Read Online Sam Bass by Bryan Woolley - Free Book Online Page A

man’s adventure that Dr. Ross wished he had had, a memory to store up and bring out again before the fireplace of Dr. Frank Jackson, an old man.
    It was freedom I was feeling. A young man’s freedom, which is the absence of responsibility and the prospect of unlimited possibility. And danger! I was riding with a man who owned ten thousand dollars, taken at gunpoint from a Union Pacific train. A man who had tended animals at a hotel and grubbed brush, but who now was considered dangerous because he dared take what others wanted to keep. I liked that. I didn’t think of that as a crime, nor did many others. I had read in a newspaper that the Texas government had compiled descriptions of more than forty-five hundred men in the state who were wanted by the law somewhere, and almost a quarter of the counties hadn’t even filed reports. Oh, many people railed against the “lawless element,” I guess. But I venture to say that those who railed were rich, or had arrived in Texas with prospects of getting rich. Yankees, most of them, who hadn’t suffered the war and its humiliation or the carpetbaggers. Some had even profited from our misery. And many of those on the state’s list had got there for trying to keep what was theirs or regain what was taken from them. There were many others, weaker or more timid than they, who had suffered their losses silently, but cheered on and protected those willing to “grab onto the world and pull,” as Sam had put it. A man who had nothing to pull but a gun and who took only from those who had plenty was considered a criminal only by those who had plenty and feared for it. Believe me, there weren’t many of those in Texas in those days. Not in the countryside. So as Sam and I rode across the prairie in silence, dreaming our dreams, I felt like an outlaw but not like a criminal, and the beauty of the day and its freedom filled me.
    When the sun was almost straight overhead we entered a thicket very like the one we had left in the morning. It, too, was bisected by a creek, which we began following upstream. This one was even more overgrown than the other, full of walnuts, oaks and acacias and thick tangles of vines and brush. High walls rose on both sides, not far from the banks of the stream. Large outcroppings of limestone gleamed white near the tops of the walls, shading caves and crevices whose depths I couldn’t determine. “Cove Hollow,” Sam said. “It runs about six miles up yonder, but we don’t have to ride that far.” We dismounted and led the horses to the creek and dropped the reins. The horses, their necks extended, their noses close to the ground, sniffing the water, stepped gingerly down the bank, found firm footing and dipped their muzzles into the stream. Sam and I flopped on the grass. He took off his hat and rubbed his sleeve across the sweat and dirt of his brow. “Welcome home, Frank,” he said.
    When we were refreshed we remounted and picked our way up the creek. I could see that Cove Hollow was ideal for our purpose, but it struck me as an unpleasant, unhealthy place. The ground was spongy under our horses’ hooves. Clear Creek, as it was called, was dark and sluggish, and our course along its bank stank of rotting vegetation that had collected in numerous stagnant pools. Miasma and fever and snakes displaced freedom and adventure in my thoughts.
    We had ridden about two miles into the hollow when a high, rasping voice screeched: “Throw up your props!” Sam halted his mare and raised his hands above his head. I looked around me, confused. I could see no one. The voice came again: “Throw up your props, Frank!” I did, and the voice laughed. “Can you see me?” it asked.
    â€œNo,” Sam said. “Come on out.”
    Henry Underwood rode out of the shadow of the limestone outcropping above us, disappeared into the trees, then emerged on the creek bank only a few feet