The Legend of Bass Reeves by Gary Paulsen Read Free Book Online Page A

with dribbled tobacco juice. The man swore foully at the mules in a voice so deep and loud it sounded like thunder.
    While Bass watched, a horse kicked a stray dog and killed it and two drunk men came boiling out of a saloon, fighting with knives as big as swords. The knives clinked blade to blade, and then one of the men slashed the arm of the other and the fight was over. Blood was everywhere, but the two drunks went back into the saloon.
    The mister pulled up in front of the dry goods store and tied the mules to the hitch rail. “Come in with me to load.”
    The mister climbed down and Bass followed. Just inside the door he had to stop.
    The smells were overpowering. Coffee, turpentine, tobacco, produce and many, many smells he couldn’t identify because he hadn’t smelled them before.
    He’d never seen so much of everything in his whole life, or imagined that such a place existed. On a plank counter were glass jars full of the most wonderful-looking things: strips of oily jerky, hard candy in amazing colors, popcorn balls, twisted papers full of taffy. Bass’s mouth started to water and he looked away from the jars.
    “Here.” The mister handed a list to the storekeeper. “Just put the goods on the counter and my boy will take them out. ’Cept the big barrels. We’ll roll them up a plank.”
    Two slabs of smoked bacon almost as tall as Bass were wrapped in paper and he carried them out first. Then bags of coffee and sugar and salt and dry corn for horse feed and a bag of sweet dry corn for cornmeal. The corn weighed almost as much as Bass and he struggled but finally got the sacks up into the wagon. There were many other small sacks with odds and ends, spices and tobacco and the like. By the time they rolled the flour barrel out and up a plank into the back of the wagon, the day was on the edge of dark.
    The mister got up in the wagon and drove the mules down to the livery stable, parking the wagon out back. Once there, he and Bass unhooked the mules, took them out of harness and put them in the corral. The livery man— a black man so old and thin Bass thought he looked like a skeleton—fed them grain and fresh hay.
    Then the mister took Bass out back to the wagon. “Here.” He handed Bass a small paper sack. “Mind you stay with the wagon. You sleep underneath it. I’ll be in the saloon playing cards probably till morning. Somebody comes, messes with any of this, you come get me.”
    “Yes sir.”
    The mister walked away without looking back, andBass looked in the little sack to find it half full of colored hard candies. He hadn’t seen the mister buy them and he smiled as he crawled under the wagon and spread his blanket. He had brought the tow sack with food with him and ate a piece of corn bread and some pork and when he was done put just one piece of candy in his mouth.
    He had eaten honey and a couple of times rock sugar his mother gave him when he had the croup and kept coughing, but he had never tasted anything as good as that candy. Soon hard dark would come, and he wanted to be able to hold the candies up to the light and look at the brightness coming through the color before he ate them all, but there wasn’t enough light and he didn’t think he could keep from eating them.
    Nearby was the livery barn, and four or five men had a lantern inside and were sitting around on stumps passing a jug and talking. If he tried to listen to them, it might take his mind off the candy.
    “Mexico will beat the Texicans,” one man said, and Bass wondered who or what were the Texicans. “They got a real army. Sam Houston ain’t got nothing but a bunch of scallywags and highbinders.”
    “Some of them highbinders can shoot you in the eye at two hundred paces.”
    “Yeah, but Santa Anna has five thousand sets of eyes. That’s a lot of shooting when they’re shooting back, and them Mexicans got cannon, too. They slaughtered everybody at that Alamo. Took some of them out with that Crockett fellow and shot