Blood and Gold

Chapter 4

Only when Reeves stood did I realize how big he was. He was well over six feet and I guessed he weighed about two hundred pounds. He was big in the chest and shoulders with muscular arms and long, powerful legs and he had the Western rider’s narrow waist and hips. His knuckles were large and knotted, scarred all over from dozens of rough-and-tumble fistfights, and his nose had been broke more than once.

I was told later that Bass Reeves could whip any two men in a bare-knuckle fight, and by the time I met him, he’d already killed twelve outlaws in the line of duty, either with his .38.40 Colt or his same caliber Winchester.

Now he looked down at me and asked: “Hungry, boy?”

To my surprise I found I was. I nodded and said: “I could eat.”

Reeves nodded toward my sack of supplies. “What you got in your poke?”

“Bacon,” I said. “And some corn bread.”

The big lawman nodded. “I got me a slab of salt pork and a few three-day-old sourdough biscuits, so we’ll have ourselves a feast.” He smiled. “Good for you, boy. Build up your strength.”

After we’d eaten I did feel better, though I was still very weak and my head was pounding.

Reeves said he’d ride with me as far as the Red, but that was where his jurisdiction ended and he would go no farther.

“Maybe we’ll catch up with Lafe Wingo and the others by then,” he said. “Maybe not. But we’ll give it our best shot.”

At first light we saddled up and headed south.

It was raining again.

Reeves’ big red stud was a sight to see. Montana-bred, he went more than eighteen hands and had a right pretty white blaze. The horse’s powerful legs with their four white stockings stepped high, his long, rangy stride eating up distance. But the buckskin was game and kept right along with him.

I was still very weak and dizzy and couldn’t wear my hat because of the fat bandage on my head. But after the rain soaked that bandage through, I tossed it away, replacing it with my hat, even though the tight leather band threatened to punish me for days to come.

Bass Reeves was a personable man and I enjoyed his company. In the past, I had ridden with a number of black punchers and they did their work well. They were uncomplaining, even riding the drag, and I never had any problem with them.

There was a stillness in the big lawman—a kind of serenity, I guess—and when he reached for a thing his hand did not tremble. He pointed out things of interest along the trail that I’d never paid no mind to before. Maybe he was trying to keep my spirits up, because right then I was mighty glum, worrying about Simon Prather’s money and how I’d get it back.

Reeves showed me the deep holes of the little burrowing owls, the only owls that eat fruits and seeds as part of their diet, mainly gathered from the tesajilla and prickly pear cactus. He pointed out where rutting elk had rubbed their antlers against trees, stripping the velvet as they prepared for combat. He said to listen close because their challenging bugles could echo for miles through the gulches between the bluffs and mesas.

Reeves could put a name to just about every bird and plant we saw and he told me about a cave to the east of us where millions of bats roosted during the day, then took off in a spiraling funnel cloud that filled the sky at nightfall.

“I reckon it takes maybe thirty minutes for all them bats to leave their cave,” he said. “Dusty, pretty soon the sky is full of them, filled with flapping black dots as far as a man can see. Some college feller told me one time the bats eat ten tons of insects every night, and that’s how come the sodbusters love them so much.”

Bass Reeves taught me a lot of things during those days we rode together.

When I happened to let it drop that I was no great shakes with the rifle, he showed me how to hold the sights of my Winchester real still on the target, told me when to inhale and when to hold my breath and how to get a clean break on the trigger so I didn’t jerk the gun.

“Rifle shooting is all in the mind,” Reeves said, “and that’s why it takes every bit of your concentration. It’s like when you tie a line to a fishhook, you direct all your focus on the knot. Dusty, you should use the same amount of concentration when you fire a rifle. It’s an all-or-nothing proposition.”

Keeping in mind what the lawman told me, I was hitting every target I shot at pretty soon, and then he made me work on my speed, cranking and firing the Winchester from the shoulder so fast that I sounded like a one-man army.

Once I dropped a whitetail buck with a shot from my rifle at a distance of two hundred yards and that night, as we broiled venison steaks, Reeves said I could unravel a Winchester bullet as well as any man and maybe a shade better than most.

The big lawman was impressed with the speed of my draw from the holster and he said he’d seen maybe just two or three faster, including his ownself, but it was an uncertain thing and not one he’d care to put to the test.

“In any case, we’ll leave it alone, Dusty,” he said. “When it comes to the Colt’s gun you don’t need any advice from me.”

Maybe so, but very soon I was to see Bass Reeves use his Colt and I realized then that the black lawman could teach me plenty about shooting a short gun, and then some.

Reeves and me cleared the Gypsum Hills and crossed the Canadian. The riverbed was about six hundred yards wide but there was only about forty feet of water not more than a foot deep. We splashed through a shallow elbow of the Washita, then headed south again in the direction of the Antelope Hills across high tableland dotted here and there with post oak, stands of tall timber growing in the deep ravines.

Although we could see far across miles of country, there was no sign of Lafe Wingo and the others.

Reeves led the way as we rode on across rolling country, here and there rugged, flat-topped mesas rising dramatically more than two thousand feet above the level. Numerous small creeks, cottonwoods and willows growing along their banks, cut through the land around us, and the grass was good and plentiful. Juniper, pine and hickory crowned most of the hills, and here and there spires and parapets of weathered red sandstone jutted from their slopes.

Now the rain had stopped, we stowed our slickers behind our saddles. The days had become hot and still, and often the only sounds were the muffled fall of our horses’ hooves and the hum of bees among the wildflowers.

Four days after my first meeting with Bass Reeves, we camped for the night at a bend of Cottonwood Creek, a fair-sized stream with many twists and turns, the leaves of nearby tall trees reflecting dark green in the millpond water over which even greener dragon-flies hovered.

I broiled up the last of the salt pork and venison steak, and not much of either, and we washed down this meager fare with a half cup of thrice-boiled coffee and were wishful of more.

At times Reeves was a deep-thinking man, and we sat in silence and smoked, each occupied with his own thoughts, as the darkness gathered around us and an owl questioned the night from somewhere deep in the hills.

The big lawman, with ears long attuned to even the smallest sound that could signal danger, suddenly sat straight up, his body tense.

I opened my mouth to question him, but he held a finger to his lips, motioning me into silence. Reeves rose to his feet in one graceful, athletic motion, his gun coming up fast.

From out in the darkness I heard a faint, rhythmic creak . . . creak . . . creak. As my eyes finally penetrated the gloom, I made out the pale glow of a yellowish-orange light bobbing toward us.

I was never one to be afraid of the boogerman and ha’nts and such, but I felt the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end as the creaking grew louder, now joined by the noisy clank of metal, and the light bobbed ever closer.

I drew my own Colt and was aware of Reeves fading like a ghost back into the shadows.

The creaking and clanking suddenly stopped and the light bobbed to a standstill.

The silence around me grew and out in the darkness I heard a horse stomp the ground and blow through its nose.

“Hello the camp!”

I looked around and found Reeves at my elbow.

“Come on in real slow, and keep your hand well away from your gun,” he yelled.

“A gun?” echoed the voice from the gloom. “Is my name not Amos Rosenberg and am I not a harmless peddler? What do I know from a gun?”

But Reeves would not be moved. “Then ride in easy and keep your mitts up in the air where I can see them.”

“Ride in, he says. Am I not riding in already?”

The creaking and clanking started up again and the bobbing light was gradually transformed into a guttering oil lamp fixed to the side of a small two-wheeled wagon drawn by a swaybacked, mouse-colored mustang. Pots, pans and ladles clanked on the outside of the wagon and the whole rig creaked and groaned like an old man getting up from his seat at the fire.

The driver up on the box was short and thin, a battered, flat-crowned hat on his head, a black beard, shot with plenty of gray, falling over his narrow chest. As he got closer, I saw dark eyes, bright as those of a bird, peering at us from under a pair of shaggy eyebrows, taking in everything, missing nothing. He looked to be about sixty years old.

“Hold up, Rosie,” the man said, hauling on the reins, stopping just beyond the circle of the firelight. He looked around him. “How did I find your camp?” he asked finally. “Did I not smell your coffee from a long ways off?”

“Coffee’s all gone,” I said. I felt no threat from the peddler and decided to be friendly. “Sorry.”

Rosenberg nodded. “No need for sorrow. I have coffee. Arbuckle coffee, fresh in the sack. Got sugar too, if that’s to your taste.”

Beside me, I saw Reeves think this through. Then he made up his mind as I had done earlier and holstered his Colt. “Peddler, I guess you’ve come to the right camp because we’re fresh out of everything. That is, if your prices are honest.”

“Honest?” Rosenberg asked. “And why would my prices not be honest?”

Reeves’ smile was thin. “Out here, where there ain’t a general store for miles around, a man could get to thinking he can get mighty rich mighty quick.”

“Rich, he says,” the peddler snorted, “out here in this wilderness where a man hears nothing but the howl of the wild beasts. Look at me. Am I not a poor man? Those most in need have no money to buy, and those with money have no need. Who then gets rich?”

Reeves’ smile widened. “Well maybe so. Unhitch that pony and show us what you have in your poke.”

I helped Rosenberg put up his horse, liking the way the man’s quick movements were practiced and precise as he undid the traces, with no wasted effort.

The little man was a Child of the Book, one of hundreds of Jewish peddlers who wandered the West selling their wares, mostly dry goods like needles and thread, calico cloth, pots, pans and ladles. Most carried packs on their backs, trudging for miles across the prairie to isolated ranches and farms, but a few, like Amos Rosenberg, were successful enough to afford horses and wagons.

Peddlers also traded with the Indians and one I met had spent six years living with the Cheyenne and had him an Indian wife.

Most ranch and farm women warmly welcomed the peddler, not only for his goods, but because of the news he brought from the cities. I reckoned if put to it, Rosenberg could tell us how the women of fashion in Cheyenne were wearing their bonnets and how big were the bustles of the Abilene belles and how sheer their fine silk stockings.

The pioneer woman isolated amid an empty sea of grass for months and years at a time did not know or care that the latest fashion in Abilene was already a year old back in the East and two years out of date in Paris. It was all new and exciting to them, so no wonder the visit of the peddler was a welcome thing, eagerly anticipated.

Rosenberg seemed to be a shade more prosperous than the rest, because in addition to his dry goods, he carried a small supply of bacon, salt pork, flour and coffee. Arranged around the floor of his wagon, crammed beside bales of calico and muslin, were small kegs of vinegar, sugar and molasses. He had a glass jar of pink candy sticks and another of black-and-white-striped peppermint balls. To my joy he also carried sacks of tobacco and a supply of .44.40 shells in boxes, enough to replenish the ones I’d fired off so freely on the trail.

Between us, me and Reeves spent close to fifteen dollars on what the peddler had to sell. My major purchase was a new cotton shirt, but it seemed my free-spending ways did little to impress Amos Rosenberg. He glanced at the coins and crumpled paper money in his hand, shook his head and muttered:

“And now you know why I am a poor man. It’s because I buy dear and sell cheap.” He shook his head again. “Oy, I fear you have taken advantage of me.”

I doubted that very much, figuring he’d made a more than fair profit, but I held my tongue. I was well aware of how merchants loved to complain. Like sodbusters, they were quick to plead poverty while all the time having sacks of money stashed under their beds.

I filled our pot at the creek and soon had coffee boiling. Having a young man’s appetite and still being mighty hungry, I fried up some bacon and pan bread and me and Reeves finally ate our fill. Rosenberg would have no part of the bacon, but ate a couple of strips of his own antelope jerky, which he washed down with coffee, strong and boiling from the pot, sweetened with molasses.

After we ate and got to smoking, the little peddler brought out a battered pipe and lit it with a brand from the fire. Every now and then, he’d stretch out his left hand, contemplate his pinkie finger and let out with a deep sigh, usually followed with a shake of the head and a muttered: “Oy, oy, oy.”

“Finger broke?” Reeves asked with scant interest.

“Why would my finger be broke?” Rosenberg asked. “Who has a broken finger?”

The lawman shrugged. “Just asking.”

“Oy vey,” Rosenberg said again, looking at his pinkie, his head shaking even more.

Since the little peddler tended to answer a question with one of his own, I tried to trap him. “Tell us what’s troubling you, Mr. Rosenberg.”

“What is there to tell? Who needs to know?”

I shrugged. “You keep looking at your hand. Maybe it pains you.”

Rosenberg nodded, his black eyes glittering in the firelight. “Ah yes, there is pain. But not in the finger.” He placed a hand on the chest. “The pain is here.”

I was right sensitive about pain in the chest after what had happened to Simon Prather, so I asked: “Is it in your pump?”

“Ah, is it in my pump? Boy, you hit the penny nail right on the head. It’s in the heart sure enough. Oy, my poor heart is broke.”

“How come?” I asked, then wished I hadn’t. But Rosenberg surprised me. He answered the question straight as a fire poker.

“I had a ring,” the peddler said. “I wore it right there on my little finger. It was a silver ring given to me by my wife.” Rosenberg sighed. “She’s no longer with me, took by the cholera this five years past.”

“You lose it?” Reeves asked. He was idly rolling a smoke and didn’t look up.

“Lose it? Why would I lose it? It was took from me.”

“Who took it?” I asked.

“Brigands. Black-hearted brigands.”

Now Reeves was all attention. His unlit cigarette drooping from the corner of his mouth, he asked:

“Was one of them a man with long yeller hair? Carries a big Sharps with a fancy brass scope on the top? Goes by the name of Wingo?”

The peddler shook his head. “That man wasn’t among them. There were six of them, and I heard the name of one of them spoken but it wasn’t that name.”

“Oh?” Reeves asked, his interest quickly fading as he lit his smoke.

Rosenberg nodded. “Their leader was a man named Yates and afterward I remembered that I’d seen him before.”

Reeves’ head snapped around. “Bully Yates? Big feller”—he traced a finger down his left cheek—“has a bowie knife scar right here.”

“How should I know what gave him the scar?” the peddler replied. “But scar he has. Like I already told you, later I remembered him. I saw him use a scat tergun to kill a man outside a saloon in Abilene three summers ago. Should I forget a thing like that?”

Reeves drew deep on his cigarette and shook his head. “Well, well, well, Bully Yates as ever was.”

“You know him, Bass?” I asked.

“I should think I do,” the lawman said. “I have a warrant for his arrest, signed by Judge Parker. Yates is wanted for bank robbery and murder and any number of other crimes, including the part scalping of a loose woman he took up with for a spell.” He looked across the fire at Rosenberg. “Did you recognize any of the others?”

The peddler shrugged. “The others I did not know. But they were all hard men and weighed down by guns.”

“Well, I have a stack of John Does for the others, so that doesn’t make no difference.” Reeves rose to his feet. “Can you recollect where was you robbed, peddler?”

“Why should I not recollect? Was it not me who was robbed?”

“Tell me straight now,” Reeves said, his face grim. “For I plan to start after those men at first light.”

Rosenberg nodded. “To the west of here, maybe twenty miles. Maybe more.”

“Over to the Salt Fork country?”

“Further west. By Sandy Creek.”

Reeves thought that through, then said: “That’s wild, empty country to the west of us. I’d guess Yates is holed up there, figuring to lay low until the heat over the Lawton bank robbery dies down.” The big lawman threw his cigarette butt into the fire. “Bully Yates was always a damn careful man.”

“He’s not laying so low,” Rosenberg pointed out, his face bleak. “He stole my ring and the seven dollars and eighty-three cents I had in my purse.” The little peddler shrugged. “He also took some bacon, salt and flour and most of my coffee.”

“I don’t know about the money,” Reeves told the peddler. “But when I get your ring back, I’ll give it to the clerk of Judge Parker’s court in Fort Smith. You can pick it up there.”

Before Rosenberg could reply, I said: “Bass, you can’t go after those men alone. Hell, man, there’s six of them.”

“And hard,” the peddler said, shaking his head. “All of them hard.”

“I don’t have time to go back to Fort Smith and round up more marshals,” Reeves said. “By the time we all got back here, Yates could have lit a shuck.”

Reeves reached down and placed a hand on my shoulder, an unusually friendly gesture for a man as reserved as he was. “Dusty, you have your own trail to follow. I won’t think any less of you if you don’t follow mine.”

Truth to tell, up until that moment I hadn’t even considered going after Yates and his gang. But now, when I looked up into Reeves’ eyes I saw a deal of shrewd speculation going on there. He was saying one thing, but thinking another, like he was determined to judge me as a friend and a man by what I said next.

I realized then that the cat that had my tongue was a wildcat and I sure had it by the tail.

So far we had seen neither hide nor hair of Lafe Wingo and the others. If I didn’t catch up to them soon, Simon’s money would be gone and his SP Connected doomed to foreclosure. Ma Prather would be thrown off the ranch and then what would become of her? I didn’t even want to think about the answer to that question.

Yet how could I stand by and let Bass Reeves ride alone into a one-sided fight with six outlaws? Nobody needed to tell me that he’d saved my life and I owed him. Now that thought nagged at me, yammering to my conscience that I was an ungrateful wretch, giving me no peace.

Torn, I was about to speak when Amos Rosenberg’s voice bridged the widening gulf of silence stretching awkwardly between me and the big lawman. “Mar shal, I would ride with you, but I am too old and slow,” he said. “I know of calico and cotton, pots and pans, but of tracking men and of guns and gunfighting I know nothing.”

I rose to my feet, my mind made up. “I’ll ride with you, Bass,” I said, “if you’ll have me.”

The lawman stuck out his huge hand and I took it. “Proud to have you along, Dusty.” He dropped my hand and slapped me on the back. “You’ll do, boy. You made a man’s decision here tonight, and by God, you’ll do.” He put his hand on my shoulder. “From this moment on, consider yourself a deputy of Judge Parker’s court, duly sworn and appointed.”

He turned to Rosenberg. “Thanks for the offer, peddler, but you best stick to the business you know.”

Rosenberg shrugged. “Every man has his own business. You are right, Marshal. I’ll stay with my own.”

Absently my fingertips wandered to my top lip, touching only fuzz, and above me the bright moon lost itself behind a cloud and suddenly the land around me was shrouded in shadow, dark with foreboding.