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?”
