The Pistoleer: A Novel of John Wesley Hardin

by James Carlos Blake

  I expected the whole damn world to come running to see what the shots were about, and I was already putting a story together in my head about us being attacked by these two strangers, hoping like hell they weren’t U.S. marshals. But there were no cries of alarm, no sound of running feet—only the sudden splashing of a school of mullet in the St. John’s and the distant music from the saloons around the corner.

  We went through their pockets and stripped them clean, then dragged the bodies into one of the warehouses and covered them up with a rotted canvas sail. We piled broken crates on top of that. It’d be days before the corpses worked up a stink strong enough to be smelled beyond the warehouse—and even then they might not draw much attention. Then again, some scavenging tramp might uncover them the very next day, you never knew.

  We cut through the back streets to my boardinghouse room. As soon as we shut the door behind us, I poured us a drink. Then we went through their papers and found out they were Pinkertons. The Handlebar was James Kelleher and Freckles was Francis Connors. They had ticket stubs off that morning’s train from Atlanta—and a Texas reward poster offering four thousand dollars for the capture of John Wesley Hardin.

  The next morning he put Jane and the children on the westbound train. He’d bought their tickets for New Orleans in case somebody came nosing around the depot asking where the Hardin family had gone. But he’d told Jane to get off the train at Pensacola and hire a hack to Polland, a small settlement just across the border in Alabama where her kin were living.

  John stayed in Jacksonville a few days longer to give them time to get away safely, and in that time nobody discovered the bodies. I told the police chief I was quitting the force to go gold hunting in the Dakota Territory with John Swain, and a bunch of the coppers made a lot of jokes about it—which was good, because it meant they believed me.

  Two days later we were met at the Pensacola depot by Jane’s Uncle Harris, just like John and Jane had arranged, and by nightfall we were in Polland.

  * * *

  And so we got into the logging business, me and John. We went partners with a lively buck-toothed fella named Shep Hardie and his nephew, an eighteen-year-old asskicker named Jim Mann. They owned some prime timberland about thirty-five miles up the Styx River but were short of the capital to log it. John and I put up the money for the necessary machinery and wagons and to hire four more loggers. The eight of us went upriver to the property and set up a work camp, and that’s where we spent most of the following year, cutting timber and logging it. Some of it we floated down the Styx to the sawmills on the Perdido fork, and some of it we sold to companies that used mule teams to haul the logs to the railway west of us. It was damn hard work but it turned us a pretty fair profit.

  Every now and then we took a day off and went to Mobile to put some of that profit to work on the card tables—and so those among us who had the notion could buy themselves a good time at one of the swell pleasure houses to be found in that lively, lowdown town. Mobile always smelled to me of low tide, pine tar, magnolias, and puke. It was full of hard trade—sailors and shipworkers and sawyers, card sharps and whores. I don’t recall a time we went there that two or three of us didn’t get a broken nose or cut hand or some other kind of barfight memento. Jim Mann always came back sporting fresh cuts and bruises. He was a fine wild-hearted boy who wore a black eye like a badge of honor. He would grin through his puffy lips and make some joke about how we ought to see what the other fella looked like.

  One time in Mobile, John and I got into a saloon row with a couple of timber teamsters named Lewis and Kress, and a little later—and unfortunately for us—they somehow or other ended up shot dead in an alley. We were arrested and wrongly charged with murder, and we spent two long miserable days and nights in jail before we finally got things all cleared up—with a little help from our contribution of two thousand dollars to the Mobile Police Department. After that, we mostly stayed clear of Mobile and took our pleasures in Pensacola.

  Pensacola was anyway where we always took on camp supplies. We’d send the goods by rail to Pensacola Junction—Whiting, as some of the locals called it—and a freight boat would take them up the Styx to our camp. After shipping the goods, we’d stay in Pensacola another couple of days for a bit of fun. Shep Hardie had grown up there and knew all the poker rooms in town. The best was run by Alston Shipley, the regional railroad manager who’d been a logging contractor before going to work for the railroad. He still cussed like a logger and was strong as a mule.

  When we’d done with our good-timing in Pensacola, Jim Mann would take the rest of the crew back to camp while John and I stopped at Polland for a couple of days so he could visit Jane and the children. It was on one of these visits that Jane’s Uncle Harris informed us that Wild Bill Hickok was dead. He’d read about it in a New Orleans newspaper a couple of months old. It happened in a saloon up in Dakota. Hickok was playing cards, sitting with his back to the door for some damn reason, and some tramp shot him in the back of the head. “It’s a damn low shame,” John said. “Bill deserved better than to get it like that.” He was down in the mouth the rest of the evening.

  Jane had use of a house belonging to her Uncle Harris, and I’d sleep in a small side room whenever John and I were visiting. I always did my best to mind my own business, but the house was small and the walls were thin. Jane had never cared much for John living way off in the timber camp so that she didn’t get to see him more than once or twice a month. She’d get visits from her Polland kin, but most of the time she was alone with just the children for company. To keep the law from tracing them through the post office, they’d been careful not to write any letters back home, so she hadn’t been in touch with her family since leaving Texas. Still, she’d been a good soldier during the first few months of our logging operation, and their reunions were always full of affection. Late at night I’d hear their bed creaking and thumping with all the affection they’d stored up since they’d last seen each other.

  But as time went by she found it harder to bear their separations. She complained she was lonely and that it was hard to raise the children properly when they hardly ever got to see their daddy. Why couldn’t he run a saloon again, or go back to cattle shipping or butchering like in Jacksonville? John would say that for now the logging business was the only safe way he had of making money. He reminded her that he was a seriously wanted man and nobody but her and me and a couple of her Polland kin knew who he really was. If he opened a saloon or went back to the cattle business, he’d be sure to be recognized by somebody, and next thing you know the law or the bounty men would be down on him. She might not see much of him now, but he reckoned she’d see a lot less of him if he was dead and buried. John was right about the whole thing, of course, and I’m sure Jane knew it, but that was still a hard way to put it to her, and it made her cry. We’d been logging for close to a year by then, and Jane was about to give birth to their third child, so I could see why she felt like she did.

  One morning near the end of June, as we were finishing up a visit to Polland and about to head back to the timber camp, John’s brother-in-law Brown Bowen showed up. John had told me about him. He’d described him as one of those sorry creatures other men can’t stand to have around. He was always trying too hard to be one of the boys, to be included in the doings of men, but all his efforts to be liked had exactly the opposite effect. Nobody ever asked his opinion or laughed at his jokes or listened to his stories. The only claim to notice he’d had in his life was being brother-in-law to John Wesley Hardin. Then one day he shot a drunkard sleeping in an alleyway, an old rumpot most everybody had liked. He killed him for no reason except he was pretty drunk himself and feeling low because nobody liked him. John said the boys would have hung him on the spot if the sheriff hadn’t been right there to arrest him and hustle him off to the Gonzales jail. Even then, a mob would’ve got him that night for sure if Jane hadn’t pleaded with John to do something to save her brother from the noose. So John went to
the sheriff and money changed hands and that evening Brown Bowen escaped. John put him on a midnight train to Florida with the warning that if he ever came back to Texas he’d let the boys hang him next time. And now here the fella was.

  It didn’t take but five minutes to see how right John was about him. Brown’s smile was phonier than a medicine barker’s, and he never looked you square in the eye. He’d been drifting all over Florida since leaving Texas, following one trade after another—hunting for plumes and gator hides in the southern glades, wrangling for a cattle outfit on the Gulf coast, cutting logging trails in the cypress swamps, farming on the lower St. John’s, a few other things in a few other places. He tried to sound like he was an expert at all of it, but it was my guess he’d done so many different things because he couldn’t do any of them worth a damn.

  When he heard we were logging up on the Styx, he wanted to throw in with us. John told him sorry, but we had a full crew. Brown Bowen said John just didn’t like him was why he wouldn’t take him on. John said, “You’re right, Brown. I shouldn’t of lied. The truth is I don’t like you and don’t want you near me, you’re right.” And that was that. Jane looked like she might want to scold him for being so hard on her brother, but she didn’t. She just folded her arms over her swollen belly and kept quiet. Brown stood there with his mouth open and watched us go.

  We’d been back in camp a couple of weeks when word came up the river that Jane had given birth to their second daughter. John had told me that if the baby was a girl they were going to name her Callie, and he broke the news to me by sticking his head in the bunkhouse and yelling, “Callie’s home, Gus! She got there three days ago!” We all lit cigars and passed around a bottle to celebrate.

  A few days later I came down sick and was either shitting or throwing up every ten minutes. All I was good for was laying real still in my bunk. I couldn’t even fart without soiling my pants. I tried to last it out, but after another few days I was full of fever and too weak to stand, so John had me loaded in a wagon and told Sweeny the Swede to take me to the doctor in Mobile.

  As they loaded me in the wagon, John joked with me not to take too long about getting my sorry ass back to work. He and the boys Were about to make another run to Pensacola and he joshed about all the fun I was going to miss out on. Then he slapped me on the shoulder in farewell and Sweeny giddapped the team and we set out down the logging trail.

  I was tended by a gap-toothed doctor named Amons. He gave me some god-awful medicine to drink five times a day and told me to stay in bed and eat nothing but mashed greens and in a few days I’d be fine. Sweeny checked me into a hotel that faced out on the bay and made arrangements with a restaurant down the street to bring me my greens every day. Then he wished me luck and headed off for Pensacola to catch up with John and the boys.

  Doc Amons’s medicine might of been the worst stuff I ever tasted, but it surely did the cure. In fact, it stopped my runs so good I didn’t have a decent shit for the next six months. My fever broke after two days, and in two more I was back on my feet and able to walk down the street for my first real food since I’d took sick—a beefsteak the size of a saddlebag, best thing I ever tasted.

  The next day I felt strong enough to get moving, so I paid up my hotel bill and went down to the depot to catch the early train to Polland. I figured John was either already there, after his run to Pensacola, or soon would be.

  When the hack got me to the depot, there were hundreds of people mobbing the place. I asked the driver what was going on. “You ain’t heard?” he said. “John Wesley Hardin. They caught him yesterday in Pensacola. Texas Rangers. They brung him here and put every policeman in town around the jail house. Word is, they’re aiming to take him back to Texas today. Everybody’s waiting to have a look at him.”

  I waited at the station with everybody else, waited to see for myself if he’d really been arrested. I didn’t believe it. He said he’d never be taken at gunpoint, he’d go down shooting first. If they nabbed someone, it wasn’t him.

  An hour later we got word the Rangers had believed his friends were waiting at the station to free him, so before sunup they’d taken him by wagon to the rail station in Montgomery. I knew then it was all bullshit. Nobody’d captured John. It was just one more of the stories people were always making up about him all the way from Texas to Florida.

  I took the late train to Polland. On the way I wondered if John would laugh at the story of his “arrest” in Mobile—or worry that such stories were being told too damn close to his hideaway. Then I got to Polland and found Jane in tears and I knew the truth of it.

  THE CONVICT

  The El Paso Daily Herald,

  20 AUGUST 1895

  Henry Brown testified as follows:

  “My name is H. S. Brown. I am in the grocery business in El Paso with Mr. Lambert. I dropped into the Acme Saloon last night a little before 11 o’clock and met Mr. Hardin and several other parties in there, and Mr. Hardin offered to shake with me. I agreed and shook first; he shook back, and said he’d bet me a quarter on the side he could beat me. We had our quarters up and he and I were shaking dice. I heard a shot fired, and Mr. Hardin fell at my feet at my left side. I heard three or four shots fired. I then left, went out the back door, and don’t know what occurred afterward. When the shot was fired Mr. Hardin was against the bar, facing it, as near as I can say, and his back was toward the direction the shot came from. I did not see him make any effort to get his six-shooter. The last words he spoke before the first shot was fired were ‘Four sixes to beat,’ and they were addressed to me. For a moment or two before this he had not spoken to anyone but me, to the best of my recollection. I had not the slightest idea that anyone was quarreling there from anything I heard.”

  (Signed) H. S. Brown

  The Life of John Wesley Hardin as Written by Himself

  “I was at a terrible disadvantage in my trial. I went before the court on a charge of murder without a witness. The cowardly mob had either killed them or run them out of the county. I went to trial in a town in which three years before my own brother and cousins had met an awful death at the hands of a mob. Who of my readers would like to be tried under these circumstances?”

  ——

  “When we got to Fort Worth, the people turned out like a Fourth of July picnic, and I had to get out of the wagon and shake hands for an hour before my guard could get me through the crowd.”

  ——

  “I knew there were a heap of Judases and Benedict Arnolds in the world and had had a lifelong experience with the meaning of the word treachery. I believed, however, that in jail even a coward was a brave man.”

  ——

  “In 1885 I conceived the idea of studying law.…”

  The Daily Democratic Statesman

  (AUSTIN, TEXAS)

  AUGUST 25, 1877

  MORE GLORY FOR THE ADJUTANT GENERAL AND THE STATE TROOPS

  ——

  WESLEY HARDIN ARRESTED AT PENSACOLA, FLORIDA

  ——

  A DESPERATE FIGHT

  ——

  ONE OF HIS CONFEDERATES KILLED AND THE OTHER TWO, WITH HARDIN, ARRESTED

  ——

  General Steele and the efficient State Troops under him have for some time been quietly working for the arrest of the notorious and desperate John Wesley Hardin, the terror of the Southwest, and the glorious news of his arrest at Pensacola, Florida, is announced by dispatch to the Adjutant General from Lt. J. B. Armstrong, who left this city on this mission, accompanied by Private Duncan, on the eighteenth instant. The arrest of this notorious character with two of his men and the killing of another adds new laurels to the achieved honors of the State Troops…. The following is a copy of the dispatch received by Gen. Steele yesterday morning:

  WHITING, Alabama, August 23.

  Gn. Wm. Steele, Austin:

  Arrested John Wesley Hardin at Pensacola, Florida, this afternoon. He had three men with him, and we had some lively shooting. One of their number
was killed, and the others were captured. Hardin fought desperately, but we closed in and took him by main strength, and then hurried aboard this train, which was just starting for this place. We are now waiting for a train to get away on. This is Hardin’s home, and his friends are trying to rally men to release him. I have some good citizens with me, and I will make it interesting.

  J. B. Armstrong

  Lieut. State Troops

  John wired me in Dallas saying he’d been put in charge of running down John Wesley Hardin and wanted my help. General Steele had authorized him to appoint me a “special Ranger” for the job. I sent a telegram right back saying I’d do it and he could expect me in Austin on the morning train. After making a reservation, I went to my boardinghouse and packed a bag, then went to Sally McGuire’s to celebrate with a Duncan Special. A Duncan Special was one girl to mount up on and another to lay on her back behind me with her face between my legs, doing whatever interesting things she could think of with her mouth and fingers while I rode her partner. Then they’d switch off and we’d do it some more. That particular night cost me a pretty penny, since we went at it till almost dawn. I just did make the train, looking like something the cat dragged aboard, and mighty aware of my reek of stale jissum and whorehouse perfume.

  John met me at the station and gave a grinning snort at the smell of me. We went straight to the Red Rock saloon so he could fill me in. He was heavyset and going bald in front. The more hair he lost off his head, the thicker he grew his walrus mustache. He was a damn fine peace officer, quick and fearless. We’d worked together several times before, and he knew I was the best detective in Texas. I’d say I was the best in the country but it might sound like bragging. He also knew I’d jump at the chance to help him hunt Hardin. It wasn’t every day a man got the chance to get on the state payroll just to try and collect half of a four-thousand-dollar arrest reward.