A gaunt scarecrow of a man, riding his crazy plow. A beard covered his face up to the frost blackened cheekbones. His clothes were a patchwork of blanket, cowhide, and buckskin with the hair on. His hair came to his shoulders. Under the deerhide covering, his hands and feet were swollen and stiff from frostbite.
“Sam Bass was born in Indiana; it was his native home.
And at the age of seventeen, young Sam begun to roam.”
The song blended crazily with the bawl of starving cattle, the creak of his covered plow runners and the click of hoofs.
South into the sheltering badlands where the snow was deep but soft. The plow cut through, clearing a ten foot path through the drifts. The cattle packed the trail, crowding and riding one another to get to the precious feed.
“Grass belly deep!” cried Buck, looking back. “Come on, you hungry dogies! Git the wrinkles outa your paunches. Mebbe so it’s come Christmas fer you.”
He unhooked the team at last and watered them at a hole cut in the ice. He camped at the edge of the cleared bottomland and his pitch fire sent its crimson shaft into the night. He had found feed for his cattle. There was more to be had for the plowing. He slept that night with a smile of tired happiness on his bearded, frost cracked lips.
In those days to come, Buck Bell found a measure of happiness and peace. He labored untiringly, a man of rawhide. A bearded, frost blackened scarecrow. And the haunting ache of that stolen money slipped into a forgetfulness, buried by the work he was doing.
He cleared huge patches of grass. He rode back across the river and trailed in more starving cattle to share his grass. Sometimes he came within a mile of the cabin at Rocky Point but always he was too busy to stop. Those short days were too brief to waste even a few minutes in idle pastime. The snow was too deep to tire his horse in breaking useless trail to the cabin to see whether any one had been there.
So he did not know that Horace had come and found that note on the table.
Hay’s played out. I’m pullin’ out. If I don’t die off before the chinook comes, I'll come in and give myself up. I taken that money that night in town. Then I lost it. So the law kin take it outa my hide.—BUCK BELL.