The Adventures of Bass Reeves Deputy US Marshal

by Charles Ray

  “Thank you for this,” he said. “We owe you.”

  “Remove this dark spirit from our land,” the man replied. “And that debt will be repaid.”

  They resumed their journey, leaving the villagers staring at them, curiously not unkindly, as they passed through, cutting off the trail and heading north as soon as they cleared the collection of huts.

  A half hour later, they came to the valley the Seminole had described, and it was much as he’d described it. Walls about forty feet at the highest points, about forty meters across, and a valley floor littered with boulders and a few stunted trees and scrub brush. The far end of the valley, some two miles distant, was barely discernible through the haze of dust kicked up by the wind.

  Bass turned to the guard and cook. “Y’all wait here,” he said. “Me ‘n Joseph will go on up and get the prisoner.”

  The cook grunted acknowledgement, and the guard looked relieved. A man in a cave is trapped, with only one way out, but a trapped animal is often the most dangerous, and unpredictable.

  Bass and Joseph rode on through the veil of dust, until the far wall of the canyon, and the dark spot that was the opening of the cave, came into view.

  They dismounted fifty yards from and slightly off center of the cave, and secured their horses behind a large boulder.

  Except for the wind, and the snuffling of the horses, it was quiet.

  “What do we do now?” Joseph asked.

  “Reckon we make sure he at home,” Bass said.

  “Then what?”

  “Now, that depend on him.” Bass stepped from behind the boulder and moved until he was almost directly in front of the cave opening. He saw no sign of movement at first, and then, he noticed an undulation or rippling of the darkness beyond the opening. Someone was moving inside the cave.

  “Caleb Hunt, you in there?” he called. “I’m Bass Reeves, Deputy U.S. Marshal out of Fort Smith. I got a warrant for your arrest.”

  At first, there was no response. Then, “Go ‘way and leave me ‘lone,” a raspy voice said. “I ain’t goin’ back there.”

  “You ain’t got no choice, Hunt. You goin’ back, one way or t’other.”

  A shot rang out, and a geyser of dirt and gravel spouted up a foot to Bass’s left. He quickly jumped back behind the boulder.

  “Guess he does not want to cooperate,” Joseph said. “It will be hard to get him out of that cave. What do we do, wait him out?”

  Bass thought on it a moment. “You think that cave has another way out?”

  Joseph shook his head. “No. If it did, he would be long gone by now.”

  “Kinda what I thought, too. I think I know a way to get him to come out, and I might not have to shoot him.”

  Joseph looked perplexed. “You gonna wait him out?”

  “Naw, I got a quicker way.” Bass smiled. “When you got dirt daubers in your barn rafters, what do you do?”

  After a moment, Joseph’s eyes widened in comprehension. “You smoke ‘em out.”

  While Bass kept Hunt diverted by yelling at him to surrender, Joseph, keeping out of line of sight of the cave mouth, gathered as much dried wood, green grass, and moss as he could. He piled it off to the right of the entrance of the cave, about five feet from it, moving as silently as a gentle breeze. When he had a mound of dried wood about three feet high, Bass signaled for him to light it, which he did with a phosphorous match from the box he carried in his saddle bag. When the wood was burning well, he began tossing the green grass and moss on it, a bit at a time. This generated a thick cloud of acrid smoke, which the air currents pushed in the direction of the cave mouth. Joseph helped it along by fanning his hat at the fire.

  When the entrance was obscured by smoke, and Bass heard the first rasping coughs from inside the cave, he moved up and helped Joseph by fanning his own hat. The coughing increased.

  “Won’t be long now,” Bass said.

  It took another twenty minutes.

  A medium height man with a heavy gut and thin, brown hair plastered to his florid skull, stumbled through the smoke waving his hands in front of his face. His face was red, his eyes were red with tears streaming from them, and his nose was red with twin rivulets of mucus trailing down across the stubble on his cheek. He coughed as if he wanted to spew out his lungs. He held a long-barreled .44 caliber single-action Smith and Wesson revolver in his right hand, waving it around aimlessly as he squinted, trying to find something or someone to shoot at.

  Bass and Joseph smiled at each other as they rose from the fire and circled around behind the hapless outlaw.

  Before he was aware of their presence, Bass had grabbed the revolver from his hand and slipped handcuffs around his right wrist, while Joseph immobilized his left hand. Before he could do more than utter unintelligible protest, they had him securely manacled and seated on the hard earth blinking like a barn owl.

  Bass used water from his canteen to rinse out the man’s eyes, and when he could finally see enough to recognize the tall, dark man standing over him, he sputtered.

  “Y-you that colored deputy marshal, ain’t you?” he asked. “Whyn’t you jest shoot me and be done with it?”

  Bass looked down at him. His lips turned down in a disapproving frown. “While you a sinful man, Caleb Hunt, and I believe if you don’t repent, you gon’ burn in the hell fire, it ain’t my job to pass judgment on you. That be up to Judge Parker.”

  Hunt blinked and sputtered some more. But, when Bass frowned at him and opened his mouth as if to speak, he raised his manacled hands in front of his face in a placating gesture. “Please, Deputy, no more of your sermonizing. I promise, I’ll be quiet.”

  Chapter 6.

  Dan Cooper was a man who, like most Texans, rode tall in the saddle. A Texas Ranger, based out of the Ranger station in Fort Worth, he’d been in Paris, Texas, investigating a rumor of cattle rustlers operating in the area, when word of the bank robbery in Blossom arrived. A ranger for four of his twenty-five years, he was, at five-eleven, a tall man, broad of shoulder, with flowing blond hair that hung almost to his shoulder, and a silvery-blond mustache that drooped loosely on each side of thin lips. His glacial, blue eyes, and the uncompromising way he looked out at the world, made him look older than his years. He was thought of as fearless, and once had faced a group of five gunmen alone, and killed them all. He was the epitome of the saying about the rangers, an organization that had been founded by Stephen F. Austin in 1823, to keep law and order among the Americans he’d brought to settle in what was then Mexican territory, that it only took one ranger to restore order to a town. “One riot, one ranger,” people said, and often, that was the truth.

  The rangers had, when Texas gained its independence from Mexico in 1836, been one of the first national police forces on the continent—the others being in Canada and Mexico, and when it became a state in 1845, they became the first police organization in the young United States with authority that covered the entire state.

  When Cooper ha been told by the sheriff that his posse had stopped chasing the murdering thieves at the Red River, and allowed them to escape into Indian Territory, he was livid. They’d killed a citizen of the state of Texas, and deprived hardworking people of their hard-earned cash, and the lily-livered sheriff of Blossom was fretting about jurisdiction. He’d questioned the sheriff closely, getting a good fix on where the three outlaws had crossed the Red River. From there, he reckoned it would be a matter of questioning locals to figure out which way they went after the crossing.

  Cooper knew that the territory was considered sovereign Indian land, but he also knew that the tribal police only enforced Indian laws, against Indian hooligans. A white man who committed a crime in the surrounding states was untouchable by the law of the tribal councils. He didn’t expect much help from the Indians. Most of them held Texans in low regard anyway, except for a few who had sided with the south during the War for Southern Independence, as his father had insisted on calling it until the day he died. Having grown up in
West Texas, a place of sprawling ranches, that had Mexican and black ranch hands who worked side by side with their white counterparts, he had no particularly negative feelings about people of color, learning to judge a man by the quality of his work rather than the color of his skin. Unlike many of his fellow rangers, he treated everyone the same, refusing to demean a man just because his skin was black or brown. A lot of the freedmen had moved to the territory in 1862 when Abraham Lincoln had issued the Emancipation Proclamation, preferring the rigors of unknown territory to the second-class citizenship they were offered in Texas. And, he knew, there’d been a lot of them already there long before the war started, as indentured servants of the Cherokee, brought with them with Andrew Jackson had exiled the eastern tribes to what came to be known as Indian Territory. He figured he might be able to get a bit of cooperation from some of them, provided they weren’t too closely linked with their Indian neighbors. While he thought of himself as a fair man, he acknowledged that he had a bit of a blind spot where the red man was concerned. Settlements in the west and south had been plagued by Indian raids for decades before the war, and were again experiencing tribal uprisings out west and over in New Mexico. He didn’t exactly dislike Indians, but gave them a wide berth. His anger at the posse was somewhat mitigated by his knowledge that tribal police, and most of the Indian villages would have given them a hostile reception. They didn’t like having white men who wore badges coming into their lands.

  “Well, by dang it,” he said to himself, as he sat astride his palomino in the street in front of the bank in Blossom. “If the sheriff won’t go after these yella dogs, the Texas Rangers will.”

  With that, he wheeled his horse and headed north toward the Red River, and he had murder in his eyes. The people of Blossom who watched him go, cheered and waved. They knew the desperadoes who’d robbed their bank and killed the teller would never see the inside of a courthouse, because this Texas Ranger would face them down, kill them, and recover the money. Justice would be done.

  ***

  Bob Dozier and his two comrades were well to the north of the Red River, when Dan Cooper forded at almost the same spot where they had crossed, and but for a stroke of luck would have never known of his existence.

  That stroke of luck came in the form of Harley’s horse throwing a shoe just outside a little town called Burnside.

  Now, calling Burnside a town was being generous. It was, if anything, even tackier than Beaverton. The main street was a quagmire of churned-up mud from hundreds of hooves and wagon wheels, and the board walks lining it had no two planks that matched, and more gaps than solid footing. Every structure leaned one way or another, and roofs had missing panels that gaped like missing teeth in a drunk’s mouth. It did, though, have a livery stable. Like every town on the frontier, there were two essential things, saloons and a livery stable. The former to fill a traveler’s belly and gut with greasy food and foul-tasting, rotgut liquor, and the latter to see to his mount.

  They stopped at the livery stable to get William’s horse reshod. Inwardly, Dozier cursed, and was even more determined to shed himself of the man as soon as they arrived at their Cherokee Hills’ hideout. Maybe, bury him somewhere in the hills where his carcass would never be found. It wasn’t likely anyone would enquire about his absence; the only people interested in him were the bounty hunters and deputy marshals.

  The proprietor of the livery stable was a muscular, squat half-breed, looking to be part Indian, part black, with a completely bald head, and muscles bulging in his arms, chest, and legs.

  “How do, gentlemens,” he said, showing a mouth of missing teeth when he spoke. “What kin I do for y’all today?”

  Dozier pointed at the unfortunate Williams. “His hoss needs a new shoe. Can you fix it?”

  “Why, I sure can, boss. Jest light down and old Moses’ll have a new shoe on that critter ‘fore you can finish a drink of whiskey over to the saloon.”

  “How much is it gonna cost?” Harley asked.

  “Well, suh, since you seems to be in a all-fired hurry, I think twenty-five cents ought to cover it.”

  Williams looked as if he wanted to haggle, but Dozier reached into his pocket and pulled out some coins. He took two quarter coins and tossed them at the man. “Here’s four bits,” he said. “You get that hoss shod in ten minutes, boy, you here.”

  The man snatched the coins from the air, clinking them together in his large hands. “Sure nuff, boss. It be ready in ten minutes, for sure.”

  “Can we leave our horses here while we go get a drink?”

  “Yassuh, boss. You jest tie ‘em up to the fence there near the water trough. I keep a good eye on ‘em for you.”

  They dismounted and tied the horses. “Don’t let nobody get near ‘em, and don’t mess with the packs on ‘em, boy.”

  “Don’t you worry, boss, ain’t nobody gon’ bother ‘em. Ole Moses, he see to that.”

  Dozier smiled ruefully, but decided the man meant what he said. With all the shooting irons they were packing, and the trail-weary expressions left little doubt that they were not hombres to cross. He started walking toward the saloon, with his men in tow. Crossing the road, he hesitated, and looked over his shoulder at Harley. “You owe me four bits for that shoe,” he said. “You can buy the drinks, and we’ll call it even.”

  “You should’ve let me hassle with that nigger, boss. I could’ve got it done for a nickel.”

  “Ain’t worth hasslin’, so quit your belly achin’. We need to keep the locals happy, so they ain’t about to go talkin’ to them marshals when they come lookin’ for us.”

  William’s face screwed up in concentration as he considered Dozier’s words. Then, he nodded. “Oh, yeah, reckon that’s a pretty good idea at that.”

  They went the rest of the way in silence.

  The saloon was dimly lit on the inside, with only the light coming through the doors and grease-stained windows for illumination. There were few patrons, and one lazy looking bartender wearing a sooty apron behind the bar. He smiled as they approached the bar, showing a mouth with as few teeth as the livery man.

  “Howdy, gents, what’s your poison?”

  “A bottle of your best whiskey,” Dozier said, looking at Harley through narrowed slits, as if daring him to object.

  The man put a greasy bottle and three glasses on the bar. “That’ll be three dollars.”

  Williams grumbled, but fished out some coins and slapped them onto the stained bar top.

  The bartender opened the bottle and began pouring.

  “Say, ain’t you Mr. Bob Dozier?” he asked.

  Dozier glared at him. “Why you ask?”

  “They was a rough rider in here early this morning, had some news I think you might be int’rested in.”

  “What news is that?”

  “He said Bob Dozier and his boys might be ridin’ through this way, and they oughta know they’s a Texas Ranger done crossed the Red and is on they trail.”

  Dozier gripped the bar so tightly his knuckles turned white. “A Texas Ranger? What in blazes is a ranger doing in Injun Territory?”

  “This fella said the ranger been stoppin’ at settlements askin’ for the direction Bob Dozier and his men went. Seem he wanted for robbin’ a bank down in Texas or something.”

  “This fella say whether anybody told the ranger anything?”

  “Naw, he didn’t know that, but he said the ranger seem to be makin’ a beeline in this direction, so I reckon somebody might’ve talked.”

  Dozier made a growling sound deep in his throat.

  “Where’s this ranger at, did he say?”

  “Last night, he said he about thirty mile south of here, and headin’ this way.”

  William’s brow furrowed. “What we gonna do, boss? I hear them Texas Rangers is as bad as bull dogs. Once they git on a trail, they don’t give up.”

  “Texas Rangers got no jurisdiction up here in Injun Territory. Say, barkeep, did they say if this ranger’s ridin’ with
a posse?”

  “Naw, Mr. Dozier, he ridin’ alone.”

  Dozier grabbed the filled glass and tossed the contents down his throat. He put the glass down and grabbed the bottle by the neck.

  “Drink up boys, we ridin’ south.”

  “South? Why we want to do that, boss? That’s where he said the ranger is.”

  Dozier laughed. “I know. And, we’re gonna go and give him a right warm welcome to Injun country.”

  ***

  Cooper was tired and every muscle in his body was sore. He’d been in the saddle from sunup to sundown for two days, but despite his weariness and aching, he felt good. At the last settlement, a wizened old black woman, in exchange for two nickels, had informed him that the outlaws he sought had ridden through, heading north, just the day before. He was close, and he could feel it.

  He knew he’d catch hell from the captain when he returned to Fort Worth, but ridding the world of scum like Bob Dozier and his ilk, and returning the bank’s money would be worth it. Besides, he knew the captain would give him a tongue lashing because it was expected of him to do so, but would secretly admire him for his initiative. Hell, he might even get promoted to sergeant or lieutenant. Now that, he thought, would be something.

  He would give the scum the opportunity to surrender, but in his heart he knew they would refuse. No matter. The world would be better off without them.

  Resisting the urge to push his horse faster, he eased it into a fast walk. No sense being tired when he cornered the outlaws. His right hand caressed the butt of his .45 Colt Peacemaker, and then moved to the stock of his .45 caliber rifle in the saddle mount. Both weapons were loaded and ready. He was ready.

  He was so preoccupied with the scenario that he was sure would play out when he met up with the outlaws, he failed to notice the glint of sunlight reflecting off a rifle barrel poking through a clump of brush off the trail to his right.