The Legend of Bass Reeves (16 page)
Read The Legend of Bass Reeves Online
Authors: Gary Paulsen
He found the tracks of a single horse just after daybreak. Once the mare saw they were following the tracks,
he let her have her way and scanned ahead. They were in an area of small, sharp-walled rocky canyons where the experienced criminals never hid because they knew it was a trap; the only way out was the way they’d come in.
But Bennie had never been an outlaw and didn’t think that way. In one of the small canyons Bass came around a bend and saw a rock-walled shack that had been abandoned by homesteaders long ago. Bennie’s horse was hobbled out in some grass to the right.
He rode straight in, stopped in front of the shack, dismounted and called, “You got coffee on?”
He heard footsteps scrambling, and then the old door opened. Bennie was holding a gun, but when he saw Bass, he put it down against the inside wall.“I knew you’d be the one to come.”
“It had to be me. It was the only way.”
“I don’t have any coffee.”
“I’ve got some.” Bass took the coffee and a pot out of his saddlebag and handed them to Bennie. “Put some on while I hobble my mare.”
Bass heard Bennie rattling a stove lid and then a fire starting. He dealt with the mare and then sat down next to the shack on a big rock in the sun. He had never smoked and now he wished he had started, just to have something to do with his hands.
“What am I going to do, Pa?” Bennie had come back out. “What’s going to happen?”
“You have to go back and stand for it.”
“But I caught her. She was right there and—”
“It don’t matter. You’ve got to stand for it.”
“But why?”
“Because,” Bass said, sighing, looking out across the
grass, looking at everything, looking at nothing, past the edge of the world. “Because it’s the law.”
He paused and looked up to study his son.“The law. It’s not just the white man’s rules anymore, son, and free men live by the law.”
PILOGUE
Bass brought his son Bennie back to stand trial and stood by him through it all, stood by him when he was found guilty and when he was sentenced to life in prison. (After serving an unspecified time as a model prisoner, Bennie was pardoned and released. He lived a straightforward and successful life for his remaining years.)
Bringing his son in did not break Bass. It is hard to believe that anything could break him—but he later said it was the hardest thing he had ever done.
In 1907, law enforcement in the Territory was taken away from the federal marshals and turned over to the individual communities. Muskogee, Oklahoma, still very much a wild and woolly Western town, approached Bass and asked him to be the town constable.
At age eighty-one, he accepted the job. Such was his
reputation and hard work that from 1907 to 1909 not a single crime was committed on his beat.
In late 1909 his health began to fail, and he died on January 12, 1910, of Bright’s disease.
The
Muskogee Phoenix
wrote:
“Bass Reeves is dead. He passed away yesterday afternoon … and in a short time news of his death had reached the federal courthouse where it recalled to the officers and clerks many incidents in the early days of the United States in which the old … deputy figured heroically.
“Everybody who came in contact with the … deputy in an official capacity had a great deal of respect for him, and at the court house in Muskogee one can hear stories of his devotion to duty, his unflinching courage and his many thrilling experiences.… At different times his belt was shot in two, a button shot off his coat, his hat brim shot off and the bridle rein in his hand cut by a bullet. However, in spite of all these narrow escapes and the many conflicts in which he was engaged … he killed fourteen men … Reeves was never wounded. And this, notwithstanding the fact that he never fired a shot until the desperado he was trying to arrest had started the shooting.”
Each year thousands of tourists and curiosity seekers go to the grave of Billy the Kid in Fort Sumter, New Mexico. Many pray and weep and some even worship at the grave, thinking Billy was an innocent youth.
The same thing happens in Deadwood, South Dakota, where Wild Bill Hickok is buried. People weep at what they think is the tragic loss of an American hero.
Mourners and tourists flock to Lookout Mountain above
Golden, Colorado, to the grave of William F. Cody, and thousands visit the grave of Kit Carson, in Taos, New Mexico. Mobs stop in Tombstone, Arizona, every year just to see the place of the gunfight at the OK Corral. And there’s a cult of people who want to know what “really” happened to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
There is nothing for Bass Reeves. He lies in an unknown place in an unmarked grave, ignored by dime novelists in his lifetime and by Hollywood after his death. There are no monuments to him, no flocks of weeping tourists, no epic films or drums or music, no last words or sweeping eternal thoughts.
He was there.
And then he was gone.
But perhaps there is a suitable epitaph for him, spoken by a man who worked with him and knew his character. When some doubter asked Chief Marshal Leo Bennet about Bass, and what qualities he had that made him worth keeping as a deputy, Bennet looked at the man and said:
“He never shirked his duty.”
BOUT THE
A
UTHOR
Gary Paulsen
is the distinguished author of many critically acclaimed books for young people, including three Newbery Honor books:
The Winter Room, Hatchet
, and
Dogsong.
His novel
The Haymeadow
received the Western Writers of America Golden Spur Award. Among his Random House books are
Lawn Boy; The Amazing Life of Birds; The Time Hackers; Molly McGinty Has a Really Good Day; The Quilt
(a companion to
Alida’s Song
and
The Cookcamp
);
The Glass Café; How Angel Peterson Got His Name; Caught by the Sea: My Life on Boats; Guts: The True Stories Behind
Hatchet
and the Brian Books; The Beet Fields; Soldier’s Heart; Brian’s Return, Brian’s Winter,
and
Brian’s Hunt
(companions to
Hatchet
);
Father Water, Mother Woods;
and five books about Francis Tucket’s adventures in the Old West. Gary Paulsen has also published fiction and nonfiction for adults, as well as picture books illustrated by his wife, the painter Ruth Wright Paulsen. Their most recent book is
Canoe Days.
The Paulsens live in New Mexico and Alaska.
Published by Laurel-Leaf
an imprint of Random House Children’s Books
a division of Random House, Inc.
New York
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either
are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales
is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved.
Laurel-Leaf and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
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RL: 5.0
eISBN: 978-0-307-51379-3
January 2008
v3.0