Part 2
For the rest of that day Bass and Jackson vanished from sight. Posses and Ranger detachments scoured the vicinity, but not until Saturday morning did Rangers find Sam Bass, alone, near death, lying beneath a large oak. He admitted his identity and made no resistance.
Jackson had insisted upon remaining with his dying leader, but Bass--game, unselfish to the last, the cowboys’ ideal now as he had been in brighter days--was equally insistent that Frank save himself. So, having made Bass as comfortable as possible, unwillingly Jackson escaped.
Taken into Round Rock, Bass received the best attention local medicos could administer. But he died on Sunday, July 21st, his twenty-seventh birthday, steadfastly refusing to give the names of associates or friends. Upon the tombstone set to mark his grave was carved the inscription:
SAMUEL BASS Born July 21st, 1851 Died July 21st, 1878 A brave man reposes in death here. Why was he not true?
Frank Jackson, after Sam Bass’ death, asked only for an opportunity to meet the traitor, Jim Murphy. But the latter evaded him and finally committed suicide. So the famous Bass Gang was finally broken up, but the memory of Sam and Frank Jackson, of Sebe Barnes and Arkansas, and of the traitor Murphy, is green today in Texas.
* * * * *
A few years ago, the writer was returning to Texas from New York, in company with a San Angelo cowboy. We unloaded the Mercer roadster on the Mallory dock at Galveston and started for El Paso. Coming into a land of wide prairies near Menard, vast and bleak under the pitiless December wind, we encountered three lean riders in two gallon Stetsons and Fort Worth boots and stopped to pass the time of day, the Durham and the quart. When we had gossiped a while of range affairs and with benumbed fingers wrapped tobacco in those huge, thick brown papers colloquially known in Cattle Land as “saddle blankets,” we said “so long” to the cowboys and they jogged on.
The tall puncher in the checked mackinaw began to sing in a high, dolorous tenor, swaying to his pony’s running-walk:
“Sam Bass was born in Indiana, it was his native home; And at the age of seventeen, young Sam began to roam, He first came down to Texas, a cowboy for to be, A kinder hearted fellow, you seldom ever see!”
Beside me, mechanically Morg took up the old ballad that every Texan knows, that I had not heard for years; sang it to the last verse, which deals with Jim Murphy’s treachery:
“And so he sold out Sam and Barnes and left their friends to mourn. Oh, what a scorching Jim will get when Gabriel blows his horn! Perhaps he’s got to heaven; there’s none of us can say; But if I am right in my surmise, he’s gone the other way!”
“He was a great guy, Sam,” opined Morg, Twentieth Century cowpuncher. “Hadn’t been for that blanked illegitimate, Murphy, he wouldn’t have been caught, either!”
[Transcriber’s Note: This story appeared in the May, 1926 issue of Frontier magazine.]