Sam Bass

It was after midnight, but men were arming themselves. Groups were riding off in all directions, as if to a war. Men and women, some in nightshirts and gowns, ran past our house toward the depot. As soon as my customer left my room, I got dressed and joined them. La! The train was a mess. The sides of nearly all the cars showed splintered places where bullets had hit them. Oil was splashed on the door and wall of the express car. The conductor’s shirt was bloody. Two men were helping him away. The platform was a swirl of people, all babbling at once. “They’ll be in the banks next,” a man said.

“Four trains in two months, and within twenty-five miles,” said another. “Nobody will want to settle in Dallas.”

Policemen cleared a path through the crowd for the passengers, who were climbing down from the coaches, women and children in tears, men red in the face. From time to time a hand would reach from the crowd and touch a passenger, then there would be embraces and loud cries.

I went back to the house and went to bed. About noon the next day Norene knocked on my door and handed me a copy of the Herald. “Your friend’s name is in the paper,” she said.

“Which friend?” I closed the door and unfolded the paper. They named him, all right, in the sixth and smallest headline at the top of the article:

Unsuccessful Pursuit After the Eagle Ford Gang—Sam Bass, Underwood and Jackson in Denton County, Where They Defy the Law and Out-general their pursuers.

He wasn’t named, though, in the account of the robbery at Mesquite. I glanced quickly over the first part of the article, about the train’s arrival in Dallas, and began reading in the middle:

Mr. Sam Finley and others of the Texas Express Company, although they had just returned from a trip after the Eagle Ford robbers, started in pursuit of the robbers at about half-past two o’clock this morning.

The number of shots fired could not, of course, be ascertained, for it was almost continual for ten or fifteen minutes, the coaches and express car being riddled with bullets, though fortunately no one was hurt on the train, as far as learned, but the conductor.

Several have offered the opinion that the robbers were cowboys, headed by a man who is nearly six feet high, with beard all over his face. He had a fine, shrill voice; wore a broad-brim light’colored, low-crown hat; and a slouch coat of coarse texture.

Great apprehension was felt by people on the streets when the news spread last night that the robbers might make a dash into this city and attempt to rob the banks. Precautionary measures in the shape of shotguns have been prepared for them, however, and a warm reception will be given them if they come this way. The excitement on the streets was intense.

La! Sam Bass six feet high and with a beard, too! The rest of the story was a heroic tale of a posse crashing about the bushes of Denton County and finding nothing. I dropped the paper to the floor. “Sam Bass,” I said aloud. “You silly little clown.”

I got up and pulled on my stockings. I wanted to eat before the customers began arriving.

You may think a woman of my calling never loves anyone, but I did love Joel Collins. He loved me, too, in his way.

He was a pretty man, over six feet high, slender as a reed and hard as rock. He dressed well, even when he didn’t have much money, and his black hair and heavy mustache were so fine and silky that a woman’s fingers itched to touch them. His blue eyes had the light of the devil in them. It was that light that got him into trouble, I think.

We met in Deadwood, after he and Sam had driven some cattle there and sold them. They weren’t in a hurry to go home. They owed somebody in Texas a lot of money or had stolen the cattle they sold. Something like that. Joel bought a house on the outskirts of Deadwood. He and Sam called it a ranch, but there wasn’t much land to it, and no cattle. It was really a sporting house, with a bar and a couple of gaming tables in the front and cribs in the back, where they worked four girls. I was one of them. After I became Joel’s woman, I didn’t take customers unless Joel told me to. I didn’t mind. Sam had eyes for me, too. Sometimes we would close the house and have little parties, and all of us would get drunk and dance and laugh. Sam would make eyes at me, and Joel would notice and wave his hand and tell Sam, “Be my guest.” I didn’t mind that either, much. I liked Sam. But I loved Joel.

Then he closed the house and told me that he and Sam were going back to Texas. Just like that. It like to broke my heart. I didn’t want to go back to work in some Deadwood saloon, or to someone else’s cribs. But I kept my feelings to myself and said goodbye. I didn’t know he planned to rob a train.

They had been gone just a few days when I decided to go to Dallas myself. And I did. And went to work for Norene. Then the news came down. I had known them all. Berry killed in Missouri. Heffridge and Joel shot down by soldiers in Kansas without a chance of saving themselves. They had twenty thousand dollars in gold tied up in a pair of pantaloons on their pack horse. And they say that one of the papers in Joel’s pocket was a beautiful love poem. I wish I had it. The newspapers and the rumors said six men held up that train in Nebraska, and I knew one of them was Sam. Joel was like a big brother to him.

Then Seab Barnes was in my bed. He said he was from Denton. That was where Sam was from, and I asked Seab if he knew him. He said, “No.” I said, “Well, he’s not there anymore. He was way up north when I knew him.”

A couple of weeks later, I was walking down the stairs to greet my next customer, and there was Sam, sitting on Norene’s horsehair sofa with his hat on his knee and a glass of whiskey in his hand, just as I remembered him. He stood up and gave me a little bow. Beth was in the parlor, too, entertaining a customer, and I didn’t know whether Sam was calling himself by his real name or not, so I said, “Good evening, sir.”

We went up to my room, and I locked the door. He kissed me on the cheek. “Joel’s gone,” I said.

“Yeah.” He patted my shoulder. “I hope to run into them that killed him someday.”

I looked up at him. I didn’t have to look up far, because he wasn’t much higher than me. “Well, let the dead bury the dead,” I said.

He seemed shy and awkward. Maybe it was because he was in my room without Joel’s permission. I poured two glasses of whiskey from the decanter on the table beside my bed. I handed him his glass and asked, “Do you want me?”

I undid my dress and stepped out of it and laid it across the back of the chair. I wore only a chemise under it. I lifted a foot to the chair and said, “Unbutton my boots, will you?”

His face turned red, but he bent to unbutton the boot. His fingers didn’t seem able to do what he wanted. He fumbled with the buttons and laughed that nervous laugh again, but he finally got the boot undone and did better with the other one. He stepped back and watched me roll my stockings and garters down. I was about to get into bed, and he said, “Take that off, too.” So I pulled the chemise over my head and dropped it to the floor. I lay back on the feather mattress. Sam stood at the foot of the bed and just looked at me. I didn’t mind. I like my body, especially in gaslight. I smiled at him. “Aren’t you coming?”

He set his drink on the table. His fingers trembled while he unbuttoned his shirt, but he undressed quickly and crawled into bed and took me in his arms and kissed me on the neck, then on my breasts. I’m proud of my breasts. They aren’t too large, and they aren’t too small, and I rouge the nipples nice and rosy.

You laugh when I say “made love”? Well, that’s what he did. I had never before had such a tender time with a man. You may call it what you like, but what Sam did was make love to me. I kept wishing he was Joel.

Later we sat up against the big feather pillows, and Sam poured us each a drink from the decanter. He rolled a cigarette and lit it and breathed out the smoke in a long sigh. “Your bed smells pretty,” he said.

We sipped our whiskey slowly and didn’t say anything else. When our drinks were gone, Sam set the glasses on the table and shifted down into the bed and laid his head on my breasts. He made love to me again, and it was longer than before. When he finished he lay quietly inside me for a while. He smelled of old sweat. “You expecting somebody else tonight?” he asked.

I slapped him on the rump, and he moved away. I slipped on my dress and went downstairs barefoot. Business was slow, and Norene was pleased that Sam was staying. I went back to my room and locked the door and took off my dress again. “Turn off the gas,” he said.

I made his breakfast myself and carried it to him. “Scrambled eggs!” he said. “I ain’t had them in a coon’s age.” I sat on the edge of the bed and watched him. He ate like he hadn’t had anything in a coon’s age. He drank the whole pot of coffee himself.

After breakfast I heated the water and poured it in Norene’s big brass bathtub for him. He splashed like a child. “If you get water on this carpet, Norene’ll kill you,” I said.

He held the soap to his nose and sniffed it. “It’s been a long time. Soon I’ll be rich enough to do this whenever I want to.”

I lathered his face and sat down on a stool beside the tub and tried to shave him, but he kept moving, like a child. “Get still, or I’ll cut your nose off.” He got still, like a little boy minding his mother.

That night, long after I thought he was asleep, he rolled over and touched my shoulder. “Maude?” “Hmm?”

“I want you to be my woman someday. Like you were Joel’s. Would you like that?”

He was dressing, standing by the door. “How much?” “Nothing for me. It was for old times. But Norene will want something.”

He laid five double-eagles on the bureau. “Give her whatever she wants,” he said.

Dallas was like a circus. Every politician was writing letters to the governor, demanding that every resource of the state be slung against poor Sam. They always sent copies to the newspapers, which always published them, along with the governor’s replies assuring us that we wouldn’t be murdered in our beds and that the precious railroads would prevail in the end. That’s not how they said it, but it’s what they said.

Every tin badge in North Texas was in the city. The saloons and sporting houses were full of sheriffs, deputies, constables, city policemen from burgs I never heard of and farm boys toting old cap-and-ball pistols, who styled themselves “bounty hunters” and bragged that they would soon have the scalps of Sam Bass and his gang, and the reward money in their pockets. A couple of girls in our house received proposals of marriage from those idiots, who thought their prospects of future riches sufficient to buy themselves permanent professional bedfellows.

There were reporters, too, from St. Louis and Chicago and Baltimore and New York. They were funny men who took themselves very seriously and imagined themselves on a dangerous adventure on the wild frontier. They wrote long, lurid dispatches about the desperate characters they found and interviewed at the bottom of their bottles. I had one of those, a young man from St. Louis. As soon as he finished his puny work on me, he asked, “Have you ever met Sam Bass?”

He jumped out of bed and rummaged through his clothes, his white rump glistening in the gaslight. He found his pad and pencil and climbed back into bed and asked, “What does he look like.”

“He’s nine feet tall, and his face is blue. He can’t keep his hat on because of the horns on his head.” “Please be serious,” he said.

“He’s a very large and powerful man. It’ll take a lot of bullets to bring him down. If you go with the posses, I hope you’ll arm yourself.”

“Oh, I am armed,” he said. He sprang out of bed and rummaged in his clothing again and brought out a shiny little derringer with a mother-of-pearl handle and showed it to me.

Not all who came were fools, though. The governor sent Major John B. Jones, commander of the Frontier Battalion of the Texas Rangers, to Dallas to calm the people and organize the search. He brought several members of his battalion with him, and I feared for poor Sam when I saw them. La! They were tall, hard men who dressed in dark pantaloons and vests and hats. They bristled with pistols and knives, but they walked erect, unburdened by the weight. The weapons were as natural to them as parts of their bodies, and one unarmed would have been incomplete. They rarely spoke except to each other, and they walked with long strides, but the swing of their arms didn’t match their step. Their hands were never far from the sweat-stained wooden butts of their pistols. Their faces were burned darker than even the buffalo hunters’, and their pale eyes moved constantly and slowly, scanning their surroundings with a kind of calm deadliness. The Texas Rangers were older than the Republic of Texas itself and had spent more than forty years killing Mexicans and Indians and Yankees. They had begun hunting outlaws only recently, and the arrogance of Major Jones’s men told Dallas that they considered the job unworthy of them. They never came to our house.

Some of the Pinkertons came, though. There were about forty, most of them from Chicago, headquartered in the Le Grand Hotel. They worked for the railroads, and had a sleek, big-city Yankee look that made them easy to distinguish from the bumpkins who followed them about, aping their dress and manner. La! One afternoon I saw two hicks in five-dollar suits riding up St. Paul Street. The beard of one of them flew off his face and fluttered to the ground! He jumped off his horse and grabbed it and shook the dust from it and stuffed it in his coat pocket. He heard me laugh and glared at me, then jumped back on his horse and galloped up St. Paul.

The real Pinkertons were dangerous though. They didn’t have the cool, open deadliness of the Rangers, but they were crafty. When they looked at you, you felt guilty and a little afraid and became more careful in your talk. One, at least, hated all of us. “You don’t believe Sam Bass is just a simple robber, do you?” he asked.

He was stretched on my sheets. His soft, pale body was absolutely still, and our brief exertion hadn’t disturbed a hair of his oily, center-parted hair. But for his spent sex lolling against his thigh, you would have thought him dressed and relaxing in an office.

“It’s a plot,” he said. “Against the North. The United States.” He smirked, but there was no humor in his eyes. “You Rebs never give up, do you? Bass is out there raising money for another try at us, isn’t he? And he’s not the only one.”

“The South is full of men like him. Texas is the worst. Nothing but thieves and brigands from Marse Robert’s ragtag mob, hating our guts and waiting for another try.”

I pictured him in some Chicago saloon, his feet crossed on the table, saying these things. “I was at Second Bull Run,” he said. “I’ve never forgiven them. I never will.”

I got out of bed and started dressing. “It may interest you to know that Sam Bass is a Yankee,” I said.

“There are many Copperheads in Indiana.” He swung his heavy legs out of the bed and reached for his underwear. “A Copperhead’s a Northerner who believes in your holy Southern cause,” he said. “In other words, a snake.”

“Sam’s too young to be a soldier or a Copperhead or anything else,” I said.

“You called him by his first name.” He was buttoning his collar in front of my mirror.

He said nothing else until he was dressed and had laid his hand on the doorknob. Then he gave me the closest thing he had shown me to a smile. “Do you know what Southern women are?” he asked.

The man frightened me, and when the Herald said William Pinkerton, the great detective himself, had come to Texas to capture Sam, I was sure he was my customer with the oily hair and the heavy legs, and I worried that I had told him something important. I told Norene I wouldn’t entertain any more Pinker-tons. She was a little angry, for they paid well.

I don’t know why the Mesquite robbery upset Dallas so much more than the others. Sam got little out of it. Maybe it was all the gunplay and the wounding of the conductor. But Sam’s name was everywhere in the saloons, in the stores and hotels, the livery stables and the streets. The banks hired extra guards, for everybody believed Sam planned to dash into the city and strip us of our last dollar. The newspapers wrote of little else, sometimes spreading the wildest rumors and alarms, sometimes crowing that all the law and guns congregating in the city would bring poor Sam to a quick and bloody end. I figured they might be right. The vision of Joel dead on the Kansas plain with a love poem in his pocket haunted me, and it wasn’t hard to substitute Sam’s image for Joel’s in that scene.

Maybe Major Jones concluded that his Frontier Battalion regulars weren’t sufficient to do the job. Or maybe they refused to stoop to pursuit of a train robber. The governor commissioned Junius Peak as a second lieutenant in the Rangers and authorized him to recruit thirty men for a month’s service. Cowboys and buffalo hunters and even hotel clerks hurried to enlist, so they could brag forever that they had been Rangers.

I knew June Peak, though not professionally. He had just been elected city recorder, but his past was full of jobs not so meek. He had served in the war with both Morgan’s Raiders and Forrest’s cavalry and had been wounded twice at Chickamauga. He had been a deputy sheriff in Dallas, and later a city marshal. A few years back, he had been hired to wipe out a ring of cattle rustlers in New Mexico, and had done it. He had hunted the buffalo, too. His face wore a mild smile befitting a city recorder, but he was a dangerous man, and the bankers and merchants and newspapers were pleased with the governor’s choice.

A U.S. marshal and a federal district attorney arrived from Tyler and issued a warrant for Sam and Jackson and Barnes and Underwood for the Mesquite robbery. Dad Egan volunteered to serve it. And a Pinkerton was working as a bartender in the Wheeler Saloon in Denton. That I got from Callie, who hadn’t stopped entertaining Pinkertons. She liked them and called them “suave.”

One night there was a commotion outside Callie’s room, across the hall from mine. My customer covered his head with the sheet, and I opened my door a crack. June Peak himself was standing at Callie’s door with a gun in his hand, and two men with him. Norene was with them, too. She saw me and motioned behind her skirt for me to close my door. I did, but put my ear to the wood and listened. “Come out!” June Peak said.

June Peak said, “We don’t want you, ma’am.” Then he said, “Is your name Scott Mayes?”

Some reply was mumbled, and June Peak said, “You’re under arrest for harboring Sam Bass. Get dressed and come.”

I learned later that Scott Mayes was one of Sam’s oldest friends. They had come to Denton together years ago. But he was no robber. June Peak was just rounding up everybody in Dallas who had ever known Sam. I was worried that it might happen to me, and I asked a lawyer friend if it was legal, and he said it was.

Every morning a bunch of June Peak’s greenhorn Rangers left their tents at the Fairgrounds and rode off toward Denton. And the two-bit officers and bounty hunters sat in the saloons and dreamed of their future wealth until they were drunk enough to mount up and try to beat the Rangers to their prey. Denton County must have been full of them.

What the Pinkertons were doing, besides screwing everyone in our house except me and Norene, God only knows.

The news that Union Pacific gold was circulating in Dallas alarmed me. Each time Sam had come to me he had left four or five of the 1877 double-eagles behind. I knew where he had got them, of course, and I had been careful about disposing of them. A friend of Norene’s named John McElroy ran a saloon not far from our house. Each time Sam left me, I sent Norene’s nigger Willie to McElroy with the gold, and he gave me silver for it. I warned Willie never to tell anyone about the gold, where he got it or what he did with it. To ensure his silence I always let him keep the shiniest silver dollar of the change he brought back. “If you tell, no more money,” I would say.

I never told McElroy the source of the gold, either. Not because I thought he might tell, for John McElroy was no friend of the law. I thought he would recognize the coins and cache them in a safe or strongbox. But the fool had banked them! And it suddenly occurred to me that if only John McElroy was depositing the double-eagles in the bank, and if he was getting them all from Willie, it wouldn’t take the detectives long to trace them straight to the top of my bureau.

I folded the newspaper and laid it on the table beside my rocking chair. Norene was playing the piano, and two Pinkertons, both a little drunk, stood at her shoulder, trying to sing the song she was playing. They were waiting for their turn upstairs, and one glanced at me, then whispered something to Norene. “She’s got the curse,” Norene said aloud, and he said, “Oh.”

I rocked and listened and worried. One of our new regular customers, a deputy sheriff from somewhere, stumbled down the stairs and tipped his hat to Norene and went out the door.

Beth came into the parlor and took one of the Pinkertons away. The other, who had the better voice, huddled with Norene, flipping through the songbook for a tune he liked. Willie appeared at the door and glanced at them, then at me. “Oh, there you is,” he said. He crooked his finger, and I followed him to the kitchen. “You got visituhs, Miz Maude,” he whispered, nodding toward the back door. “I knowed better’n to show dem in.”

I laid my hand on the doorknob and took a deep breath to slow the pounding of my heart. I opened the door only wide enough to slip through into the alley. Sam was in the shadows, just out of reach of the light from the kitchen window. Another man stood deeper in the shadows. Down the alley, two horses stamped and snorted. I ran to him. He said, “What’s the matter?”

The other man drew a pistol from his belt. Sam said, “This here’s Frank Jackson.”

Jackson, still in the shadows, tipped his hat and bowed slightly. “Howdy do, ma’am,” he said. His voice had a sad, musical quality. I stepped deeper into the shadows. Jackson took off his hat then and held it near his waist, over the hand with the gun. His hair was light and curly, his eyes so deep-set I couldn’t see them.

It took me an instant to catch his meaning. “How are things in Denton County?”

“Crowded, ma’am.” He still held his gun under his hat. I knew he was watching the window.

Sam put his arm around my waist and walked me proudly, slowly, toward the horses. Jackson stayed in the shadows, his gun under his hat. Sam stopped and kissed me. “I guess I won’t be seeing you for a while,” he said.

“I come to tell you about a proposition,” he said. “I have a plan. When this is over, I’m going down to New Orleans and buy me a boat and go into the hide business.”

A shadow moved across the strip of light the kitchen lamp threw across the alley. Jackson moved his hat and cocked his pistol. The click was very loud. He glanced toward us.

He kissed me quickly and motioned to Jackson. Frank sidled toward us, keeping his eyes and gun on the window. When he reached us, he uncocked the gun and returned it to his belt. He tipped his hat again. “Nice to meet you, ma’am,” he said, then swung into the saddle. He smiled down at me while Sam mounted. Sam gave me a little wave, and they walked their horses down the alley toward the lighted street. They turned into the light, and I held my breath, half expecting to hear gunfire, but there was none. I stayed in the alley for several minutes, listening. There was nothing.

In the kitchen I stood against the door, blinking against the light. Willie was sitting at the table, behind the lamp, his black face glistening. “You got anuthuh visituh, Miz Maude,” he said.

The Pinkerton who hated Southerners was standing by the parlor fireplace, his elbow on the mantel. He smirked when he saw me and extended his closed hand. As I approached, he slowly opened his fingers. A shiny 1877 double-eagle lay in his palm.