I, Tom Horn

by Will Henry

  In it with me was a horse thief name of Driftwood Jim Macleod, or McCloud. I just called him Jim. He was a bad lot but had hard nerves. Or so I thought. Our plan was desperate but had a real chance. Most real, maybe, because likely—for Tom Horn—it would be the last chance.

  Deputy R. A. "Dick" Proctor was six feet and seven inches tall, slow in mind, strong as a Hereford bull. And he was the nightwatch man, still on duty till ten a.m. As such, he would bring Jim's stomach pain "medicine" to our cell if it was needed before he went off duty.

  It was.

  Jim called him, in fearful pain, and good old Proctor shuffled up and unlocked our door, and when he did we both of us hit it like two bronks coming out of the same chute.

  Dick Proctor knocked us both down in one circling sweep of his arms. He got aholdt of McCloud and hoisted him over his head like a kid and throwed him over the second-floor railing to the first floor down below. In the time it took him to do this, I had got up and tackled Proctor from behind. God lent a hand to me. We rolled under the rail and crashed down to follow McCloud, and Jim pitched in to help with Proctor who was using me up fast. I went crazy. I got Dick by the throat and bore down to choke the life from him. I felt him slow under me and get weak. "Jim!" I yelled to McCloud. "I got him. Go and get us some guns for Christ's sake!"

  Driftwood Jim staggered up to run for Smalley's office and the guns. The minute he left off holding Proctor with me, Dick heaved up under me like a volcano. He had been acting out to grow weak, and now he had me by my throat and I wasn't acting; my life was blurring out.

  But again God sided me.

  With a last wrench of strength I smashed Proctor's head into the stone floor of the jail. It groggied him enough that Jim McCloud and me could get his hands tied behind him with sash cord from the exercise aisle window. Next minute we were in the sheriff's office for the guns.

  But damn!

  The Winchesters and sawed-offs were all locked in a cabinet behind Smalley's desk. It had a safe-lock on it and no way we could bust into it. As Proctor was coming to again, McCloud found a loaded Winchester on top a file chest. He jammed it in Proctor's belly, and we told him to open the gun closet or get his innards splattered. We had to untie him to let him work the lock. I said to McCloud, "Jim, hold the rifle on him, I got to check outside."

  I ran to the window and could see the jail steps to Ferguson Street. Nobody was out there except the man I hated most in all Cheyenne, Deputy Les Snow. "Jim," I called over my shoulder, "she is all clear. Nobody outside but Les Snow. He's on the steps taking the sun and also a few bows for getting Tom Horn."

  I didn't hear any answer from McCloud but rather a scuffling behind me. I whirled in time to see that Dick Proctor had got the Winchester away from McCloud. There was no move for me but to go for the deputy. I run in a crouched weave and Proctor got off two shots at me, and then I was on him and had the gun by the barrel. Jim had sense enough remaining to dive at the backs of big Dick's knees and collapse him for me. In falling, the deputy let go of the Winchester. I clubbed it and hit him a fearful blow acrost his shoulder and the side of his head. He uttered a groan and shrunk in a heap.

  In that instant both me and Jim McCloud stood stockstill. There was no sound of Snow coming. Incredible luck there. He had not heard the shots fired by Proctor because of the calliope out to the rodeo grounds just then starting up to play "Meet Me in Saint Louie, Louie!"

  "God, Jim," I panted. "We're going to make it!"

  But I didn't know Jim McCloud.

  No thought of me, he at once broke for the outside door. It was opened from the street side just as he got to it, and there stood Les Snow. More luck, but mean and rotten this time. Snow still hadn't heard nothing, but was only coming in to maybe bum a smoke off Dick Proctor, or something. Seeing McCloud, the deputy jumped out of the doorway and run along the outside of the building to escape. McCloud, the way open for him, bolted out the door and was gone.

  "Jim—!" I yelled, but the yell was cut off from behind. Proctor had got up again—unbelievable!—and was on me without warning. And he had a gun from somewhere!

  Now I knew it was me or Proctor or death for one.

  My life lay out that same door the coward Driftwood Jim McCloud had just vanished through.

  I have to say it once more, the Lord lent Tom Horn the strength of ten. I reckon He figured me for a man with a just cause. He could see it where those cow thieves on the hanging jury couldn't. I managed once again to get a choke-hold on the huge Dick Proctor and smother off his breath. He was turning lavender color when I let up on him this time. I heard the automatic pistol he had pulled from some hiding place thunk onto the floor from his slack hand. This is what saved Proctor's life. Else than that, I'd have killed him sure.

  Grabbing up the pistol, I jammed it in my pants top and ran. There wasn't no other thing to do; it is a black lie that I panicked or lost my nerve. I still saw that open door of Cheyenne Jail. I still saw the unconscious Proctor helpless and disarmed. And I still saw me and Jim making it away. Reason for this was that out the open jail door I could see two things, as I got hold of the newfangled automatic of Proctor's and rolled up onto my feet from the fight with him. First, there wasn't yet any commotion on the street. Ferguson was still Sunday morning empty. Second, God bless him and forgive me for calling him a coward, Jim McCloud hadn't forgot me!

  Our plan called for us to get to the small barn back of the jail where Sheriff Ed Smalley kept his fine saddle horse. It was a big strapping dun, and Ed kept him saddled as a duty horse. We was to get the horse and go on him doublemounted just over the U.P. yards where our friends on the outside was to have four prime horses for us to change to. That was a relay of two apiece. And we was to split and ride opposite directions from there.

  And now yonder came old Jim around the jailhouse corner riding the sheriff's big dun saddler hell-bent for salvation down Ferguson toward the front of Cheyenne Jail to pick up Tom Horn. I said something to God for the first time in long years' memory and sprinted down the jail-house steps and out into the street for Jim to make the old rodeo pickup of his pal. It wasn't nothing to it as a stunt, and we would make it clean as bright light down a new gun barrel. All Jim needed to do was slow the big horse for about ten yards, and Tom Horn would be up behind Jim McCloud like a cougar on a lame calf.

  I hit the middle of Ferguson and turned to my left to be going the same way as the approaching horse and rider. As I did, I noted out of eye-corner that people were now running up from all directions, but no firing yet, and I knew me and Jim would be free and riding far before ever any crowd could get itself thinking straight.

  In the last strides, I turned head over shoulder to time my grab of the dun horse's saddle skirt going by.

  What I saw was McCloud on top of me with the dun horse flying. I hollered, "Slow, for God's sake, Jim!" but instead he cursed something at me for barring his way, swerved the dun wide of me, dug his heels into him, and left me with heel-clods flying back into my face.

  And now the people were clotting up, all sides of me.

  I heard a shot, then several shots. Two, three bullets hit building walls near me and screamed off in wild whines. I ducked and ran for the alley back of the courthouse. At the corner of it, a big son of a bitch on a red mule tried to block me off. I snapped a shot at him, but the auto pistol only clicked, and the trigger went soft. It wasn't a misfire. It was that the damn gun was "on safe," and I didn't know how the "safe" on it worked. Winchesters and Colts don't have such flossy gadgets as safeties on them, by God, and it would be a long spell before Tom Horn ever went to anything else than a gun by Sam Colt or Oliver Winchester again in that life.

  But the man on the mule saw only that I was "shooting" at him from close range, and he whipped his mule out of there. I got on down the alley, but my sombra was running with me now, dead even. It had finally caught up to me.

  And it was saying, too late! too late!

  I stretched to run faster, not listening to it
; I put in my mind only the last thing it had told me before the darkness of the alley behind Cheyenne Jail. For me, my shadow-spirit was still crying, ride out! ride out—! and I would hear nothing else from it, then or ever.

  I was hearing things from elsewhere though!

  People yelling. Horses galloping. Church bells tolling like crazy all over Cheyenne. Shots firing everywhere. Ricochets screeching. Women high-pitching their yells at kids getting away from them to go "run Tom Horn."

  Jesus, Christ Jesus! call me the right turn now!

  The alley wasn't a blind one, I knew that. It made a T with a side street off Ferguson up ahead, and it had to be either left or right up there, for Tom Horn.

  "Sombra!" I yelled out loud, a little dazed. "Which-away, whichaway, yonder?" I thought to hear it answer me, in Mexican, "Izquierda!" and I veered in full stride to cut to the left, away from Ferguson Street.

  I made the turn and there in my way was a man I knew from the carnival. It was O. A. Aldrich, the fat man who ran the merry-go-round. He was the only one in the way. Past him I could see open space, then the U.P. yards. God, oh God! If my pals were holding steady over there, those relay horses were two, three minutes of sprinting on foot from where I panted toward the carny man.

  "O. A.!" I cried out to him, "let me past for God's sake. It's Tom Horn! You know I'm innocent—"

  But O. A. Aldrich had a gun.

  And a gun in any man's hand makes that man a different man. "Damn you, Horn!" I heard the fat man say, and he fired right into my face. The bullet plowed a furrow in my skin over the skull, knocking me to my knees in the dirt and dung of the side street. I staggered up, turning to try the other way, out toward Ferguson. I was spared vision just long enough to see the way was clear there. Had I gone to the right, I would be running free. The thought twisted in me and, of a sudden, my knees began to shake and go to water. O. A. Aldrich came up to me as I pitched down into the dirt again. I fought back to my knees, looking up to find that fat face in my blurring sight. All I could see was the gun he had. It was held by the barrel and the butt was whistling down toward my bleeding head. The ugly sound its steel backstrap made going into the meat of my skull was the last sound I remember. After that it was still as the grave.

  I slept peaceful as a dead calf.

  Barabbas's Visitor

  It was now stark clear to me that they were going to hang me. For weeks following the big break, my regular lawyers tried every legal delay to hold off the supreme court ruling on our appeal. But on October 1 the high court handed down their opinion, "verdict of the lower court affirmed." Tom Horn was guilty of the minder of Willie Nickell. His execution date was affixed at November 20, 1903. For the first time, I knew what it felt like for a man to realize he was going to die.

  It shook me for thirty days.

  Then, I understood that at last it was me against them all. Even the strange man A. W. Rowells was helpless to do more for Tom Horn. This was on November 1. At once, I left off the writing of desperate letters of appeal. I kept penning just enough of such notes as to keep authorities and my own defense from smelling out that I was once again—one last time—up to something.

  Since the breakout, I had been denied regular visitors, only my attorneys of record and certain newspaper reporters were allowed in my cell. Even these, for the greater part, had to work outside in the block aisle, speaking twixt the bars. In fact, the sole one to make a problem over it was A. W. Rowells. He went to the high court and somehow got a writ to make Ed Smalley admit him, Rowells, to the "very cell of the prisoner, Tom Horn, for purposes of proper conduct of legal rights of the condemned." So lawyer Rowells could come in the cell and, by damn, nobody else. That narrowed my life to him.

  If this gangly, homely, cow country lawyer who nobody knew nor cared about, except to get riled at, would not "aid and abet" his doomed client, I would hang.

  I asked three things of him.

  One: Would he carry out of the jail for me certain messages to certain people, the content of which lawyer Rowells would remain ignorant (hence innocent) of?

  Two: The execution date standing, could he visit me the night of the last day before November 20—the early evening of November 19—bringing his briefcase full of innocent things that would pass jail inspection and could be left in my cell, having thus an empty case to refill for his exit with certain documentary material given him as The Last Will & Testament of Tom Horn?

  Three: Would he arrange for a Catholic priest to visit Tom Horn without fail that same evening, after he, lawyer Rowells had been gone one hour. The priest to be told by Rowells to tell Sheriff Smalley I had requested a father of the true faith. And Rowells then to select a padre as near as could be of a size and heft to Tom Horn? (I did not care for little priests, nor fat ones.)

  A. W. Rowels had three questions of his own.

  A: Did I think him fool enough to enter into any such conspiracy?

  B: Did I know the penalty for being accessory to the unlawful flight of a condemned murderer?

  C: What time, exactly, did I want him there at my cell the early evening of November 19, the last day before they were to hang me by the neck, until dead?

  I just looked at him a long moment, then took his bony right hand in both of mine.

  "Lawyer," I said to him, "before you come to Wyoming did you ever practice law in Galilee, or Golgotha?"

  I knew my Bible from my mother beating it into me, but A. W. Rowells just looked steady at me and said, "No, why?"

  "I believe you should have," I told him. "You'd have surely tried to get Him off, and likely done so."

  The keen young face with the old eyes in it peered at me. There was a faint smile on it, and his barky voice went soft. "More likely," he said, "I'd have represented Barabbas. And lost the case."

  He went out of my cell never looking back, and I did not know in that moment if he had said yes or no to my plea for one more chance at life.

  I only knew he'd said he would be there the evening of November 19, and then one more thing:

  I knew who Barabbas was.

  He was a murderer.

  The one that Pontius Pilate gave to the crowd the day they crucified Jesus.

  God's Padre

  What I tell of those closing days may seem to be bare and simple. It was by no means that. The rush and crush of lawyers and reporters and law officers all in and about Cheyenne Jail was like an asylum. It made a man think he had lost his head and that everybody on all sides of him was doing the same. It was a madhouse.

  But things like all the major papers—from New York, Chicago, Kansas City, Saint Louis, Denver, everywhere that counted—having reporters in Cheyenne, well, that didn't interest me. Neither did such things as Sheriff Smalley ordering a Gatling machine gun mounted atop the jail to keep off a suspected "power break" at the last minute by "desperate friends of Horn." Not even when it was announced that those desperate friends were none other than Butch Cassidy and his Wild Bunch! What bosh. But I kept my head. It didn't even sidetrack me from my secret breakout planning to learn that Ed Smalley had got Governor Chatterton to order out the state guard and had stationed the militia boys up and down Ferguson Street. Smalley likewise had deputized local men posted at every one of the jail windows with shotguns and orders to shoot to kill. Inside the building itself, Ed Smalley told me he had up to a hundred men, changing shifts every four hours. Outside in the street, no matter the mean November weather, it was like the carnival had never left town. That did get into my innards, but none of the rest of it did. I was too busy with my breakout, going over and over the plan in my mind to have it all perfect on the night of the nineteenth. So the time drew down.

  The day of the nineteenth, my last day that I would see a sunset on this earth—unless my wild plan worked—came on dark and cloudy, with a northwest wind.

  Good.

  Such a wind would blow and drift snow to fill the trackline of a horse and rider in no more than minutes of their passing. And with the clouds so
low, the dark would come early, and the night to follow would be as black and blind as a bat cave. By morning of the day they were going to kill me, I would be fifty miles away and as lost to Wyoming as the icy wind that blew me home toward Arizona. No pursuit could find the way I went, no posse ever catch me. Only the Apache would know where Tom Horn had gone, where Talking Boy had flown to find sweet Nopal and little Sombra. And the Apache did not live who would sell his brother to the Pinda Lickoyi, betray him to the hated White Eyes.

  Those hours of the day that I now must wait in Cheyenne Jail were passed in doing the things I had done since they locked me in that mustering old juzgado del norte. I did some of my famous horsehair braiding on a hackamore for Johnny Coble, the work I had learned from Chikisin and Sister Sawn, that one of the reporters called "more jewelry than harness." I wrote at letters for last friends. I got together a little pile of personal things to go to Coble, chief of which was the manuscript, pencil-wrote, of my life up to the time I come to Wyoming. And it was this stack of my papers that figured vital in the first step of my plan. It was writing them and having them out and obvious in my cell all these last ten months of my time that I was gambling on to cover up what I would put in lawyer A. W. Rowells's empty hand-case in place of the Coble manuscript, when Rowells left me for the last time. This was my secret:

  For the past three of those ten months of writing my "memories," I had not been writing the Coble manuscript, at all. I had been putting down this story that you read here and keeping it separate and secret inside a slit in my bunk's mattress. It was my last will and testament to the truth. The only chance that Tom Horn would ever have to undo the evil lies which otherwise would live forever after him.

  It was the story of my Wyoming days; I had told Rowells of it, and he had agreed that any man ought to have the opportunity to have his side heard and testified to. If he could, he would take it out of my cell that night and see that it was one day printed and published. Or at the very least placed in some safe hands where it would live on and come to light another day and time, to speak for me.