The Pistoleer: A Novel of John Wesley Hardin

by James Carlos Blake

  Well now, by that evening the whole lot of them are drunk as lords and playing poker at a table at the back of the room. They’re all laughing and talking at once and so drunk they keep losing track of who’s dealing and whose bet it is, everything. One time I hear Jerry Ostermann yell, “Blackjack! I got blackjack!” Everybody else laughs and curses him for a damn fool. “How do you reckon we’re playing blackjack, you asshole,” Frank says, “when you got five fucking cards dealt to you? Answer me that.” Well, Jerry thinks it over for a moment, his face all twisted in hard thought. Then he brightens and says, “Well, hell, I thought it was a sporting new way of playing the game!”

  A half hour later Frank suddenly jumps up and hollers that he’s by God had enough of Vernon Leaky’s cheating. Now Vernon, he owns the Hotel Lee up the street and is one of the few truly honest men I ever met. How he got into a game with fellas such as these I can’t say—except that he’d been drinking harder than usual, which is sufficient explanation for almost any stupidity a man might do. He turns white as his collar, he does, when Frank calls him a cheat.

  “Frank,” he says in his high voice. “Frank, I’m not cheating.” Frank stands there, swaying a bit and looking hard at him, and says, “Last time I heard some sorry sonbitch say that, turned out he had three aces up his sleeve.” The Hardin fella’s watching all this with his chin in his hand and a big smile on his face.

  “But, Frank,” Vernon says, “how can you think I’m cheating? You’re doing all the winning!” Frank looks at his own stack of money and sees it’s for sure the biggest on the table, so he grins a bit sheepish, he does, and says, “Be goddamn.” He sits down and says, “Hell, maybe I’m the one’s doing all the damn cheating.” Like I say, drunk as lords, the bunch of them, and it’s still early yet.

  All right then, by eleven o’clock the place is packed. The pianola’s plunking one tune after another and the bar’s two deep from end to end. The smoke in the place is thick as Dublin fog. There’s already been a couple of fistfights, but nothing serious and not much broken except one fella’s arm and a beer mug or two. Behind the bar I’m as busy as a one-legged man in an arse-kicking contest.

  All of a sudden it seemed the pianola was a good bit louder, and then I see most of the fellas have shut up and are staring hard at some Yank soldiers I never even saw come in—six of them, including a pair of woolies, moving slow and careful through the parting crowd, all of them armed with repeaters, heading for the rear of the room. I glanced at the back door and saw three more blues already there. Jerry and Vernon were staring big-eyed at the Yanks as they closed in on them. Frank had his head down on his pile of money and was singing loudly to the tune on the pianola—“My Darlin’ Clementine.” The Hardin fella was nowhere in sight.

  The Yank in charge—a bloody big brute of a sergeant, he was—motioned for Jerry and Vernon to get away from the table, and they bolted like rabbits. The Yanks formed a half circle about Frank with their rifles raised and ready. Now the only sound in the room was the music and Frank’s awful singing. The sergeant gave the table a hell of a kick and some of the money went clattering to the floor. But the kick got Frank’s attention, all right. He looks up, his face all sodden with drink, and stares around at all the carbines pointed at him. “Well now, shit,” he says, and straightens up in his chair—and every one of the Yanks draws back the hammer on his weapon. At the sound of all those cocking rifles, I thought sure the floor would be running with Frank’s blood in the next instant.

  But Frank wasn’t so drunk he couldn’t grasp how the thing stood. Any wrong move he made would be his last in the mortal world. Still, you had to hand it to Frank for brass. He says: “I ain’t gonna stand up and fucking salute, if that’s what you’re waiting for.” Looking right up the sergeant’s rifle when he says it.

  They took his gun and yanked him to his feet, but they had to hold him up or he’d have fallen on his face, he was so drunk. Out in the street they roped him tight from his shoulders to his waist with his hands bound behind him. The whole while, the crowd’s jeering the bloody Yanks, cursing them for whoresons and bastards and such. The sergeant knows they’re all drunk and getting bolder by the minute, and he’s urging his boys to move fast.

  They get him up on his horse at last—but the instant they set off, he tumbles from his saddle and lets out a hell of a yell. He’s shouting his shoulder’s broke. One of the niggers jerks him up to his feet and Frank howls like a banshee and curses him for a black son of a nigger bitch. The nigger grabs him by the hair to tug him over to his horse and Frank spits full in his face. He gets a fist in the mouth for it, and he spits another bloody gob at the nigger in return.

  “Enough of this shit!” the sergeant shouts. He clouts Frank on the head with his carbine and takes the fight put of him. But while they’re tying him belly-down over his horse, he pukes on one of them. Didn’t that get a big laugh from the crowd!—and even from some of the Yanks. They left town at a canter, poor Frank bouncing on his belly and letting fly another streak of puke as they went.

  As for the Hardin fella, we figured he either saw the blues coming or somebody tipped him and he was able to make his getaway. Nobody was faulting him for deserting Frank, either—not with Frank so damn drunk he couldn’t even walk. A situation like that, it’s every man for himself.

  Early next morning, however, when I go to the facility behind the place for my morning ease, who do I find sitting over the hole with his trousers bunched around his shins and his head against the wall, snoring like a frog in that outhouse thick with flies and smelling like a dog that’s been dead a week? Sure it was the Hardin lad. So I gently wake the boy and tell him what happened with Frank and all. And he laughs, he does. Turns out he had come to the facility before the Yanks showed up and passed out in the middle of doing his business. Said it was the first time he’d been saved by a call from Mother Nature.

  Anyhow, that’s how the Hardin fella escaped capture by the Yankees in Corsicana in the summer of ’69.

  Frank went to prison for a time for killing that shopkeeper, but they say he was wild as ever when he got out. It must have been true. The way I heard it, he got into a poker game down in Limestone County and killed a fella at the table for cheating. It was poor Frank’s bad luck the fella was mayor of the town. Frank made a run for it, but a posse chased him down and trapped him by the banks of the Navasota. He hollered out to them from the trees that he was willing to let bygones be bygones. “I’ll forget about the ninety dollars the son of a bitch cheated off me if you fellas’ll forget about taking me in,” he told them. “Fair’s fair.” Those were his last words before they gunned him down. They buried him there beside the river. That’s how I heard it.

  Jim Newman had us roaming the Richland bottoms in search of mavericks—me, Wes, Simp, Joe O, and Tim Calloway. You didn’t get much breeze through there in summer and it was hot as blazes. We’d work our mounts through the brush and scare out all the cows we could handle. Then we’d herd them up near whatever clearing we’d made our camp on that day, and the next morning two of us would drive them back to the camp at Pisga while the rest of us hunted up some more.

  Early one morning, just after Joe O and Tim had left for Pisga with another bunch of longhorns, Simp went off to the creek to get water to make more coffee. A minute later he comes running back, all excited. He flings my blanket over the fire and soaks it with the pot of water he’s just dipped, snuffing the fire without raising too much smoke. But all I can think about just then is that he’s ruined my blanket and I start to give him hell for it, but he hushes me up with a finger to his lips. Wes was seeing to the horses, and Simp gives a low bird whistle and waves for him to come over.

  He tells us there’s soldiers coming by way of the creek. They’re only about a hundred yards downstream, he says, but they’re coming slow and lazy and probably just doing some routine patrolling. He figures they must of been camped pretty near us last night. His eyes were just dancing, he was so excited about what was com
ing.

  “How many?” Wes wants to know. Simp says three. I’m ready to mount up bareback and get the hell going in the other direction. I hadn’t done a thing to the Yanks since killing some of them in Tennessee before they tore up my legs pretty good with grapeshot. I’d been walking like an old man ever since, but hell, I counted myself lucky to be walking at all. I didn’t want to give them any more reason or chance to do me worse than they already had.

  But Simp and Wes are already checking their loads and talking about how to set the ambush. They quick decide to lay for them in the heavy stand of willows at the creek bend about thirty yards downstream. As they start out, Simp takes a look back at me, so I hurry over to my saddle and slide my Henry rifle out of its sheath and head out after them.

  Listen. Ever since Tennessee—at a place called Franklin, where I got wounded so bad—I never could stand the sound of close-by shooting. I’m not exaggerating when I say it froze me up to hear a gun go off anywhere near me—large or small gun, either one. Hell, it still does, I ain’t ashamed to admit it, not anymore. And if the shooting went on for more than a round or two, I’d start shuddering like a cottonwood in a stiff breeze. Sometimes it was so bad I’d have to grit my teeth and hold tight to something solid to keep from hollering like a crazy man. It was something nobody around Pisga knew about me except for Jim Newman, who was a good man and who I was sure I could count on to keep it to himself. It wasn’t an easy thing to hide, but I knew that if the boys found out about it I’d never hear the end of it. I would of constantly been made to suffer and look the fool for their entertainment. It’s what happened to me when I got back home to Nacogdoches. It’s why I left there.

  But what could I do now except go with Wes and Simp? It was the thing I’d been most afraid of—that the Yanks would catch up to them while I was with them, there’d be a fight, and I’d be seen to be a coward. Simp glanced back at me again as we made our way into the trees, but I couldn’t tell a thing from his face. I was feeling so damned scared I thought sure I was going to dirty my britches.

  Just as we reached the creek bend, Simp and Wes suddenly stopped and took cover. I dropped on my belly behind a big rock and peeked around it real careful. My heart was pounding something awful and I couldn’t hardly catch my breath.

  Then there they were. Just up ahead and coming at a walk alongside the creek. It was six of them. Damn Simp and his three. They were coming closer and closer and I couldn’t understand what him and Wes were waiting for. Part of me was praying for them to let the soldiers ride on by—and part of me was terrified that if they let the Yanks get any closer they’d sense right where we were. They’d smell us out. And all I’d do is lay there paralyzed while they killed us.

  They were close enough for me to see the white scar running through the point rider’s red beard when Wes suddenly jumped out from behind a tree and fired square into his surprised face and knocked him out of the saddle. The others jerked their mounts around, yelling “Ambush, ambush!” and trying to double back. Wes’s Colt and Simp’s Sharps fired at the same time and another Yank fell off his horse and went rolling into the creek. I couldn’t move and I couldn’t stop watching. My throat was as tight as if somebody was choking me with both hands.

  Wes’s pistol cracked again and a horse went down screaming. The rider landed on his feet like a cat and grabbed hold of a loose horse bolting by him and somehow managed to drape himself across the saddle, holding on for dear life, his legs flapping and his head bouncing up and down as the animal hightailed back the way they came. The wounded horse on the ground was screaming and kicking every which way, trying to get to its feet, but it wasn’t going to make it.

  All the Yanks were putting spurs to their mounts now and boom-pow!—Simp and Wes shot together again and blood flew off a soldier’s neck and he slumped forward but stayed in the saddle as his horse hit full gallop. Wes ran out for a clearer shot and fired twice more just as Simp got off another round himself.

  “Got him!” Simp hollers. “You see the blood pop up where I got that one in the leg?”

  “Bullshit!” Wes hollers. “That was one of mine hit that leg!”

  The wounded horse was still making a hell of a ruckus, and Wes went over to it and put it out of its misery. While he was doing that, Simp started scalping. That’s when I was finally able to look away.

  I’d been gripping my Henry so tight my hands hurt.

  After a while I looked back and saw Simp stripping the Yanks of their guns and ammunition and going through their pockets. Their scalps hung from his belt and were dripping on his pants and boots. Wes was standing off a ways, rolling a smoke and paying him no mind. Up to now neither of them had looked my way. I sat on the rock I’d hid behind and felt lower than a dog.

  Then Simp moseyed over to me, working the lever on one of the Yankee Spencer carbines. “I got to admit this bluebelly rifle is damn nice,” he said. “Ain’t got the punch of my Sharps, but it’ll hold seven rounds, so you don’t got to load and lock for every shot. And .56 caliber will make a big enough hole in a fella to let the moon shine through. What you think, Lenny? You think I ought to switch?”

  The casual way he was talking, I knew he knew. I lifted my face to look him in the eyes, but there wasn’t any scorn or mean humor in them—and no pity either, which some was full of for me back in Nacogdoches and which I hated even more than the scorn and the ridicule. He was looking at me like a friend.

  “Jim told us, Lenny,” he says softly. “He thought it best we knew. Hell, brother, any man who wore the gray and got tore up by cannonfire while he was killing Yankees can’t ever be nothing but a hero to us, don’t you know that? Me and Wes, Lenny, we’re proud to know you.” I guess my face probably got as red as his, then both of us just grinned and looked away. “Well, hell,” he said, “let’s catch that other Yank horse and get the hell back to Pisga.”

  And that was it. They neither one said another word about it, not to me. If they said anything about it to anybody else, I never knew of it, but I know damn well they didn’t. You won’t find two men in a thousand like them. Not in ten thousand.

  By the following evening they were both of them long gone out of Pisga, and I never saw either one again. I believe Wes laid low with kin in Hillsboro for a while before he went to Towash and got in that trouble everybody heard about.

  As for Simp, I heard he rode with a band of Kluxers for a time before telling them it was a waste of time to go nigger-spooking and barn-burning when there were still so damn many bluebellies in Texas to kill. The Klan was out to avenge all of Dixie, but Simp was mostly interested in getting even for his own kin. Then I heard he’d taken up with a cut-nose Cheyenne squaw that had tits like whiskey jugs and an ass like a mule. They said she would of been pretty but for that cut nose, which is what a Cheyenne brave did to a cheating wife before kicking her out to fend for herself. A jawhawker brought her into a Fort Worth saloon on the end of a rawhide leash, and for some reason—maybe her—Simp and the hawker got into a fight. They say that when Simp got the hawker down and started putting the boot to him, the squaw ran up and got in some pretty good kicks of her own, which sounds like she was ready for a change of men. The way the story goes, Simp took her to live with him in a cabin deep in a woods by the Navasota. They say him and the squaw were completely bare-ass and humping like hell on the riverbank one evening when a Yank hunting party snuck up and shot them more than a hundred times.

  FUGITIVE DAYS

  The El Paso Daily Herald,

  20 AUGUST 1895

  Frank Patterson, the bartender at the Acme Saloon, testified before the coroner as follows:

  “My name is Frank Patterson. I am a bartender at present at the Acme Saloon. This evening about 11 o’clock J. W. Hardin was standing with Henry Brown shaking dice and Mr. Selman walked in at the door and shot him. Mr. E. L. Shackleford was also in the saloon at the time the shooting took place. Mr. Selman said something as he came in at the door. Hardin was standing with his back to Mr. S
elman. I did not see him face around before he fell or make any motion. All I saw was that Mr. Selman came in the door, said something and shot and Hardin fell. Don’t think Hardin ever spoke. The first shot was in the head.”

  (Signed) F. F. Patterson

  The Life of John Wesley Hardin as Written by Himself

  “I liked fast horses and would bet on any kind of a horse race, a chicken fight, a dog fight, or anything down to throwing ‘crack-a-loo’ or spitting at a mark.”

  ——

  “I had been receiving letters from my father and mother urging me to quit my wild habits and turn to better ways.”

  ——

  “I was young then and loved every pretty girl I met.”

  ——

  “If there is any power to save man, woman, or child from harm, outside the power of the Living God, it is this thing called pluck.”

  ——

  “Everybody … tried to help me and everybody was my friend, but the infamous police were after me and there were several mischief-makers about me.”

  My wife, Slider, was cousin to Wes and introduced us at a get-together over at Jim Page’s place on the Brazos River, where Wes and his brother Joe were staying. They’d come down after visiting at Slider’s momma’s house in Hillsboro for a time and everybody was damn happy to know Wes was all right. We’d only recently heard of the Yankees’ back-shooting murder of Simp Dixon and had been worried the blues might of got to Wes too.

  We hit it off right away, me and Wes, but Joe was standoffish and we never did cotton to each other much. When I found out how much Wes liked gambling and horse races, I told him he’d surely enjoy Towash, a small but high-kicking town a few miles from the Page place. It had plenty of loud saloons and gambling halls, and just outside of town was the Boles Track where they raced quarter horses. On race days that little town was just booming with action. Wes said he liked the sound of it, and we agreed to go to the track together on the coming Saturday.