Kelsey let go of Greer. “You want the money,” she said.
Cord looked away and scowled.
Chi said gently, “We need it more than you, hija.”
“Do you? Never mind; I’ll fetch it.” But for a moment she did not move, except to contemplate Kyle Greer. “I can make him well,” she said. When no one answered, she turned up the stairs.
In the livery barn, Cord let the mechanical tasks of saddling blank his mind for a few minutes. Chi was on the porch when he brought the horses around. Pearl stood woozily next to her, hands tied. Cord hoisted him into the saddle and looped a tether rope around the bonds wrapping his wrists, then mounted the bay and led them toward the swinging suspension bridge.
“Adios,” Buskirk called. Kelsey stood beside him on the porch. “Come back sometime—you get special rates if you stay the week.”
Cord hated the swaying bridge, but managed by staring rigidly ahead and trusting the bay not to pitch him into the void. He led Pearl up on the opposite bench and let out his breath.
But then Chi turned and trotted back across the narrow span, easy as if she were riding down a prairie wagon-track. She was fine on an animal, Cord thought. She reined up on the other side. “Hermana!”
Kelsey came running. Cord watched Chi bend in the saddle and put her head close to Kelsey’s. Chi reached under her serape. Kelsey smiled and kissed Chi awkwardly on the lips. Chi swung her mare around and crossed the bridge once more.
They rode north in silence for several miles, Pearl oozing in and out of consciousness. Given the last few days Cord felt good enough, on the whole. At least they were on the road and heading with the spring to Montana, he and Chi. Another piece of gunman’s luck.
Cord thumped the gelding and pulled up beside Chi. “Cuanto, amiga?”
“Two thousand,” Chi said. “You think it was too much?”
“About right.” Cord looked off left toward the mountains. “Anyway, there are things more important than money.”
Chi laughed. “Let us go to Montana, querido.” She rode ahead to lead the way.
Afterword
Joe LeFors met Tom Horn in the fall of 1901in Frank Meanea’s saddle shop in Cheyenne. The two men were a study in contrasts. LeFors was several inches under six feet, and wore a bow tie, a waxed walrus mustache, and a three-piece suit with the signet of a fraternal organization on his watch fob. He had clean, vaguely Germanic features, and at the age of thirty-six was growing a bit soft above the belt. He looked like a cop.
Tom Horn was six feet two inches tall and weighed 206 pounds, with broad sinewy shoulders and a slab-flat stomach. Five years older than LeFors, he wore trail clothing and worn boots. His thin hair was beginning to recede, and below his high forehead were small hard eyes that seemed long divorced from anything like humor. He looked like bad news.
Horn was picking up a scabbard that Meanea had custom-crafted for his .30-30, and to make conversation the two men discussed the finer points—sighting accuracy, muzzle velocity, penetration power—of the popular Winchester lever-action rifle. LeFors found his new acquaintance “well posted on small arms and rather inclined to brag.” After a time the two men shook hands and went their separate ways.
LeFors and Horn, strangers until this meeting, had lived similar lives, but now they worked different sides of the road. Joe LeFors was a U.S. Deputy Marshal, and Tom Horn, with his dark mean eyes, was the last and most deadly hired gun in the West.
The tenacity of the character of Enos Ryker in Gunsmoke River is inspired by Joe LeFors, although it should be noted that there is no hint of Ryker-like corruption in the true-life marshal. LeFors was born in 1865 to farming folk in Paris, in the northeast corner of Texas. He was the fourth of five brothers. His father James J., a Kentuckian, was fifty-seven that year, and his mother, Mahala Wester, a native of Tennessee, was thirty-eight. In 1878, the family moved to the Texas Panhandle, where it farmed outside Mobeetie on the Sweetwater River, in the area of the present-day town of LeFors, and by 1880, both parents were dead.
During the next five years LeFors was a freighter, mail-route rider, and cowboy. He learned to handle a ten-yoke oxen team, work cattle, and adroitly avoid the renegade bands of hostile natives who frequently left the reservations in the Indian Territories to rustle range cattle and, when the spirit moved them, attack isolated white ranchers and riders.
In the spring of 1885, LeFors signed on with the H Bar Y Ranch at Gageby Creek east of Mobeetie. Hitting the trail on April 10, the H Bar Y crew drove 2,900 head of yearlings and two-year-olds 1,000 miles north across open range and runoff-swollen rivers to Buffalo, Wyoming, in sixty days. LeFors, sniffing opportunity, drew his pay and took a job on a local ranch. A competent, honest, and responsible hand, he was soon promoted to foreman.
In 1890 LeFors moved north to Miles City, the eastern Montana livestock center, where he worked for the Murphy Company, which had contracted to supply over 3,000 beeves annually to the Sioux Indians at the Standing Rock Agency. LeFors learned both Sioux and the hand-signing language that served as a lingua franca among different tribes and whites, and says that the Sioux named him Tiatonka Che or Beef Chief.
Miles City was the headquarters of W. D. Smith, chief investigator for the Montana Live Stock Association. On Smith’s recommendation, LeFors was offered a job as brand inspector, assigned to northeastern Wyoming. LeFors was looking for a new challenge and accepted. Although it would be another six years before they met face to face, another new inspector had recently taken the same position with the Wyoming Cattlemen’s Association. For a time, at least, Joe LeFors and Tom Horn were colleagues.
Tom Horn was born near Memphis, Scotland County, Missouri, on November 21, 1860, and ran away from home at the age of fourteen, after his father had beaten him so badly he spent a week in bed. A job as a teamster took Horn to New Mexico, where he quit to drive an Overland Mail stagecoach between Santa Fe and Prescott, Arizona. At the time, the Western and Chiricahua Apaches were waging perhaps the most viciously effective guerrilla war any native tribe ever launched against Europeans, and Horn’s job should have been somewhere between perilous and suicidal. He managed to survive through luck and go-to-hell brass, and by age sixteen was fluent in Apache and Spanish. That skill, and the recommendation of Al Sieber, the famous German-born Indian-fighter, got Horn a job with the U.S. Army.
For the next ten years, Horn and Sieber worked out of Fort Whipple as scouts, translators, and mercenaries.
Geronimo’s surrender ended the Apache Wars and idled Horn. Still well under thirty, he served as a deputy sheriff for a time, and rodeoed on the side, taking the steer-roping buckle at Phoenix one year. In 1890 Horn joined the Pinkerton Detective Agency. He was credited with breaking up the McCoy gang, a notorious bunch of murdering train robbers, but Horn later claimed that he never liked Pinkerton work. His trail finally led him to Wyoming and a job which was not so different from what he was used to. By 1894, Tom Horn had lived by his gun for twenty of his thirty-four years.
The profession to which Joe LeFors and Tom Horn turned within a year of each other was variously called “brand inspector” , “range detective”, or “livestock investigator”. The employer was either a stockgrowers’ organization or a single large rancher, and the inspector had no official law enforcement status. His general instruction was to protect the financial interests of his boss, but methodology and the lengths to which an inspector carried his mandate varied from man to man.
One stockgrower concern was nesters, small ranchers who took advantage of the several Homestead Acts to claim, settle, and often fence off prime sections of bottomland range with access to year-round water. Although claiming no legal title to the land, the big ranchers did claim the rights of usage, eminent domain, and capitalist prerogative.
In some areas, sheep were another worry. Grazing woolies crop grass close to the ground’s surface, and cowmen believed that this irredeemably ruined the range. The fact that they were wrong did not stop them from harassi
ng sheepherders and their flocks.
Finally, there was rustling, an unfortunate term that once innocuously meant “gathering,” as in “rustling up some grub.” There were surely those who stole cattle and horses as an ongoing criminal enterprise; indeed, Joe LeFors was assigned by his Montana bosses to the Powder River country of Wyoming because it was a major corridor for driving stolen Montana stock to the famous robbers’ roost at Hole-in-the-Wall. But some stockmen used the accusation of rustling as a general weapon in what was essentially an economic war. The basically honest rancher who ignored the brand on a cow or two during spring roundup was technically a thief, though hardly a threat to order. Among the utterly blameless were those who ranched near rustler hole-ups and kept their traps shut out of neighborliness and prudence, and those who were simply getting in a local stockgrower’s hair. For a more complete discussion of the complexities of the rustler question, see our Afterword to Hunt the Man Down, the fifth book in the “Cord” series.
Despite the similarity of title, Joe LeFors and Tom Horn had different mandates. LeFors’s assignment was to recover stolen Montana cattle which had been driven across the border into Wyoming, and to obtain convictions of the cow thieves as a deterrent to others with the same idea. Tom Horn combated professional rustlers too, but a significant part of his job was to intimidate and sometimes drive out nesters and sheepmen.
Further, Lefors and Horn brought different points of view to their work. LeFors believed in an honest day’s work and the sanctity of property rights. He was a meticulous detective with an eye for detail, and his successful cases are marked by doggedness rather than brilliant deductive leaps of imagination. He concentrated on the professional bunches, and was with the small army that finally breached Hole-in-the-Wall in 1897. Although locals were invited to come forward to make ownership claims, none did, for the excellent reason that the cattle rounded up were patently stolen. Five hundred head bore the brands of Wyoming and Montana cattle companies; fifty head had had brands clumsily altered, and on another twenty-eight steers the brands had been knife-skinned from the living animal and the edges sewn together. Later, LeFors was a member of the posse that trailed Butch Cassidy’s Wild Bunch after it blew up the express car on the Overland Flyer. Around 1900, LeFors accepted a commission as a Deputy U.S. Marshal. His superior, Frank A. Hadsell, was a Federal appointee who spent most of his time on his sheep ranch near Rawlins, so the day-to-day marshaling fell to LeFors. In his first year, he successfully apprehended a train robber and counterfeiter.
Tom Horn, on the other hand, believed that life was a mean game with few rules, in which the deadliest son of a bitch with the most guns won. Horn saw himself as that son of a bitch. The Army had paid him to hunt down Apaches, and the Pinkertons had paid him to hunt down anyone for whom money was offered. In either case, the employer rarely cared whether the prey came in breathing or stiff. If capitalist ranchers were willing to pay to fight rustlers or rivals—or to stop them dead—Horn saw it as about the same job. “I’m an exterminatin’ son of a bitch,” he once proclaimed.
Hired guns were nothing new to the West when Horn sold his to the stockgrowers of Wyoming in 1894. They dated from the years immediately after the Civil War, when a lot of men with killing experience were out of work. Before the nester troubles began in the West in the mid 1880’s, gunslingers worked for mining magnates with labor trouble and railroads bothered by road agents. Historian Paul Trachtman writes, “Of all the gunfighters, these mercenaries were the hardest to classify. As a group, they were neither outlaws nor lawmen, though many had pursued both careers in the past. In their role as vigilantes, they usually operated not so much in defiance of the law as simply beyond its reach.”
After abortive service in the cause of the Spanish-American War (Horn caught malaria and was mustered out in Florida), Horn killed two alleged rustlers, Nigger Dart Isham and Matt Rash, in another notorious outlaw hideout, Brown’s Park, near the Wyoming-Colorado-Utah border. Then, in the spring of 1901, Horn went to work for John Coble, scion of a wealthy Pennsylvania family who had given up an appointment to the U.S. Naval Academy to horse ranch at Iron Mountain, Wyoming. Coble was attracted to the romantic figure of Horn as an embodiment of the just finished century and the Old West, and put him to work searching out rustlers and other troublemakers in the neighborhood. It was Horn’s perhaps overzealous execution of this assignment that led to that first meeting with Marshal Joe LeFors.
Glendolene Myrtle Kimmell was a minor though catalytic character in the drama to come. A strange little woman with almond-eyed, vaguely Oriental features who had left her Missouri home to teach at the Iron Mountain School, she idolized Horn and was his occasional lover. To a reporter for The Cincinnati Enquirer, she swore that Tom Horn was “a man who embodied the characteristics, the experiences, and the code of the old frontiersman.”
Glendolene Kimmell boarded with the homesteading family of Victor Miller, neighbors to the family of Kels P. Nickell. Nickell had outraged nesters and big cattlemen alike by bringing in sheep; in the spring of 1901, Nickell and Miller were also feuding over a fist-fight between two of their sons at a dance. On the morning of July 18, 1901, fourteen-year-old Willie Nickell was found at the corral gate, shot dead. He was a big lad, and was wearing a low-brimmed hat and an overcoat against the early-morning high-country chill, and the murderer may have mistaken him for his father.
Tom Horn, whose reputation as a killer was so potent by now that he usually needed only to be seen riding the range to stop rustling in an area, was accused of the murder, as was Victor Miller. Horn claimed that he was on a train between Cheyenne and Laramie the day of the killing. Miller was, ironically, alibied by schoolteacher Kimmell, who testified to a coroner’s jury that Miller was at his home when the killing occurred.
Seventeen days after Willie Nickell was killed, his father Kels was shot in the arm, hip, and side from ambush, and while he was in the hospital several masked men fired into his sheep herd, killing a couple dozen of the woolies. Kels Nickell finally saw the bloody handwriting on the wall, and removed to Cheyenne to work as a night watchman for the Union Pacific.
Enter Joe LeFors.
Partially through pressure from the cattlemen of the Cheyenne Club, the investigation into the Nickell shooting was eventually dropped by local lawmen, but as U.S. Marshal, LeFors considered it his duty to pursue the killer. After a time he became convinced it was Tom Horn. He knew that Horn had killed men for money; anyone who had heard Horn’s barroom crowing knew that. There was a wealth of circumstantial evidence as well, although it is notable that LeFors was unable ever to prove Horn’s guilt through evidence or witnesses. LeFors later admitted to Horn, “In the Willie Nickell killing I could never find your trail, and I pride myself on being a trailer.’’
Still, LeFors had no motive for hounding Tom Horn, besides a belief in his guilt and a sense of justice. If LeFors were under any external pressure, it would have come from stockman’s allies from the governor (who had once almost hired Horn himself) on down, and it would have pressed him to drop the case.
LeFors’s investigation began while Kels Nickell was still in the hospital, when he interviewed Mrs. Mary Mahoney Nickell at the family’s Iron Mountain ranch. After eliminating as suspects a half-breed barn painter and family enemy Miller, LeFors settled on Horn. It was at this point that LeFors asked Police Chief Sandy McKneal for an introduction when they spotted Horn in Meanea’s saddlery.
Not long afterward, an informant told LeFors that Horn had arrived in Laramie the day of the killing on a “steamy shaken horse,” and had left a blood-stained sweater at a cobbler’s shop. Still, all LeFors’s “evidence” remained anecdotal, hearsay, or circumstantial. Even by the investigative standards of the time, LeFors could not convict on the basis of what he had, and he knew it.
Meanwhile, Tom Horn was in Denver, drinking heavily, and avoiding Wyoming for a time. Denver was a cosmopolitan city by the turn of the century, and Horn a charming anachronism who blew lou
d about himself, especially when drunk. Although the faithful Glendolene Kimmell wrote to warn him that LeFors would not let the Nickell matter lie, Horn went on accepting free drinks from amused bankers and petty politicians in the Denver public houses.
At the very least, Tom Horn was a bad drunk. At worst, he may have been losing touch with reality and his own mortality. He apparently made dangerous but less than damning allusions to his role in the Nickell killing before several witnesses, despite Glendolene’s warning. On another occasion, Horn abused for sport a compact citified dude who had the nerve to take the spot at the bar rail next to Horn. The dude turned out to be a nationally ranked prizefighter known as “Young” Corbett. Corbett broke Horn’s jaw and battered him into unconsciousness.
While Horn was drinking his meals through a straw in Denver, a woman Pinkerton working undercover with LeFors got Glendolene Kimmell liquored up. Glendolene shared Horn’s fancy for hootch, braggadocio, and the confusion of reality and might-have-been, because she told the woman agent that she had brought Tom Horn sandwiches while he lay in ambush for Kels Nickell, Willie’s father.
On sobering up the next morning, Glendolene must have had an inkling that she had mouthed off too much, because she sent word that she wished to see LeFors in her hotel room. There she asked point-blank if Horn was a suspect. LeFors evaded the question, assuring her only that everything would turn out all right. According to LeFors, the interview ended this way:
I said, “Well forget our talk.”
She laughed and said, “When I sent for you, I fully intended to kill you, but I believe you are all right now.” While she was talking she shook a keen-edged dagger out of her sleeve.
“I didn’t know what you wanted,” I told her, “or who I was going to meet with when I was coming upstairs,” and I shook an automatic (pistol) out of my sleeve. She laughed and we shook hands and declared we would be friends.
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