Lone Star Cinderella by Debra Clopton Page B

haunt—no he was taunt ing her, Melody thought an hour after she left church. Settling on the floor amid a stack of computer printouts on money stolen and attributed to Sam Bass and his gang, she vowed to kick Seth out of her head. Hours later as darkness fell, she kept coming back to Sam’s biggest score. Coffee in hand, she carried the pages to the couch and curled up with a blanket, letting the stories roll through her head.
    The outlaw, in her estimation, was more of a bungler than a skilled outlaw. The single documented robbery of a substantial amount was the sixty thousand dollars in gold pieces that he and his gang stole when they robbed the Union Pacific in Ogallala, Nebraska, in 1877…or, depending on which account she was looking at, it was documented to have taken place in Big Springs, Nebraska—the next stop over. It was the largest documented train robbery to date, but Melody was always struck by the fact that Sam couldn’t get the safe open on the train. The man hopped on a train unprepared to get the safe open in the event that no one had the combination—why would you go to all that trouble without a backup plan? Inside that safe was two hundred thousand dollars, but Sam didn’t have a plan other than to get the porter to open it for him. And he hadn’t been the good ole boy many gave him credit for being, because he pistol-whipped the poor man, trying to force him to tell the combination, which it turned out the porter didn’t know.
    Then, no safe to rob, one of Sam’s gang members found some silver bullion in bricks but it was too heavy for them to carry…oh, yes, a greedy, stupid gang, to her mind.
    It wasn’t until one of the gang members found two small boxes sealed with sealing wax that they hit pay dirt. When they opened the boxes, they discovered the sixty thousand in gold coins. Luck, pure and simple! There was absolutely no skill involved. And that’s why the line between legend and truth fascinated her. How could a loser like Sam Bass get such a mystic admiration built around him?
    Especially since after the discovery of the coins they continued on and robbed the passengers. This netted a total of four hundred dollars. So there it was, if they hadn’t happened upon the gold coins, this robbery would have yielded the gang a mere four hundred dollars and the only memorable part of the tale would have been the fact that the gang had been too unprepared for the job to steal the large money. Instead they’d gone down in history as the gang who’d, to date, pulled off the largest train heist ever. It was laughable; it was so crazy.
    Melody was of the mind that Sam Bass was a legend that was stretched way out of proportion. Much of themoney supposedly buried across Texas by him and his gang was probably pure legend. But there was the real mystery around what exactly happened to that sixty thousand dollars.
    Once leaving the train, the men split the money and separated into pairs. A set of men was killed a week later, another set separated and one man was captured while it was rumored but not confirmed that the other escaped with his gold to Canada. The last two men, Sam Bass and Jack Davis, came back to Denton, Texas, and within four months were back robbing stagecoaches. What happened to all their money? Some stories were that they’d spent it on a life of extravagance. But ten thousand dollars each—that was an exorbitant amount of money in the 1870s and seemed too large to blow in such a short time period. So some believe they hid it in caves in the Hill Country…and this was only one of a massive amount of documented tales. And it did nothing to help her figure out who was supposed to have been on Seth’s property. These two men didn’t die here in the stagecoach house. In 1878, Sam was shot during a bank robbery and died in Round Rock, Texas, and The Ballad of Sam Bass was written soon after and became a song sang by