving a neglectful steward of what the Lord had given me. So I said, “I’ve got no place for another teamster now, but I do need some help.” And I told him about the new place and all that needed to be done there, and offered to let him live with Mrs. Egan and me at our town place. I also promised that if one of my teamsters quit, he could have the job.

He accepted my offer with enthusiasm, and wanted to move his belongings into my house that very night, but I refused. “It would be unfair to the Widow,” I said. “Tell her what you’re going to do and give her a few days to find somebody to take your place.”

“She ain’t going to like this, Dad,” he said.

“No, she won’t.”

“Will you tell her? She’ll kill me.”

The prospect of telling the Widow Lacy that she was losing her right hand didn’t thrill me, either, but I agreed to do it. Sam wanted me to go to her right then, but I decided to wait until morning, when the woman wouldn’t be so tired.

The Widow gave me unshirted hell. She even wept, and accused me of stealing the boy away from her. But I told her Sam was so restless that she was bound to lose him soon, anyway. And she had begun to suspect that, and finally told me that if she had to lose him, she was glad he was coming to me. She implored me to treat him right, and I promised that I would. She took my hand and pressed it and wiped her eyes, and that was that.

A few days later, Sam moved his gear into the little room off my back porch. I rode out to the new place with him and my younger brother Armstrong, who is called “Army,” and showed Sam the work he would have to do, with Army’s help. The prospect would have disheartened almost anybody. Nobody had lived on the place in years, and the cabin was in ruins. I didn’t care about that, since I didn’t plan to live there anyway, but the land was on the verge of ruin, too. The fields were overgrown with weeds, and the brush was making a vigorous comeback in the pasture, and the fences would have to be rebuilt. The improvements I wanted were minimal, since I intended to use the land for grazing and for the firewood I could get out of the bottom on the back side of the place. But Sam and Army would have to spend days in the pasture with grubbing hoes and axes, hacking at the brush and snaking timbers out of the woods and splitting them to rebuild the fences, and chopping and hauling the firewood. Just looking at it made my back ache, but Sam and Army regarded it as nothing. Youth is wonderful.

Within a month they had the fences up, and I bought a few head of stock and moved them there. The boys cut enough firewood to last the whole winter and hauled it to town. Then Army went back to the ranch and left Sam alone with his grubbing hoe and ax and the brush. Every morning Mrs. Egan fixed him bacon and biscuits to take with him, and he would saddle the little buckskin and ride out just after daylight. He would stay out there all day by himself, working like a nigger, and ride back in time to milk our cow, gather the eggs and do anything else he could to help my wife. He would dandle my daughter Minnie on his knee, and let little John ride him piggyback. He called John “Little Pard.” He made a lot of progress on the pasture, too, and I guess he would have grubbed brush all winter if Billy Chick hadn’t quit.

Billy was one of my teamsters. When the weather started getting cold, he looked for an inside job and found one. I wasn’t sorry. He was lazy, and I probably would have let him go anyhow.

I was looking for a way to reward Sam, since he hadn’t uttered a word of complaint and I knew he wouldn’t be happy hacking brush forever. So when Billy quit, I offered his job to Sam.

I’ll never forget the day of his first trip to Dallas. The wagon was piled high with buffalo hides, and they stank to high heaven. But Sam had a brand new haircut and a shave and was wearing new black pantaloons and a checkered shirt that the Widow Lacy had given him. I don’t guess he had worn them more than twice before.

“Lord, son,” I said, “you look like you’re going to church.” “Better than that,” he said. “I been tending these goddamn horses all my life, and now they’re going to take me somewhere.”

He came back a few days later full of tales about the city. His eyes flashed as he described the iron toll bridge across the Trinity River, the street with the outdoor gas lights that made night almost as plain as day, the huffing of the steam locomotives, the mule-drawn cars for the public to ride on Main Street. You would have thought he was Marco Polo home from Cathay. His taste of the wider world had given him such a thrill that he was a pleasure to see.

He hinted of sampling the city’s darker pleasures, too, offhandedly mentioning the elaborate gambling setups in some of the saloons there, the piano music and the women with uncovered shoulders and plumes in their hair who knew how to separate a man from his money. I suspected they had separated Sam from some, but if they did, it was his own money and not mine. He returned with every penny he was supposed to, so I didn’t ask how he took his ease in Dallas. I had sent Sam to the city to do a job for me, and he had done it. I was satisfied.

And I was more satisfied as time passed. Sam was the most willing, capable hand I ever had. He became the man I relied on for any duty requiring intelligence and a sense of responsibility. It was he who hauled the first load of ice from Sherman to Denton, a day of note in the history of the town. The ice had come all the way from the Great Lakes by riverboat and train, but so much of it could have been lost on the hot fifty miles from Sherman that the enterprise wouldn’t have been worth the effort in the hands of a careless man. Sam packed the big blocks in the wagon with a care befitting glass, surrounding and covering them with straw before he lashed the canvas over them. When he arrived, he and Frank Jackson chipped off two big chunks and danced a jig in the street, holding the ice over their heads, shouting its coming to the town. The butchers and saloonkeepers bought it quickly at a premium price, and the ice run to Sherman became one of Sam’s regular duties. I wouldn’t have trusted it to anybody else.

Sam lived in my house and ate at my table and had my leave to treat most of my goods and belongings as his own. My children worshipped him. My wife pitied him and tried to teach him to read and write. He wasn’t much of a pupil, but he did learn to write his name. When my wife concluded that he was enduring her instruction only to please her and not out of a desire for learning, she gave up. He received two or three letters from his family in Indiana, and Mrs. Egan would read them to him and write out his replies for him. In one, I remember, a couple of his brothers were inquiring about Texas and expressing an interest in joining him here. And he told Mrs. Egan to tell them they were better off in Indiana.

Sam had several brothers, I gathered from his rare mentions of his family. One was named Denton, the same as our town, I recall, but if I ever heard the names of the others, I’ve forgotten them. He had some sisters, too, I think. They were orphaned when Sam was just a boy. Their farm and everything on it were sold at auction, and Sam and the others went to live with an uncle, who had a large family of his own.

From Sam’s vague references to that time I deduced that he was a runaway. He mentioned a quarrel with his uncle, about wages, I think. “I walked away without nothing but the shirt on my back,” he said. He went to St. Louis and hung around the waterfront for a while, then drifted downriver to Mississippi and got a job at a sawmill. It was the same work he had done for his uncle, but they paid him for it in Mississippi. He saved enough money to buy a horse and a gun, somehow hooked up with Bob Mayes and his family, and wound up in Denton because that was where Bob Mayes was going, and one destination was as good as another to Sam, just so it was Texas.

There was nothing interesting in his story, and nothing unusual. The world is full of runaways, and many of the best citizens of Denton admit to scrawling “GTT” on their doors back home, a message to friends or the law or creditors that they had gone to Texas. There’s no shame in being a runaway or even an outlaw here, so long as the wrong was done somewhere else. Since the war, many decent people have fled carpetbag debt and carpetbag law, and there’s no disgrace in that, just as there’s no disgrace in being a poor freedman, now that the Yankees have cut the niggers loose from the secure places they used to know. What matters here is what people make of themselves after they get here, not what they were where they came from.

Nobody tried harder to make something of himself than Sam did. As I’ve already said, he was a hard worker, and at that time there wasn’t a cheating bone in his body. He returned from every freighting trip with all the goods and money he was supposed to bring back, and sometimes more. Once he returned so much of the expense money I had given him that I asked if he had fed the horses during the trip. He just said, “Don’t worry till you see their ribs.”

I didn’t worry. I would have trusted him with anything, especially my horses. People around town took to calling him “Honest Eph.” I don’t know why, unless they just thought “Honest Eph” sounded better than “Honest Sam.” Anyway, he earned the name. And I couldn’t have felt closer to him if he had been my brother or son. I even invited him to sit with me and Mrs. Egan at night when we read the Bible to each other. “Are you reading the Old Testament or the New Testament? “he would ask. When we were reading the Old Testament, he would join us sometimes, but he wouldn’t when we were reading the New. He didn’t care about Jesus and Paul, but he loved some of the stories in the Old Testament, especially those about Samson and those about David before he became king, when he was a bandit.

One night I read the story about Pharaoh’s dream and Joseph’s interpretation of it as a sign that Egypt would have seven years of plenty and seven years of famine. “And Pharaoh took off his ring from his hand,” I read, “and put it upon Joseph’s hand, and arrayed him in vestures of fine linen, and put a gold chain about his neck.”

“Did what Joseph said come true?” Sam asked.

“Yes,” I said, and I went on to read about the famine that hit Egypt, and how Joseph’s preparations had saved the people and brought his brothers out of the land of the Hebrews to buy corn from him.

Sam was astonished. “Is there really people that tell you what dreams mean?”

“Things happened in Bible days that don’t happen now,” I said. “It was a special time, and God was closer to people than He is now.”

“I was thinking of my horse dream,” he said. “I ain’t no Pharaoh, but I’d give a penny to know what it means.”

“I don’t think dreams mean anything,” I said. “Not anymore.”

“Why does it come to me all the time if it don’t mean nothing?”

“You’ve just got horses on the brain,” I said.

No one could doubt that he did have horses on the brain. His whole life was horses. My freight animals were entirely under his supervision, and he had begun spending more and more of his idle time at the racetrack at the edge of town. Army was responsible for that, I regret to say. Army shared Sam’s love of horseflesh. They also shared a love of gambling. Army loved the races and had known most of the sporting men around Denton for years. He introduced them to Sam, and after a while the races became a regular part of their Sunday afternoons. Sometimes Frank Jackson or Henry Underwood would go with them.

By the standards of my native Kentucky, the Denton races were pitiful. The track was just a quarter-mile stretch of harrowed prairie with a row of primitive chutes at one end and a finish line at the other. The performers were usually just cowboys and cow ponies racing for a new hat or a new suit of clothes or a bottle of whiskey. A few townspeople who owned good horses but didn’t know how to ride them would hire the young darkies who hung around the track to climb into the saddle in their stead. A few of the niggers were excellent riders and fulfilled all their worldly needs in that way, never turning a hand at honest labor.

Those races were taken very seriously by many, though, especially those who bet habitually and heavily. And since those chosen to judge them often were incompetent and all the spectators and many of the riders were drinking, there were many cries of foul and many accusations, threats and fights resulting from them. It was as unholy a way to observe the sabbath as the devil has devised, and I had as little to do with it as possible. Any attempt of mine to break up a fight out there likely would have led to another fight, so I left the sportsmen to settle their own disputes. I rarely even went to the track except when a stranger would ride into town leading a thoroughbred behind him. I knew that he was a professional, and that he was going to taunt the locals into laying outlandish bets on some hometown favorite, and I knew he was going to win the race. On those occasions I would go to the track and do what I could to see that the race was run fairly, that the professional got his money, and that he got out of town quickly and safely.

The track was a thorn in my side, and I’m sorry that my brother was so devoted to it. But nobody can be his brother’s keeper in all things. Nor could anyone foresee what terrible consequences would result when Sam caught the contagion in earnest.

That happened the day he returned from a freighting trip to Sherman and walked into my office at the courthouse and stood trembling before me. “Dad!” he said. “The horse in my dream is tied outside!”

The beast that had galloped through Sam’s sleep was a little sorrel mare, about two years old and fifteen hands high. She had only one marking, a white stocking leg, the left hind one. She was a fine animal, but I saw nothing about her that should inspire such ecstasy in a man. I’ve never seen an expression on another face to compare with what I saw on Sam’s. Moses must have looked like that when he beheld the burning bush, and the Emmaus pilgrims when the risen Christ revealed himself to them. It’s blasphemous, I suppose, to compare the effect of a mere horse on a man to revelations of God, but no other comparison will do. Sam trembled as he stood there staring at that animal, and his face shone with a light that I can only call holy. Finally he stepped to the mare as if in a trance and extended his hand, and the mare nuzzled his palm.

“How do you know it’s the one in your dream?” I asked.

“I just know.”

“That mare belongs to Mose Taylor. I’ve seen her many times.”

“I never seen her but in my dream,” he said. “I know she’s the one. I must have her.”

“I doubt Mose will sell.”

“He’ll sell. God wants me to have her.”

That’s the only time I ever heard Sam speak the Lord’s name outside our evening Bible readings, except in curses. His admission that God lives and works in our lives surprised me, and I was moved by it. “Come on,” I said. “I’ll help you find him.”

Mose Taylor was a farmer. He lived in the eastern part of the county, off the McKinney road, and didn’t come to Denton often. But I knew him and, as I said, I had seen the mare before. Mose was standing at the bar in the Wheeler Saloon when I introduced him to Sam.

Sam said, “I want to buy your mare.”

Mose laughed. “So do a lot of people.”

“I don’t want to haggle. How much will you take for her?”

Mose regarded Sam with some surprise. “Six hundred dollars,” he said. His eyes roved over Sam, over his shaggy black hair, his unshaven face, his patched pantaloons and scuffed boots. “Not a penny less.”

He might as well have demanded a million. I knew that, and I knew that Mose knew that. It was a ridiculous price for any horse in Denton County. But Sam didn’t bat an eye. “Give me time to raise the money, and you’ve got a deal,” he said. “Will you shake on that?”

Mose didn’t want to sell the mare. He glanced at me, but I just gave a slight shrug. Then Mose extended his hand. “The shake is good for a week,” he said. “After that there’s no deal. Dad is our witness.”

Sam shook his hand and walked out without another word. I followed him. “You don’t have anywhere near six hundred dollars,” I said.

“No.”

“How much do you have?” “About two hundred.”

“You’re crazy. Where are you going to raise four hundred dollars in a week?”

Sam gave me a tight little smile. “Don’t worry, Dad. I’ll get it.”

He did, too. He got it from Army. The next Sunday, they rode out of town together in the morning and returned near sundown, Sam astride the mare and leading his buckskin. He was grinning bigger than I’d ever seen him. “Dad, meet Jenny,” he said. “The fastest horse in Texas.”

Army was grinning, too. He said, “There’s many a dollar in Jenny.”

Then I knew what their intention was, and I was troubled.

Army owned two-thirds of Jenny, but she really belonged to Sam. I gave permission to stable her in my barn, and every day when he finished his work Sam went straight there and put a hackamore over her head and leapt upon her bareback and rode out to the racetrack. There he galloped her up and down the harrowed stretch until darkness brought him home. Sometimes he wouldn’t arrive until after supper, and Mrs. Egan complained of that, but Sam always refused to let her warm it for him. She complained of his no longer milking the cow or gathering the eggs, too, but I reminded her that those were no part of the duties for which I was paying him. Nor was he obligated to carry the children piggyback or attend the Bible readings, which he no longer did. He tended the animals and drove my wagons with the same care and profit as before, and that was all I had a right to ask of him.

We were hurt by his withdrawal from our family circle, though. Even I, who as a horseman understood his enthusiasm for his new possession, couldn’t help being offended by the indifference he displayed toward us, since we had gone the extra mile to befriend him.

I won’t say I was angry. I was disappointed. Yes. And my disappointment wasn’t eased by his constant company with the least worthy of his companions, the derelict husband and freighter, Henry Underwood. That ne’er-do-well now walked in Sam’s shadow like a cur, and he rode out to the track every day, too. I mentioned to Sam one night that I didn’t like the company he was keeping.

“What’s wrong with Henry, Dad?” he asked.

“He’s no good.”

“Aw, there ain’t nothing wrong with Henry. He’s just helping me train Jenny.”

“Yes, when he should be at home with his wife.”

“His wife’s a bitch, Dad. There ain’t nothing wrong with Henry.”

I had never heard Sam refer to a woman in that way, and I bit my tongue to hold back the reply I wanted to make. It would serve no purpose, and I might wind up losing my most valuable hand. So I said nothing. But I didn’t like Sam’s new cockiness, and I didn’t like his mare for inspiring it, and I didn’t like Army’s involvement with either of them. That part of it came to a head on the day the mare won her first race.

I heard Sam and Army long before they reached the house. They were shouting and singing in the night, and I knew they were drunk. I stood at the gate, watching for them to come up the lane. They were on foot, weaving hither and yon, leading their three horses. I sent Mrs. Egan and the children into the house and told them to shut the door. I stood waiting, and when they reached the house Army handed his reins to Sam and staggered up to me. He grinned in a silly way and took off his hat and handed it to me. “Hold it with both hands, brother,” he said. Then he stuck his hands into his pockets and dropped several silver dollars into the hat. He rummaged in other pockets and found more and dropped them in, too. “Wooo!” he hollered.

“Quiet!” I said. “The children will hear you.”

He grinned in the same stupid way and tipped his absent hat and took the reins from Sam, who stepped up and dropped more money into the hat. He said, “Old Army told you there were lots of dollars in that Jenny. That’s how many she throwed up for us today.”

But it wasn’t Jenny who had “throwed up.” Army’s shirt and vest were covered with vomit, and his sour odor filled the air between us. Sam noticed my disgust. “Old Army taken sick and fell off his horse,” he said. “That’s why we was walking.”

I gave the hat and its heavy contents to Sam and gathered the reins from Army’s hand. “I’ll help Army with the horses,” I said.

“Army, he’s too drunk…”

“I want to talk to my brother in private,” I said. “Don’t go inside until you’re sober.” I put my arm around Army’s shoulders and half led, half carried him toward the barn, pulling the horses behind. Army mumbled, and leaned heavily against me, and it was hard to keep my balance in the darkness. But I made it to the barn and managed to prop Army against the wall. I unlatched the door and lit the lantern and led the horses inside and unsaddled them. While I was currying Jenny I called out, “How much will you take for your part of this mare, brother?”

“Ten thousand dollars,” he called back. Then he giggled to himself, and I didn’t speak to him again until I had put the animals up and fed and watered them.

When I closed the door Army was sitting against the barn. His chin lay on his chest. He appeared to be asleep, but he raised his head when I nudged him with my toe, and I said, “I’ll give you four hundred dollars in the morning, brother. Take it or be damned.”

He frowned, trying to focus on me, but said nothing. “Our dead mother demands it,” I said. “She would weep to see you now.”

Army wept. He tried to get to his feet, but couldn’t. “Sleep in the barn,” I said. “I don’t want you in my house.” Then I left him.

Sam was slouched on the porch still, but seemed fairly sober. Either he hadn’t drunk as much as Army or he held it better. Army’s hat was in his lap, and he was counting the silver into two neat stacks. “So you won,” I said.

“Yeah. Where’s Army?”

“Asleep.”

“I couldn’t stop him, Dad.”

I shrugged. “He’s a grown man. He’s responsible for himself. But I’m buying his part of the mare.”

Sam smiled and offered his hand. “Good,” he said. “Shake, pard.”

“No, I won’t be your partner. The four hundred is a loan. The mare is all yours.”

Sam gazed thoughtfully at the stacks of dollars. “It’ll take a while to pay back four hundred of those.”

“Take as long as you need. I should have loaned you the money in the first place. It’s not good for me or my family to be mixed up in horse racing.”

“I’m sorry about Army, Dad.”

“It’s not your fault. Sam, do you have to race her?”

“Yeah. If I do it right, she’ll be my ticket to big things.”

“What things, Sam?”

He waved at the stacks of dollars. “Money’s what makes us men, ain’t it, Dad? Without it, nobody can be much more than a nigger. You’ve treated me good, and now I’m your head nigger. But I’m still a nigger. I’ve been a nigger all my life. But I come to Texas to stop being a nigger, and Jenny’s going to help me do that.”

I laid my hand on his knee. “You’re looking for a short cut where there isn’t any,” I said, “but that’s none of my business. Let’s go inside.”

“No, I’ll stay with Army,” he said.

That happened in the fall of ‘74, and I’m proud to say that Army never went to the track again. But the races became the most important thing in Sam’s life. He associated himself with a skinny nigger called Dick, who became his jockey, and a remarkable one. He rode Jenny without saddle or bridle. He used only a hackamore, and slathered the mare’s back and sides with molasses before each race. He stuck to her like a fly, and seemed to communicate with her in a mysterious way that no one, except maybe Sam, understood. It wasn’t long before Dick and Jenny had beaten every fast horse in Denton County and several challengers from other parts.

By the spring of ‘75 Jenny had become known far and wide as The Denton Mare, and Dick’s unorthodox way of riding her gave rise to tall tales about the animal’s speed and the human fly who urged her to her victories. As the mare’s owner, Sam was regarded as something of a gentleman, and became one of the better-known men in Denton County. Sometimes his winnings were considerable, and even though he presented generous shares of them to the darky and Henry Underwood, who now bragged of being Jenny’s manager, Sam always made at least a small payment on the loan.

The rest he squandered, like the Prodigal Son in the far country. When the sporting crowd rode into town from the track on Sunday evenings, he made the rounds of all the saloons, usually with Dick and Henry in his train, and bought drinks for all present. When he left one saloon to move to another, many of the drinkers would follow, in hope of picking up another free drink at the next stop. Sam never turned them down, so he became a popular man. But he was popular with trash. Henry Underwood and the darky were pet dog and monkey to him, and most of his crowd were worse. Hard drinkers, gamblers, thieves and such, men who lived by guile and wit. The boy Frank Jackson and Jim Murphy were the only decent people in his company.

Inevitably there came the day when the owners of other horses and those who bet on the losers ceased to wonder at the speed and consistency of The Denton Mare and began to suspect that she was helped along by some clandestine means. The quarrels began with a mound of dirt in The Denton Mare’s starting chute. Since our racetrack has no turns, a horse’s place in the chutes gives it no advantage or handicap, you see, as it would on an oval track. But some horsemen held a superstitious affection for one chute or another, and out of courtesy their competitors usually didn’t object to their always using their favorites. Sam was one who always used the same chute, and he somehow got the idea that a downhill start would give his mare an advantage over the other horses. So he and Dick built a mound of dirt, about three feet high, in her chute, so Jenny’s first stride or two would be downhill.

I don’t know whether the mound gave the mare an advantage or not, but the judges allowed it, and the owners of rival horses found it a convenient excuse for their losses. Cries of foul became a part of the regular Sunday doings at the track, and the quarrels and bickerings that started there continued into the carousing in town and became more bitter and dangerous with every glass of whiskey consumed.

I told Sam that his dirt mound was playing hob with my Sunday nights, and he gave his rivals a headstart of a length or two thereafter. But no pride is larger or more easily injured than that of the owner of a fast horse, and as The Denton Mare continued undefeated the alibis of the losers’ backers became more and more farfetched until one finally accused Sam of outright crime.

The beaten horse was from out of town, and his owner didn’t know how well Sam was liked in Denton. Otherwise, he probably wouldn’t have made such a foolish accusation, especially in the Parlor Saloon. Maybe the man knew Sam was in the place at the time, maybe he didn’t. Anyway, the stranger was standing at the bar, and the man next to him, a staunch Bass supporter, started needling him about the drubbing his horse had taken from The Denton Mare. And he replied: “Well, he would have done better if he hadn’t been poisoned before the race.”

Sam was sitting at a table nearby and heard him. He got up and confronted the man. “Who do you think poisoned your horse?” he asked.

The fool persisted. “Somebody who was afraid of a fair race,” he said.

Sam struck him hard in the face. The man reeled back against the bar, then reached under his coat and came up with a gun. But Jim Murphy, who was standing behind the bar, grabbed him by the hair and jerked his head back very hard. The man screamed and dropped the gun, and somebody kicked it out of reach. If Jim hadn’t been where he was, Sam might have been killed, for he wasn’t armed, and the man had the drop on him anyway. As I said, Jim Murphy was a handy man around a saloon.

The man could have filed a complaint against Sam for striking the first blow, I guess, but no Denton County jury would have convicted him. Maybe he figured as much. He left town that night and never raced in Denton again.

That incident was the end for Sam and me, though. I had worried all along that Sam’s involvement with racing and the racing crowd held a potential for my political disgrace. That’s why I forced Army to end his association with Sam and The Denton Mare. No decent man can consort with thieves and gamblers indefinitely without sharing their taint, and Army’s drunkenness after that first race showed me he didn’t have the will to resist even the grossest temptations. Indeed, his stupor convinced me that his slide to hell was greased, and his upright behavior since that drunken night proves I did right in invoking our dead mother’s name and asserting my authority as elder brother.

Of course I didn’t hold that kind of sway over Sam. He was in my hire and lived in my house, and The Denton Mare was stabled in my barn, but I knew those facts didn’t give me the right to dictate to a man who was free, white and over twenty-one and wasn’t my kin.

However, the incident in the Parlor convinced me that Sam was in for trouble, so long as The Denton Mare beat all comers. I knew it was only a matter of time until Sam would be a party to some violence or other, and whether he was the victor or the vanquished, my impartiality as an officer would be put in jeopardy. From any point of view racing and its attendant vices are bad, and my association with them, even in so remote a way as through my hired hand, could ruin what good I might do for peace in Denton County, not to mention any political aspirations I might have now that the carpetbaggers were losing their power in Austin. So I called Sam into my office and told him he would have to give up either his mare or his job.

I might as well have clubbed him between the eyes. He groped to a chair and sat down. Those Indian eyes stared so long at me that I became nervous, which isn’t characteristic of me, and began shifting in my chair.

“Do you really mean that, Dad?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said, and I began explaining my reasons, but he interrupted me.

“You know I can’t give up Jenny,” he said. “Remember my dream?”

“That dream means nothing,” I said. “Jenny’s a fine animal, but she’s not that special.”

“Then why ain’t nobody beat her?”

“There seem to be several opinions about that,” I said. Sam glared and started to rise, but I waved him down. “I’m not accusing you of anything. I’m not even dropping any hints. I just can’t afford the sort of thing that happened last night. I can’t have it associated with me in any way. Don’t you understand that?”

“Well, I can’t give up Jenny.”

“Stop racing her then.”

Sam smiled. “What’s the good of owning a race horse if you don’t race her?”

“I’m sorry, but that’s your choice. Stop racing or stop working for me.”

He was silent for some time, just sitting there twisting the brim of his hat in his hands, never taking his eyes from mine. Then he expelled his breath in a kind of hopeless sigh and said, “It ain’t much of a choice, Dad. I’ll be out of your house by tonight.”

“I’m sorry you see it that way. You can pick up your wages tomorrow.”

“I still owe you better than two hundred dollars.”

“Pay me when you can. I trust you.”

He put on his hat and started toward the door, then said, “I ain’t had that dream no more since I got Jenny.”

I still wonder sometimes if things would have turned out differently if I hadn’t made him leave me. But it’s foolish to speculate on what might have been. If Adam hadn’t bitten the apple, we would still be in the Garden, wouldn’t we? Or maybe Cain or Enoch or Methuselah would have bitten it later. The snake would have kept trying, that’s for sure.