The Adventures of Bass Reeves Deputy US Marshal Read online

  THE ADVENTURES

  OF

  BASS REEVES

  DEPUTY U.S. MARSHAL

  CHARLES RAY

  Copyright © 2018 Outlaws Choice

  All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this book may be used, reproduced, distributed, transmitted in any manner, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without written permission of the author.

  This book may contain views, premises, depictions, and statements by the author that are not necessarily shared or endorsed by Outlaws Publishing LLC.

  For information contact: [email protected]

  Cover Design by Outlaws Publishing LLC

  Published by Outlaws Choice

  August 2018 Box Set

  10987654321

  FATAL ENCOUNTER

  The Adventures of Bass Reeves Deputy U.S. Marshal

  CHARLES RAY

  Chapter 1

  With purposeful strides, Bass Reeves, strode down the dimly-lit hallway, his destination, the office at the end. When he reached the door, he paused and adjusted the hang of his jacket, making sure there was not a wrinkle in evidence, straightened his tie, and pulled up his trousers so that they broke neatly over his highly-polished boots. Removing his gray Stetson, he checked it to make sure the brim was straight, and the dimple in the top was precise, in a fashion similar to the cowboys from Texas, but, in his opinion, much finer looking. His last task, before rapping softly on the door, was to check the badge affixed to the upper left side of the vest he wore beneath his jacket, a five-pointed silver star in a circle, with the words ‘Deputy U.S. Marshal’ engraved on it, to make sure it was perfectly centered over his left chest and properly aligned.

  “Come on in,” a gruff voice beyond the door said after he knocked.

  Bass pushed the door open, entered, and closed it softly. Then, hat in hand, he approached the battered and scratched wooden desk in the center of the room and centered on the back wall, facing the door, behind which sat U.S. Marshal for the Western District of Arkansas and the Indian Territory, James F. Fagan, his boss. He stopped precisely three feet from the desk, and stood, ramrod straight, his broad shoulders square, and his hat held in his large left hand at his side. As was his practice, he remained silent until Fagan acknowledged his presence.

  Fagan was looking down at a stack of wanted posters and other papers scattered on the surface of the desk. He toyed at the end of his mustache with his left hand. Finally, he stopped, placed both hands on the desk, palms down, and looked up at Bass. His face was set in stern lines, weathered from his years of war when, as a brigadier general in the army of the Confederacy, he’d commanded the Arkansas Brigade in some of the fiercest battles on the Civil War’s western front. His eyes, though, had a kindly twinkle as he regarded the man who had, in the three years since he’d hired him, become one of his favorite deputies.

  “Pull up a chair and sit yourself down, Bass,” he said. “You block out all the light standin’ there like a sycamore tree.”

  Bass smiled. With his military bearing, Fagan cut an impressive figure, but at six feet-two inches tall, with his broad-shouldered, muscular, two-hundred-pound frame, Bass towered over him, and knew that physically he made the marshal look small. He had always been larger than the men around him, even when he’d been a slave in his teens, and had learned to minimize the impact of his physical size with a disarming smile and gracious manner. When he was a slave, he’d on occasion been whipped simply because the offended white was upset at having to look up at him, and since becoming a deputy marshal, he’d found that appearing diffident tended to lull fugitives and potential witnesses into a sense of security—false in the case of fugitives.

  He pulled a chair in front of Fagan’s desk, slightly off center, and sat down. Just as he stood, he sat ramrod straight.

  “You wanted to see me, Marshal?”

  “That’s one of the things I like about you, Bass, you get right down to business.” Fagan picked up six sheets of paper. “I have six warrants here for you. You ready for another trip into Indian Territory?”

  Bass had been back home for three weeks, having spent a good part of the month of October in Indian Territory chasing after the Crawford Brothers, a couple of land swindlers. This was longer than usual between trips, and he’d been wondering when the marshal would send for him. With the help of the three oldest of his ten children, and a neighbor, old man Reuben Moses, he’d managed to get his crops in, and they would fetch a pretty good price, and the livestock had been prepared for the winter, which he was suspecting might be pretty cold. But, truth be told, he was itching to get back out on the trail of the many law breakers who found Indian Territory a welcoming place to be, one outlaw in particular.

  Until the arrival of Judge Isaac Parker, three years back, the territory had been a safe haven for those fleeing the long arm of the law. Home mainly to the tribes who had been kicked off their lands in the east by white settlers, tribes like the Cherokee and the Seminole, Indian Territory was a vast swath of land, over 17,000 square miles, of low mountains, deep lakes, and verdant valleys, and thick forests. Unlike the Indian reservations farther west, barren tracts of land almost unfit for human habitation, the Indian Territory supported agriculture and stock raising, and the lakes and forests provided ample fishing and hunting to support the tribes. Because it was nominally under Indian control, with its own police force, the only American government law extending into the territory was the U.S. Marshal Service. When President Grant appointed Parker federal judge for Western Arkansas and the Indian Territory, and charged him with bringing order to the place, the federal court at Fort Smith, and the Marshal Service, also at Fort Smith, became very busy.

  The first thing Parker did was to arrange to have Fagan, a former Confederate officer, who after being paroled in 1865, had gone into farming and local politics, appointed marshal. He then charged him with increasing the number of deputies by 200, in order to bring ‘American law and justice to the lawless Indian Territory.’

  Both Parker and Fagan, though, realized that the contingent of deputies they inherited were not up to the task. Not because of any lack of diligence or professionalism, but due to the fact that they were white.

  The people of the territory, Indians, former slaves, and whites—lawful and outlaws—were not disposed to trust or cooperate with white men. Black men, on the other hand, had always found a degree of welcome in the territory, hundreds having fled there before and during the war to escape the bonds of slavery, and some having traveled there with the Seminoles after their final battle with the U.S. Government in 1845. They reckoned, therefore, that black deputies stood a better chance of gaining cooperation, so among the 200 new deputies Fagan hired, a great number were to be men of color.

  Bass, after Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation in 1862, had returned to Arkansas, and taken up farming. But, during nearly three years in the Territory, living with the Cherokee, he had learned five of the Indian languages, improved his skill as a marksman, and learned to read a trail as good as any Indian. Along with his farming, another thing he’d proven proficient at, he also served the deputy marshals out of Fort Smith as a guide when they had to go into Indian Territory in search of fugitives. Fagan had heard of him, and decided that he would be a good deputy, and had offered him the job.

  When they learned that Bass could neither read nor write, they’d had doubts, but after a demonstration of his ability to remember, without fail, anything read to him, he was hired. In three years on the job, he’d more than proven them right. He could remember names and other details from warrants and wanted posters
, and never failed to match the right fugitive with his or her warrant—a few of the desperadoes of the day were women—and, he often snared his target without a shot being fired. He managed to submit his required written reports by finagling someone to write them as he dictated, and scrawling his ‘X’ at the bottom, and, in three years, he’d established a reputation as one of the most feared deputy marshals to ride the territory.

  More, though, than just being good at his job, Bass discovered that he liked what he was doing. He found that he looked forward to doing what Judge Parker said, when speaking to the assembled group of black deputies right after they were sworn in, “You’re in a position to show the lawful as well as the lawless that a black man is the equal of any other law enforcement officer on the frontier.”

  Oh yes, he was ready. But, Bass had never been one given to extravagance, except perhaps in his attire, for he was always nattily attired. “I reckon I am, Marshal,” he said. “Who you want me to bring in this time?”

  This was a ritual the two men had fallen into since Bass’s hiring. Fagan, or someone else who could read, would read each warrant for Bass, giving him a chance to associate the marks on the paper with the description, or picture, of the wanted fugitive. Bass would then neatly fold the warrants and stuff them inside his coat. He could take them out and retrieve a desired warrant, and never made a mistake, a capability that never ceased to amaze those who saw him demonstrate it.

  Smiling, Fagan went through the six warrants, one at a time, reading each one carefully to give Bass the opportunity to absorb and remember he information it contained.

  “The only one here you watch out for is Caleb Hunt,” he said, holding up the last one. “He’s wanted for the murder of his wife and her mother on their farm over near Little Rock. Butchered ‘em both while they slept, and then set the house afire.”

  Bass tugged at his bushy mustache, which made Fagan’s look scraggly, and his brown forehead creased as he frowned.

  “Why would he do a terrible thing like that?” he asked.

  Fagan shook his head. “Your guess is as good as mine. He lit out while the place was still burning. A neighbor saw the fire, and called for help. They managed to put the fire out before the bodies were burned to bad, and that’s when they saw what he’d done to ‘em. Looked like he took an axe to ‘em, the local sheriff said. They put a two-thousand-dollar bounty on him . . . dead or alive. People that know him say he ain’t likely to surrender without a fight.”

  “Well, Marshal, you know I prefer bringin’ my prisoners in alive. Even with the reward, I don’t cotton to havin’ to pay burial expenses. ‘Sides, I figure it’s up to a judge to decide whether a man lives or dies, not me. I only kills ‘em if they don’t leave me no choice.”

  “I know that. That’s why I’m givin’ this one to you. I’m plumb curious why he did what he did, and if he’s dead, he can’t tell.”

  Bass reached across the desk for the warrants. “Well, I’ll do my level best to give you a chance to hear his story, Marshal.”

  He picked the warrants up, studied each one carefully, putting Hunt’s on the bottom of the stack. He then folded them and opened his jacket to store them away until they were needed. A worn paper, creased and crinkled was already in his pocket. He took it out, put the warrants in, and then carefully reinserted it.

  “Is that paper what I think it is?” Fagan asked.

  Bass nodded. “Yessir, that there’s the warrant for Bob Dozier.”

  “I gave you that thing over a year ago. You still carryin’ it around?” Fagan shook his head. “When you gonna give up tryin’ to catch Dozier, Bass?”

  “I ain’t givin’ up ‘till I catches him,” Bass said. “Bob Dozier’s a mean un, and he deserves to be behind bars.”

  “Deputies been after that galoot for over three years, and the only one ever to come close to catchin’ him, got himself killed in the process. That man’s like a snake. He hides in the grass, strikes when you least expect it, and slithers away. You takin’ a mighty risk keepin’ after him like you do. I hear he knows you’re after him, and he’s issued a death threat.”

  “Yessir, he done that, more ‘n once as a matter of face, but it ain’t gon’ stop me from gettin’ him.”

  Bob Dozier, formerly a prosperous Arkansas farmer, had, for reasons no one knew, turned to a life of crime. Unlike other outlaws who tended to specialize in one crime, Dozier was a jack-of-all-trades where criminal enterprise was concerned. The man robbed banks and stage coaches, rustled cattle and horses, and operated land swindles. He’d even been known to waylay lone travelers and relieve them of their valuables, down to their horse and boots, and leave them stranded. He was also implicated in a number of murders. While the authorities knew of his crimes, they could get no one to come forward to offer testimony against him, and he never stayed in one place long enough to be pinned down. The only thing that was known with even slight confidence was that he hid out somewhere in Indian Territory.

  More than once, when word got out that Deputy Marshal Bass Reeves was on his trail, Dozier had left threatening notes at the deadline, a spot about sixty miles west of Fort Smith, inside Indian Territory. The deadline got its name from the fact that outlaws informed lawmen that if they crossed the line, they were as good as dead. Bass had, in addition to the two or three notes he’d received from Dozier, received five or six others. A couple of the writers of those notes were currently residents of the federal penitentiary in Detroit, Michigan, and one had taken a long trip at the end of a short rope. A few had shot at Bass, even putting a bullet hole in his favorite Stetson, but no lead had yet found his flesh, and most of those who had been foolish enough to take a shot at him, were sleeping the long sleep on the wrong side of the grass.

  “Dozier’s not like any outlaw I’ve ever seen,” Fagan said. “He’s as dangerous as a copperhead, and twice as sneaky.”

  Bass shook his head. “He just a man. Mebbe he’s a mite luckier than most, but he ain’t nothin’ special. One of these days, I’m gon’ get him.”

  Inclining his head politely, Bass stood, looming over the desk, and looking down at his boss. His expression was benign at first glance, but Fagan saw the flint in his gaze. He also knew that, though soft spoken, Bass Reeves was a man who kept his word. If he said he was going to continue to pursue Dozier, then pursue him he would. He only hoped that the man’s dedication to the law didn’t cost him one of his best deputies.

  Chapter 2.

  Nellie Jennie Reeves looked across the room at her husband as he sipped coffee from the battered cup that was his favorite. Although he’d just celebrated his fortieth birthday four months past in July, his brown face was unlined, and except for the bushy mustache, could’ve passed for a man in his early thirties.

  She sighed as she looked at him, proud of the man she’d been married to for more than ten years. Such a beautiful man, she thought.

  Part of that beauty, she decided, was his calmness. No matter the situation, he never seemed to get excited or out of sorts. Not even with their ten children, five boys and five girls, born in rapid succession after their wedding, gallivanting around the house, getting into all manner of mischief. The house, built with Bass’s own hands, was big enough for them to roam, as big and fine as those occupied by the white folks, and much bigger and finer than the houses of the colored folks who lived in Van Buren, but that many children made enough racket to wake the dead. Despite their clamor, though, Bass was always calm.

  Supper was finished, and the younger children were asleep, while those who were old enough to attend school were doing their homework. Except for the sound of timbers creaking as the cool of the November evening made them contract, and the crackle of the fire in the fireplace across the room, the house was quiet. Bass, sitting on the sofa, coffee in hand, was relaxed, glad of the quiet, but Nellie, sitting in the rocking chair that faced the sofa, was anything but relaxed.

  Sitting there, now, drinking his coffee, and looking like he didn’t have
a care in the world, while she fumed, instead of kissing him as she often desired to do, she wanted to smack his composed face.

  “Bass, you just got back from over there in the territory a little while ago,” she said, fighting to keep her voice under control. “Why you got to go back so soon?”

  He looked at her over the rim of his cup, a slight look of concern in his eyes. “They’s still bad men out there need to be caught, Nellie girl, you knows that. I got me a stack of warrants to serve. ‘Sides, I been back over three weeks now, that ain’t what I call soon.”

  “But, you ain’t the only deputy they got.” Her lips quivered. “Why can’t one of them other ones go?”

  Bass leaned forward and put the cup down on the wooden coffee table that he’d built himself, and placed his large hands on his knees.

  “I ‘spose it’s ‘cause I’m the best deputy they got. I always gets my man.”

  “Yes, but you have to go in Indian Territory to do it. Bass, that place’s full of bad people, dangerous people.”

  ‘Nellie, honey, the whole world’s fulla bad people. One of the men I’m goin’ after done took a axe to his wife and her mother, and then he set fire to the house. And, this took place down near Little Rock. It can get pretty dangerous here in Arkansas, too, my girl, believe me.”

  She wrung her hands and shot him a look of despair.

  “I just wish you’d ask that there Marshal Fagan to let somebody else go after this bunch.”

  Bass saw the worry in her eyes. He stood and came around the table. Kneeling next to the chair, he took her small hands in one of his, dwarfing them, and patted her shoulder with the other.

  “Now, what done got into you, woman? You ain’t never acted like this before when I go after outlaws.”

  She looked at him, tears in her eyes. “I don’t know . . . it’s . . . I worry ever time you go, but I . . . this time.” She gulped and brushed at the tears that threatened to flow from her eyes. “I had a dream, Bass. In my dream, you was in some kind of trouble.”