The Pistoleer: A Novel of John Wesley Hardin

by James Carlos Blake

  Right about then, this fella who’d been watching them play says he wouldn’t mind wagering on a few rolls. His name was Phil Sublett. He was an overdressed dandy with a thin mustache and a high opinion of himself, a tinhorn, always on the lookout for a sure thing. He must of reckoned he had one just then against Wes.

  “Fine with me!” Wes says. “Don’t much matter to me who I win it back from. What’s your bet, mister?” Sublett says how does three dollars a ball sound? Wes says how does five? The gambler smiles real big and says, “It’s a bet.” So they each put up fifty dollars to cover all ten balls and hand the stake to me.

  Well, sir, Wes wins the first two rolls and everybody in the place is laughing and cheering at what we all figure ain’t nothing more than simple luck, considering the way he was playing just a minute earlier. Then he wins the next two balls and Sublett does some hot cussing and looks at Wes out the sides of his eyes and Wes laughs and says something about the luck of the Irish. When he wins the fifth roll, we all just look at each other. Barnett gives me a wink and I finally catch on how bad they’ve hornswoggled Sublett.

  When Wes won the sixth roll, even Sublett knew he’d been taken in and was pretty hot about it. He said he wanted to lower the bet to two dollars a ball. Nothing doing, Wes said; they made the bet for five and that was what it’d stay. Sublett said either the bet got lowered or he was quitting. Wes says, “You quit and you forfeit the whole bet.”

  Well, Sublett was a tinhorn gambler but he didn’t lack for guts, just brains, and he grabbed for his pocket gun. Wes caught his gunhand by the wrist and slapped him three or four quick times across the mouth, then twisted the little gun away from him and pushed it up into his nose. I thought Sublett had breathed his last. But Barnett grabbed Wes’s arm and said, “Hold on, cousin—it ain’t worth it!” Sublett’s eyes looked like boiled eggs and his face was splotched red around his mouth where Wes had slapped him. Wes let go of him and said, “You best give up gambling, hoss, if you gonna take losing as hard as all that.”

  He hands me Sublett’s derringer and I stick it under my apron. “Let’s get on with it,” he says, and then rolls again. Sublett loses that roll worst of all, naturally, as shook up as he was. “Oh, hell,” Wes says, “now it’s like playing against some softbrain. This ain’t no contest.” He takes the stake money from me and counts out his own fifty plus thirty-five of Sublett’s and hands him the fifteen left over. “Here, bubba,” he tells him, “game’s over. Come on, I’ll buy you a drink. Hell, I’ll buy everybody a drink!”

  We all go out to the front room and Wes stands the house a round. Then I notice Sublett’s left the scene. He’d likely slipped out the side-alley door while everybody was cheering Wes and thanking him for his generosity. I reckoned he felt too damn shamed to stay and drink with us.

  Ten minutes later Wes went over to the front doors to have a look outside—which was the worst thing he could of done at that moment. Somebody in the back of the room yelled, “Watch it, Wes!” And there was Sublett, standing just inside the side-alley door, aiming a shotgun. Wes started to turn and pull his pistol, but there was only thirty feet between them and Sublett had the drop on him and couldn’t miss, not with Wes squared in the doorway like he was, just a perfect target.

  The charge hit him just above the hip and knocked him clean out of the room. Everybody dropped to the floor and Sublett fired the second barrel at the empty doorway and took out a good chunk of doorjamb. Then he lowered the shotgun and stood there for a minute, looking like he couldn’t believe he’d done it.

  Sublett was just starting to smile when Wes lurched back in through the door, clutching at his mangled side, his face all twisted up in pain. He yelled, “You sonbitch!” and got off a wild shot just as Sublett dropped the scattergun and ran out.

  The blood was rolling off his wound and drenching his pant leg, but he staggered back outside as Sublett came out from the alley and ran down the street. Wes stumbled out into the street after him and got off a couple of shots, and Tim Jackson swore he saw Sublett catch one in the shoulder, but I don’t know. Sublett disappeared around the corner and that’s the last any of us ever saw of him. He had to of had a horse all saddled and waiting to get away as fast as he did.

  Wes managed to gimp about ten feet down the street before he dropped, and we all went running up to him. He was gasping and wide-eyed. “I reckon I’m killed,” he said.

  Barnett kept trying to soothe him as me and a bunch of the boys hoisted him up, one on each leg and one under each arm, and started toting him fast over to Doc Carrington’s office. It was a hell of a wound and left a bright red trail all the way to the doc’s. I thought sure he’d be empty as a tore-open water bag by the time we got him there.

  On the way over, he told Barnett to take his money belt off him, that it had about two thousand dollars in gold, and that his saddlebags were holding another two or three hundred in silver. He told him to get the money to his wife and to tell her he tried to avoid this trouble but had no choice in the matter.

  He was breathing rough when we got him into Doc Carrington’s, but his eyes were still burning with life. We put him on the table in the office and the doc sent one of the fellas to go get Doc Lester from his office in the livery, where he tended to animals and people both. Then he ran the rest of us on outside. Barnett was the last to come out. He had the money belt with him. It was dripping blood and had seven buckshot wedged in it.

  If his assailant had aimed at his head instead of his middle, they would have carried him directly to the undertaker rather than to me. Or if the shooter had been standing five to ten feet closer to him so that the load had not spread quite so much before impact. Or if he hadn’t been wearing a well-packed money belt which shielded him from some of the shot. But if, if, if—if is meaningless. It is the premise of a parlor game. What might have happened to him is what did happen to him. And thus he was not killed.

  He was, however, at the lip of the abyss, as it were, when they brought him to me. The buckshot charge had torn away a sizable portion of tissue from his side and had severed several large veins. My immediate obligation was to contain the bleeding. But I was also quite concerned with two distinct entry wounds positioned rather more toward the navel. I turned him on his side but perceived no exit perforations, so it was clear the two shot were still in him. I was inclined to believe the wound was mortal, for his blood loss was quite severe. Yet his eyes showed clear focus and his breathing, though rapid, was even and strong. He was neither lung-shot nor wounded in the stomach, and his spirit seemed robust. I have seen many men die for lack of endurance against the shock of their wounds, but had Mr. Hardin expired on my table, it would not have been for want of grit.

  By the time Dr. Lester arrived, I had extracted eight scattered and relatively shallow-perforation buckshot and had determined that the two wounds closer to the navel had lacerated the kidney and were most likely positioned near the lower juncture of posterior ribs and spine. It would be difficult to extract them, but not to do so at once would entail the greater jeopardy. Dr. Lester concurred. Up to this point, Mr. Hardin had endured my probings and extractions with impressive fortitude, holding tightly to the edges of the table and giving little evidence of his pain except for an occasional grimace and grunt. He rejected the opiate I offered him to dull the even greater pain he would feel when I went after the buckshot at his spine. “If death’s going to get me,” he said, “I want to give it a clear look in the eye when it does.”

  We labored over him for more than an hour, and though he cursed loudly at times in reaction to my deep and sinuous explorations with the forceps, his tolerance of the pain was extraordinary. He bore the cauterizing iron with hardly more than a quivering flexion of sinew at each application. A man of less constitution would not likely have survived the procedure.

  When at last I had removed the two buckshot, we stitched the gaping wound as best we could and carefully bandaged it. Lester and I looked as though we’d been in attendance at a
hog slaughter. We were blood to the elbows and our aprons were heavily stained. Mr. Hardin was deathly pale from the loss of blood, and his sweat exuded severe pain’s prodigious reek. Yet he did not lose consciousness at any point in the procedure. He even smiled when we told him the ordeal was over. “Damn shame,” he said in a whisper, “it was so much fun.” Grit.

  I informed him quite frankly that the chance for his survival was no better than sixty percent. The immediate dangers, as I made clear to him, were fever and infection—and, of course, a recurrence of profuse hermorrhaging if he did not keep passively to his bed while recuperating. He thanked me warmly for my services, assured me that his kinsman would see to my recompense, and said he would obey my instructions to the letter.

  His friends made arrangements for him at a hotel across the street. Despite my protests, his kinsman, a lively fellow named Barnett, pressed a pair of twenty-dollar gold pieces on me, an exceptionally generous payment. As they were easing him onto a litter to carry him to his quarters, I heard Barnett whisper to him that they had cut the telegraph wires and posted lookouts at either end of town.

  * * *

  I have on many occasions been asked how it feels to have saved the life of a man who had already killed so many, and who, because of my surgical skill, survived to kill so many more. My answer has never varied. I am proud to have done it. I applied all my skill to save a man in extremis and I succeeded. As one sworn to the Oath of Hippocrates, I could have done no less than try. And I utterly reject any responsibility whatsoever for his subsequent depredations. He was the captain of his soul, I of mine—and I shall discuss it no further.

  Wes and I had been schoolmates in Sumpter. Daddy had doctored his family from the time they came to East Texas from Dallas. Then Wes went off and became the notorious John Wesley Hardin, and I didn’t lay eyes on him again for nearly five years, not until the night Barnett Jones and some others brought him to our house in a wagon, burning with fever and bleeding to death.

  Barnett called out for Daddy, saying he had somebody bad hurt who needed tending. We recognized his voice, so I let down the hammers on the shotgun I’d grabbed up when we first heard the horses, and I followed Daddy out the door. The moonlight cut white and sharp through the dark trees and across the hats of the mounted men. Daddy held the lantern over the man laying in the wagon and we saw it was Wes. He was unconscious and breathing rough. Daddy felt of his pulse and checked his eyes, then held the lantern close to his sopping wound. He smelled half dead already.

  He’d been shot in Trinity six days before, Barnett told us. For two days Doc Carrington had thought he would die, but then his fever broke and he started taking food and looked like he’d recover. “But some son of a bitch yapped to the police,” Barnett said, “and we had to quick get him out of Trinity. Wes said to bring him here.”

  They’d been a day and a night on the old Trinity trace, moving slow and careful, and it was God’s own wonder they didn’t meet up with any police patrols. But it’s a rough old trace they’d come on, and all that bouncing around in the wagon hadn’t done Wes a bit of good. Barnett said he’d been passing out off and on.

  Daddy had him carried around to the lean-to in back of the house. I held the lantern up close for him while he worked at cleaning the wound and patching it where the stitches had come undone. The sweat was just steaming off Wes, his fever was so high. He was pretty much out of his head and mumbling nonsense.

  While Daddy did all he could for him, Momma poured coffee for the fellas who’d brought him and passed around some warmed-over pone. They gobbled it up quick and left, all except Barnett. He was still at the table when Daddy got done with Wes. He told us he’d set up in the south woods, at a spot where he could watch both the main road and the old trace for any sign of somebody coming.

  As sudden as all that, Wes was our responsibility. Momma’s face was hard as stone about it, but she didn’t speak her objections. Still, every time she looked over toward the lean-to, it was clear how much she hated Wes Hardin for putting her family in such danger with the law.

  Daddy and me sat up with him all that night. Just before Barnett had gone off to the woods to watch the roads, Daddy’d had a whispered talk with him, then gone to the shed and got a pick and spade and placed them up against the lean-to door. If Wes had died in the night, he would have been in the ground before sunrise, and nobody but us would have known whatever became of him.

  I was brought out of a doze just before dawn by Wes saying, “I could sure do with a drink of water, Billy-boy, if you don’t mind.” Billy-boy was what he always used to call me in our school days. Daddy was sleeping with his chin in his chest in a chair by the door. I dipped some water and held Wes’s head so he could sip at it. I could feel his fever was down. He smacked his lips like he was tasting the most delicious thing in the world, then said, “So, Billyboy, what’s new?”

  He was with us about ten days all told. After a week, Barnett figured Wes was safe enough with us and decided to get on back home. He had his own family to tend to, and they were sure to be worried about him. He’d cleaned and loaded Wes’s pistols and put them on a chair by the bed. They shook hands and looked serious for a moment, then both laughed—which made Wes wince with pain. Barnett said, “You let me know soon as you feel up to having some fun in Trinity again, hear?” And Wes said, “You can count on it.” Then Barnett left for back home. He was as fine a kinsman as a man could ask for.

  Three days later we got word from a close friend and neighbor named Charles Crosby that a State Police patrol had come into town that morning and was passing around a reward poster. “Somebody’s probably already talked to them,” Daddy told Wes. “They’re likely to be all around us by tonight.”

  Wes had some friends called the Harrels who owned a small farm some thirty miles away, deep in the Angelina Forest. He figured he could hide out there till he finished healing. He’d have to ride, though, and he wasn’t even up walking yet. Daddy bound his wound as tight as Wes could stand it, then helped him to his feet and into his clothes. He was bent nearly double, and it was all he could do to hobble on outside to his horse. Charles held the animal next to a stump that Daddy and I helped him to step up on, and then we shouldered him up on the saddle. It all took a good while to do, and the whole process left Wes sucking for breath and pouring sweat. Worse than that, it had opened his wound some. I could see the blood seeping through his shirt just over his gunbelt. Momma gave me a sack of food she’d fixed for us and kissed me on the cheek, and Daddy squeezed my shoulder and said to take care.

  We couldn’t ride hard but we rode steady. Charles rode in the lead about fifty yards, keeping a sharp eye for lawmen and bands of vigilantes. I stuck right next to Wes in case he started to fall, but he hung on tight. More than once we had to rein up and hide in the trees while small groups of riders passed us by. Wes would sip water and wet his face some. The bloodstain on his shirt kept getting bigger and his eyes were red with pain. That night we camped without a fire in a thick stand of oaks and supped on jerky. Wes was able to sleep a bit with the help of a bottle of bourbon I’d thought to bring along. In the morning the blood on his shirt was crusted, but it started flowing again as soon as he mounted up.

  We arrived at the Harrel farm early next evening. It was a family of four—Dave, Louella, and their young twin sons, Jack and Mack. They were happy to see him, but were alarmed by the sight of his bloody wound. We helped get him into a bunk in the side room of their enclosed dog-run cabin. Louella sent one of the boys for a kettle of steaming water and the other for her needles and thread and a clean sheet she could shred into bandages. “Dang, woman,” Wes said, “I been sewed up so many times in the last couple of weeks, I’m starting to feel like somebody’s poorly made shirt.” Louella told him to hush his mouth or she’d start by sewing up his lips.

  The Harrels were fine people. When Charles and I left in the morning, I felt sure Wes would be safe there for a while. But he wasn’t. He was never safe anywhere for lo
ng.

  Dave put a shotgun and extra loads next to Wes’s bed, and every morning and afternoon him and the boys went out to work the fields, same as always. I kept a big pot of beef-and-bean soup simmering and would spoon some into Wes every time he awoke. By the fourth day it was clear how quick he was getting his strength back because he was feeling better enough to start peeping at me in a mischievous manner.

  I was good-looking in my younger days, take my word on it—but I’m not and never have been a loose woman. I always did love my husband, first to last. I’m not making excuses for what I’m about to tell. I don’t think it needs any excusing, no matter what anybody else might think.

  I was wearing a big loose shirt of Dave’s, and when I bent over Wes to adjust the bedclothes and his pillows, I knew he was getting a good look right down into it. He smiled up at me and I guess I smiled back. He put his hand up behind my neck and pulled my face down and gave me as good a kiss as ever I got, so wet and full of tongue it was like a living sin in my mouth. He slipped his hand up under my shirt while he was at it and my teats got tight with excitement. Then my shirt was bunched up under my arms and his mouth was at my nipples and I went dizzy from the sweetness of it. Next thing I knew, he was hard in my hand and his hand was all the way up under my skirt and we were panting like dogs against each other’s neck. He started twitching in my fist and it felt like hot wax flowing over my fingers just as a shiver slid up through me like a snake.

  My tongue still gets a bit dry when I think on it.

  We kissed and stroked each other real gentle, and a minute later he was back asleep. We never talked about it after that. I don’t know why I did it. I guess because I married so young and always thought I was missing some secret excitement in life. I’d get these yearnings. That small wickedness with Wes satisfied me of them for good. Later on, whenever I’d get to feeling the least bit restless, I’d recollect that time with Wes and feel a blush and then be just fine again. As for him, well, I reckon he’d just plain been taking pleasure in being alive.