by Charles Ray
His first stop after the deadline was at Henry Lone Tree’s farm. Henry often served as his scout and posse man. When the two of them worked together, fugitives had no chance of remaining hidden. The two of them together brought dread to all evil doers.
CHAPTER 5
Henry had been awaiting Bass’s arrival. He knew that his friend wouldn’t remain absent from the territory for too long.
A member of the Choctaw tribe, Henry had been the first friendly face Bass encountered when he’d run away from Texas to the territory during the war. Bass had been given by his original owner, William Reeves, to his older son, George. When the war started, George Reeves was made a colonel in the Confederate forces, and took Bass along as his orderly. One night, while his master slept, Bass slipped away and headed north to Indian Territory. He’d crossed the Red River, and was in unfamiliar territory when, unknown to him, a band of slave hunters had begun tracking him. Henry Lone Tree, out hunting, had seen the lone black man making his way through the bush, and noticed the gang of white men close behind him. Reading the situation correctly, Henry had intercepted Bass, informed him of the danger closing in, and helped him elude his would-be captors. From that moment, the two had become friends.
When the familiar grey stallion came into view down the road, followed by two wagons, Henry stood, his hand shading his eyes against the glare of the morning sun, and watched them approach.
The two wagons stopped at the gate, fifty yards from his front porch, but Bass kept riding until he was only a few feet away.
“Hello, Bass,” he said. “How many evil men are we going after this time?”
“Howdy to you too, Henry,” Bass said. “I’m doin’ fine, how ‘bout you?”
Henry laughed. “You have been back in the land of the white men too long, my friend. You can see that I am alive and well, as I can see that you are as well.”
Bass frowned. He threw his leg over and dismounted. “You’re right, Henry. Guess I done learned the old ways again. I sure can see you doin’ good. We got us five fugitives to catch this time. Couple of ‘em s’posed to be over by Shawnee, ‘n the rest I hear might be ‘round Chickasha. I reckon we be able to pick ‘em up in ‘bout a week, ten days at most.”
Henry held up his left hand and counted the fingers of his right. “Hm, that comes to just thirty dollars tops. Hardly worth leaving the farm for that.”
“Yeah,” Bass said. “But, where else you gon’ get paid that much for doin’ next to nothin’?”
“You think this will be that easy?”
“Yeah. ‘Cept for the robber and the fella who killed his friend over a card game, they ain’t really likely to be dangerous. I don’t even think them two will put up any kinda fight. Won’t be no harder than the time you ‘n me was on the run from them slave catchers.”
“Well, since you put it like that, let me get my rifle and we can get going.”
CHAPTER 6
“Well, Belle, I reckon we done overstayed our welcome, haven’t we?” Cole Younger stood on the porch, his hands shoved into the pockets of his brown nankeen trousers, his head cocked to the side.
Belle, wearing her dark, blue riding habit, a derby with a peacock feather stuck in the band, and a riding crop in her right hand, frowned as she faced him.
“It’s not that I’m not happy to see you, Cole,” she said. “But, because of Sam’s father, and the fact that he’s now head of the clan, the law over in Arkansas watches us with eagle eyes. If they ever found out I’ve been letting you and the James boys stay here, we’d both be in a peck of trouble. And, trouble is something we don’t need right now.”
“Way I hear it, it’s not just old Tom Starr the law’s interested in. I hear that man of yours gets himself mixed up in some pretty nasty goings on from time to time.”
Belle’s frown deepened and her cheeks turned red. Even though she was well aware that when Tom Starr became too old to keep pace with the clan’s activities, Sam, as the oldest son, had inherited the leadership of the Starr clan, the biggest gang of thieves and ne’er-do-wells in Cherokee land, but she didn’t like having it thrown in her face, least of all by someone to whom she’d extended the hospitality of her home, and someone who was so far on the wrong side of the law himself, he couldn’t even see the line.
“He’s been sticking to the territory,” she said. “He’s done nothing to draw attention from the law in Arkansas.”
“Then, what you got to worry ‘bout, girl?”
She stamped her foot on the uneven boards of the porch. “Look, Cole, I don’t want to get into an argument with you about this. I just think it’d be better if you found another place to stay. Sam will be back by noon, he’s bringing in some horses we’re putting up for sale. It really might be best if you were gone when he gets here.”
Smiling broadly, he nodded.
“Ah, now I see what the problem is. Your man’s jealous of me. He know about me ‘n you from when we were young?”
Her cheeks turned redder. “No, and don’t you even think about telling him anything, you hear me, because you and I both know nothing ever happened between us?”
“Now, don’t you be frettin’ that pretty head of yours, Belle,” he said. “What happened before is just between you ‘n me. But, if he don’t know about us, why is he so hot on me leaving?”
“It’s not just you, Cole. He wants Frank and Jesse gone, too.”
“What’s he got against them?”
“I told you, we don’t want trouble with the law. Our neighbors see you three hanging around, they talk. All it takes is for one of them to recognize one of you, and we’ve got more trouble than we need.”
She had a painful look on her face, and was on the verge of tears.
“Okay, Belle, I get it. Don’t you worry,” he said. “I’ve got no desire to cause you any trouble. I’ll go get Frank and Jesse, and we’ll be on the road in less’n an hour.”
She breathed deeply. “Thank you, Cole,” she said. “I’m sorry to have to do this. We’ve been friends a long time, but there’s just too much at stake. You understand?”
“Of course, I do, Belle. Maybe when things get better, I can come back and get to know you and that man of yours. Show him that I ain’t such a bad man.”
“Maybe,” she said. But, there was no conviction in her voice. One thing she knew for sure, handsome as he might be, Cole Younger was indeed a very bad man.
CHAPTER 7
Bass and his crew found the bank robber holed up in a line shack just north of Shawnee.
The rundown structure, with boards missing from the walls, corrugated tin sheets rusted and turned up at the ends, and oil cloth covering the many broken windows, sat back from the rutted trail, against a low hill covered with ivy and blackberry bushes. A trail of white smoke curled up from the iron chimney pipe. For someone trying to hide from the law, he hadn’t shown much skill. He’d left a trail, according to Henry, a blind man could have followed, and had picked a structure that offered no protection from rifle fire, and with only one door, effectively trapped him inside.
Bass and Henry smiled at each other as they halted their horses on the trail about a hundred feet from the shack.
“How are we going to do this?” Henry asked.
“I’m just gon’ go up and ask him to give himself up,” Bass replied.
“You sure he will do that?”
“Only one way to find out.”
“You know, one of these days, you’re gonna to do that, and someone’s gonna shoot you.”
“I reckon if he was gon’ shoot, he’d of done it by now,” Bass said. “We wasn’t exactly quiet comin’ up on this place, and we standing here in plain sight. Naw, I reckon he’s just waitin’ for me to give him the chance to give up.”
Henry shrugged. “Okay, old friend. It’s your funeral. I’ll make sure you get a good burial.”
Bass dismounted and walked up to the door of the shack. He rapped on the warped wood.
“Who’s out the
re?” a voice called from inside the shack.
“You James Tucker?” Bass asked.
“Who want to know?”
“I’m Deputy U.S. Marshal Bass Reeves, ‘n I come to arrest you. Come on out with your hands up.”
Henry, the prisoner wagon driver, and the cook watched with mouths agape, expecting a hail of slugs through the flimsy door. Instead, the door swung open, and a short, tow-headed young man, who looked to be about nineteen years old, walked out with his hands in the air.
“How’d you find me, deputy?” he asked.
“You shouldn’t ask the general store if they’s deliver your goods to save you havin’ to tote ‘em, and you rode right in the middle of the trail. You left a trail a blind man could’ve followed,” Bass said. “Now, hold them hands out ‘n let me put handcuffs on ‘em.”
Tucker, with a downcast look on his face, held his hands out, and Bass slipped the steel cuffs around his wrist and led him to the prisoner wagon.
“Shoot,” Henry said. “If I’d known it’d be this easy, I would have stayed home.”
Sitting slump-shouldered in the wagon, Tucker gave him a forlorn look. “If I’d knowed it was him comin’ after me, I’da saved y’all the trouble ‘n jest come down to town and turned myself in.”
Bass mounted his horse and pointed it west. “Don’t be ‘spectin’ it to be this easy all the time. It ain’t over until we got ‘em all trussed up ‘n in the wagon. Now, let’s move out. We still got four more to find.”
They spent the next two days trailing the two land swindlers, who were moving from town to town, always, it seemed, just a few hours ahead of them. The two men, Nathaniel Springer and Jonah Caulfield, had worked together to swindle people in Arkansas and Louisiana out of their land, or convinced them to buy land that didn’t exist, and had fled together into Indian Territory when warrants were issued for their arrest. Now, though, they’d split up, complicating the task of following them.
After a day of following overlapping trails, Bass and Henry decided to concentrate on one of the fugitives at a time. They finally tracked Caulfield to an isolated farm, five miles southwest of Shawnee. He’d paid the farmer, a Chickasaw tribesman, for the use of his barn, and was hiding in the hay loft. The man, who knew both Bass and Henry, pointed at the barn when they rode up to his house.
When Bass and Henry walked into the barn and called out his name, he climbed down from the hay loft and meekly surrendered.
It took them another three days to find Springer, who’d shown much more creativity in selecting his hiding place. He had, in fact, hidden in plain sight. Instead of heading for a remote area of the territory, he’d circled around and returned to Shawnee, where he’d paid one of the painted women in the local saloon to allow him to hide under the bed in her room. They literally stumbled upon his hiding place when they entered the saloon to eat lunch, and one of the cleaning women was heard talking to one of the other working girls about ‘the strange man hiding in Lulu’s room.’
Bass corralled the woman, found out from her where Lulu’s room was, signaled Henry to follow him, and the two of them barged in, lifted the bed, exposing him, and then led the surprised and disappointed Springer out of the saloon in handcuffs.
After Springer’s relatively uneventful capture, they only had to find Billy Conner, the young man who’d killed his friend during an argument provoked by a suspicious hand in a card game. The youngest and least experienced of the fugitives they sought, he was also the hardest to find.
While experienced outlaws tend to follow predictable patterns when on the run from the law, Conner had never been in trouble before, had panicked after knifing his friend in an argument over a card game at a local saloon, and had fled into Indian Territory without any kind of plan of escape, only the blind fear of what would happen to him if he was captured. As a result, his movements through the territory were erratic. He would stay in one place for a day or two, and then, for no apparent reason, would leave, heading in a random direction, stopping and sleeping under the stars sometimes, or hiding in barns or abandoned shacks at others.
Tracking him had been like following a wounded coyote, his trail at times doubling back on itself, and with no apparent destination in mind.
But, Bass and Henry were the best trackers in the territory, and they were patient men. Once, during the war, after Bass had run away to the territory, and shortly after they met and became friends, he and Henry had tracked a wounded whitetail deer for three days until they finally cornered it in a blind canyon and put it out of its misery.
They applied this same patience in tracking the young fugitive, and after five days of following one blind trail after another, they’d finally found him, back at the first place they’d picked up his trail, a copse of trees at the south end of a farmer’s field, a mile east of Chickasha.
When confronted, he’d pulled out the knife that he’d used on his friend, his only weapon, and waved it wildly at them, screaming that he wouldn’t be taken alive. Bass had talked softly to him, all the while edging closer and closer, until he was within reach, whereupon, he’d knocked the blade from the young man’s hand with one swipe of one huge hand, and then cuffed him on the side of the head with the other, knocking him unconscious.
When he came to, he was handcuffed, and in the prisoner wagon, sandwiched between the two land swindlers. Bass and Henry stood near the back of the wagon.
“Looks like I figured wrong about how long it’d take to round these fellas up,” Bass said.
“I am not complaining,” Henry said, smiling. “It means more money for me. It has been a good trip.”
Bass removed some folded banknotes from his jacket pocket and counted out the fee he owed his friend. “It was well earned. I’ll be seein’ you again in a couple of weeks, I reckon.”
After counting the bills, folding them, and stuffing them into his pockets, Henry smiled. “I’ll be waiting for you. I sure hope the next time’s as interesting as this one was.”
CHAPTER 8
Belle balanced on the second rail from the bottom of the corral fence, peering at the horses milling around inside the enclosure.
“Looks to be about ten head shy of what you said you were going to get,” she said.
Sam Starr, his face glistening with sweat, swung the corral gate shut, and turned to look up at her.
“Yeah, it is,” he said. “But, the corral is crowded as you can see. I knew I couldn’t get ‘em all in there, so I put twelve head up next door at old Joseph Crow’s place until the buyer can come look at ‘em.”
Belle hopped down from the fence.
“I suppose that makes sense. Wouldn’t do to crowd ‘em up too much and have them hurt each other. That could hurt the sale.”
“And, old man Crow ain’t chargin’ us much to put ‘em up for a few days.” He clapped his hands. “We’re gonna make a good profit off these nags, Belle, a good profit.”
She was happy to hear that, for it meant he would probably not be going off on one of his ‘trips.’ She never asked what he did when he was away from home for days, and he didn’t encourage her to ask, nor did he ever talk about what he did. But, she had a good idea what he did, and was sure that it involved relieving other people of their possessions. He was much like his father, and everyone knew that old Tom Starr was a first-class brigand, and in Sam’s case, the apple hadn’t fallen far from the tree. But, she’d been on that ride before. Her first husband, Jim Reed, like Cole Younger, had been someone she’d known as a teenager. The difference, though, was that she’d had found Reed attractive, and had had a thing for him from the time she was fourteen or fifteen. After the war, when her family moved to Texas, she’d married him. She’d been 18 years old at the time. While Jim had seriously tried farming, it was just too hard, and he’d soon taken up with the Starr clan, involved in stealing whiskey, cattle, and horses in Indian Territory. He’d also thrown in with the James and Younger gangs, and tried his hand at stagecoach robbery, and eight years after
they were married, just when she thought she’d convinced him to settle down at the home they had in Paris, Texas, he was shot and killed by an old friend who had betrayed him in order to collect the reward on him for crimes he’d committed from Texas to California.
Six years after Jim Reed’s death, she married Sam Starr, and moved to his place in Indian Territory, to live with him and his extended family. Sam had let her name Younger’s Bend, despite his concern about her previous relationship with Cole Younger.
Belle knew full well that Sam was still involved in breaking the law, but hoped that he was confining his illegal activities to purloining from the Indians in the territory, so he wouldn’t bring the federal law down upon them. The tribal police, she felt they could handle with a few well-placed bribes, but the U.S. marshals, especially now that Isaac Parker was the judge in Arkansas, couldn’t be easily bribed. And the most feared of all the deputies was her friend, Bass Reeves. Not only could he not be bribed, but the man seemed to lead a charmed life. According to the stories Belle heard, he’d been shot at dozens of times, and never been hit, and when he went after a wanted fugitive, that person was as good as behind bars.
She did not, however, share any of her concerns with Sam. She knew that he, like many of the Indians in the territory, respected the dark-skinned lawman, even considered him one of them. But, she worried that if a warrant was ever issued, it would be given to Bass to serve, and that would test the limits of Sam’s respect for him.
She had, however, lived among the Cherokee long enough to have adopted some of their philosophy. One of those was, it made no sense to fret over things that you could not control. Better to use your energy to deal with the things staring you in the face. So, she took a deep breath, and looked up at the blue sky, around at the lush green leaves on the trees, and sucked in the air smelling sweet with honeysuckle. What will be, will be, she thought.