I should have been more careful with the rifle. I’m sorry.”
The judge was thinking about what Bass had just told him. He knew the big man loved his animals like they were his own children and he was the best deputy he had, so he hated to lose him. But he was a judge sworn to uphold the law.
“Bass, you know that you may have broken the law. I am not going to have you arrested and I want you to continue to do your job, but you will have to stand trial. I may call a Grand Jury hearing to determine if you should be charged. I am very busy dealing with much worse criminals right now, so what I am going to do is to set you up with a trial date about 2 years from now. As your friend, I would advise you to hire one of the very best attorneys in Fort Smith and you know who they are. If it were me, I would hire someone from the law firm of William H.H. Clayton, William M. Cravens and Thomas Marcum. Clayton, as you know, is the District Attorney.”
“I don’t have to worry about you not showing up for trial,” the judge continued, ”with a wife and kids and property nearby, so there will be no warrants or any bail. But you will have to stand for a trial or Grand Jury hearing. It’s possible that when you jumped up while extracting the shells from your rifle, like you said, you could have killed the cook accidentally. But your lawyer will have to deal with that and we will probably have to have a jury, since I would probably not be able to render an unbiased opinion when it comes to you. The prisoners you had with you would probably not make good witnesses in court, but your posse man and guard might have to testify. Understand?”
“Yessir,” Bass replied.
He was somewhat relieved, because the judge didn’t seem to be mad at him. The judge had dealings with the cook before and had put him in jail a few times for cheating at cards and being drunk and for shooting another man’s dog and for beating a horse. As far as Judge Parker was concerned, the man needed killing, but the public would probably not tolerate him letting Bass off without a trial. He knew that President Grant would probably pardon Bass, at his request, if he happened to get convicted. He was far more concerned with cleaning up the Indian Territory, which covered 74,000 square miles.
Bass was more concerned with going home to his ranch and seeing his wife and kids and extended family. He had bought the ranch with money he had earned as a bounty hunter out of the Van Buren court before Judge Parker’s court existed.
Once Bass had determined he was going to settle down, he went to Fort Gibson to ask Jennie to marry him. She was part white, part Indian and part negro. He had met her when he was living among the Indians during the Civil War. It was then that he had learned to speak Muskogee, the language of the Creeks and Seminoles and had learned to speak the languages of the all the tribes that inhabited the Indian Territory. Many slaves had escaped into the Indian Territory during the Civil War and were accepted by the Indians, even though some Indians had traded for and owned negro slaves of their own. After the Civil War, the slaves became “Indian Freedmen”. As a part of the 1866 treaty, those freedmen became members of the Indian tribes. Many negros married or otherwise integrated with the Indians.
Bass had built 3 houses on the ranch. One for he and Jennie and their children and one for his mother Pearlalee and one for his sister, Jane and her husband. Jane’s husband ran the ranch while Bass was out rounding up outlaws. He viewed his family as his most valued asset. The ranch and horses came next. He had bought a beautiful property on a plateau overlooking the Arkansas River and Fort Smith, on top of Mount Vista. He could stand on the edge of his property and see the river winding around Fort Smith and heading West into the Indian Territory and he could look downriver to where the river separated Van Buren and Fort Smith. When bad weather approached, it usually came from the Southwest and he could see it coming from miles away. That allowed them to make sure the livestock and the family were safely inside. Tornadoes usually seemed to follow the river, but as far as he knew, none had ever jumped up onto the plateau, although the wind could be pretty dangerous. There were some people who thought he was “uppity” and he guessed he was pretty “uppity”, setting up on his mountain. Looking down at all of the land below him did make him feel pretty special. Once he had managed to buy all of the land on the plateau, he started expanding his land on the flatlands below the mountain.
He had purchased most of the land for about $5 per acre. Most of his best pasture land was on the flatlands below the mountain. He had bought the land on the plateau for $2 per acre. One of the reasons that Bass had selected the plateau as the place to build his home, other than the vast beauty of it, was he felt like his family was safe there. There was only one trail up the mountain and one or two armed men could hold off an army of men trying to come up the trail. He had made a lot of enemies and a lot of dangerous men would like to see him dead. He was worried that some of those men might get the idea of harming or capturing his family to get to him. It gave him great comfort when he was 250 miles or more West of Fort Smith to know that his family was safe on the mountain. His brother-in-law, Green Saunders, was a good rancher and was a good shot with a rifle and made it a point to keep an eye on the trail.
He had several ranch hands, who were Indian, who also helped to keep an eye on the trail. Someone was watching it 24 hours a day. There was also a giant bolder at the top of the trail that could be set to roll down the mountain with a charge of dynamite if that became necessary. He hoped they never had to resort to that, since it would be a lot of work to clean up the trail again. It had taken them almost a year to build the trail, one stick of dynamite and one wagon load of rock at a time. Most of the folks in Van Buren thought Bass was crazy to buy a piece of property like that and even crazier to build a house up there. It was a lot of extra work to get all the building materials to the top of the hill, although they cut most of the lumber off the top of the plateau.
Bass was not afraid of hard work and knew that being a marshal was dangerous. So he had to plan for that and be prepared for the worst. He could rest at ease with his family living in the “fortress” he had built for them on the hill.
Homecoming and Leaving
By the time Bass got to the top of Mount Vista, he had to remind himself of why he had built on top of this hill. The trail up there was really giving his horse a workout. But he figured any horse that could make it up this hill could probably catch any horse around. There was one horse at the ranch that could outrun the sorrel, known to him as “Rusty”. He wasn’t sure of the lineage, but the horse was solid white. He called the horse “Silver”, because sometimes the sun reflecting off the horse seemed to reflect some hair that looked just like it was made of silver. Besides, “Whitey” just didn’t seem right. He loved to ride Silver, but was saving the stallion for a special trip. He did not want everyone to know he had a white horse. Right now, everyone expected to see him on a sorrel. He actually had several sorrels that he rode on different occasions. He always wanted to have a horse that was as rested and well fed as possible. Fast horses gave him the same advantage that his ability with firearms did. Having an edge of any kind might make the difference between staying alive or being dead.
As Bass rode up to the house, his wife Jennie and his eight children, Sarah, the oldest, Robert, the second oldest, Harriet, the third oldest and Georgia, Alice, Newland, Edgar and Lula, in the order of birth, all came running up to him while the youngest kids screamed, “Daddy, daddy, daddy!” As soon as he got down off Rusty, they all hugged his neck one at a time. This is what I’m working for, he thought, as he hugged them back. This is what the marshal looked forward to the whole time he was gone. This is what kept him motivated while he was out risking his life and dealing with scumbags and killers. He then gave Jennie a big kiss and they headed into the house.
Bass had built the house from oak logs he cut off the plateau. It was a simple structure that had a kitchen and large sitting area on one side of a “breeze-way” and the parents’ bedroom and five bunkrooms for the kids on the other. The breeze-way served as a middle sitting area and connected to a porch facing west that looked down on Fort Smith. The wind, which usually came from the west or south
