I, Tom Horn

by Will Henry

  It was established directly that Willie's brother Fred Nickell had gone through the one-mile gate only minutes before Willie was shot down there. Indication of this was that the killer was looking only for Willie Nickell. The finger of that circumstance pointed to Victor Miller. And, if not him, then some Miller. Meaning Jim Miller the father. The feeling was given that this would match in an eye-for-an-eye vengeance, being a son for a son.

  For me, the most interesting testimony of the coroner's inquest was Kels Nickell's: "Tom Horn will get the blame for this, but he never done it," Kels stated.

  This was in answer to repeated effort under oath by small ranchers to drag me into the picture by name and reputation alone. Chief among these Tom Horn accusers was Jim Miller. But all he succeeded in doing was to rekindle doubts of his own whereabouts the day of the murder. Nevertheless, I could not shake my own uneasiness about finding who did kill Willie Nickell. Me knowing I didn't do it was not going to help anything but my conscience.

  I sought advice of parties at the stock growers association, whose names will never appear, and was told that it would be wise for me to find a little daylight work that would take me away from Albany County for the time.

  Meanwhile they, my stockmen friends, would be able to prove I was on the train between Laramie and Cheyenne on Thursday, July 18. Or at least they would contend this story to be a provable alibi. And, as I knew I was entirely innocent of the terrible crime, I could accept their alibi as they offered it, with a clear mind.

  I first argued that, hell, I had a real alibi and that all they had to do if they wanted to help me was go out and collar the wandering cowboy, Charley Starrett. This they made a brief run at doing but came up with nothing but a handful of lost trail dust. Nobody out in the country had ever heard of a Charley Starrett, and Starrett had certainly had opportunity and time to come forward. Maybe I had better quit telling them about my alibi and grab a good hard tail-holdt on theirs. I agreed with a deal more of uneasiness. But it was a good thing they took the precaution of "urging" on me their extra alibi of me being on the cars for Cheyenne the time Willie got shot. The inquest was opened up again suddenly and without warning, and we were all back under oath. A bombshell had been fired off. We might damned well need that bogus alibi!

  Miss Kimmell wanted to change her testimony.

  She had sworn previously that Victor Miller was at home, with her and all the other Millers, the day of the Willie Nickell killing. Then the Millers had double-crossed her. They had begun to go around telling it that Tom Horn was the real murderer and that they had witnesses ready to swear and testify to that fact. This was of course a vile lie, and Miss Kimmell was forced to reveal her former falsehood under oath.

  The little schoolmarm now said that she had testified for Victor Miller on the promise of the Miller family that neither Tom Horn, nor any other innocent party, should be charged with the crime or, might God in heaven forbid, tried and convicted for it.

  Well, Coroner Murray wanted to know, what did Miss Kimmell wish to depose differently at the present time?

  "I lied to protect a confused and frightened young boy as I would do again given the same circumstances of misguided vengeance that warped the lad's heart," Glendolene answered in a good clear voice. "But I cannot now stand by and see an innocent man crucified for this heinous murder, the fault for which must be faced by this entire community."

  Coroner Murray sensed something strange and dark here, but he held steady.

  "What precisely are you saying, madam?" he asked carefully. "And I must warn you that testimony you now give may be entered against you, yourself."

  "Your threats do not affect me, Mr. Murray," the little battler said. "What you will get from me is the truth I would to God I might have hidden. Victor Miller was not at home at the time of the killing of Willie Nickell. He was not there, not can it be else than falsely proved that he was." Miss Kimmell arose from the witness chair, fixing Murray with her slant-eyed, smoky look. "But I can tell you where he was at that exact time," she said.

  "Miss Kimmell I must warn you—"

  "And I must tell this court the truth, Mr. Coroner."

  "Order! Order!" The bailiff rapped his nightstick on the railings of the witness box.

  "Miss Kimmell!" Murray was getting red.

  "Victor Miller confessed to me that he killed Willie Nickell. He did it to avenge his father for the accidental death of Little Brother Miller. The father's sins have been visited on poor Victor. That is why I lied for him. But no more, Mr. Coroner. Tom Horn is innocent!"

  At once, the court was in a bedlam.

  "The witness is excused!" the bailiff yelled, on a cue from Murray. "Step down, step down."

  "He wept like a child of eight, not eighteen," Miss Kimmell continued, as if unhearing. "Victor was fond of me and I believe had been coached not to speak to any living soul of the crime. His relief at telling someone, was profound and touching. I asked him if anyone else knew of this and he said, yes, his father did."

  "Order!" the bailiff shouted. But Miss Kimmell was not to be ordered by him or any other hearing officer.

  "Moreover," she swept on, "Jim Miller himself told me Victor had confessed to him the killing of the Nickell boy."

  "Clear the room!" the bailiff yelled. But again Miss Glendolene would not back off.

  "Nor is that the end of it," the dusky little teacher of the Iron Mountain School concluded. "When Victor then saw his father coming into the house where we were, I asked him to repeat what he had told me, to Jim Miller.

  "Victor did so; Jim Miller knows, as well as he knows his God is in heaven, that the boy committed the crime, and only he committed it. Yet he, Jim Miller, has been going about the community saying it is Mr. Horn and that he has witnesses who saw Mr. Horn do it. I challenge this court to bring Jim Miller forward and demand of him the names of those witnesses!"

  With that, little Miss Glendolene Kimmell stepped down at last. She swept right on up the aisle and out of the stuffy fly-buzz of the hearing room, and the court permitted her to go, I suspect, damned glad to be shut of her.

  The ruckus among the spectators that followed her sensational charge against Victor Miller lasted something over five minutes. It was a heady, remarkable feeling for me, as I believed I was now out of it.

  How "innocent" I really was! Miss Kimmel's entire testimony, first and last times, was thrown out of court and she herself threatened with an indictment for perjury! My situation was murkier than ever.

  Worse than that.

  My other witness, the missing cowboy Starrett, now showed up out of the sagebrush, full of apologies for his late appearance, and demanding to be heard then and there. Coroner Murray wanted to go home to his noon dinner, but the crowd in the hearing room started growling and he called the bailiff back, and had Charley Starrett sworn.

  It was plain inside of two minutes that Charley was full of more than his sorrows for not showing up sooner.

  He had been at the bottle for some time—I later was told that the Millers had got wind of him being in town and had "oiled him up" good and proper before turning the poor younker loose to speak his piece for Tom Horn.

  By the time Starrett, who would become a staunch friend and sober witness after the inquest, had been on the stand long enough to get his name spelled right in the records, he had convinced the noisy crowd and the hungry coroner that he had never before that minute seen or likely even heard of Tom Horn. He could not remember if we had met on the Sybille or the Chug, and, as with Glendolene's loyal and God knows I knew true story of my innocence, my case suffered grave damage. After the laughs and guffaws, came the scowls.

  The little ranchers and rustlers, in town from their hideout draws and ratty homesteader flats, especially didn't like the taste of Glendolene's reversed story. She was known to be "in heat over Horn." She was showing her "furriner blood." She had been paid by Coble to change her story.

  She had lied flat-out to villify the Millers and put Tom Hor
n in a white-knight light, and on and on.

  The stockmen's association didn't like it. They put me on the train for Denver that same night, advising me to not get off in Cheyenne, nor even stuck my nose out the vestibule of the smoker. I didn't. And I hadn't hardly found me a room in Denver before a news headline made me mightily thankful to be in Colorado: somebody had tried to kill Kels P. Nickell, Willie's father!

  Kels had been shot walking out early in the morning of August 4 with his little daughter to get in the milk cows. Kels was unarmed, the girl toting the bucket. The ambusher fired seven or eight shots. He hit Kels three places, left elbow, left hip, under right arm, the elbow hit shattering the joint. Mary Nickell's brother, William Mahoney, took Kels to Cheyenne for treatment. There Kels, tough as they come, accused Jim Miller and his sons Victor and August, of the attack. He made it flat, saying he saw them as he ran for his life.

  A second edition of the Denver papers the same day told something else:

  Later that day (of the shooting) it was learned that about seventy-five sheep owned by Dr. Bennett and Mr. Geddes, run by Kels Nickell, were killed when four masked men fired into the herd of about one thousand head. The sheepherder, an Italian immigrant, told a confusing story but maintained his life had been threatened, and he knew two of the voices. He is said to have walked the entire distance to Cheyenne from the Nickell pasture.

  That was all right news for me.

  It seemed to point stronger than ever at the Millers and away from Tom Horn. Why the devil was it, then, that I kept getting sombra twinges? Move out! move out! my shadow was telling me. Don't go back, don't never go back to Wyoming. But the temptation to return was on me.

  All I could do in Denver was drink, which I done, see some women, which I likewise accomplished and found a new special one name of Big Blondie, and in general stayed up nights and spent my money.

  Well, Denver was growed to eight, ten times the size it was when I knew it in the early days, and had electricity everywhere. Moreover, they was throwing a great Colorado Carnival, and I had brought some outlaw horses for its rodeo on from Wyoming with me. These were John Kuykendall horses. And were my alibi, too. So I stayed where the carnival was, drank my fair share of old Overholt bourbon, Baltimore Rye and Wilson Whiskey, and tried to stay up with Big Blondie. But the outlaw horses was easier to board and stay on. About three days of this was two too many, and I was thinking of a ticket to Cheyenne all over again, when I got a clipping dated August 8, from the Laramie Boomerang. There was no name from a sender, nor any letter inside, just the newspaper story tore out:

  The first man to step from the cars was Special Deputy Sandy McKneal. He carried his Winchester and was followed by James Miller. After Miller came his son Victor carrying a Winchester, then August with another rifle. Special Deputy Brown brought up the rear with a short rifle.

  The crowd was orderly. Miller looked unconcerned. The boys appeared very nervous. At the sheriff's office, the door was slammed in the face of the curious.

  A crowd of over 200 met the train returning with the prisoners.

  The Miller men were arrested in connection with the wounding of Kels Nickell and the killing of 75 head of sheep he was pasturing. . . .

  Good, good. Just what I wanted. Now they would quit talking Tom Horn, and I could go home to Wyoming.

  I decided I would wait another day.

  It must have been a hunchy decision, for next day came another envelope to me, no letter, no name, and another clipping from the Boomerang:

  Feeling in the Nickell matter is running higher than ever in Cheyenne. Sheriff Shafer, seriously ill, has asked Deputy U.S. Marshal Joe LeFors to come in on the case. LeFors, a seasoned sleuth, says he has heard of the shootings and is anxious to go to work on them. He insists, he says, on no fanfare in the work that he will do. His first act has been to visit the Nickell place. In his typical way, he went out there and came back with no one knowing of it. His sole companion, Deputy Warlaumont, says the guilty party is known to LeFors and will be brought forward in proper time. . .

  Now I did not care for that. I had never met LeFors, but he had a hardcase reputation as a bulldog who never quit. He was a southerner, fearless as a rutting elk, nervy as a riverboat gambler. He was the kind, I suspected, that would mean real trouble, or might. I went out on the town that night and got the drunkest of my life. The last thing I recall of it was the lights spinning in my eyes at a Blake Street saloon. I woke up in my room at the Windsor Hotel, just conscious enough to put a call out on the telephone for John Kuykendall.

  The hotel found him, and he come over and told them who I was and had me ambulanced over to the Saint Luke's Hospital, where I was for the next nineteen days with a multiplied jaw fracture. Mr. Kuykendall told me I had made the poor choice of loudmouthing and then trying to land a punch on a member of a party of professional boxfighters then touring the West. Among the number was one Gentleman Jim Corbett, a dapper younker aiming to whip old Jim Jeffries out of his heavyweight championship. Having learned something by this far in my life of the grand luck of Tom Horn, you will not need to be told who it was I picked out to swing on.

  Well I had always had trouble with whiskey.

  But those broken bones in my face were to prove the least I lost to the bottle and Mr. Gentleman Jim Corbett that night of my staggering drunk in Denver. Before the fight, I had been to God knows how many other saloons talking free about who I was and what I had done in the world that ought to be remarked and remembered. Loose talk like that—talk of ten invented killings for every real one Tom Horn was party to—had dogged me all my days. I used it as a way to scare off men I didn't want to come to shooting, sure. And it worked grand for me that way. But only to a point; the point being a whiskey bottle.

  Once blurring, thick-tongued drunk, like I was that fatal night on the town in Denver, Colorado, I would say and claim anything to draw attention to Tom Horn. Down uncounted such bottle-bragging trails, I must have said I killed a hundred men I never even saw, or was tied in to a dozen big-name murders of range rustlers that I wasn't in three days' ride of.

  It was my way, drunk and oft-times even sober, of building my name to a place of dread where, when it was signed on a note nailed to some cow thief's door, that man would saddle in the night and be gone with daybreak.

  But in the end of it, trying to spare other men their lives in this way like to cost me my own.

  Somehow, past belief, I said something that night to the head barkeep at the Scandinavian Saloon, in Denver, that could hang me. And, God help me, to this day I do not know why I said it, nor where the terrible thought of it could have crept into my brain. But Mr. Kuykendall got it from the barkeep direct; I had to have said it.

  It was about the Willie Nickell killing:

  "It was the longest shot I ever made," I told the Denver barkeep, "and the dirtiest trick I ever done."

  Through those long days in the Saint Luke's hospital, I tried to slink back on the night that had put me there. I even tried talking to the Lord in the middle of the long, bedpot-banging nights that followed each of those days. I was figuring that being in Saint Luke's care might gain me some listening up above. It didn't. I could never unravel any reason why I would say what I did to the Scandinavian's barkeeper. Finally, I gave it up. I took the easy trail away from it, telling myself that the Scandinavian man, and anybody else hearing it from him, would put it down for drunktalk and forget it.

  That being that, and my nature never the one to lose sleep over what was done with, I forgot it myself.

  But I had learned something in Saint Luke's.

  I celebrated getting out of the hospital there by shipping home, cold sober, on a string of cattle cars scheduled to make Cheyenne by Frontier Days.

  It is no use to trust the further claims of a man who drinks, so I will not boast of my success in the rodeo contesting there. I will leave it to the newspapers and to at least one honest reporter who saw me take the top honors in all the roping on the big da
y and who wasn't interested in accusing me, between his lines, of shooting little boys in the back.

  The Laramie Boomerang, September 1, 1901:

  ALBANY COUNTY BOYS DID GOOD

  WORK ON FRONTIER DAY:

  Tom Horn easily won first honors in the riding and roping contests Frontier Day in Cheyenne.

  Otto Plaga did some fine work in bronco breaking and was given first money in bareback.

  Duncan Clark was high up in fancy roping and is one of the best; he has money to put up if anyone does not believe it.

  Frank Stone rode Bay Devil, the noted outlaw horse, and rode him straight, fanning both sides.

  Little Flowers

  That fall of 1901 was open weather and fine for the most part. I worked steady for the Iron Mountain company on both the I-M and the Bosler ranges. This was regular cow work, not stock detective assignments. It was largely gathering, separating, branding, and shipping cattle out of all the pastures I rode for Mr. John Coble. It was the time of the most hopefulness and contentment that Tom Horn had known since the grand days with old Al Sieber, Merijilda Grijole, Mickey Free, and all of them, down in Arizona. And during that spell, I growed a lot different, or anyways a little so, than my hard man-hunting life had taught me to be.

  Mr. Coble was purely set to help me, for he knew what I was going through, and he was then, as forever, the stoutest friend Wyoming ever gave me. Moreover, John Coble was smart. He understood that Tom Horn's day was sundownbound, and he did what he could to put me onto other grass, and finer, while there was time.