I, Tom Horn

by Will Henry

  Yes, surely, that had to be it.

  Push on, Pacer.

  Get to the top yonder; up there it will come clear.

  But when we came out on the top, it was not the ridge I knew, but a hill that didn't even belong in that country. I checked the tired bay, looking around. There was nothing of marker up there but the old lightening-rove stump due ahead. It was ringed with a grass that didn't grow on that range, and I got down off Pacer and said to him, "Ho-shuh, brother, be easy," as the Apaches gentled their wild ponies when they were spooking as Pacer was working up to do.

  I didn't blame the horse; there was a mound in the grass to the left of the stump, a grave sure.

  "Whoa up," I said to Pacer, louder now, and went forward. At the sound of my raised voice, there was a whine back of the stump and out from behind it limped a dog— an old farm shepherd dog—and, Christ Jesus, I knew him.

  It was Shed.

  Old Shed, my own dog from home.

  I whirled about, wanting to go for Pacer and ride far from there. But Pacer was gone. There was no sight of him. No place even where he had bent the grass that I might see and know he had stood there. I ran back a few steps past where I had left him. I could see down the hill from there.

  That bridge below—my God—it was Wyaconda Bridge. And that brushy stream with its trees that never knew this land —it was Wyaconda Creek.

  The fog moved in, closing my view.

  I turned back to old Shed. He was standing by the gnarled root stub. His ragged tail was making excited circles in the frosty air. It was clearing where he waited for me. The sun was breaking away the mists beyond him. And old Shed was barking at me, whining for me to come with him.

  He turned as to lead the way, going where we had always promised to go, to the other side of Stump Hill.

  I commenced to run, to stumble after him.

  "Wait up, Shed," I called. "Wait for me—"

  It was cold where I woke up.

  I was laying on a bunk, my face to a gray stone wall. There was days marked off on the wall, months of them, by a hand I knew. And there was an Old Overholt calendar on the wall, with only one date marked on it.

  It was November 20, 1903.

  I shut my eyes and swung my legs to the floor. I raised my head, turning to the light. I opened my eyes and saw the morning's sun, gray pink and chill as that of Calvary, fingering through the bars of the lone, small window in that wall of gray Wyoming stone.

  And it was my window:

  The one to my cell in Cheyenne Jail.

  • • • • •

  On the last morning in Cheyenne Jail Tom Horn ate a good breakfast. He then said to the jailer, "How much time do I have?"

  "Two hours," the man answered.

  "Good," the prisoner replied. "A man can tell a lot in that time."

  Horn then proceeded to write in his firm hand for the entire two hours remaining of his life.

  It has never been agreed what it was the doomed man wrote. What subject could so compel a man about to die that he would forego all other preparation in order to finish writing down something that would "tell a lot"? The question has baffled historians and legend buffs for seventy years. No answer has come forth. Some say none ever will.

  But wait up, as Tom would say:

  Could it be—could it just have been—that Tom Horn took those precious hours to complete the strange last segment of his testament, I, Tom Horn?

  Did this man of the unimaginable nerves have grit enough remaining to sit down and write out the details of his heretofore unreported "last plan" for breaking out of Cheyenne Jail on that eleventh-hour night of November 19th?

  And then include the nightmare ending of his next morning's awakening back in that terrible cell? That grim cage of "gray Wyoming stone?" That horror chamber with its single window looking out upon the "chill and pink gray" dawn? That dawn that "fingered through the bars" to light the gallows scaffolding that waited just beyond for him, Tom Horn, the last knight errant of the western cattle kings?

  Who is to say?

  Not the historians certainly.

  They only know what they read and they will never read this.

  Nor will they ever read what follows here:

  It is the scrap of paper bearing Tom Horn's writing found in his cell following the execution. It was left on his neatly made-up bunk, pinned there with a sliver of wood broken from a bunkpost split. It said nothing of his ghostly ride, nothing of the chill awakening from that freedom dream. It did not mention the dark crime for which he then died, did not repeat his pleas of innocence, said no farewell to his enemies, nor to old Wyoming.

  Yet perhaps it is his true last testament.

  This is all the scrap of paper said:

  Is there a warrior left who remembers me? A woman remaining who will weep to know that Talking Boy will bring his horse no more outside the jacal of her father? A single child, a sister, an old man to light one dark face with the candle of its smile thinking back to him the soldiers called Tom Horn? Yo no se, amigos. Montad en vuestros caballos. Ride out, ride out. . .

  Tom Horn

  in Cheyenne Jail

  Beyond the Ending

  Any history of a man who actually lived will come up short in its telling. Wherever the writer ends his story, he will have ridden over landmarks more significant than those he thought to include.

  In the case of Tom Horn, a man who spent his life avoiding the open, the leftover pieces multiply. The problem is again compounded when the writer must work from an original document much damaged by fire, smoke, and water.

  Entire parts of the Starrett holograph are thus rendered illegible. Other sections have been scribbled out by Horn. Or confusingly annotated by him in the margins. Or simply fail of their own content to make useful sense.

  The appended errata are therefore set down in the order of their occurrence as marginal notations. As such, they do not follow any catalog of time, place, or importance to the legend.

  The $11 Rifle; its strange pattern in the fate of Tom Horn: When Tom Horn met his end in Cheyenne Jail, he had exactly $11 in his pockets and to his name—the precise amount that storekeeper Jessup paid Tom for his rifle in the summer of 1874 to begin his Odyssey.

  Old Tags ending: Tagidado Morales, the natural father of Merijilda Grijole, ending his days happily, lived with Mary Cornmeal and, it is rumored, with Tom Horn's lovely Yaqui bride Nopal, and the infant Tomasito, down near Fronteras, Sonora. Old Tag is said to have lived to 104, and been the only grandfather Horn's son ever knew.

  Tom Horn's Indian son Sombra: Sweet Nopal named the baby "Shadow" after its white father's known inhabitation by the sombra or inner spirit shade. She and Mary Cornmeal called the boy Tomasito. A legend persists in Sonora that the boy grew up to be a renegade of the Sierra del Norte, a chieftain of the monte, with an outlaw price of fifty thousand pesos on his head. It was never collected. The story still remains to be told on Sombra Horn, the "shadow" of his famous sire.

  Pajarita Morena; what happened to the Santa Fe fallen sister: A nice ending has joined the folklore, relating that Pajarita lived out long and happy days as a part of the household of Old Tag and Mary Cornmeal, down in Fronteras. A less charming but some would feel better ending is still told in Tomcat Alley; Pajarita went to Prescott and joined Miss Pet in the opening and promotion of a "house to call their own." They forced Madame La Luna into early retirement, put their money into Prescott real estate, married well, and left many prominent grandchildren in old Arizona.

  "The Eye That Never Sleeps;" Tom Horn and the Pinkerton National Detective Agency: By his own grinning admission, Tom was never much of a man hunter in the traditional law enforcement sense. "Trouble was," he said, "when I would get the fellers cornered, maybe after six, eight weeks tracking and starving all over Colorado and half of Utah, like as not they was always old pals of mine and, hell, you can't take an old pal in." He detested routine detective work and in fact any work where he was not "riding free." Allan P
inkerton, famed Civil War head of U.S. intelligence and later of the detective firm bearing his name, said Horn was a first-rate man, "but inclined to disappear even better than the suspects we sent him after."

  Tom Horn, mule packer in Cuba: Sources here are whatever one wants them to be. All the way from claims that Tom was a lieutenant colonel in the Rough Riders to insisting he never even got on the boat for the big fight (the yellow fever got him at Tampa Bay). The truth seems to lie between; he did get to Cuba and himself takes credit for the idea to throw the mules overboard into the bay at Daiquiri, when the long-eared animals refused to debark normally. (Teddy Roosevelt also took credit for this stroke of military genius.) Horn was taken ill almost at once and did not see the front or any of the fighting in the war with Spain.

  Makeup of the Horn jury: The jurors were: O. V. Seeburn, rancher, Goshen Hole; Homer Payne, cowboy, Two Bar ranch; F. F. Sinon, foreman, White Ranch, Little Horse Creek; H. W. Thomas, rancher, La Grange; T. R. Babbit, rancher, La Grange; Amos Sarbaugh, foreman, Two Bar ranch; J. E. Barnes, butcher, Cheyenne; G. W. Whiteman, rancher, Uva; Charles Stamm, rancher, Wheatland Flats; C. H. Tolson, porter, Cheyenne; H. W. Yoder, rancher, Goshen Hole; E. C. Metcalf, Wheatland. This is the jury Tom said contained "several men I have arrested and seen jailed for cattle stealing." He does not name the men but the addresses cover some of the hottest spots of Wyoming rustling of the day.

  Death weapon for Little Brother Miller: Jay Monoghan, biographer par exaggeration of Tom Horn, says the young Miller boy was killed by a shotgun leaning on a buggy dashboard. The weapon slid on a bump and discharged, striking the boy. Horn and other sources say it was a rifle being cleaned in the Miller kitchen. It is a safe argument. Who is going to prove it either way?

  The eerie song of Tom Horn's harmonica: No modern source mentions the mouth organ in context with Horn. But old settlers of the Sybille and the Chugwater insist they heard it back in the hills on those nights whose following dawns found some new "good rustler" lying eyeballs-up and the small rock under the head, tried by the system that never failed. The tune, the oldtimers said, was "a eerie sort of off-the-key rendering of "Streets of Laredo."

  Truth of the "pebble under the head" legend: Horn denied the story consistently, pointing out that "any cheap crook wanted to kill somebody for his own reason had only to chunk a rock under his head and holler 'Tom Horn done it.' The last thing any professional killer would want," Horn added, "was to 'advertise' his work."

  Too many queens in Brown's Hole: The woman Tom Horn calls Queen Zenobia is none other, authorities insist, than Josephine Bassett's fiery redheaded sister Anne Bassett, the later-known "rustler queen" of northwest Colorado. There is also confusion on which of the Bassett sisters was betrothed to Madison "Matt" Rash. Tom Horn (as Jim Hicks) enters it as Anne Bassett. The honorable John Burroughs agrees with him but gives Anne Bassett as both the sweetheart of Matt Rash and the legendary Queen Zenobia of the Brown's Hole basin.

  Newsclippings and quotations from same, by Horn in Cheyenne Jail: Some followers of the legend do not like the idea that Tom, in his second life story (I, Tom Horn) enters exact quotes from press sources, as though, these detractors sniff, "he had actually cut them out and saved them for the purpose." To which charge it is only proper to sniff right back—"Right; he seemed to have done precisely that." Horn was also quite accurate in his press entries, a fact some of the detractors might employ in their own writings to substantial benefit.

  The mystery of lawyer Rowells: Proof is lacking but the legend keepers insist that young attorney A. W. Rowells is that same "attorney of record for the defense, who dares not enter his name in witness," who prepared the transcript of the Tom Horn holograph found in Charley Starrett's cabin. The assumption would seem mandatory. Who else had access to Horn in Cheyenne Jail, who was also an attorney-at-law? But there is a double-back in this trail: no A. W. Rowells is to be found in either Laramie or Albany County records, and Horn trackers must then agree that Tom changed the name in his I, Tom Horn testament in order that "young lawyer Rowells" would be protected.

  Even stranger matter and mystery; how the final "nightmare installment" of the Tom Horn testament was gotten out of Cheyenne Jail: True buffs of Horniana take two trails here.

  One is that Sheriff Ed Smalley himself took this trust from his prisoner. Both men had come to respect one another, and Smalley was known to be an emotional man. However, the second method is given the more common credence; a Catholic priest did visit Tom in the last hours "as a friend from the better times," and it is this, the real-life "Father Kennedy," whom the Horn buffs believe smuggled out the bizarre 'last chapter" of Tom Horn's life.

  Who "truly" killed little Willie Nickell; the altered Glendolene Kimmell accusation; perjury or passion-under-oath: No corroborative evidence was ever introduced to support Miss Kimmell's sensational charge against Victor Miller. Some believed the schoolmarm's "swap of saddles," story, more did not. Perhaps the best verdict was the one ascribed to Tom Horn himself. When pressed by newsmen for his "final view" of young Miller's guilt, Horn is said to have answered, "No, the boy is all right. They'd ought to have stuck to their original person or persons unknowed.' That was the surest facts of it. Way it is now, they've fixed it so's it will never be found who truly killed the Willie Nickell kid."

  Erratum of Horn's "no visitors after the jail break" statement: It must be assumed here that Tom meant he was allowed no visitors without full surveillance after the break. It is certain he did have visitors right up to the end, John Coble prominent among them. The romantic and kindly Iron Mountain ranchman was indeed Tom Horn's last visitor—last but for that other caller no man remembers, or bids to come in.

  John Coble at the end; the incredible calm of Tom Horn; their famous brief good-bye: No man, guilty or innocent, ever faced death with the resolute courage of Tom Horn. Those who believed him then, and believe him now, contend that no human being who was guilty could have kept that gentle composure and surely must have broken. "I am innocent," Tom Horn said. And that was all he said, save for those famed quiet words to Coble; words that have lived on to be remembered long after the cries and curses of those who hated Tom Horn, and finally killed him:

  "Keep your nerve, Johnny, for I will keep mine. You know Tom Horn."

  Ad notum; a last word from the Pinkertons; Tom Horn innocent! In a letter written shortly after Tom Horn's death, Robert Pinkerton, son of the detective firm's founder, expressed regrets that the Pinkertons had not "looked more closely into the Tom Horn case," as subsequent information left the strong impression with him that "Horn might have been innocent." One is left to ponder grimly how different history could have been, had the Pinkertons examined more rigorously into the Tom Horn evidence. The question continues to cast its uneasy shadow on the western past. In the seventy-one years since the trial, no satisfactory answer for it has been found.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Will Henry was born and grew up in Missouri, where he attended Kansas City Junior College. Upon leaving school, he lived and worked throughout the Western states, acquiring the background of personal experience reflected later in the realism of his books. Currently residing in California, he writes for motion pictures and television, as well as continuing his research into frontier lore and legend, which are the basis for his unique blend of history and fiction. Four of his novels have been purchased for motion picture production, and several have won top literary awards, including the Wrangler trophy of the National Cowboy Hall of Fame, the first Levi Strauss Saddleman Award and five Western Writers of America Spur awards. Mr. Henry's most recent books include: From Where the Sun Now Stands, The Fourth Horseman, The Bear Paw Horses and Chiricahua. I, Tom Horn is his most important work to date.

 

 

 
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