I, Tom Horn

by Will Henry

  I close to choked on my mouthful of meat. One of them that had flanked me, the big one, hammered me on the back and knocked the roast loose from my throat.

  "Chew more slower, younker," he advised me. "You don't want to die with but eleven dollars in your poke." He reached inside his shirt and pulled out my "roll," which he had plainly thieved from me while prodding me with his horse pistol. "Count it, kid," he said, tossing it back to me. "You cain't trust a passel of crooks like these here. Take it from old Cole, they're a desperate pack."

  So that's the way I met Cole Younger and, in their grinning or scowling turns, the others of them: Charley Pitts, Marl Barker, Bevis Hill, Woodson Stode, Clell Miller, and Cole's brother, Bob Younger.

  Never was told where at was Frank James and Jim Younger that there night in the Kearney woods. But when I got to Kansas City next day I heard the James gang had hit the Liberty National Bank, scant miles from where we camped, Counts was dead and Bevis Hill that bad shot he wouldn't last. It was only on account that Frank James and Jim Younger were hid out as "cover" for the raid, in Liberty, that the entire gang wasn't riddled and rode down. Or so I was told in Kansas City.

  I don't truly know about the James gang. But I never peeped that I et and slept with them, nor hinted at where their camp was. Well, they didn't take my eleven dollars. It would have been mean and small to inform on them. I never would have done it.

  I wasn't to alter my mind about that, nor about them.

  Folks can say it wasn't really the Jameses and Youngers I camped with. But let them, I saw those race-bred horses all greyhound lean and groomed to the tailhairs. Yes, and hooked on one long picket line just like the U.S. Cavalry, full saddle, full bridle, ready to wheel and go at the snap of one harness ring. Hell, and all those belted pistols and each one with a rifle stacked handclose to his reach from the fire? Oh, it was them right enough. But they still didn't rob my eleven dollars.

  Wish I might say as much for Kansas City.

  Kansas City was big, built all out of bare-board lumber, nothing painted but the churches, and had horse-manure dirt roads like any other town. But that's where the resemblance desisted. People! There were more of them in two minutes than I'd seen my whole life previous. They were hiving like bees. And the noise! You simply could not believe it. And wagons? God Amighty, it was hub-and-hub jammed with them. A body could scarcely wedge through the streets. And when he got out of the roadway, he was trapped in such a herd of folks on the woodwalks in front of the stores that his watch could run down and need winding again before he made twenty rods.

  Say, it was fearful full of people in Kansas City.

  Which I figured made it fat and dandy for me.

  It was so crowded no crook nor sneak could find the pickpocket room to get at my eleven dollars. If somebody in that pack had had to go to the bathroom, he couldn't have raised his hand to save his bladder. I thought that was right cute of me. It kind of tickled me that a farm boy could come up with a sly notion like that. Fact is, I was still smirking over the humor of it, when a nice old lady with a pea-green parasol and a big wicker basket over her arm tottered up to me and pleaded for aid.

  She wanted to get over the main stem and was too tuckered from the crowd to make it alone.

  The poor thing.

  She had a pitiful winceful game leg and was toting to a sick friend a fine hot lunch. The friend lived in yonder hovel, down the mud alley next the livery. She was desperate ill with the sweats and heaves and might never know another meal in this life. Could a fine young and Christian boy spare five minutes of his time and heart?

  Well, you don't declare out of a duty like that.

  Not brought up in Scotland County, you don't.

  I gave her my arm and away we went twixt wheelhub and neath tailgate and over whiffletree safe to the far side. Whereat, partways down the dark alley, I gave her something else. It was my eleven dollars.

  She persuaded me by opening up the wicker lunch basket and pulling out of it a Colt's pistol big as a Civil War artillery piece. She then asked me to turn about. Which I done spry enough. For by this time, poor light or otherwise, I was seeing a lot better. The old lady hadn't shaved for a week and had hair on her chest, where her dress popped open, thick as the wool on a black ram's belly, and, well, when her voice changed over low enough to sing bass at a bull fiddler's funeral, I moved!

  Soon as I did, two hairy hands grabbed my hatbrim and shoved my round beaver hat square down over my two ears. Which took heft, for my ears were hooked on like jug handles and hard to bend as shoehorns. But it was done and I couldn't see a wink for staring straight into my own hatband. Then, before I could get my mouth open to bawl out for the police, or anybody, there was a terrible crackling of bright lights, and I knew I had been pistol-whupt over the back of my hat and had best just stay down there in the mud of the alley to think things over.

  Well, after a bit I wobbled back out on the street and sought the law. When the deputy at the station heard I was flat busted, he recommended I find gainful employment or they would have to run me in for being a vagrant—which is a bum with no money, he explained—and the best course for me was to haste down to the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe railroad depot, where they were hiring section hands. At this, my sore ears perked upright

  "Mister," I said, "I don't reckon I ever heered of Acherson nor Topeeky, but did I understand you correct to add on Santy Fee?"

  "You did," the policeman answered. "The line's a-building west, younker, fast as you could walk afoot. Three miles a day, and more. And paying a dollar a day, every mile of it. It's the only place I know you're going to get your eleven dollars back this year. But they don't wait, you hear? Train's leaving just about right now—" He pulled out a railroad turnip with stem winder and punch reset. "Yep, 11:47. Work train pulls out at noon. She's late to toot, right now."

  He hadn't more than snapped the lid shut on his watch when there came from down at the trainyards the screech of a steamtrain whistle—three long toots followed by two shorts—and my heart like to cut off my air with its hammering. Santa Fe! Great God Amighty, I could ride the cars to Santa Fe and get paid a dollar a day whiles I was at it. Cripes! I lit out of that police station like they'd turpentined me. Santa Fe, my God. That was about as out west as a boy could get.

  And a dollar a day to go there!

  I guess I had old Kansas City wrong, after all.

  It was some grand town.

  Santa Fe

  They were hiring all right down at the A.T.&.S.F. I got my work ticket and stuck it in my hat, as I saw the men all about me doing. Over on the tracks, the steam engines were huffing and chuffing. Behind them, I saw the strings of chair-car coaches, each one bright painted and carrying a name on it. And some of those names! General Fremont. Jim Bridger. Kit Carson. Why, it was enough to fire the mind of any youngster. I could barely keep from shouting my joy to be aboard those wonderful coaches. Off to Santa Fe, first-class!

  Well, not quite.

  They marched us right on past the puffing passenger trains to track three where where was a string of brown old flatcars hooked back of a broke-down wreck of an engine. The engine didn't have a diamond-stack smoke-belch, nor any brass brightwork, nor not even a damned cowcatcher on the front of it! "Hobos, over here!" some railroad fellow yelled out, and we all skulked in that direction knowing he meant us. Hobos to the railroad people weren't bums or drifters but day-hired trackworkers. And that was surely Tom Horn and those two hundred other men now shoving to be first for the good places.

  Aboard the five little flatcars we went, or tried to go. It was a coon fight right off. The cars were loaded already with crossties, wire, rail iron, spike barrels, flanges, bolt and nut crates. It was like a stampede, and those men were rough runners who did not mean to get a poor seat. Leastways not so as to give a good one to a farm boy from north Missouri. I came powerful close to getting muscled out, but was "rescued" at the last minute by an old oneeyed hobo. He was dug-in in a great spot right be
hind the coal car, which was a cordwood car on this dinky run. He saw me and give a rebel yell and a big wave. When I run up alongside the car, which was already moving, he reached me down a hand and I swung up and hunkered in alongside him.

  Well, he had a rat-tangled beard to his belly button and was dirtier than a wallowed hog. The greasy black eye patch he wore didn't help any either. But away in under the jut of his brow burned that one good eye, and it gleamed like a pale-hot ember in there. I knew in the instant that he wasn't like the others, no more than was I. Quick as that, he read my thoughts.

  "Name's Bronson," he said. "They call me Wolf-Eye."

  "Who does?" I said stupidly.

  "The Cut Arms," he answered. "The bastards."

  "Who's the Cut Arms?"

  "Why, the Cheyenne Injuns, young un. Don't you know nuthin' atall?"

  My blood stirred at the name Cheyenne Indians. I didn't know much, but I knew enough to understand they weren't any of your tame Indians. Not hardly!

  "They give you the name? The wild Cheyennes, I mean. Honest Injun, Mr. Bronson?"

  The lone eye burned brighter still beneath its dark overhang of eyebrow brush and jut of skullbones. He looked out across the land, and I knew he wasn't seeing that Missouri River railroad bridge, or the stockyard pens, or the bottoms shacktown that I was looking at. He was seeing "out there." Out yonder and far away, the places I wanted to see. This terrible-looking and unscrubbed old man beside me was no section hand. He was the real article. He was inside wild, like me, only he had already been out there his whole lifetime, and he was out there again, right that minute, on that wheezy work train chuffing out of Kansas City for Santa Fe.

  "Mr. Bronson," I said, "you was going to tell me how the Chey—, how the Cut Arm Injuns, give you that there name; I mean, if it was them really did it."

  He came back with a little start, scowling like he resented being brought back, then easing.

  "They not only give me the name," he nodded, "they likewise arranged for it in the first place."

  "Huh?"

  "They het up a rifle barrel in the fire and burnt out what's under this here patch," he said, touching the eye cover. It was the first I'd noticed that there was Indian beadwork on the filthy patch, a sign of some sort. "Afore that," he concluded, "I didn't have no Injun name. Most folks called me Staked Plains Bronson. Some sawed it off to just Llano Bronson. That was from my early years out yonder in Comanche country, when I had two eyes." He paused, and I knew he was making that long journey again in his memory. "But that don't mean nothing nowadays. Not to you, younker. It's been long forgot afore you was born. Wagh!"

  But he was wrong. And my heart pumped fast.

  Staked Plains Bronson? Why, I had read about him in the only book I ever read, at all; it was by a fellow named Ned Buntline, and he called it The Comanche Killer, and it was entire devoted to Staked Plains Bronson.

  I wasn't apt to forget that book. It took me a month to read it, word for word, and my lips got aching tired just forming the letters for all those pages—there was over seventy-five of them—but I never quit till done.

  I reached over and touched the old man's arm.

  He looked around and he wasn't scowling this time.

  "Mr. Bronson," I told him, "you got it plumb wrong about folks forgetting you. I know your whole life and heroed adventures. I can read. Comanche Killers was the onliest book I ever had. You won't never be forgot."

  The old man just looked at me.

  I started to look back at him but then turned away natural as I could when I seen it; there was a tear rolling out from under the beadwork eye patch.

  His hand, big and knotted up as a burl-root, dashed at that tear and he grumbled out something like, "damn them firebox cinders," and then he handed me his heavy-barrel Sharps Big Fifty buffalo gun. "Here," he said, "you kin cradle this awhiles; I'm tire't of its cumber."

  I thought that was all of it, and it was honor enough to get to hold that great old rifle, believe you me.

  But there was a tidbit more.

  "Younker," he said, when I had settled the Sharps and myself up against our windshelter of flange crates, "you will do." Then, soft-gruff, "Call me Wolf-Eye."

  All day and night we rattled and banged and wood-smoked our way across country flat as a com fritter. I kept waiting for distant view of the mountains—it was a day-bright full moon that night—that I knew humped up all about Santa Fe. But sunrise came and we took a water stop at a place called Newton, and damned if we weren't still in Kansas and it wasn't any water stop but the end of the line!

  I looked and couldn't believe it. But I had to, because yonder to the west there wasn't anything but short curly grass and old buffalo chips and heaps of white bones. Not a crosstie, nor a rail pile, nor one single sign of a railroad ran on west.

  I had been cheated bald.

  It was three hundred and more miles on down to Santa Fe and the New Mexico country. And I didn't have a dime of money to get me there. I would have quit the A.T.&.S.F. right smack in the middle of my first cussword at them duping me into going to Newton, Kansas. Except that you can't quit a job you haven't started to work on yet. So I got off the flatcars with the other two hundred hobos and we commenced to laying rails. I lasted twenty-six days. That meant twenty-six dollars. It was the amount Wolf-Eye Bronson calculated we would need to make it on down to Santa Fe in some style. For it turned out that the meat hunting he'd hired on to do ahead of the tracklaying crews had petered out about as bad as my expectations of getting west had done when halted at Newton, Kansas. So old Wolf-Eye had consented to go with me. Only trouble was, the part of the money that was to come from him, he was never paid. The company maintained he brought in but three buffalo—two of them sick—and two ribby doe antelope, one of which was wolf-bit, and that this just did not fill the terms of its meat hunting contract with Mr. Clarence Wesley Bronson.

  Fact was, Staked Plains Bronson owed the railroad $93.75 advanced him on his busted contract.

  Which Wolf-Eye had drunk up in Taos Lightning whiskey the first ten days.

  Still he was a bulldog and would not quit. He said that no matter the twenty-six dollars wasn't what he'd planned on, he would come along and share the hard doings with me anyway.

  "I ain't never let down a blood brother yet," he vowed to me. "And me and you have took the Cut Arm oath."

  I never did learn what that oath amounted to, but it scarcely mattered. Wolf-Eye knew the trail to Santa Fe, and more. He knew a teamster freighting out of Newton down into the Llano Estacado country. Fellow name of Blades, who needed two drivers and didn't give a hoot if one of them was fourteen years old and the other a hundred and forty.

  "We're hired," Wolf-Eye said loftily. "Just go and draw our twenty-six dollars from the paymaster, and may the Great Bull Buffalo shit his scared pile square on the A.T.&S.F. railway."

  Mr. Blades had good stock and good wagons. We didn't hit Indians, Comancheros, nor even any white horse thieves. There wasn't any high water at any of the rivers, excepting for the Cimarron which we hit so high up its course that the flooding wasn't but brisket-deep at worst. For the rest, it was just like the trailmaps said it was; not a mile off nor a half day's time wasted in the whole run.

  And right here let me say something for all the brainy experts who can tell you more of where I went and what I done than Tom Horn ever could.

  Depending on which of them you listen to, you can hear your choice of stretchers from A to Izzard. One claims I went all the way back to Kansas City to take the Santa Fe Traill Now wouldn't that be brilliant? Way we did it was go right due west from Newton, little over one hundred miles, to hit the trail along the Arkansas River, between Pawnee Rock and Fort Dodge. It was the old Fort Larned wagon route Blades followed, and it was well traveled, had good grass and easy grades the entire way of it. Had we gone back to Kansas City, like that damn fool said, it would have taken us four hundred miles to get back to the same spot on the trail as the Fort Larned cutoff! Another
of those natural-born geniuses had me hiring out to drive Texas cattle up from the Panhandle. That loony had me wintering in San Antone, learning Mexican in two months, killing some old lady in a outhouse crapper whiles riding home to the ranch drunk, and fleeing the law all the way back up into Kansas and the Flint Hills, where I was supposed to hide out on brother Charley's place. My God, I surely did cover a lot of territory! Trouble is, Tom Horn never took one step into Texas. I would like to have them try it in my place! The ninnies. Listen:

  It was getting into October 1874 when me and Staked Plains Bronson hired out to Blades. Just short of Christmas Day, the selfsame year, 1874, we rolled Santa Fe in Blades's wagons. That's three months. There were many stops on the way. Blades was a trader. We would load and unload, deliver and pick up, and swing out of the way to do either and in any part of the trail. There was also frequent outspannings and grass camps where the stock would rest and fat up for more pulling. The trail was in deep sand a lot of its way. Rocks like bear teeth studded up other stretches. There was breakdowns. And blacksmithing, wagons and horses, all the while. Sometimes we'd miss our water, or find a spring gone bad, or a rocktank alkalied thick as flapjack batter. Hell, going down the Santa Fe Trail in 1874 wasn't any light buggy ride. You did damned good to cover it—and make a profit—in only three months. Still those "experts" had me all those other places—you know it wasn't just Texas, some of them threw in Denver and Leadville, Colorado, for good measure—and they still got me to Santa Fe in the same time that I made it my ownself with the Blades train!