The Pistoleer: A Novel of John Wesley Hardin

by James Carlos Blake

Wes broke free of Hosea’s grip and got to his feet and tried to box him. He knew the manly art real well and had put on demonstrations for us in camp, hitting with open hands and making one or another of us look like staggering drunks, he was so quick and smooth. He hit Hosea square in the nose with a jab, but the Mexican looked more stunned by the way Wes was dancing up and down in front of him with his dukes up. Wes hopped forward and jabbed him again and Hosea let out a shriek and rushed him. Wes tried to sidestep but the Mex was pretty quick himself and caught hold of his shirt and down they went in a snarling knot.

  They must of fought for ten solid minutes without letting up for a second. I’ve seen dogfights that didn’t have as much fury. They was punching and biting and clawing, kicking, butting heads, cussing and spitting, just flat tearing each other up. Finally the both of them were breathing like bellows and having trouble getting to their feet. Their clothes was all ripped, their faces all lumped up and smeared with blood and dirt. One of Wes’s eyes looked like a purple egg with a red slit, he had bad scratches on both cheeks, and his lips were blowed up. Hosea’s eyes were swole nearly shut and his nose was puffed big as a potato and he had an ear tore half off.

  A couple of the Mex hands tried to help Hosea on his horse, but he shook them off. Wes waved off any help from Jim and Big Ben. It was a wonder either one was able to mount up by himself, but they did. Wes looked at Hosea and said, “This ain’t … over,” said it like that, hardly able to talk for breathing so hard. Hosea spit blood at him and said, “Kill you … son of … the whore mother.”

  Wes rode back to our wagon and it was a good bet Hosea had gone off to his—and there wasn’t no question they were going for guns. Keep in mind, both herds were still moving. With nobody keeping them in columns, they’d started spreading out, and some steers had headed off on their own. The swing riders for both outfits had to work fast to cut the strays back and tighten the herds up again. At the same time, every rider on both sides was straining to keep up with what was going on twixt Wes and Hosea. Jim passed the word for us to stick to our positions on the herd and stay out of the fight unless we saw the rest of the Mexicans get into it. He told me to get up on point, intending to keep me as far out of harm’s way as he could. Wes buckled on his two-gun holster and borrowed a pistol from Nameless to replace the one of his that didn’t work, then him and Jim giddapped on back toward the Mexicans. They headed off on the east side of the herd, so I snuck back on the west. I was damned if I was going to stay out of it.

  The dust was swirling thick, and I heard shots before I could see what was happening. Then I spotted Wes riding straight for a bunch of Mexicans at the rear of the herd. He had his reins in his teeth and a pistol in each hand and looked like Judgment Day on horseback. Behind him a Mexican was already spread-eagled on the ground. Jim came riding out of the dust to join him. The Mexican horses were spooked and their riders were having to shoot wild. There were five of them. Wes and Jim closed in and opened fire. I drew my gun, put the spurs to Who Me, and took off behind them, letting out a rebel yell like Uncle Ike had taught me to do.

  There was a clatter of gunfire and three Mexes dropped as Wes and Jim rode through the bunch of them like a couple of Mosby’s Rangers. Then they reined around and started back at the two still in the fight. One threw up his hands, but not quick enough to keep from getting shot off his horse. The other one tried to hightail it—and came riding straight at me. We headed for each other at full gallop, both of us shooting and yelling to beat all hell. Next thing I knew I was in the air, flying ass over teakettle—and then I didn’t know a damn thing until I opened my eyes and found myself flat on my back, looking up at my brother Jim, who was kneeling over me with a great big grin and checking me for broken bones. He told everybody the first words out of my mouth were, “Am I kilt?”—which I don’t recollect saying, but which gets a good laugh every time Jim tells the tale. The Mex had shot my pony from under me is what happened. “Wes evened the score for you, Maverick,” Jim said. Jim had caught the Mex’s horse for me, a fine blaze stallion I named Pancho, and he proved a fit replacement for Who Me.

  The herds had been stopped and pretty quick we were joined by riders from outfits up and down the line who’d heard the shooting. Everybody was laughing and jabbering all excited about the fight. Wes himself, beat-up as he was, was grinning wide. He’d took a round through his hat brim and another through his sleeve but didn’t get a scratch. He came over and shook my hand and said, “I’m obliged to you, Huck, for coming to our aid.” Jim says I blushed a little and maybe I did, since I hadn’t done a thing but get my horse killed and my back nearly broke. But hell, I couldn’t help feeling proud just the same.

  It was six dead Mexicans all told, including Hosea, who’d been the first to fall. Jim had put down two and Wes had dropped the other four. The rest of the Mexes, including the two who’d come over that time after Wes killed the Indian, had stayed out of it. They told Wes they were glad the rankling was done with. Must of been true, because for the rest of the drive they kept their cows well back of ours.

  For the rest of the drive we didn’t have any troubles worth mentioning. What we mostly talked about around the supper camp-fires—besides telling and retelling about the fight with the Mexicans—was the good times we aimed to have ourselves in Abilene. For those of us who’d never been there before, the tales told about it by Nameless and Ollie and Big Ben were so exciting we couldn’t hardly keep from twitching. The things they said about the women! The closer we got to the end of the drive, the later I’d lay awake every night, agitated with thoughts of those painted cats, as some called them—soiled doves, fallen angels, they had lots of different names. Ollie said they had skin as smooth and tasty as warm milk and would pleasure me in ways I couldn’t even imagine. Big Ben said they put cherry-flavored rouge on their nipples and dusted their pussies with French bath powder. They said Abilene had hundreds of such women, hundreds! And everything they said turned out to be true. Before I got to Abilene that first time, I’d never yet seen a grown woman fully naked, and trying to picture all that bare and willing female flesh made me feel sort of drunk. It’s one more thing about that first drive I’ve never forgot—the excitement of closing in on Abilene and all its wickedness just waiting for me with a wide red smile. About the only one not itching to whoop it up in Abilene was my brother Jim, who was only thinking about getting back to Annie Tenelle as quick as he could. The rest of us talked about nothing but the high times ahead. And about Wild Bill, of course, who damn well knew Wes Hardin was coming his way.

  We had the Texas reward poster for weeks before he showed up. Besides Bill, who I mean by “we” is me and Tyler McBride and Mike Williams, his main deputies. Every cattle outfit arrived with more news on him than we’d got from the one before. It was that way all spring. We never had to ask about him, all we had to do was listen. We heard about the Indian and we knew all about the fight with the Mexicans on the Newton Prairie. When he was told Hardin had dropped four of the six Mexes that went down in the fight, Bill’s blond mustache spread in a smile over his glass of whiskey—he was in his favorite chair at the Alamo at the time—and he said, “Four, was it? That’s a smart of killing. The boy must be all they say.”

  Abilene had been booming for a couple of years. It had a schoolhouse, two churches, banks, and real estate offices. It had stores and shops of every kind. It had photography studios. It had hotels as fancy as you’d find anywhere east of Frisco and west of St. Louie. It even had a damn newspaper.

  But more than anything else, Abilene had cows. One big herd after another got packed into the rail-yard pens at the end of town for shipment to the East. And with those cows came the wild boys from Texas. Outfit after outfit rode in from three hard months on the trail, looking to have a good time. And ready to give it to them were dozens of saloon-keepers and flocks of hard-eyed whores and more quick-fingered gamblers than you could shake a pair of dice at. Abilene got so damn loud they said you could hear it all the way over in
K.C. Cowboys whooping and howling, cows mooing day and night, train whistles blasting at all hours. There was brawling in public and drunks reeling on the sidewalks and horse racing in the streets. And sometimes—in spite of the ordinance against carrying guns in town—there was shooting. Usually it was in fun and only busted up some glass. Sometimes it was in earnest and somebody got shot.

  Right from the start, Abilene loved the cowboys’ money—but as the town had prospered and grown, many of the good citizens began to take offense at the cowboys’ kind of fun. Bad enough the cowboy money stank of whiskey and whorehouse perfume by the time it reached the good citizens’ hands, but the cowboys’ wild ways in the streets got to be more than they could bear. What was needed, they decided, was a hardcase lawman who could keep the wild boys under control. And so, in the summer of ’70, they hired Bear River Tom Smith to be the town marshal.

  Bear River Tom was a big redhead from back east where he’d been a policeman, and he was tough as they come. But Abilene was tough as they come too, and Tom hadn’t been marshal but about five months when one night somebody chopped off his head with an ax. Nobody wanted the job after that, and the town got wilder than ever. It took months to find somebody to take Tom’s place. But they finally hired themselves the best there was—Wild Bill. That was in April of 1871, about two months before Hardin got to town.

  Bill was already a legend at the time he came to Abilene. The “Prince of the Pistoleers,” the dime novelists called him. And he truly did love being a famous man. He was always ready to cooperate in promoting his heroic reputation, which mostly meant telling magazine and newspaper writers the kind of adventurous bullshit stories they wanted to pass on to their gullible readers back east. He had a natural flair for being a public figure, and he damn sure looked the part—the long yellow hair, the fancy Prince Albert or the fringed buckskin, the wide red sash holding his pearl-handled navies butt-forward. He spent most of every day and night at his special table in the Alamo, the fanciest saloon in town, with double-glass doors and a mahogany bar and shiny brass cuspidors as high as your knee. He drank steady and gambled and joked and told tall tales. Every now and then he’d tour the town and let the citizens see that Wild Bill was on the job. Tyler or myself would sometimes follow along to keep watch for back-shooters, but it wasn’t necessary. Bill had a sixth sense for guns being pointed at him, even from behind. A gunshot would flame from the alleyway shadows and he’d already be spinning and ducking down and returning fire, all in one smooth motion. In his first month on the job he wounded two ambushers and scared off a half-dozen others. There were plenty of pistoleros hankering for some celebrity of their own, and killing Bill was a sure way to get it. But even when he was drunk—Wild Bill Hiccup, some called him, though never within his hearing—there wasn’t a one who had the guts to take him on face-to-face. (His sixth sense finally quit working for him five years later—in the Number 10 Saloon in Deadwood, where some dirty-nose tramp named McCall shot him in the back of the head. But even in death, he looked the legend: the Deadwood doc said Bill was the prettiest corpse he ever saw.)

  I ought mention that just before Hardin got to Abilene, Bill had some trouble with Ben Thompson that heated up a lot of Texan tempers. It started over a sign Ben and his partner, Fancy Phil Coe—both of them Texans with lots of friends—had recently hung over the door to their Bull’s Head saloon, which happened to be directly across the street from the jail. The sign showed a huge red bull reared up on its hind legs, proudly displaying to all the passing world a monster pair of balls and a giant pecker ready for action.

  The first time Bill saw it he looked sad. “A sight like that,” he said, “is apt to make a lady feel cheated the next time a feller lets down his breeches for her. I don’t generally mind a fanciful exaggeration, but it shouldn’t be of a sort to disappoint the ladies nor diminish a man’s sense of his own manhood.” Just the same, he wouldn’t have done anything about the sign—live and let live whenever possible, that was Bill’s motto—except that Mayor T. C. Henry got a storm of complaints from henpecked storekeepers, red-faced mothers with giggling children, and preachers having purple fits. He came into the jail like a man being chased by yellow jackets. “You got to do something about that sign, Bill, that’s all there is to it.”

  So Bill told Johnny Coombs the painter to get his equipment and come along with us to the Bull’s Head. Johnny no sooner got up on the ladder and started to paint over the offending portions of the big bull when Phil Coe came out of the saloon and asked what was going on. When Bill told him, Phil shrugged and said, “I warned Ben that sign would rile the good folk.” Fancy Phil Coe was easy enough to get along with and had fairly decent manners for a Texan—which is why it seems all the more pitiful that of the only two men Bill killed in Abilene he was one of them.

  While him and Bill were talking and watching Johnny paint, Ben Thompson came stomping out. He wasn’t nearly so agreeable a fella as Phil. He was as stocky as the bull on the sign and had a reputation as a good pistolman. They said he’d killed at least ten white men in Texas and served two years in prison for trying to kill his wife’s brother for beating up on her. I believe Bill was one of the few men Ben Thompson ever truly feared in his life—and so naturally Ben hated him.

  “If they don’t like the sign,” he told Bill, “tell them not to look at it, damn their eyes!” He was wearing a gun in defiance of Bill’s ordinance. Sorry, Bill told him, but the sign was going to change whether Ben liked it or not.

  There was but six feet between them and you could see Ben trying with all his might to beat his fear and pull on Bill. He got all sweaty and tight in the face but he just couldn’t do it. When he finally broke off the stare, his face was splotchy with shame. Phil Coe looked embarrassed for him. Ben pretended to watch Johnny paint for a minute, then started back into the saloon with his back as stiff as a fence post.

  “Don’t wear that useless hogleg on the street again,” Bill called after him. He normally wasn’t one to rub a man’s face in it, but Ben brought out the worst in him. Ben’s ears got red as beets but he went on inside without looking back. You could smell the rank hate he left in the air.

  A couple of days after the business with the sign, I arrived at the jail one morning just as Columbus Carol was coming out. He was puffing a cigar and calling “So long, Bill” over his shoulder. He saw me and gave one of those big winks that always made me want to shoot him in the eye. “Howdy, Deputy!” he yelled. “Arrested any bad hombres lately? Har-har-har!” I never did understand how Bill came to be good buddies with that loudmouth son of a bitch.

  Carol had pastured his herds at the North Cottonwood, about thirty miles south of town, and intended to keep them there awhile. He wasn’t the only drover doing that. The cattle market was glutted and the price of beef was on the floor. But he’d been to the bank and borrowed enough to pay off his men, and it was mostly them we heard across the street in the Bull’s Head. Bill told us all this—and that the main reason Carol had come to see him was to square Wes Hardin. He smiled and said, “I want you boys to give that young hoss wide room, hear? If he gets wildhair, you fetch me. I’ll be the one to deal with him.” What about if we saw him wearing his guns, I asked, but he didn’t answer. He was already going out the door and on his way to the Alamo for his morning toddy.

  I couldn’t help but admire Bill’s smarts. He knew Carol would brag to everybody in town about squaring Hardin with his good buddy Wild Bill. It was a reason everybody would understand for Bill not coming down on Hardin. They’d all think, Hell, Hickok ain’t shying from Wes, he’s just doing Columbus a favor is all. Just the same, there was only so much slack Bill could give. If Hardin pulled on his string too hard, Bill would have to do something about it, consequences be damned.

  The following night Bill was wearing his best Prince Albert, so I knew something was up but couldn’t figure what. I went out on a turn with him and he headed us over to the Applejack. We had to make our way through swarms of drunks and y
ahooing cowhands in the street. We kept a lookout for guns but didn’t spot a one. The wild boys had seen Bill head-knock too many gun-toters not to take him serious about wearing guns on this side of the river.

  The piano player in the Applejack was practically hitting the keys with his fists to be heard in all the clamor of talk and laughter and shouting and dealers’ calls. When Bill ordered a drink for me as well as himself, I knew for sure something was going on and wished he’d let me in on it. He normally didn’t like for us to drink on the job. “One drunk lawman out on the town’s enough,” he’d say, meaning himself. He clinked his glass against mine and said, “To love, Tommy boy, wherever it’s keeping its pretty ass.”

  He tossed off the drink and the barkeep poured him another, but I only sipped at mine to be polite. No matter what Bill was up to, I wasn’t about to do any real drinking in a crowd like that. It was practically all Texans, and we were getting a lot of eyeballing. Bill noticed the grip I had on my shotgun down alongside my leg and told me to put it up on the bar. “These fellers are mostly just gawkers,” he said. “Don’t let them think they got you twitchy.”

  Pretty soon George Johnson pushed in beside Bill and hollered, “Wild Bill! Got somebody here you ought to meet!” George was a friend of Bills, an easygoing railroad agent who knew most of the Texas cowhands. He reached back and put his hand on the shoulder of a tall young fellow wearing a new black suit with a red plaid vest and a black hat with a silver concho band around it—and two big army .44s tied down on his legs. “Bill,” George said, “meet Wes Hardin. Wes, this here is the one and only Wild Bill Hickok.”

  My hand instinctively went to my shotgun, but Bill tapped my arm, so I let it be. It was clear he’d had George set up the meeting, and it irritated hell out of me that he hadn’t let me in on it beforehand. It’s how he was about a lot of things, lousy with secrets.