I, Tom Horn

by Will Henry

  In this direction, we had many campfire and ranch-house yarnings, him with his calabash pipe chuffing away, me usually spinning him a tale of some desperate men I had never known and killings by Tom Horn that never took any real man's life, excepting as they was invented to lead on John Coble. I never saw another to take such head-cocked, pipe-puff interest in the work of the western range rider. Mr. Coble was a cowboy in his eastern citykid heart, and he never outgrowed the yearn to be a Tom Horn himself. Naturally, he could never have made it. There wasn't in John C. Coble nothing but gentleness and honorability. And the fact he hired me to, well, push on rustlers from his legal-owned grass did not change that part of it. He knew these rides got rough. He also knew they had to do so now and again. But he trusted me. And I never let him down. I could say to him, and did, just what I had told a hundred others before and since; there was never a man I shoved on, or bid to stay permanent where he was, that I couldn't have proved legal in court was a damned cow thief, or a hell of a lot worse. Nor was there ever a one of them that wasn't warned, not once, but two and three times, to, for God's sake, if not for that of his woman and little ones, get out of the country and to do it alive. Most of them listened. Some didn't.

  But John Coble believed to the last day I knew him that I got my job done by scaring the lives out of them that needed moving on and not by taking those lives in dark blood. Above all, he believed that I was innocent of the Willie Nickell killing, and he spent a great or at least good part of his personal fortune on that belief.

  John Coble was a handshake man, always.

  He looked you in the eye, and you looked him in the eye, and you said, "By God, John, I didn't do it," and that was all the bond he needed, all the word he ever asked. You can't over-glory a man like that.

  There was but one thing we tested back and forward on, and that was women. He knew that like most cowboys I held a female to be worth whatever she said she was worth. Happen she was a lady, she got high respect. Providing she wanted to play, and was still quality about it, she likewise got treated careful. Was she just a trampy thing, she would be handled about rougher than a bawly calf at a branding fire. Mr. Coble didn't hold with that, being a man who bowed to all ladies, shady as well as sunlight brand. "They are glorious things, Tom," he used to tell me, "like the little flowers that come up in the May rains. Here a day or three, then gone. We dassn't pick them or tromple on them, but must gentle them and treasure them. There is nothing God makes so well as He does a woman. Find yourself one, Tom, before it is too late. And gentle and treasure her, always."

  Well, fine, but the trouble with that was that he had a particular female all picked out for me. He was head of the Albany County school board and had been the one to hire Miss Kimmell. He'd been partial to the little dumpling lady from first sighting. When he found out she was gone on me, well, he thought he saw his duty clear and went to work on Tom Horn for her. He was still at it that autumn of the coroner's hearing, arguing that I'd ought to see her for several reasons other than the fine set of her busts and, as he put it with a brown-eyed wink and a wave of his pipe, "the rustle of her bustle."

  The excuse he gave was that "we" ought to talk to her about our case; if she had been bold and loyal enough to do what she had done for me, the least I should answer with would be to thank her in person, letting her understand she was important to me in every way and that I was mightily aware of it and grateful to Glendolene Kimmell, my brave friend and maybe more.

  Hell, I could see he was right. We hadn't any real argument to it. Finally, I give in.

  "Listen, Johnny," I said. "I will do it, but you must front for me in the matter. Me and Glendolene ain't been seen public since she was at the Millers. It seems all quiet now in the Willie Nickell business, and let's tread light to see it stays that way."

  "It is just that quiet that I don't care for it, Tom," he answered me. "We must do what we can, while we can, to find out anything that may help us. This is a mean thing you're into. If Miss Glendolene can tell us something, we had better hear her out on it."

  "All right," I agreed. "You go and get somebody you can trust to pass her on a message. It will be from me and will say only "meet me at our place" and set a night to do it. You got somebody to trust with that?"

  "I think so," he nodded. "How about John C. Coble?"

  It was some full-of-the-moon Indian summer night that Glendolene Kimmell showed up on at our place that September of 1901. It, the place, was where I had taken her on some other nights I would likewise remember to my twilight years. This night, though, went different. It had to. Both our lives had changed since those other nights. I wasn't the same "western man" that I was then. Nor was Glendolene any longer "my little private slant-eye lady" that I had said she was before.

  "This world turns," she said to me, in that low, husky way of hers, coming up to me there in the moon shadows. "We can't go back, Tom. But we can go on. Will we, Tom?" She had come right to it. I understood it. So did Glendolene Kimmell. It was her way. She never backed off nor played bat-eyes with a man when the matter was earnest, or the time growed short.

  "I don't know, Glennie," I said. "I reckon that's why we're here tonight. To find out."

  "I want to go down by the water, Tom. To our fire rock, and the cave. Can we do that?"

  "Sure, come on. We'll have a fire, too."

  We had met up on the headland above a craggy loop in the Sybille which nestled a postage stamp of a pine-shored lake. It was the home of loons and fish hawks and eagles, of the coyote brother and, in shadowed times, of the lobo wolf and even of Old Ephraim, the great silver-tipped bear. Hard on the shores of this tiny water, we called it Wolf Pond from an old near-white loafer we'd seen there one night, was the fire rock and the cave Glendolene spoke of. It lay above the lap and moon-twinkle of the lake, sheltered alike from wind and man, and it was there that we had "our place." Going down to it now, leaving our horses hid in a grassy swale of the crags, our minds was going back, hers as well as Tom Horn's, I knew, and our hands held tighter, for the way was steep, and we didn't say anything more all the way of the climb down.

  Once down, I made the fire. The wondrous smell of the new pine chunks taking flame in the old ashes rose to mix with the needle-scent of balsam and cedar. We sat side by side, backs braced on the warming rock of the cave's wall, watching out over the water. Under us was a bed of pine duff maybe hundreds of years in the gathering there. Back in the cave I knew, and had showed Glendolene, there was Indian markings, both painted in colors and drawed in lines. It could be that a thousand autumn nights before this one, Indians had lived here, maybe even one man and one woman of them climbed down to set as we was setting.

  I said something of it to Glendolene, and she had been thinking the same long-ago thoughts herself.

  "Tom," she said, "could we live like the Indians? If we do go on together, if we ever do, would it be possible, for a little while, at least, for you to take me with you, far, far into the wild country, and find the Indians again?"

  "I don't rightly know," I said, surprised at the turn of her mind and the stir of the question. "But, by God, it's an idea, Glennie. Maybe we could."

  I felt the tiny hand squeeze hard, holding mine.

  She leaned into me, the smell of her coming to me with the smoke and the rock and the pine smells.

  "Tom," she whispered, "let's do it."

  I laughed, sort of low, sort of chuckling, the feeling of the place and the soft small woman good within me. "I said maybe we would, Glennie. Or leastways maybe could."

  "No," she said quickly, "I mean tonight, Tom. Right now. There's time yet. They haven't caught you and, oh, Tom! I know they will try. They are trying!"

  "Do you know that?" I said. "That they are trying?"

  "Yes, I know it. I see it and hear it all the time."

  "Who is they, Glennie?"

  "All of them, all of these miserable people in this terrible country. They are going to hang somebody and they have let the Millers go
. That leaves you, Tom, don't you see that? Who else would it be?"

  "The one who shot Willie."

  "They don't care who shot Willie. They want to get Tom Horn. We know who shot the Nickell boy. The Nickells know who it was, too. Just as they know it was the Millers shot Kels and killed all those sheep. But that's changed, Tom. Now both Mary and Kels Nickell are saying you did it. They've gone completely around. The whole thing has changed. I don't hear any talk of the Millers now. It is all 'that damn Tom Horn.' "

  "Who you suppose is behind it?" I asked.

  "I don't know and can't find out. I can only tell you what I hear. Oh, please. I will go anywhere with you, Tom. Now, tonight, tomorrow at the very latest."

  "But I ain't guilty. Damn it to hell, don't nobody care about that?"

  "Nobody," Glendolene Kimmell said. "Not one."

  I couldn't believe it, but she told me things to anchor what she said of the tide shifting against Tom Horn.

  The Miller boys, Victor and Gus, had made much of my telling them how to shoot from the ridge at somebody coming through one-mile gate. Of how I had told them the right gun, the right caliber. How to get on and off the ridge without leaving tracks. How to be certain to pick up empty brass after the ambush. The whole stupid and dumb "advice" and "scouting hints" on man hunting that my simple mind had carried me away into giving those damned kids, both in the backyard tent and up on the ridge next day. It was like I had deliberate set a trap for my ownself. Then stepped square into it.

  All we were waiting for now was for it to go off.

  I thought of my original hunch, and then doubts, that Victor Miller had really done it. How could a kid have shot that good?

  Yet I thought, too, of my hunchy fear that day when we set up on the ridge looking down at one-mile gate, and how Victor kept asking me how I would lay my sights, how much to hold over for the long 300 yards distance, all of that nightmare stuff of how to kill anybody coming through that gate. And then how, inside my mind, it wasn't Victor Miller I saw laying up on that ridge to frame Willie Nickell in that pasture gate, but me, Tom Horn. And me who shot. And me who killed the boy. Christ Jesus, I was in a cold sweat all over again and told Glendolene to quit talking, that I had heard it all before and it didn't change nothing.

  Sure, maybe there was a lot of them wanted Tom Horn strung up. But, hell, that had been tried before. It didn't work then and wouldn't work now. Wasn't it all quiet now? Wasn't that because they had no real case against anybody, since they dropped the Millers?

  Why, hell, sure it was.

  Forget those Laramie and Albany County bastards. They hadn't, none of them, seen the day they could hang a guilty Tom Horn, let alone one that was innocent. Let all that be. It was running down now. In a few weeks or months it would all be a bad memory. Meanwhile, I was going to do some changing of my own to make a different life for me, and maybe for somebody with me. I surely would rather talk of that than of running away to live with the Indians.

  And what with the wind fallen still and the lake like a glass sheet out yonder, the fire died back to red coals, and Miss Glendolene Kimmell smelling so sweet of woman-smell and feeling so soft and close against a man, why, God, had we to talk of Indian hunts and Tom Horn's troubles to be run away from?

  Wasn't there something else to say?

  Something else to call back?

  It was quiet then and we held each other. We said gentle things, made long vows and tender promises, all the little-talking that goes with a man and woman loving in a natural way. It was good, and we both knew that it was and was grateful each to the other. For a fleeting while there on fire rock over Wolf Pond, we were again the western man and slant-eye lady. But then the moon went low, the ashes to blowing in the dawn wind, and the chill rose up off the lake. Glendolene and me parted like we had come. Climbing the crag footpath hand to hand, saying no word but understanding we wouldn't see our place again, nor ever find those Indians, nor raise those kids, nor travel on from there together.

  Miss Kimmell never really knew Tom Horn.

  She was bright and sweet and kind and full of a courage and love away too good for my lonesome, troublous breed of drifting man. She would fight for me to the mean, bitterweed end of it. She would know I didn't kill Willie Nickell, and she would know who she thought did and try, in face of the cruelest low and sneaking treatment, to so testify. God never made a braver nor better little lady. But He didn't make her for me or, putting the blame of it where it really rode, He never made my kind for Glendolene.

  When we topped out and stood panting atop Big Loop crags, above the sweep of the Sybille, I did my best to say it out and leave it straight with her.

  "Miss Kimmell, ma'am," I said, bowing to her with a lift to my voice that made it light when it wasn't, "I reckon you know, being a schoolteacher, and all, that I don't talk too good."

  "Oh, Tom!" she said. "Don't talk. Not now."

  "Got to, little slant-eye lady."

  "I know, I know."

  "I'll say it in a tongue I speak better, ma'am." I was still touching it with that playgame smile you use when it's damn serious but neither wants it so. But she wouldn't look up at me, and I reached and took her gentle by her both arms and kissed her on the forehead.

  "Hasta la vista, Glennie," I said to her, soft. "It means 'until we meet again.' "

  She raised those lovely, dark-deep eyes, at that.

  Nodding, she answered me just as soft.

  "Aloha, Tom Horn; it means the same thing."

  Glendolene's Letter

  I never saw Miss Kimmell, close enough to touch her or call out to, but once after the aloha on the Sybille crags. By then, things had altered so ugly and bewildering that I let her pass by. With her went the last, best chance I would have to leave Wyoming.

  But for the rest of that September I lived the life that the Lord had sent me west for. It was to be out on the open, unfenced land. Me and my horse tending our cattle, ranging pasture grass, camping with a fire every night, going free as the eagles that I saw nesting on the crags of the Sybille, running wild as the waters of the Chug, where she falls ten foot in a quarter mile, ah, God! A man that hasn't rode western cattle country by himself, out yonder neath that sky higher than the main Rocky Mountains, dry and sharp as champagne wine, grass smell in his nostrils, why, dear Jesus, he ain't drawed the breath of true life yet. He don't know what riding free is like. If he did, he would know, like Tom Horn knew in those dwindling precious days of his life, what price he would pay to stay where he was; to never give in or to go in on a charge that was false and would cage him away forever from the eagle and the morning wind.

  No man was going to close the bars on Tom Horn, and no law ever to make him say he killed a poor damned little fourteen-year-old kid by shooting him in the back from ambush. Christ Jesus. Not while Tom Horn could still ride on and find his own place to die, "out there," where he belonged.

  So went my September days, and soon.

  Early in October, it was learned Kels Nickell finally had got his fill. He healed good from his wounds but realized the next time he would not be so lucky. He was the oldest settler south of Iron Mountain, yet he sold out his place at a loss, moved his family into Cheyenne, and opened a steam laundry there. He said he was on the Nickell place twelve years. I don't know. He was there the whole time I was, beginning in '94.

  For another spell then nothing happened.

  The matter seemed more than ever to have wearied itself out. I commenced to think of that happier future.

  Then, on December 2, a doubtful letter addressed to Tom Horn came to the Wyoming Stock Growers Association, care of its secretary, Miss Alice Smith. It read:

  Madam,

  There is a gang of thieves in this neighborhood killing cattle and stealing horses and I want a good man to help me watch and catch them. Can you send me Tom Horn, or please send me his address for reference to my standing.

  Very respectfully,

  J. E.

  Esterbrook, W
yo.

  Miss Smith, a fine if sober-sided maiden lady, told me she answered the inquiry, thusly:

  Sir,

  In reply to yours of December 2, would say that we think a letter addressed or directed to Tom Horn at Bosler, Wyoming, in care of the Iron Mountain Ranch Co., will reach him. You of course understand that he is not in the employ of the Assn.

  Yours truly,

  Alice Smith, secty.

  I don't know why, but something was bothering me about that letter, and I never responded to it, or to Miss Smith. I was still pondering whether I ought to look up rancher J. E., of Esterbrook, when another letter came to me, and not through the association. I will not give it all here, for it is an embarrassment in a personal way. But had I heeded it and its devoted sender, all my life would have been different, and finer, than it was.

  "You must take heed of this warning, as your life is in serious threat," the letter claimed.

  "Joe LeFors has been at Millers and Nickells and every ranch in the vicinity. He makes no secret wherever he goes as to whom he thinks 'did the job' on Willie Nickell. He has turned your onetime friend Mary Nickell even more against you than I told you. He has done it by telling her that Tom Horn is the one who 'killed her little boy,' and saying she is 'not to worry about Horn getting away with it, as justice will be done and the guilty caught and hung.'

  "Tom," the letter concluded, wrought up, "be careful! LeFors is after you and has been from the beginning. He is the one I didn't know, to name, when I warned you the night at our place that somebody was stirring the country against you. LeFors is the one. You must believe me.

  "This man will never quit on your trail. He does not care that you are innocent or guilty. Tom, get away while you can. And for God's sake, Tom, and for mine who loves you, watch out meanwhile for Marshal Joe LeFors."