The Pistoleer: A Novel of John Wesley Hardin

by James Carlos Blake

  Joe wasn’t keen on the idea at all. “Are you forgetting there are soldiers hunting for you?” he asked Wes. “Soldiers who intend to shoot you on sight?”

  “To do that,” Wes said with a big smile, “they got to see me before I see them.” He tried to make light of Joe’s nagging, but I could see it irritated him. I don’t believe he was sorry when Joe headed on back home to Navarro County the next day.

  During the next couple of weeks we spent plenty of time in Towash, me and Wes. Like I said, it was a wild place, and Wes took to it like a redbone to a hollow full of coon. That boy would gamble at anything. He was the best I ever saw at calling the turn at the faro table—at guessing the exact order of the last three cards in the tiger, the box the dealer deals the cards out of. Calling the turn pays four-to-one, and Wes won himself just fistfuls of money. We played mostly in The Alabama Star because it had the best table layout—and because they had a dealer there named Sad Horse Tom, whose real name was Tommy Flatt. He had the longest face you’ve ever seen, and every time somebody had a winning streak or called the turn oh him, that face would get even longer. You can imagine what he looked like whenever Wes had one of his good nights at his table. Poor fella’s face got so long and miserable-looking he looked like a horse about to cry. Wes started calling him Sad Horse Tom and pretty soon everybody called him that. One night, right after Wes had called the turn on him for the second time in an hour, Sad Horse Tom said to him, “Kid, you must have Jesus whispering the cards in your ear.”

  Wes liked that, and from then on, every time the last turn came up, he’d cup his hand to his ear and look up and say, “All right, Lord, let me hear them.” He’d nod his head like he was listening real careful, then say, “All right, sir, I’ll do it.” If the turn came up the way he called it, he’d smile at the ceiling and say, “Thanks, partner.” But if he lost, he’d look around at everybody with a real exaggerated expression of disgust and say something like, “Well, hell, if that’s all the dependable the Good Lord Jesus is going to be, it’s no wonder so many folk are turning heathen nowadays.” He could always get a laugh from the boys at the table.

  Except for Sad Horse Tom, most everybody was always glad to see Wes come in the Star. He was free and easy with his winnings, and I don’t recall a single time he didn’t buy the house a round after winning a big poker pot or calling the turn at faro. He was a damn good joke teller too, and just as good at laughing at the ones you told him. He smiled a lot and usually meant it when he did. He liked to sing along with the piano. He was just an easy young fella to like.

  Besides gambling in the Towash saloons nearly every night, we went out to the Boles Track every Saturday. We both liked the races even more than the table games, and we both usually came out winners at the end of a day’s matches. But the more Wes saw of the Towash races, the more he hankered for a racer of his own, since neither his old paint nor my ornery buckskin was near good enough to run against the racers at Boles. Well, he was the sort to do whatever he set his mind to, so I figured he’d get a racer, all right—I just never expected him to show up with the one he did.

  Come Christmas morning, I hear him halooing me out in front of the house, so I go to the door and there he is, sitting on this beautiful roan stallion I ain’t never seen before. I couldn’t help but stand there with my mouth open and admire it—I mean, it was a fine-looking animal! Wes just grinned down at me for a minute before he finally says, “I guess you could stand there all day letting the cold air in on your wife and child, or you might scrape up whatever money you got, saddle up, and go with me over to Boles to increase your holdings.”

  It was a beautiful day—chilly but sunny, with no wind and not a cloud in the sky. As we rode over to Boles, Wes told me the horse belonged to his daddy, who’d got it as a present from a man in Polk County. He’d named it Copperhead in honor of its sire, a stud from Ohio. The Reverend had given everybody at the Page place a real Christmas Eve surprise when he showed up so unexpected. He’d written Wes a couple of letters since moving to Navarro County but hadn’t said anything about coming out to see him. What he had done in each letter was ask him to please quit the gambling life he’d taken up and get on back to his family where he belonged. “Joe sure must of gave him an earful,” Wes said. It was pretty obvious he was caught between a rock and a hard place—the rock being his daddy wanting him to lead a righteous life like Joe and start doing the family proud, and the hard place being his natural liking for the kind of life he was living, which pleasured him plenty but pained him too, because it disappointed his daddy.

  He told me him and the Reverend had stayed up half the night, talking things over. His daddy said Yankee patrols had been scouting the countryside for him all over East Texas. His mother was eaten up with worry. The Reverend still believed Wes would be acquitted in a fair trial once the Union army ended its occupation of Texas, but there was still no telling when that might be. In another few weeks the Reverend would be the new schoolmaster in Mount Calm, a little place down at the south end of Hill County, and he wanted Wes to help him get the family moved and then stay put with them for a while. He figured Wes would be safer from Yankee patrols in a tiny out-of-the-way place like that.

  Wes finally agreed to go with him, and the Reverend had been so pleased to hear it he’d said yes, of course, when Wes asked if he could borrow his horse to ride over to say Merry Christmas to me and show off the animal.

  “I told Daddy I’d go with him,” Wes said as we came in sight of the Boles Track, “but hiding out in some two-dog town for who knows how long ain’t something I hanker to do.” Then he smiled and said, “But hell, it’s nothing to worry about till tomorrow, is it? Right now I’m smelling money from that track yonder. What say we get on over there and put some of it in our pockets, John?”

  The race day had drawn its usual big crowd. Besides the aroma of money Wes mentioned, the chilly air was full of the smells of fresh fried chitlins and roast peanuts and cigar smoke and horse dung, with a tinge of whiskey weaving through it all. It’s no place on earth as exciting as a horse track on race day.

  And that Saturday was the most exciting one of them all, let me tell you. Wes paid fifty dollars to a little nigger rider named Jerome—about four feet high and weighing all of ninety pounds—to ride Copperhead in a third-of-a-mile race against Honey Boy, belonging to Dave McIntyre. Honey Boy was the favorite because he’d already won a dozen races and lost only one—to Andy Jack, Merle Hornpiper’s horse, which everybody called the fastest in the county. Hornpiper’d agreed to run Andy Jack against the winner of our race with Honey Boy.

  But goddamn, that Wes was one to run risks. He was so confident Copperhead could win that he took Jerome aside and said he’d pay him ten dollars extra if he’d make sure the race against Honey Boy was close. “You win,” he told Jerome, “just don’t win by more’n a half length or so. If you’re the rider they say you are, you ought be able to see to that.” Jerome was a strange little spook but nobody’s fool. He gave Wes a gold-tooth grin and said, “This here some hoss, cap’n—and I’s some rider. Make it close be hard work—’bout twenty more dollars hard.” Wes cussed him for a bandit but handed over the extra twenty, then gave him a boost up on Copperhead. He was a flashy little dude, Jerome. Wore a yellow silk scarf around his neck when he rode, and it streamed behind him like a flame. A few years later somebody hung him with it from a stable rafter.

  But by damn, he was some rider. I swear I thought we were going to lose that first race right up to the last twenty yards—and then Jerome eased Copperhead up by Honey Boy and crossed the finish first by a neck. He came trotting back to us over by the corrals and leaned down in the saddle to whisper to Wes, “That be close enough, cap’n?” Besides the two-hundred-dollar stake we won from McIntyre, we pulled in nearly three hundred in side bets.

  Because we’d barely beat Honey Boy, but Andy Jack had beat him by three lengths in their race the month before, the odds were heavy on Andy Jack over Copperhead—just the
way Wes planned. Hornpiper put up a stake of four hundred dollars against our two hundred, and we laid out about two hundred more in side bets at good odds. Then Jerome brought Copperhead home a half length ahead of Andy Jack and, by God, we were rich.

  We kept slapping each other on the back and laughing like hell as fellas kept coming over to pay us off. When you win big, everything’s funny. We’d both nearly choke to death every time one or the other of us said, “With a minister’s horse!”

  We figured we’d go over to Towash and enjoy some of our winnings, but first we got Copperhead tended to. Wes gave a track boy two dollars to scrub and curry the horse. He wanted to be sure his daddy never suspected his own horse had been used as “an instrument of the soul’s perdition,” as Wes put it, imitating the Reverend’s tone and way with words and tickling me some more. We bought a bottle off a fella and shared it as the last few losers paid us and hurried off to bet on the next race.

  One of the fellas who lost money on Andy Jack was Jim Bradley. A track buzzard named Bobby Cue—one of those jaspers who fancied himself a big-time gambler but wasn’t and never would be—introduced him to Wes when they came over to pay off. Hell, I already knew Bradley—or rather knew of him. He was a big black-bearded stomper who’d as soon cut your throat as tell you the time of day. With him was a hard case named Hamp Davis, a tall honker with a mustache like a squirrel tail. It was common knowledge they were both wanted for murder back in Arkansas.

  They were all smiles and good buddy with Wes, paying off their bet and telling him what a damn fine horse he had. Wes stood there palavering with them like they were old pals and passing our bottle to them. When Bradley mentions a poker game they’re getting up, Wes was all ears. “It’s Judge Moore’s game,” Bradley tells him. “He asked me and Hamp here to sit down with him, but he prefers four hands. If you’re interested, I reckon he’d be proud to have you join us.”

  Judge Moore was a white-whiskered old gent who loved to gamble. He lived in a big two-story house on the Towash road, near a cotton gin within sight of the track. There was a stable and a grocery just this side of the gin, then the judge’s house, and then a little farther down the road, a wooden shed where they were holding the game. Wes asked how come they weren’t playing in the judge’s house, which was bound to be more comfortable, and Bradley laughed and said the judge didn’t think it looked right for a guardian of the law to have gambling going on in his own home.

  So Wes goes off with Bradley and Davis while I put our horses up in the stable. It was late in the day now, and getting colder. When I finally headed over to the shed, the sun was down and a wind had picked up and was pushing the trees around.

  Bradley wasn’t lying when he said the only ones in the game would be him and Davis and Wes and the judge, but he hadn’t mentioned the bunch of his friends gathered around in front of the grocery, drinking and carrying on. It was maybe seven or eight of them, and as I passed by on my way to the shed I glanced over and saw they were all armed.

  The shed was small and had a low narrow door, so you had to bend down and squeeze your way through. They were sitting on the floor and playing on an old horse blanket. Hamp Davis introduced me to the judge, and the old man nodded and went on puffing his big cigar. What with the cigar smoke and the black fumes from the two oil lamps hanging on opposite walls, the air in the little room was hazy as swamp mist and the walls were streaked with soot. It didn’t help the smell a bit that they’d all taken off their boots to be more comfortable and piled them in a corner—together with everybody’s gunbelts. I gave Wes a look, but he didn’t seem the least concerned that he was sitting unarmed among strangers and the biggest pile of money on the blanket was his.

  Cards never were my game, but nobody objected to me sitting down between Hamp and the judge and just watching. For the next hour or so the steadiest sounds in the room were the card shuffles, the bets and raises and calls, the hawking and spitting, farting and coughing. Jim Bradley cussed under his breath every time he lost a hand, and he was cussing a lot.

  After a while the pile of money in front of Wes was more than twice as big as it’d been at the start. The judge looked to be a little ahead and Davis had lost about half what he started with. But Bradley was taking an awful beating. His stake was down to a few dollars in silver. There was a bottle of Kentucky whiskey we’d all been sharing, but nobody’d been drinking seriously, just now and then sipping from it to warm ourselves against the cold. Now Bradley turned the bottle up and made it bubble with the long pull he took off it. Maybe it was a signal to Davis, maybe not—all I know is things turned ugly on the very next hand.

  Wes raised the pot ten dollars and Davis and the judge folded, but Bradley said, “I’ll see you,” and showed Wes two pair. “Not good enough,” Wes says, and turns over three nines. Bradley cusses and smacks down his cards and takes another big drink.

  Wes pulls in the pot and says, “That’s ten dollars more you owe me.”

  Bradley says what the hell is he talking about, and Wes tells him he didn’t put in the ten-dollar raise he called on. Bradley says bullshit, he sure enough did, and what’s Wes trying to pull here?

  While they’re arguing, the judge scoops up his money and yanks on his boots. He says, “That’s it for me, gentlemen, we really must do it again sometime”—and he goes out the door in a flash.

  For a second Bradley and Wes just glared at each other—then everybody moved at the same time. Bradley whipped out a huge Bowie and took a wild cut at Wes just as Hamp Davis grabbed for the old Walker Colt on my hip. We wrestled for it, his rotten breath full in my face, and he wrenched it out of my hand and gave me elbow in the mouth, knocking me on my ass. I heard Bradley holler, “Shoot him, shoot him!” and saw Wes going out the door on his hands and knees as quick as a kicked cat.

  “You stupid shit!” Bradley yells at Davis. “Why didn’t you shoot him?”

  “Who you calling stupid, you Ozark hillbilly!” Davis yells back. “We got the bastard’s money, so what’s the need of killing him? You want more law on our ass?”

  Then Bradley takes notice of me and I figure he’s for sure going to stick that Arkansas toothpick in me just so he can have the pleasure of sticking somebody. But Davis waves the Walker at me and says, “You! Get the hell out of here! Tell your peckerwood partner we ever see him again we’ll cut his balls off.”

  “Same goes for you, dogshit,” Bradley says to me as I scrabble by them on all fours, headed for the door, expecting to get the Bowie in my ribs as I go by, but all he did was spit on me.

  As soon as I cleared the door I straightened up and started running. The road was lit up nearly bright as day under a full moon and the air was cold enough to make my teeth ache. I ran about fifty yards before I thought to cut over into the trees alongside the road where the shadows were long and deep. Once I got into the dark, I leaned up against a tree to catch my breath and let my heart slow down some.

  “John,” somebody whispers right behind me, and I give such a start I bump my head on a low limb. Wes puts his hand on my arm and says, “Easy.” I could barely make him out, it was so dark in among the trees.

  “Christ sake, Wes,” I say, “let’s get the hell out of here.” I don’t mind saying I was scared.

  “Not yet,” he says. “It’s my fault they got my money, but I ain’t about to go home barefoot and without my gun. Lend me yours.”

  I told him Davis had it. “They take your money too?” he asks me, and that’s the first I realize they didn’t. I reckon they were too taken with him to think of robbing me.

  Then we hear Bradley and Davis coming up the road and we hunched deeper into the shadows. They were laughing and passing the bottle back and forth. They went by within fifteen feet of us, their breath steaming in the bright moonlight. I saw my Walker in Davis’s pants, and Bradley had Wes’s gunbelt and Colt slung over his shoulder. Bradley was saying he knew a whore in Dallas who could smoke a cigar with her cunt. “I know one in New Orleans can do that too,” D
avis said. “Even blows smoke rings with it.”

  “Oh, bullshit,” Bradley says, and Davis laughs. “You’ll say any damn thing to go somebody better. That’s why you got no friends, you damned peckerwood.”

  As soon as they were around the bend in the road, Wes says, “Looks like they left my boots. I’m gonna go back and see. Follow along behind them till they’re past the judge’s house, then see if you can borrow a gun from him.” Before I could argue about it, he vanished into the dark.

  The lights in the judge’s house were all out, but once Bradley and Davis were on up the road, I knocked and knocked on the door until I heard the judge calling down the stairs and asking what in thunder’s going on, and then I knocked all the harder. By the time he showed up at the door with a candle in one hand and a pistol in the other, here comes Wes trotting across the yard and clumping up onto the porch in his boots.

  The judge leans out the door with his candle held up high to throw more light on us and says, “Hey, you boys …” his face full of surprise as he recognizes us. Wes steps up and snatches the gun out of his hand just as slick as you please.

  “What the hell …” the judge starts to bluster, and Wes says, “Excuse my bad manners, Judge, but I got an awful bad need of this hogleg right now.”

  It was a big Remington .45. Wes broke it open to check the loads, then hopped off the porch and headed off up the road. Before I could follow along, the judge grabbed me by the arm and says, “Listen, son, I didn’t hand it over willingly, you just remember that if we all end up in court.” Then he slammed the door shut and blew out the light.

  I ran to catch up to Wes as he moved along in the shadows of the trees. We eased by the darkened cotton gin and closed in on the lights of the grocery. We could hear Bradley’s bunch laughing and swearing before we got close enough to make them out clearly. Three of them were out in front, talking and smoking. One of them was Bradley. The others were all inside.