Sam Bass

By Eugene Cunningham Author of “Beginnings of Great Cities,” “The Luck of Lombardy Bart,” etc.
A second Robin Hood was the romantic Sam Bass to the cowboys of Texas—but quite another matter was he to the railroad companies and the peace officers for whom he and his gang made life miserable.
The trace wound through the rolling wooded prairies of “the Nation,” where clearings were carpeted with rustling dead leaves and dry grass. The light spring wagon bounced over ruts, though the team was wearied by a long day in harness and the wagon’s pace was slow. The driver was a cowboy—just a lean brown cowboy with nothing to set him apart particularly from any of a thousand others in this year of ’77, when Texas trail herds were moving north and ever north in the great hegira that was to stock ranges from the Nation to the Selkirks with Texas longhorns.
The black-haired man on the seat beside the driver was shorter—five full inches below six feet—and powerfully muscled of shoulder. Twenty-six years old, he was, with a face that might have belonged to a boy for all the brown mustache at which he now tugged thoughtfully, as restless dark eyes looked around in half a dozen ways at once.
Suddenly the driver, who had been moving restlessly on the box-seat, jerked in the travel-worn horses so that they fairly sat down upon their haunches.
“I been a-smellin’ smoke for five minutes!” he muttered. “I wonder now if⸺”
One lean brown hand, the left, gripped the lines. The right had curled about the sinister black butt of a long-barreled Frontier Colt.
“I smell it, too!” nodded his companion tensely. “Hell! I see it. Yonder!”
A light film, that was barely detectable against the treetops a hundred yards ahead, showed faintly gray.
“An’ that damn’ axle a-squeakin’ like a dyin’ shote!” snarled the driver. “Reckon they heard us?”
He was furious-faced, glaring at the lacy smoke-film as at sign of an enemy. But the dark, stocky man was on the ground with a snaky wriggle, and he took with him the .44 Winchester carbine that had been hanging in its scabbard from the wagon-seat. He vanished into the bushes, and with an oath the driver flipped the lines in loops about the brake-handle and leaped down to follow.