Sam Bass Read Online Free

uncovered shoulders and plumes in their hair who knew how to separate a man from his money. I suspected they had separated Sam from some, but if they did, it was his own money and not mine. He returned with every penny he was supposed to, so I didn’t ask how he took his ease in Dallas. I had sent Sam to the city to do a job for me, and he had done it. I was satisfied.
    And I was more satisfied as time passed. Sam was the most willing, capable hand I ever had. He became the man I relied on for any duty requiring intelligence and a sense of responsibility. It was he who hauled the first load of ice from Sherman to Denton, a day of note in the history of the town. The ice had come all the way from the Great Lakes by riverboat and train, but so much of it could have been lost on the hot fifty miles from Sherman that the enterprise wouldn’t have been worth the effort in the hands of a careless man. Sam packed the big blocks in the wagon with a care befitting glass, surrounding and covering them with straw before he lashed the canvas over them. When he arrived, he and Frank Jackson chipped off two big chunks and danced a jig in the street, holding the ice over their heads, shouting its coming to the town. The butchers and saloonkeepers bought it quickly at a premium price, and the ice run to Sherman became one of Sam’s regular duties. I wouldn’t have trusted it to anybody else.
    Sam lived in my house and ate at my table and had my leave to treat most of my goods and belongings as his own. My children worshipped him. My wife pitied him and tried to teach him to read and write. He wasn’t much of a pupil, but he did learn to write his name. When my wife concluded that he was enduring her instruction only to please her and not out of a desire for learning, she gave up. He received two or three letters from his family in Indiana, and Mrs. Egan would read them to him and write out his replies for him. In one, I remember, a couple of his brothers were inquiring about Texas and expressing an interest in joining him here. And he told Mrs. Egan to tell them they were better off in Indiana.
    Sam had several brothers, I gathered from his rare mentions of his family. One was named Denton, the same as our town, I recall, but if I ever heard the names of the others, I’ve forgotten them. He had some sisters, too, I think. They were orphaned when Sam was just a boy. Their farm and everything on it were sold at auction, and Sam and the others went to live with an uncle, who had a large family of his own.
    From Sam’s vague references to that time I deduced that he was a runaway. He mentioned a quarrel with his uncle, about wages, I think. “I walked away without nothing but the shirt on my back,” he said. He went to St. Louis and hung around the waterfront for a while, then drifted downriver to Mississippi and got a job at a sawmill. It was the same work he had done for his uncle, but they paid him for it in Mississippi. He saved enough money to buy a horse and a gun, somehow hooked up with Bob Mayes and his family, and wound up in Denton because that was where Bob Mayes was going, and one destination was as good as another to Sam, just so it was Texas.
    There was nothing interesting in his story, and nothing unusual. The world is full of runaways, and many of the best citizens of Denton admit to scrawling “GTT” on their doors back home, a message to friends or the law or creditors that they had gone to Texas. There’s no shame in being a runaway or even an outlaw here, so long as the wrong was done somewhere else. Since the war, many decent people have fled carpetbag debt and carpetbag law, and there’s no disgrace in that, just as there’s no disgrace in being a poor freedman, now that the Yankees have cut the niggers loose from the secure places they used to know. What matters here is what people make of themselves after they get here, not what they were where they came from.
    Nobody