The Pistoleer: A Novel of John Wesley Hardin

by James Carlos Blake

  He took his family to a cabin deep in the woods and fired warning shots at anybody who rode too near to it. He would holler for them to tell Hardin he was ready for him, by God. One day his wife showed up at her daddy’s house with one of the young ones in tow, all hysterical and half out of her mind with grief. She told a terrible tale of Wilcox waking up in the middle of the night and going crazy with fright when he saw a shadow crossing the room. Thinking it was Hardin come to kill him, he grabbed up his gun and fired. It was his older boy Robert, walking in his sleep as he had recently begun to do, and Wilcox blew his brains all over the cabin wall. He ran out into the black woods, firing his pistol and screaming, “Come out and fight like a man, you son of a bitch! I’m right here! I’m right here!” While he was ranting in the forest, his wife and the younger boy slipped off and made their way to the trace and walked all night and day to get to town. Mrs. Wilcox’s daddy came into town and told the story to the sheriff, and then W.E. and me went out to the cabin to arrest Wilcox.

  We found him hung from the center beam of the ceiling. His face was all black and his tongue stuck out and his eyes bugged from his head. He’d shit his pants and the stink was awful. There was a note pinned to his shirt saying, “try geting me now harden.”

  The story goes that a few months later when he was told Ward Wilcox of the State Police had gone crazy and hung himself for fear of being killed by him, Wes said, “Ward who?”

  Even my grandpa, who’d lived in the Sandies all his life, wasn’t rightly sure how the Sutton-Taylor Feud began. There’d been bad blood between the clans for as long as anybody could remember. But whyever the bloodletting got started, it’s a fact it got worse than ever when Creek Taylor killed Fred Sutton. Creek was head of the Taylors at the time, the old granddaddy, and one day he caught Fred trying to steal a young hog from a Taylor pen. Fred put up a good fight and cut Creek across the ribs with his Bowie before Creek shot him in the knee and took the vinegar out of him. Then Creek tied him up, slashed his belly open with the Bowie, and threw him in the hog pen. The pigs rooted in Fred’s guts while he screamed to high heaven and Old Creek laughed to see him getting gobbled up alive.

  Old Creek was like that. He taught all his sons and grandsons to honor the family code: “Whosoever sheds Taylor blood shall by Taylor hand shed his.”

  When the War came, everybody went off to fight the Yankees—but the Taylors brought the War back to DeWitt County with them. Appomattox didn’t mean jackshit to them. They refused to knuckle under to Yankee military law and kept on killing bluebellies every chance they got. Pitkin Taylor was now the head of a family of hard cases that included his sons Jim and Billy and his nephews Buck and Scrap. They were joined by friends and kin from all over the Sandies who were still as much Johnny Reb as ever. One Yankee patrol after another was sent into the Sandies to bust them up, but the Taylors bested them every time. They knew every rock and tree in the region and ran the Yanks in circles. They made fools or dead men of them all.

  The Yank generals in charge of Texas got in a hellish fury with the Taylors, so they authorized a band of fifty hired guns called the Regulators to bring the whole Taylor bunch to heel. The Regulators didn’t have any trouble recruiting Bill Sutton, who knew the Sandies as well as the Taylors did. Sutton hated Yankees, of course, but he hated Taylors more. He signed on so many friends that the Regulators came to be known as the Sutton Party, even though Sutton wasn’t their leader. That was Jack Helm.

  When the Yankee troopers finally left Texas, the Sutton-Taylor war was going on worse than ever—but Governor Davis had formed the State Police, and Jack Helm became a captain in it. He quickly got to be the most hated State Policeman of them all, which is saying something. He recruited a lot of other policemen into the Sutton Party, and the band grew to nearly two hundred strong. Besides Sutton, Helm’s lieutenants were Jim Cox and Joe Tom-linson.

  The best way to describe Jack Helm is to tell about the Kelly brothers, Will and Henry. They were a pair of likable wildhairs who’d both married daughters of Pitkin Taylor. There wasn’t any question about whose side they were on in the feud, but neither one had ever killed a Sutton man, I know that for a fact. Anyhow, one day Jack Helm showed up at their homes with a troop of State Police and arrested them for having shot out the lights of a traveling show where they’d been drunk a couple of nights before. It seemed an awful small matter to call for the State Police. Everybody figured it was just one more of Jack Helm’s ways to irritate the Taylors. So Will and Henry let themselves be cuffed and taken away to the courthouse in Cuero, where they figured they’d pay a fine and then be let go. But they never made it to Cuero. Once Helm got them way out in the open prairie, he shot them both in cold blood.

  The Kellys’ mother and Henry Kelly’s wife had followed the troop at a distance in a wagon and witnessed the murders with their own eyes. They filed charges at the State Police headquarters in Austin. It wasn’t the first time Jack Helm was accused of shooting prisoners, but it was the first time he was brought to trial for it. In court he said the Kelly women were lying. He swore he’d shot the Kelly boys because they’d tried to escape. Ten State Policemen backed up his story and he was acquitted in less than an hour. But the State Police had had enough of his maverick ways and bad publicity, and they fired him off the force.

  Pitkin Taylor was at the trial. When Helm was acquitted, Pitkin had to be restrained from attacking him. He cussed Helm and swore he’d kill him for making widows of his two daughters. “There’s no place you can hide I won’t find you, whoreson bastard!” Pitkin shouted. Helm just stared at him with those cold eyes and spit at Pitkin’s feet.

  Next thing we knew, he was sheriff of DeWitt County—which didn’t mean a damn to Pitkin. “I don’t care what badge he’s wearing or how many guns he’s got under him,” he said. “One of these days when he’s least expecting it, there I’ll be with my double-barrel in his face—and boom!”

  One of these days wasn’t soon enough. A week later Pitkin’s wife woke him in the middle of the night, complaining that their milk cow had got loose and was tromping out in the high brush back of the house. She could hear its bell clanking. Pitkin grumbled and pulled on his boots and went out to put the animal back in its pen. It was a cloudy night and hard to see. Cussing loud enough for his wife to hear him from the door, he followed the sound of the bell toward the edge of the woods. Suddenly the brush was blasting bright with gunfire and Pitkin was spinning and jerking every which way and then fell. Pitkin’s wife didn’t hear herself screaming till the shooting finally stopped. The ambushers yahooed and flung the cow bell against the front of the house. “Death to all Taylors!” they hollered, and whooped off into the woods. Mrs. Taylor didn’t get a look at any of them, but there wasn’t any question they were Sutton men.

  Even though they’d put sixteen rounds in Pitkin, they didn’t kill him, not right away. He was tough as a longhorn bull and refused to give up the ghost for nearly two months. He lay in bed all that time, seeping blood and pus from just about every pore, and slowly turned into a gasping yellow skeleton. He finally whispered to his wife one night, “To hell with it,” and died.

  If anybody’d had doubts about who his killers were, they didn’t after the funeral. He was buried in the Taylors’ big family graveyard overlooking the Guadalupe River. The preacher was in the middle of the eulogy when a bunch of riders showed up on the opposite bank. It was Bill Sutton and his boys. They cussed us and laughed and said the worms that fed on Pitkin were like to die of poisoning. “You there, Miz Taylor!” Bill Sutton called over. “If you’d like a fair replacement for Pit, I got a mean-tempered, high-smelling old hog I’d be willing to sell you cheap!” The veins in Jim Taylor’s forehead looked about to pop. His brother Billy grabbed him before he could pull his gun. “This ain’t the time or place, Jim,” he said. “We got Ma here. We got women and young ones.” Sutton and his riders yeehawed awhile longer, fired in the air a few times, then rode off laughing. The Widow Taylor looked about to
go insane. “I swear to you, Ma,” Jim said, “I swear to you I’ll water Daddy’s grave with Bill Sutton’s blood.”

  A few days later Jim was drinking with friends in a Cuero saloon when somebody told him Sutton was playing billiards in Foster’s down the street. Sutton hardly ever showed his face in town anymore, so the opportunity was too good for Jim to pass up. But he’d been drinking, like I said, and he was a natural-born hothead, and so his excitement got the better of him. Instead of sneaking up quiet and getting the edge on Sutton, Jim and his friends charged into Foster’s cussing a blue streak and shooting wild. One of Sutton’s men was killed and one wounded badly. One of Jim’s friends got shot in the balls. Sutton got his left thumb blown off but escaped through the back door.

  All the Sandies was now one big battleground. Every man went armed and ready, walked careful and spoke low—even strangers passing through. Newspapers all over Texas condemned the violence in Gonzales and DeWitt and cautioned citizens to stay away from the region until such time as law and order was restored to it.

  That is how things stood at the time I met Wes Hardin. Like everybody else in the Sandies, I knew he’d been living on the Duderstadt property—him and his pretty wife Jane—ever since he broke jail on Gonzales. And like everybody else, I couldn’t help wondering which side of the Taylor-Sutton war he leaned toward. Jim Taylor was especially interested in finding out. “With him on our side, him and the Clementses,” Jim said, “Sutton’s two hundred men wouldn’t look like near so many.” I’d met Manning Clements at a cattle auction the year before and had taken a drink with him in Gonzales a time or two since then—so Jim sent me out to his ranch on Elm Creek to sound him out about siding with the Taylor Party.

  Manning was polite as a man can be about saying no. He said he sympathized with the Taylors and had much admired them for the proud way they’d stood up to bluebelly law and against the State Police. “And everything I’ve heard about Bill Sutton,” he said, “has made me want to spit. And Jack Helm, well, that sorry son of a bitch best give me wide passage. “ Just the same, he was sorry but he didn’t want to get involved in the feud: “The plain and simple of it is, it ain’t my fight. I’ve got my own family to look out for and my cattle business to tend. As long as neither party harms me or mine, I got no cause to side with one or the other.” I said I supposed his cousin Wes felt the same way. He said he couldn’t speak for Wes, but he and Jane were coming to visit that night, and if I’d stay to supper I could ask him myself.

  Wes seemed as glad to make my acquaintance as I was to make his. They’d brought their newborn baby daughter with them. They’d named her Mary Elizabeth but called her Molly, and Wes showed her off as proud as any new poppa. Then he and Manning and I sat in the parlor with whiskey and cigars, and Manning didn’t beat around the bush in telling him there was something I wanted to know. So I went ahead and asked. Wes studied my face real close for a minute, then gave me pretty much the same reasons Manning had for staying out of it. “You just met those two darlings of mine,” he said. “What sort of husband and daddy would I be if I made one a widow and the other an orphan by fighting somebody I got nothing against personally?”

  I asked if he knew Jack Helm had papers on him for the shooting of Green Parramore. “I don’t know Jack Helm from jackshit,” he said, and gave a quick glance toward the door. He went on in a softer voice. “I do know his reputation as a natural-born sonbitch, but just the same, he ain’t bothered me, and that’s all that counts. The most I ask of any man is that he leave me be, and Jack Helm has done that. Far as I’m concerned, me and him ain’t got a quarrel.”

  Well, I figured that was that, and during supper the talk turned to other things. Wes told me he was back in the cattle business. Unlike Manning, though, he had no desire to make any more drives to Kansas. He’d been rounding up cows in the Sandies and driving small herds twenty-five miles to the railhead at Cuero every week. The train delivered the steers to the port at Indianola, and from there they were shipped to New Orleans.

  “Matter of fact,” he said, “I’ve got to go Cuero tomorrow to arrange for the next shipment to Indianola.” When I mentioned I was headed for Cuero too, to pick up a new saddle I’d had sent from San Antone, Wes suggested we make the trip together, and I said fine. Manning insisted I spend the night at his place, and we then made a real fine party out of the evening.

  We left just after sunup on a pretty day. The air was cool but full of birdsong and the smell of fresh-plowed earth. We rode slowly along the new road running across the prairie between Elm Creek and Cuero, talking about racehorses, mainly. We were about eight miles from Cuero, and Wes was in the middle of telling me a wild and probably made-up tale of a time he’d won a big race in the wild town of Towash with his preacher-daddy’s horse, when he suddenly said, “You recognize that man?” and just barely nodded toward the Mustang Mot, more than a hundred yards off.

  The mot was a grove of hardwoods standing by itself out there on the prairie. It got its name because of the herds of wild ponies that used to rest in its shade in the old days. I had to look hard before I finally spotted who he meant—a mounted man, watching us from the deep shade of the trees. “I see him,” I said, “but I don’t place him from here.” The rider walked his horse out of the shade and onto the road. As we closed in on each other I saw who it was. “Jack Helm,” I said, and felt like a fool for whispering, since he was still a good forty yards away.

  Helm was carrying a Winchester with the butt braced high on his leg and wore a pistol on each hip. Wes pushed his coat flaps back over his guns. “Watch the trees in the mot,” he said. “Could be he’s got backups in there.” We closed up to within a few feet of each other and reined up.

  “Morning,” Helm said. “You boys from hereabouts?”

  Wes asked who wanted to know, and Helm’s face went tight. “I do, boy. Jack Helm, sheriff of DeWitt County. Who might you be?”

  “No might about it,” Wes said. “Name’s John Wesley Hardin.”

  Helm smiled, but his eyes didn’t get a bit warmer. Hell, I figured he’d known all the time it was Wes. He held the Winchester with his finger on the trigger. If he let the barrel fall forward it would be pointed square at Wes’s chest from four feet off.

  But Wes was all set too—his right hand high on his leg and close to his gunbutt, ready to pull. What I was ready to do was hit the ground and scoot for cover.

  “Do you have papers on me?” Wes said.

  “I do,” Helm said. “But I don’t intend to serve them.”

  Wes laughed. “I guess you don’t—not while I’m looking you in the eye.”

  “Don’t try bullyragging me, son,” Helm said. “I have no rope out for you. You’re square in DeWitt County while I’m sheriff.”

  “Is that a fact? And why are you so kindly disposed toward me?”

  “The warrant’s for killing a nigger,” Helm said. “That counts less than shooting a dog. Besides, you are not sided with the Taylor Party—or so I’ve been told. I hold no ill toward anyone with enough good sense to hate Taylors.”

  “I don’t hate Taylors,” Wes said. “But I belong to no party except my own kin and family.”

  “Well, hell, that’s good enough,” Helm said, smiling tight. He eased the Winchester down across the pommel and said, “If you’re heading into town, let’s ride in together. I’d like to talk to you.”

  He did most of the talking. He told Wes the Taylors had brought their troubles on themselves. They were pure-dee troublemakers, he said, and the Sandies would be a far better place without a Taylor left in it.

  “Now you and me, Wesley,” Helm said, talking like he and Wes were old pals, “we’re smart men—and smart men can always come to an agreement that’s best for the both of them. You have your troubles with the law and I have my troubles with the Taylors. I think we could help each other out, smart men like us.”

  “All I want is to be let alone,” Wes said. “Same goes for my friends. You can be sure we’ll take
no side in the feud so long as both sides let us be.”

  “Well now,’ Helm said, “I can appreciate that. Mr. Sutton will appreciate it too. But just to be sure everybody appreciates everybody else real good, what say we all meet at Jim Cox’s a week from today? While we’re at it, you might be interested to hear a suggestion I got for getting you clear with the State Police. I know you wouldn’t mind that. You know where Jim’s place is?”

  He didn’t but I did, and he told Helm all right, he’d be there.

  Cuero had come in sight by now, and Helm said, “Next week then—Jim Cox’s at noon.” He said he had to serve papers on some jackleg a few miles south of town, and off he went.

  Wes watched him ride away and said, “Every thought in that man’s mind is as crooked as a sidewinder. You can see it in his eyes.” Just the same, he thought it might be interesting to hear what they had to say about getting him clear with the State Police. He would’ve met with the devil himself for a chance to do that.

  We took care of our separate business at the train station, then went into a saloon to wet our whistles before heading back home. Just as we finished our drinks, a big man with bloodshot eyes, wearing a suit and bowler hat which were both too small for him, stepped up to Wes and said, “My name is J. B. Morgan, Mr. Hardin. Deputy J. B. Morgan. I’d be right proud to buy you a drink.”

  “Thanks anyway, pardner,” Wes said. “We’re just leaving.”