The Pistoleer: A Novel of John Wesley Hardin

by James Carlos Blake

  Sandra Jean got up and brushed her ass off with one hand while she held the other over her bush like some shy little schoolgirl instead of the free-and-easy waiter girl she was at Fancy Frank’s saloon in Austin. The girl in the house with Frank was a waiter girl too—Lola, a redhead with nipples you could hang hats on. “If nobody minds,” Sandra Jean says, “I will just retire to the indoors.” She turns on her heel and nearly loses her balance, then gets hold of herself and walks off twitching her pretty ass.

  The fella says, “Listen, Yarrow, I got Frank’s cousin Jim here. He’s bad sick and I’m shot.” I’d never met Jim Taylor, but I’d heard all about him from Frank. Like everybody else, I’d heard about how him and his little brother Billy had gunned down Bill Sutton on the steamer Clinton in Indianola. “Might you be …?” I say—and he says, “John Wesley Hardin. Go tell Frank.”

  Frank already had his pants on and his hand filled—and damn near shot me when I came through the door. Sandra Jean had told him there was a man with a gun behind the house and he’d thought the same thing I had, that we were being rousted by bandits. I told him who it was and we got dressed fast. Two minutes later Frank was patting the girls on their bottoms as he helped them into the buckboard while I hitched the team. The girls were still only half dressed and mad as wet hens to be getting such a fast shove out of there. Frank pressed some money on them to ease their upset. He gave Lola a kiss so long and a squeeze of her tit, then slapped the horse’s rump and said, “Git!” and the wagon rolled off down the trace toward the Austin road.

  We went around back and there was Wes holding two horses. Jim was on one and coughing into a balled bandanna. While Frank and Wes got him in the house, I staked their horses back in the brakes with ours. When I got back, Jim was tucked in bed, looking sick as a dog and sweating with a rank fever. Frank got him to drink some of the juice off the stew wed supped on, then let him drift off to sleep.

  He tore up an old shirt to make a bandage for Wes’s wound. We came to find out he’d taken the shot in some bad business him and Jim had got into up in Comanche. His family was still back there, and he was worried about how they were making out. He figured he’d lie low for a few days to let things cool off some, then slip on back and make sure they were all right. Frank told him he was welcome to stay as long as he liked. “Thanks kindly,” Wes said. He had a heavy growth of whiskers and his hair was all wild tangles and his eyes were bloodshot with pain and exhaustion. He fell asleep at the table before he finished eating his stew.

  Over the next few days Jim mostly slept and got better. His fever broke and his cough eased up. Wes was doing good too. It was the first chance for his wound to start healing since they’d made their getaway from Comanche more than a week before, and after a few days it was knitting up nicely.

  Then Alf and Charlie Day showed up. They were cousins to Jim Taylor and were supposed to be with Doc Brosius and the trail crew Wes had hired to move his herd. When Wes saw them coming out of the brakes, he said, “Oh, hell.”

  Alf and Charlie were surprised to find Wes and Jim there, but they didn’t look real happy about it, and pretty soon we found out why. We sat at the table and had a drink while Alf did most of the talking. He told us Doc Brosius and three other of the crew were under arrest in Comanche, and the herd had been confiscated by the State Rangers.

  He and Charlie had been on herd guard when they saw a gang of about two dozen riders coming at a gallop over a far rise—so they quick spurred their ponies into the woods and got out of sight. Pink Burns was already there, gathering wood for the cookfire. Doc Brosius had gone to Comanche the day before to find Wes and let him know the herd was at Hamilton, but he hadn’t come back yet.

  They watched from the trees as Scrap Taylor and the other two men in camp threw up their hands in surrender. “We knew it wasn’t rustlers,” Alf said, “not a gang that size.” When half the riders headed back toward Comanche with the three trail hands and the other half stayed with the herd, Alf figured them for some kind of posse, but he couldn’t make heads or tails of what was going on. He and Charlie and Pink circled their way around and headed into town to see if they could find Doc Brosius to tell him what happened.

  What they found was a town crawling with Rangers and vigilantes. “The place looked ready for war, there was so many guns about,” Alf said. They learned Doc was in jail too, and Wes’s brother Joe and his Dixon cousins—all because Wes and Jim had killed some deputy from Brown County. Wes’s whole family was under arrest in Joe’s house. The Rangers were arresting everybody connected to Wes by blood or friendship. There were posses crisscrossing the whole region. Alf convinced Charlie and Pink it’d be safer to stay put in the crowded town for a few days than try to leave Comanche County with so many posses on the lookout for suspicious characters.

  Wes cussed like blue blazes. Now Alf was licking his lips and looking everywhere except in Wes’s eyes. Charlie was looking awful uncomfortable too. I knew we hadn’t heard the worst, not yet. I reckon Wes knew it too. “Get it out, Alf,” he said.

  “Oh, Jesus, Wes,” Alf said, “I hate to be the one.” The way he said it, you knew it was going to be as bad as bad gets, and it was. Talking fast and without hardly pausing for breath, he told how Joe and the Dixons had been taken out of the courthouse jail by a midnight mob and lynched in the woods. “There wasn’t a thing in the world we could of done to stop them, Wes,” Alf said. “If we’d tried, they’d of hung us too. You got to believe that.”

  “He died brave, Wes,” Charlie said. “It ain’t nothing but the truth.”

  Wes’s face looked about to fall apart. He got up fast and went outside. The rest of us just sat there. I picked at the wood grain of the table top with my fingernail and wished I was someplace else. Jim Taylor looked like a kicked hound. “Sweet Christ,” he said. “Joe. He never even shot nobody.”

  After a while Wes came back in. His eyes were puffy and red, but you could tell he was done with it. Jim Taylor got out of bed and joined us at the table. He was some better but still weak, and he stunk to high heaven.

  Jim decided he’d go to Gonzales with Alf and Charlie to lay low among friends till he was full well again, but Wes was going back to Comanche. He had to know how the rest of his family was doing and see what he could do to get them clear of town. Alf said the family all been moved back to the Reverend’s house, but advised Wes against going there. “That Ranger captain got out the word that if you so much as show your face around there he’ll kill your daddy. He’s the sort to do it, Wes.”

  Wes punched the table. “Son of a bitch! I can’t just do nothing!”

  “You go,” Jim Taylor said. “But you step real light.”

  I said he could use somebody to ride with him, and I’d be proud to be the one. He looked at me for long moment, then said he’d be proud to have me. And that settled that.

  Three nights later we made our way into Comanche slow and careful. We went up through the heavy oak groves at the west end of town, where Alf said the lynching had took place. A hazy slice of moon showed through the treetops. It had rained a little earlier and the trees were still dripping. Our horses’ hooves sucked through the mud. We dismounted and walked the animals the last fifty yards to the rear edge of the Preacher’s property.

  Several of the lower windows showed light, but the upper rooms were all dark. “It’s likely possemen on the first floor,” Wes whispered, “and the family sleeping upstairs.” He nudged me and pointed—a man had stepped out of the shadows alongside the house and was coming toward the trees, a rifle laid across his shoulders and his arms draped over its ends. He stopped at the trees, about fifteen feet from us, set his rifle against a trunk, and fumbled with the front of his pants. A moment later we heard the piss pouring and a satisfied sigh.

  One of our horses snorted softly and the man’s head jerked up. He probably wet himself, cutting off his piss as short as he did. He tried to tuck himself in with one hand while he held the rifle out like a pistol with the other—
but he was facing the wrong way, sound being the funny thing it is in the dark. Wes eased up behind him in the heavy shadows of the trees, and just loud enough for the fella to hear, he said, “Drop it or die.”

  The fella dropped the rifle and froze. “Jesus, Wes,” he whispered, “don’t shoot. It’s me—Dick.”

  “Dick?” Wes says. “Dick Wade?”

  Turns out they knew each other. They’d had a run-in sometime earlier when Wes had sneaked up to his daddy’s house and found it full of possemen ambushers. He’d had to run for it with bullets whizzing past his ears. Dashing through the trees to get back to his horse, he’d run smack into Ranger Dick Wade. Wade had thrown up his hands and begged Wes not to shoot him, saying he was his friend and was pulling for him to get clear. He seemed so sincere that Wes not only spared him, but gave him a twenty-dollar gold piece to give to Jane as soon as he could sneak it to her.

  “I snuck it to her the very next day, Wes,” he said. “She was so happy to know you were alive she cried. She said if I saw you again to tell you she’s all right, the baby too, and she prays for you every night. I told your daddy I’d seen you and was your friend, and him and me got to be friends too. He hired me on to tend his garden—that’s what him and me told Captain Waller—but he really just wanted me around here to keep a lookout and warn you off in case you came to see Jane and Molly.”

  Wes asked where Joe was buried, and Wade said back in the grove about a quarter mile. Wes thought about it a minute, then said, “Show me. I want to see.”

  We followed him through the dripping shadows until we came to the grave mounds. They were set pretty much side by side, and even though the rains had flattened them some, they still smelled heavy of fresh-turned earth. Wade pointed to the one a little apart from the other two and said it was Joe’s. “Listen,” Wes said, “I want to see Jane, I want to see my little girl. Tell Daddy I’m here. Find out how I can see them.” Dick said he’d be back directly and slipped off into the dark. Wes knelt in the mud beside Joe’s grave and took off his hat.

  I went off deeper into the woods till I figured it was safe to light a cigar, then sat on a stump and smoked my cheroot and just listened to the raindrip and frogs and hoot owls. I hoped Wes was right to trust the Ranger not to bring back a bunch of his friends. When my smoke was down to a stub, I snuffed it and went back to the gravesite. Wade had already returned and was telling Wes his daddy’d been powerful happy to hear he was alive and running free. But he’d refused to wake Jane and tell her Wes was here. She’d insist on coming to see him, and all the stirring about would alert the Rangers in the house for sure. The Reverend wanted Wes to get far out of Comanche County and stay away. “He said to tell you Waller’ll kill the whole family if you’re seen anywhere in the county. He’s serious as church, Wes. I don’t blame him. Waller’s the devil’s own son of a bitch.”

  Wes paced around in a wide circle, cussing steadily under his breath. There wasn’t a thing he could do, not with his whole family hostage like they were. It’s nothing in the world as bad as having to hold back from attacking something you hate with all your might because you might hurt something you love with all your heart. It’s a situation to make a man howl like a moonstruck hound.

  Finally he says, “All right, tell Daddy I’m headed for Uncle Bob’s place in Brenham. See the word gets around. Once Waller knows I’m gone, maybe he’ll ease off on the family. Tell Jane I’ll send somebody for her and Molly just as soon as I can.” He handed Wade some gold pieces to give to Jane, then shook his hand and gripped his shoulder. “You’re a good man, Dick,” he said. “You either oughtn’t be a Ranger or every Ranger ought be like you.”

  I rode with him as far as Lampasas. We spotted more than one posse brushing the country for the Hardin Gang, but managed to avoid being seen by any of them. At Lampasas we shook hands and wished each other luck, and then I swung off on the Austin road and he pushed on toward Brenham.

  I was marshal of Brenham when Wes showed up in the summer of ’74. I was married to Jenny Parks, a second cousin of his. Will Hardin introduced us at a calf roast they were having in his honor. I already knew about the terrible happenings at Comanche, and he’d confessed to Jenny he was worried sick about Jane and Molly and the rest of his family still back there. He didn’t show it, though, when he was among people. When we were introduced, he joked about me being a marshal, and I joshed him back for being the most wanted outlaw in Texas. I liked him right off. Him and me and his cousins Will and J.D. went fishing in the creek the next day and caught a mess of catfish and perch and had us a big fish fry that evening.

  After we got easy with each other, he told me he wanted to get out of Texas for a time. He believed mob law was everywhere. It had so far cost the life of his brother and of other kin, and he was sure it would get him too if he stayed in Texas. Just a week or so earlier, he’d been given even more reason to feel that way when the four trail hands of his who’d been arrested in Comanche had been taken down to Gonzales County to stand trial on trumped-up charges of some kind. The Rangers turned them over to the sheriff in Clinton and then quick left town, all of them, and in the middle of the night a band of vigilantes showed up and dragged the prisoners off to the cemetery and hanged three of them—Scrap Taylor, Shorty Tuggle, and Frog White. The fourth one, Doc Brosius, somehow got away.

  “Even if it’s lawmen who catch me,” Wes said, “they’ll either hand me over to the mob or the mob’ll take me from them by force.”

  I argued that there were some lawmen who’d never let a mob take a prisoner from them. He laughed and asked me how many mobs I’d seen in action. I had to admit I hadn’t seen a serious one yet. “Well,” he said, “after you see your first serious one, I’ll be interested in hearing how easy you think it is for even a brave lawman to hold off Captain Lynch.”

  He had written to Jane in Comanche, writing in a code they had and using her daddy’s name on the envelope. In her return letter she said that when Captain Waller got the news of the Clinton lynching, he had released the family from arrest and told her she was free to go home. All she needed was somebody to come get her and Molly. But she warned him not to come himself, since the county was still full of Rangers and bounty men who would shoot him on sight. J.D. left for Comanche on horseback early the next morning. He would buy a wagon there to bring them back in.

  In the meantime, Jane’s father, Neal Bowen, had just got back to Gonzales from Kansas, where he’d gone at Wes’s request to help Joe Clements get top dollar for Wes’s cattle, and he was holding a good bit of money for him. Wes wanted to go to Gonzales to collect it, and he asked me to go with him, figuring my badge would keep the Sutton Party at a distance if they got wind of his presence. I really don’t think my damn badge was nearly as much protection to him as his own reputation. We heard lots of talk in town of what the Sutton Party had said they’d do to Wes Hardin or Jim Taylor if either of them showed his face in the Sandies again, but we didn’t have any trouble while we were there. Jim Taylor hadn’t been so lucky. The Suttons had made several attempts on his life in the weeks since he’d come back, and he’d been wounded in a fight near the Guadalupe. Wes wanted to see him and try to talk him into leaving the region, but he was pretty sure Taylor wouldn’t leave again, no matter what. Besides, Taylor was hiding out with an old pal named Russel Hoy, who Wes distrusted so much he would not go to his house, not even to try and see Jim.

  Wes was several thousand dollars richer when we got back to Brenham, but he was also more convinced than ever that he had to get out of Texas fast.

  A few days later J.D. got back with Jane and Molly. He’d driven day and night and gone through three teams of horses. I mean to tell you that was one happy reunion Wes had with his family. During the supper party my Jenny gave for them that evening, him and Jane couldn’t keep their eyes off each other—hardly their hands, if truth be told. I had a feeling they couldn’t wait for it to be over so they could get to their bedroom in Bob Hardin’s house. Jenny, bless her shar
p-eyed soul, saw how anxious they were to get together in private too, and she managed to bring the party to an early ending without offending any of the guests. You can’t do better in this life than to be married to a wise and good-hearted woman.

  Wes’s problem now was how to get out of Texas without putting Jane and Molly at risk. That’s where I came in. I said I’d accompany his wife and child to New Orleans so he could travel alone and not have to worry about danger to them if he should run into any trouble on the way. Jenny corrected me—she said we’d take Jane and Molly. “I’ve always hankered to go to New Orleans,” she said. “Let’s make a high time of it.”

  Wes left Brenham on horseback a couple of days before the rest of us set out in a wagon with a couple of spare horses hitched to its rear. It was a real nice trip for us. We slept under the stars some nights, in road inns on others, and in hotels when we were near a town. Jenny and Jane became true fast friends. Molly wasn’t yet two years old at the time, but she was a hardy little traveler and eyeballed everything on the road with curiosity. I knew she was going to be a smart little scamp, that one.

  fancy little bonnet with flowers on it for Molly to wear in her stroller.We met Wes at the Prince Francis Hotel in the French Quarter as planned. He’d been there for four days by the time we arrived. He’d registered as J. W. Swain and told the hotel manager that his brother Harry would soon be arriving with the wives and child. Jane and Jenny couldn’t believe the splendor of the hotel. “Makes me feel like poor kin, though,” Jane whispered, “dressed like this in such a place.” Wes said he’d figured that’s how she’d feel, and had already informed the dress shop around the corner that she and Jenny would be in for fittings that afternoon. The next day our wives were wearing beautiful dresses and ready to see the town. You never saw two prettier gals with happier eyes. They even bought a