The Legend of Bass Reeves (11 page)

He felt safe, high in the sky on the bluff, and would sometimes find himself looking down on eagles and hawks flying beneath him. He started calling the bluffs by name based on what he saw. One was Torture Bluff, another Eagle Bluff, a third Bather’s Bluff, where he saw six or seven children by a homestead jumping around in a pond.

He began to know the country. He found good grass, good water, well-traveled trails and places where people seldom went. He found pockets of game, buffalo, deer and rabbit, where he knew he could find game when his meat ran low.

He came upon scores of small farms and ranches scattered throughout the territory, and would lie overlooking
some of them for days, wistfully remembering Mammy and her cooking and love.

He also knew where there were gang hideouts. Usually it would be an older farm or ranch, poorly maintained. Perhaps just a sod hut with a pole corral. There would be few cattle and many horses and men, sometimes a dozen or more.

Even from a distance he could see these were hard men who were always heavily armed, like the two he had killed, and he kept well away from such places, certain that the moment anybody saw him they would begin shooting.

So he kept riding, walking, hiding by night and mostly by day, until weeks turned into months. As he moved, he learned.

Bass was illiterate, and written maps meant little to him. But his inability to read had a benefit. His memory became truly phenomenal. When he saw a special canyon or watering place, or a hideout he needed to avoid, he would kneel in the dirt and draw a picture of the place in the dust, how it looked from above, from the side. He’d look at it for a moment, then erase it.

It was all in his mind now. The Territory was not really that large, perhaps one hundred fifty by two hundred miles, and he covered over seventeen hundred miles that summer, back and forth, up and down, zigzagging to avoid people—and learning, learning, filing everything in a steeltrap memory.

Soon he knew every nook and cranny, every watering hole, every hideout and potential hideout, each of the four “stores,” almost every shack or overhanging cave shelter. He felt sure that unless he was taken completely by surprise,
it was almost impossible that anybody could capture him. He wasn’t cocky, or even overconfident. It was just that he knew all the places he could go to avoid people.

There was no way in the world he could have expected to run into a little girl named Betty.

Bass had discovered a six-mile trail leading from one small homestead to another. It was about fifteen miles from the well-traveled trail to the store where he’d bought supplies. He decided to visit a different store on his next supply run; the two men he’d killed might have been known at the first store.

He needed to cross the trail that ran between the two ranches and then head north, because in the south there were groups of heavily armed men riding back and forth.

He came to the two homesteads with the trail between them. They were six or seven miles apart, with stands of short brush and woods between them where he could pass without being seen.

Generally, he didn’t like to get this close to ranches. There could always be riders out working stock, or somebody returning home.

But to go out and around would add maybe fifteen miles to his journey. He wanted to get north as soon as possible, so he decided to take the risk.

He was cautious. He stopped for over an hour on a rise and studied the trail, looking for movement. Nothing. Then he moved closer, until he was less than a mile from the trail, and did the same thing.

Nothing.

So he decided to make his dash across. No sooner had he started forward at a run than a paint pony came galloping out of the brush on the west side of the trail.

The pony had a little girl riding it and was going hell for leather, well beyond the girl’s ability to control it. Bass thought at first that the pony was a runaway—which was bad enough—but as it came closer, he saw it was being chased by three wolves.

When it was less than two hundred yards from Bass, the little girl lost her grip and fell off the back of the pony. The wolves attacked her instantly.

Bass had seen wolves kill buffalo calves and deer. Without thinking, he wheeled the Roman nose and kicked his ribs so hard, the horse blew snot out of his nostrils.

The Roman nose leaped forward into a dead run, but even so, by the time Bass came up to her, the little girl had been bitten on the arms, and two wolves were trying to drag her away.

“Get away!” Bass flew off his horse and into the wolves, kicking at them. “Get away from her!”

One wolf snapped at Bass and ripped his leg down the left thigh, a deep six inches from top to bottom. He didn’t feel anything, but he took his Colt out. He killed two of the wolves before the other one ran off, and then he turned to the little girl.

She had several deep bites on her arms and legs that were bleeding, but the wolves had not ripped her face. Bass picked her up as gently as possible and carried her to his horse and swung up. Then he noticed his left leg. Blood poured from the wound, but there was nothing he could do about it now. He rode with the little girl in his arms.

He could not guess her age. Four, five, six, clearly Indian,
with long black hair and almond eyes. She looked up at him with a fearless gaze, and though he knew she must be in considerable pain, she was absolutely silent in his arms.

From the way the pony had been running, he figured she had come from the western homestead, so he heeled his horse into a run. Bass looked back once. To his surprise, the little mule was following at a wild gallop.

It would not take long to get to the homestead, and that was good, because Bass was losing blood rapidly. The movement of the horse worked the wound in his thigh, and blood poured down his leg. He had three miles to go, and within a mile he felt dizzy; in another half mile he was faint and hanging on to the saddle horn with one hand while keeping a tight grip on the little girl with the other.

He wasn’t going to make it.

He’d never make three miles. He was starting to lose the ability to think straight, and he thought he should stop soon before he fell or dropped the girl. Then everything swam in front of his eyes, and all he could think was he had to hold on, hold on, hold on.…

He thought he felt the horse slow—though he kept kicking it to run—and then maybe stop; he thought he heard voices, but they were speaking in some strange tongue and he tried to fight through them; then there was a kind of warm cloud coming down and he thought, This isn’t so bad, dying isn’t so bad, not so bad at all, and then he was gone.

1841–1863
A Family

It could have been hours, days, weeks. He knew nothing but visions and sounds that made no sense. He felt as if his thoughts were swimming in thick water. When he tried to make himself think clearly, he would either pass out or fall asleep.

Images.

A moment of intense pain in his left leg and he saw, or thought he saw, an Indian with black braids leaning over him and putting a red-hot iron onto a wound on his leg, and that made him think of the Comanches and that this must be a Comanche burning his leg, and he screamed and screamed and screamed until he passed into blessed oblivion again.

Later, children’s voices, words he did not know, a singsong sound that pushed him down and down into sleep.

Still later, an old woman feeding him some kind of warm broth, and then, embarrassing even in his dream state, the same old woman holding a jar and helping him relieve himself.

For what seemed an endless time, he simply slept, neither saw nor heard anything; until finally, finally, he opened his eyes, and through the slowly dissipating fog of sleep, he could see where he was.

His last memory was of a running horse. And for some reason, kicking his horse to make it run faster. Then more came: the girl, her paint pony—he could remember the horse’s color with surprising vividness—and the wolves, oh yes, the wolves, tearing at the girl.

There were sticks above him, rows of sticks that made no sense. He closed his eyes and opened them again and saw that he wasn’t dead and buried, which he had first thought, but that the sticks were willows laid tightly over log rafters. He was looking up at the ceiling of a sod house.

He moved his head sideways and saw that he was in a single room, lying on a sawn-plank bed on what felt like corn shucks. There was a plank table with two benches in the middle of the room, and a cookstove at one end of the room and a low doorway at the other end. Two window openings about two feet square let in light, and from the angle he guessed it was either early morning or late afternoon. All along the wall facing him were plank shelves covered with jars and sacks and cooking utensils. Next to the bed on another bench was a folded set of clothes. With a start, he realized that he was completely naked under a blanket.

He was alone, for which he was grateful, and without thinking he tried to turn and reach for his pants, but he
was torn by a ripping pain from his left leg and nearly passed out.

Ahh. He’d forgotten the wolf bite. Taking breaths in short gasps, he gingerly raised the blanket and looked at his leg. There was a bandage over the upper thigh, a wrapping of clean cotton that looked like feed sack material.

He was profoundly thirsty, his mouth so dry he felt as if he had never had a drink of water in his life. On the other side of the bed from the bench there was a jar of liquid on the floor. Carefully, slowly, to avoid turning his leg, he reached down and brought the jar up to his mouth and was overjoyed to find that it held water. He drank and drank, letting the water roll down his throat, until the jar was empty, and just then the little girl he had saved came into the room.

Her arms were bare and he could see scabs healing where the wolves had bitten her. She came up to the edge of the bed, looked at him for a moment, said something he couldn’t understand, smiled and then ran from the room yelling at the top of her voice.

Several minutes went by, and then a man came into the room with her. He was an Indian, stocky, wearing trousers and a vest. His hair fell in two long black braids down his back. Bass thought he remembered the braids from a dream about Comanches, but this was clearly not a raiding Comanche, and in fact the man was smiling.

“Peter,” he said, coming up to Bass and holding out his hand. “You?”

Bass took the hand. “Bass. Thank you for taking care of me. I would have died sure if …”

Peter was shaking his head. “Too fast. No talk good. Talk slow. Again—Bass?”

“Yes. Does anybody speak English here?”

“Me.” Peter smiled. “Only one. Rest all talk good Creek.” “Creek?”

“Talk from before. From old places. From home. Speak Creek before come here. Speak Creek here.”

Bass was still in a haze. He let his head drop back and sighed. “I’m sorry, I don’t understand very well.”

Peter nodded. “Bad hole in leg. Take time. Take time. You sleep. We bring food later.”

With that, Peter and the little girl turned to leave, but Bass called, “Wait. Peter. What’s the girl’s name?”

Peter fondly touched the girl’s head while he spoke. “White name … Betty.”

“Betty?”

“White name. Indian name …” He thought for a moment. “Be Two Shoes.”

“Betty Two Shoes. Thank you. Thank you.”

He was alone for a time after they left, lost in his thoughts. His eyes closed and he dozed again, not heavy sleep this time, but comfortable. There was a pain in his leg but it was not severe unless he moved, more a reminder than anything else. The room was pleasant. There were bird sounds outside and warm air coming in the window openings, and he half dreamt, half daydreamed about Mammy and how she would take care of him when he was hurt or had the croup. Memory fed on memory and he realized he’d been gone almost a year. He hoped Mammy was all right, and he remembered how she looked working over the stove making corn bread.

Peter came bustling into the room along with Betty Two Shoes, and two women, one very old, one about
Peter’s age, as well as a very old man and a boy of about seven.