Michener, James A.

by Texas

  While he stood guard, Macnab hurried to the basement of the courthouse, where he brought forth his original three dozen prisoners. Marching them with his revolvers drawn, he drove them to the snortin' pole, where Gonzaullas bound them to the chains.

  When the pole was surrounded by milling outlaws, he issued his orders: 'Think things over till four this afternoon. Then we'll reach decisions.'

  As they sweated in the blazing sun, one of the men who had been drinking beer whimpered: i have to go to the toilet,' and Lone Wolf said: 'No one's stopping you,' and it was this humiliation which broke the spirit of these culprits.

  At four, Gonzaullas revealed his plan. 'If you men are out oi town by sunset, no further trouble. If you're in town after dark, beware. Ranger Macnab, start releasing them.' And as the handcuffs were unlocked and the ropes loosened, the prisoners started making plans to flee.

  When the field was fairly well cleared, Lone Wolf addressed the citizens: 'People of Larkin, it's all over.' Turning on his heel, pearl-handled revolvers riding on his hips, he went to his horse, signaled Macnab, and rode back to town, where he wanted to meei with Floyd Rusk.

  When the two Rangers sat in Floyd's kitchen with him, reviewing the case against Dewey Kimbro, Gonzaullas did the questioning: 'In the period when the Tumlinson twins and Boatright were murdered, how many other men were shot in this town?'

  'About nine.'

  'What makes you think their case was something special?'

  'The others were drifters . . . no-goods.'

  This impressed Gonzaullus, and he spent two days interrogating townspeople, especially Nora and Esther, whom he met together 'You say, Nora, that you and Jake were tarred and feathered anc later he was shot?'

  'Yes.'

  'Do you know who did it?'

  'I can guess.'

  'And you, Miss Esther, you saw your man Kimbro horsewhipped 7 Did you know who did it?'

  'I heard names.'

  'What names?'

  'Lew Tumlinson.'

  'Who else?'

  'His brother Les.'

  'Anybody else?'

  'Ed Boatright.'

  'And all three are dead?'

  'They deserved to be.'

  'Did Kimbro know those names?'

  'He told me to remember them. After they let him go.' She hesitated, suspecting that she was doing her man no good by these admissions: 'He was all cut up, you know. His back . . .'

  'Do you think he shot those three men? Getting even?'

  i'm glad somebody did. They came back, you know, and threatened to whip me, too, if I stayed around.'

  'Why did you stay?'

  'Dewey made a deal with Mr. Rusk. Me stayin' was part of the deal, Dewey said.'

  'But if Dewey, as you call him, if he's Mr. Rusk's partner, he must've made a lot of money. Why does he still live in a house like this? Why do you live here?'

  'We live simple.'

  It was clear to Gonzaullas and Macnab that Dewey Kimbro had

  probably shot his three assailants, but there could never be any

  c proof, so one morning when the town was pretty well subdued, and

  c permanently, Lone Wolf suggested to Macnab: 'I think we better

  deal with the principals,' and they summoned Kimbro to Rusk's

  1 kitchen.

  In ice-cold terms they spelled out the situation, with Macnab ■ c doing the talking, since although Gonzaullus was eight years senior, he was the man officially in charge: 'Rusk, you led the posse that night on your partner Kimbro. Kimbro, we know that you learned the names of the men who flogged you, and we have very solid reasons to suspect that you shot those men, one by one, in $ revenge. But we can't prove it.

  'We know something else. If you, Kimbro, have killed three

  » men, so have you, Mr. Rusk, two in Dodge City and Paul Yeager

  at his ranch gate. And Ranger Gonzaullus and I have had to kill

  men in our day, in line of duty. So all of us in this room are equal, in a manner of speaking. Ranger Gonzaullus, will you tell them what we recommend?'

  'It's simple. The flogging happened a long time ago. If you forget it, we'll forget it. You've been partners for some time now, good partners we're told, reliable. Now, Mr. Rusk, you told us that you were afraid you were going to be shot, by Mr. Kimbro, of course, although you didn't say so in your letter to the governor. I have a surprise for you, Mr. Rusk. Did you know that Mr. Kimbro told us he was afraid you were going to shoot him? To get his share of the partnership, the way you got Yeager's land? And we think he had good reason to be afraid.'

  Rusk looked at his partner in dismay: 'Dewey, my God, I'd never shoot you.'

  'So here it is,' Lone Wolf said, hands on the table. 'You two are partners, for better or worse, like they say at the wedding. Make the best of it, because when we leave, if we hear that either of you has been shot, we're comin' back to swear out a warrant for the survivor.'

  'No court in the land—' Rusk began, but Gonzaullus cut him short: 'Tell him, Macnab.'

  'It won't go to court. Because you will be shot, by him or me, resisting arrest.'

  In this rough-and-ready way the oil town of Larkin, after eighteen months of flaming hell, was cleaned up. It was a Texas solution to a Texas problem, and it worked.

  The little town of Larkin, population reduced to a sane 3,673, now boasted seven millionaires: the richest was Floyd Rusk, whose fortune from his main wells and leases was becoming immense; he was followed by his partner, Dewey Kimbro, who shared in some of Rusk's wells and owned others outright. The Larkin Field was proving out as shrewd Kimbro had predicted, a large, shallow field with an apparently unlimited supply of oil that seemed to dribble out of the ground, not gush. No single well was now producing much over a hundred barrels a day, but 100 barrels X 365 days X 40 wells meant a lot of oil.

  Some of the new millionaires spent their money conspicuously, and Dewey often spoke of one who had never fully appreciated the intricacies of the oil game: 'When I went to talk him into leasing us his land, I offered him the standard one-eighth royalty, but he said: "I know you city slickers. I want one-tenth," so after considerable pressure I surrendered. Sometime later he came to me, all infuriated: "You dirty scoundrel, you cheated me." I said: "Hold

  on a minute. You set the royalty, not me," and he said: "I know that. But Gulf offered me one-twelfth."

  Rusk and Kimbro built no big houses and bought no extra cars, but they did almost desperately long for some way to express their wealth, and it was in this uneasy mood that they discovered football; not Texas A&M football or University of Texas football, but Larkin High School football, and in those years, once an oilman or a well-to-do rancher became alerted to the grandeur of Texas high school football, he was lost, for he developed a mania which lasted forever, growing each year more virulent.

  It started because such men worked hard all week—Dewey Kimbro never ceased looking for oil—and longed for some vigorous relaxation on the weekends. There was hunting, and fishing, and breeding cattle and breaking horses, but in tune these palled, and it was then that these men plunged into the Friday afternoon madness.

  In those days Texas had no worthy professional football teams, or basketball, either, and good baseball teams played far to the north in St. Louis. Even the universities were far to the east, but there was always the local high school football team, and in time its partisans became as madly concerned with its fortunes as men elsewhere became involved emotionally with the New York Yankees or the Detroit Tigers. Competing area teams, like Wichita Falls, Jacksboro, Abilene and Breckenridge, became monsters who had to be subdued, fair means or foul, and the glorious days of autumn in Texas became heroic.

  The mania started casually, with Rusk and Kimbro attending a Friday game in which Larkin's small high school was playing Jacksboro, which had a slightly larger student body. It was a good game, nothing special, with scattered scoring in the first half and Larkin holding on to a 19-14 lead as the game drew to a close Jacksbor
o had the ball and it looked as if they might score, for they had mounted a determined drive down the field, but as the seconds ticked away, both Rusk and Kimbro started shouting: 'Hold that line! Get them!' and the roar of the little hometown crowd must have taken effect, for the Larkin men—average age sixteen—did muster courage from somewhere and they did hold.

  It was fourth down and nine, twenty seconds to go, with the crowd roaring encouragement, when the Jacksboro coach signaled his captain to call for time-out. Always alert in such situations, Rusk noticed that the coach was wigwagging frantically from the lines, and he whispered to Kimbro: 'I don't like this. Something's up.'

  It was a play which would be discussed for years on the oil fields,

  because just before the whistle blew to resume, Jacksboro made a last-second substitution. A tall end was taken out of the game, and a much shorter boy was inserted, a fact which caused Rusk to tell Kimbro: 'Now that's crazy. They have to pass. You'd think they'd keep the tall fellow in there.'

  However, the tall end did not quite come off the field. With the attention of the Larkin team and most of the spectators focused on the kneeling linemen as they prepared for the last play, Rusk saw to his horror that the tall end had not left the field. He had run purposefully to the sidelines but had stopped one foot from the chalk, remaining legally in bounds. At that moment, on the far side, another player calmly stepped off the field, leaving the required eleven players eligible for the final play.

  Rusk was one of few who saw the evil thing the Jacksboro coach was doing, and he began punching his seatmate in the arm and screaming Tick him up,' and Dewey bellowed 'Hey, he's eligible!' But no one could hear the two oilmen, and when the ball was snapped, the jacksboro quarterback coolly dropped back and lofted the ball easily across the field to his tall end, who caught it and ran untouched into the end zone: final score, Jacksboro 20, Larkin 19.

  Rusk and Kimbro went berserk. Roaring out of the stands, they shouted that someone ought to shoot any sumbitch who would pull such a trick. They wanted the referee banned for life. And they shouted loudly that never again should a team from Jacksboro be allowed on that field. When Kimbro finally cooled Rusk down they sought some other oil-field men, with the proposition: 'Let's waylay their bus before it gets out of town and give that coach a thrashing,' and they went in search of it, but the Jacksboro team, fearing just such action, had scuttled out before sunset.

  In the angered days that followed, Rusk gave orders that no employee of his should ever purchase anything, no matter how small, from any outfit in Jacksboro, and when he was forced to go there on business, he spat on the sidewalks when no one was looking.

  Of course, when Wichita Falls came down and administered a 31-7 drubbing, he gave the same orders about that infamous town, charging it with having brought in ringers who had never set foot in a Wichita Falls classroom, and Kimbro joined him in condemnation. In their new-found hatred for Jacksboro and Wichita Falls, the two former adversaries buried their suspicions of each other.

  It was Dewey who had the bright idea: 'Floyd, if Wichita Falls hires outsiders, why can't we?' Assembling the Larkin millionaires, they proposed that 'we do something to restore the honor of this town," and Rusk threw himself into this project with all the energy

  he had once given to the Ku Klux Klan. He and his men gave the coach, a mild-mannered fellow, a hundred dollars a month in cash to spend as he deemed best. Rusk himself built a dressing room at the edge of the field so that, as he was fond of saying, 'Larkin can go first class.' The oilmen scouted the region for big, tough boys and moved their families into Larkin so that the lads could play on the local team, and when the next autumn came around, it was obvious that Larkin High had a fighting chance to become a football power.

  One morning, when Rusk delivered his mother's royalty check to her—more money than she and Earnshaw had spent in a dozen years—he found her playing with his son Ransom, a big-boned child, and he cried impulsively: 'Damn, I wish he was old enough to play for Larkin!' Catching the boy and throwing him high in

  the air, he caught him and started running through the room like a halfback. Dropping the child back in his crib, he shook his finger

  ■■ at him: 'Son, you're gonna see real greatness in this town. And maybe you'll even be on the team yourself, some day.'

  He then turned his attention to the serious problem of finding an appropriate name for what he now called 'my team,' and he found that the desirable names had been preempted: Lions, Tigers, Bears, Bearcats, Panthers, Pirates, Rebels, Gunslingers, Hawks. Any animal whose behavior was terrifying had been used, any role requiring violent or even murderous deportment had been adopted by some small school in the area. One town famous for its hunting called its team the Turkeys, an unfortunate name, but Larkin did little better. By a process of painful elimination it came up with the name of a beast once common in those parts, the antelope, and when this was reluctantly adopted, a more difficult problem arose, because every Texas team had to be the Fighting This or That: the Fighting Tigers, the Fighting Buffalo, the Fighting Wildcats. So it had to be the Fighting Antelopes, even though, as Rusk said: 'There's no man in Texas ever saw an antelope fight anything.'

  Under their new leadership, and with a level of support from the oilmen that they had never known before, Larkin's Fighting Antelopes had an autumn of glory, up to a point. The team played nine regular games, and won them all. As Rusk boasted at the morning breakfasts in the cafe: 'We really crucified Jacksboro, thirty-seven to six.' They manhandled Breckenridge, too, 41-3,

  : and they even took much bigger Wichita Falls to the cleaners, 24-7. When they won the regional championship in a tight game

  I against Abilene, 9-7, it became clear to Rusk and his associates that 'our team can go all the way,' and the heady prospect of a state championship began to be discussed seriously.

  'By God, if we can win our next game/ Rusk bellowed in the cafe, 'we'll get a crack at Waco,' but his enthusiasm for such a game distressed the coach of the Fighting Antelopes, for he knew the facts, which he tried to explain to Rusk and Kimbro: 'We've played some good teams, yes. But Waco, they're much different.'

  'Are you chicken?' Rusk demanded, and the coach surprised him by saying: 'Yes. Our little team would have no chance against Waco.'

  'You oughta be fired!' Rusk bellowed. 'What kind of talk is this, welshing on your own team?'

  'Mr. Rusk, Waco is coached by Paul Tyson. Does that mean anything?'

  'He puts his pants on one leg at a time, don't he?'

  'Yes, but when he gets them on, he's something special.' Almost in awe the coach recited the fearsome accomplishments of that Waco powerhouse: 'One year the Waco Tigers scored a total of seven hundred eighty-four points; opponents had thirty-three.'

  'Who did they play?' Rusk asked. The Sisters of Mercy?'

  'The best. Of course, there was one game with the Corsicana Orphans Home, one hundred nineteen to nothing.'

  'Did the Orphans have eleven men?'

  'Only thirteen, but they were a real team.'

  'No real team loses by a hundred points.'

  'Against Waco they do,' the worried coach said, and he continued: 'They brought down a team from Cleveland, Ohio. National championship. Waco, forty-four, Cleveland, twelve. And in their best year, Waco, five hundred sixty-seven, opponents, zero, with no opposing team ever moving the ball inside the Waco thirty-five-yard line. And you ask me if I'm scared.'

  But Rusk and his optimistic oilmen were not, and when the Fighting Antelopes won their thirteenth straight game—for high schools played barbarous schedules—the big showdown with Waco for the state championship became inevitable. Most of Larkin and all of Waco found ways to get to Panther Park in Fort Worth that memorable Saturday afternoon. For a mere high school game, more than twenty thousand showed up; the newspapers had skillfully promulgated the myth that in this age of miracles, Antelopes had an outside chance of defeating Tigers.

  It was a day Floyd Rusk would never forget;
it eclipsed in significance even that wonderful morning when Rusk #3 came in with its verification of the Larkin Field, because this game would be remembered as one of the extraordinary events in the annals of Texas sporting history, but not in a way that Rusk would have wished: Waco Tigers 83, Larkin Antelopes 0.

  Before the excursion train left Fort Worth, copies of a Dallas newspaper with mocking headlines were available: it really was tigers eating antelopes, and during the train ride home, Rusk took an oath. Brandishing the offensive paper in the faces of his friends, he swore: 'This will never happen again. If we have to chew mountains into sand, it will never happen again.'

  Assembling any oilmen who had gone to the game, he extracted promises that Larkin would regain its honor, regardless of cost, and Dewey Kimbro supported him: 'Whatever you need, Floyd. The dignity of our town must be restored.'

  Prowling the train to locate the unfortunate coach whose prophecy of Waco invincibility had proved correct, the fat man snarled: 'You're fired. No team of mine loses by more than eighty points. Tomorrow we start searching for a real coach.'

  Revenge for the dreadful humiliation in Panther Park became Rusk's obsession, and as he roamed the state looking for what he called 'my kind of coach,' he kept hearing of a man in a small school near Austin, and men who knew football assured him: 'This here Cotton Harney, he's a no-nonsense coach, knocks a kid on his ass if he don't perform,' so Rusk telegraphed three of his oilmen to come down from Larkin to look the young genius over.

  As soon as the committee met Harney they knew they had their man. He had gone to A&M to learn animal husbandry, but had been so good at football that he switched to coaching, with the not unreasonable hope that one day he might return to his alma mater in some capacity or other, line coach perhaps, or even head coach, for he had the intelligence to handle either job.

  They met a man who stood only five feet eight but who was still a crop-headed bundle of muscle and aggression. In college he had been such a relentless opponent that sportswriters had started a legend, which still clung to him: 'At the training table they feed him only raw meat, two pounds with lots of gristle at each sitting.' Nicknamed Tiger, he told one sportswriter: 'I like to play in the other team's backfield,' and this imaginative reporter produced a great line: 'Tiger Harney invades the opposition backfield, grabs three running backs, and sorts them out till he finds who has the ball.'