The Legend of Bass Reeves Read Online Free Page A

rest. He ate white bread made with flour he bought in town. He got fat, so fat he had to use the wagon and hardly ever rode the bay or the Roman nose.
    As Bass searched for game he had to move further away, until on some hunts he was five or six miles down- or upstream from the homestead.
    The mister wouldn’t let him take anything to ride, not even one of the stove-up mules. Thick as the mesquite was, Bass wouldn’t have been able to ride the mule in the brush anyway. But he could have used it to get down to where he was going to hunt, and when he got something, he could have had the mule to carry it home for him. The day he got a javelina, he had to carry it draped across his back nearly six miles and didn’t get home until midnight.
    Mammy was terrified. “I thought you ran.”
    “What do you mean, ‘ran’?”
    “Ran to freedom.”
    He thought about that. “Where is that, freedom?”
    “There are places where they don’t have slaves.”
    “Where?”
    “I’m not sure. They say follow the Drinking Gourd, which the mister calls the Big Dipper, and that’s north, so it must be up north. I guess you go north till they don’t have people owning other people.”
    “I wouldn’t leave you, Mammy.” He couldn’t imagine living without her. “You know I couldn’t do that.”
    “I know, little boy. I know. But sometimes things happen, and like that witch dog told you, things change. You remember I looked in the Chinee tea leaves and they said that same thing too.”
    “Well, I wish the change could be Mister giving me a gun and a mule to ride. Even a little shooter. I could get one of those spring deer if I had me a gun.”
    But in a way it was just as well he didn’t have a mule.
    If he’d been riding, the Comanche would have seen him and he’d be dead.
    They nearly got him anyway.
    It was a hot day and he’d gone nearly seven milesdownstream hunting. The mister no longer had Bass tangling the wild cows because he was too fat to ride out and drag them in, so there were plenty of cows along the banks in the mud and mesquite.
    Bass had thought of spearing a good-sized calf, but the danger of actually trying to do battle with a longhorn’s calf, when the mother could pick up a horse on her horns and gut it, made him reconsider. Besides, he wouldn’t be able to get the meat home.
    So he had kept moving along the creek, threading his way through the mesquite until he was in new territory and he started to see more game. He’d missed two throws with the Jesus stick when he suddenly came into an opening, a trail that crossed the creek.
    It wasn’t over ten feet at the widest. It came from the north and crossed to the south and seemed like a wellused trail. Bass had heard tales of buffalo migrating, so at first he thought it might have been a place where they came through. How hard would it be to kill one of them without a gun? Probably at least as hard as killing a longhorn. He had thought of somehow making a bow and arrows. But he never could find the right wood for a bow and they always broke. He was thinking about this when he noticed two things.
    One, all the tracks on the trail that came through the mud from the north to the south were horse tracks.
    Two, none of the tracks showed horseshoes. All the hoofprints were bare hooves.
    For almost a minute he was excited. There were wild horse herds just as there were wild cattle. He hadn’t seen them but he knew they existed. If this was a place where wild horses crossed, he might be able to use a rope tomake a trap, catch a young horse and break it to ride. Would the slave laws apply if a slave actually captured a wild horse and tamed it for himself? Then he remembered that Mammy had told him that no slave could own any property. It always belonged to the mister, so even if he captured a horse and broke it, in the end the horse would belong to the fat drunkard.
    He stopped thinking when he heard a strange sound. He had been in the willows and mesquite so long