Hart the Regulator 8

by John B. Harvey

‘Yeah, maybe you will.’

  When all four men were mounted up, they rode down the main street side by side, dividing into pairs beyond the town limits, briefly acknowledging each other with a wave before pulling their mounts in different directions. Back in his office, Charlie Webb swallowed hard at the brandy and cursed them to all hell. If they met up with John Wesley Hardin, he hoped the young gunman gave them the same treatment as he’d meted out to Jack Helm. Webb didn’t want no Ranger taking Hardin in – that was something he’d reserved for himself.

  Chapter Five

  Wes Hart had responded to the news that the Texas Rangers were reforming with little enough apparent thought. Back in Texas for no more than six months after a spell scouting for the army against the Navajo, Hart had grafted a few dollars here and there without really settling. It had been his second time with the military - the second since the end of the War Between the States - and there had been little enough about it to enjoy. Most of his trouble had been caused by an officer called Rodway, whose understanding of the Indians was matched only by his humanity and common sense. As far as Rodway was concerned the soldier’s Bible was his army manual and what that taught him about respecting the Indians’ way of life could be written with one finger in a very small patch of sand. So for months, Hart had done his best to hold off Rodway’s most martinet excesses and had succeeded in making a genuine friend amongst the Navajo. The chiefs wearing blanket that he always carried with him in his saddle bag was a testimony to that. Woven from hand-spun blue, red and white wool yarns, it was striped with a row of irregular star-shaped patterns at the edges and center. Like the Apache knife he kept in his boot, the blanket was more than a souvenir: it was a constant reminder of the bravery of a civilization that was in the process of being broken up by a larger, greedier white one. A white civilization that had spawned men like Charlie Webb, like John Wesley Hardin.

  It had also spawned himself-Wes Hart did not think of that.

  Not then.

  He thought about his decision to join the Rangers and so far he figured there was little enough to regret about it. He had met some good men - some fools, too, but they were everywhere -and there was a comradeship that recalled some of his times riding with Colonel John R. Baylor’s Confederate Volunteers. That had been in the early days of the war when everything seemed possible, even victory. It had been before the progressive use of infantry ordnance had resulted in men on both sides being shelled to death or permanent injury by their own side; before the dreadful wasting diseases had swept through both armies, finally killing more than bullet and bayonet and shell put together.

  Certainly it was better than the job Hart had been holding down when he heard that the Rangers were recruiting again. After a month or so driving freight wagons across the north of the state, he had signed on with the Circle B Ranch as a cowboy, busting his butt all day long and in all weathers for hot chow, a crowded bunkhouse arid scarcely enough money to buy a glass of whiskey on the rare visits to town. He had announced his intention of quitting to the foreman with a sense of some great weight being raised from his shoulders. When the foreman heard what Hart intended to do, he called him for a fool, volunteering to take not much more money in exchange for the chance of getting shot at like he was the prize at a turkey shoot.

  Hart had shrugged and collected his gear from the bunkhouse, saddling up his mount and riding the couple of hundred miles that took him to his first interview with Captain Armstrong. By the time that session was over, Hart was as good as certain that his instincts had been right and the Circle B foreman had been wrong. When he was set to ride with Lefty O’Neal a couple of weeks later, his mind was made up.

  ‘You know you got the same damn name,’ said Lefty out of the blue, their horses trotting along the ill-formed dirt road.

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘Same name. More or less. You and Hardin.’

  ‘Wesley, you mean?’

  ‘Sure, Wesley. That is your name, ain’t it? I mean, what Wes is short for?’

  Hart nodded: ‘I guess.’

  ‘You don’t know?’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘It’s Wesley, then?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Strange, ain’t it. The name bein’ the same.’

  Hart didn’t give it a deal of thought. ‘No,’ he said.

  Lefty shrugged his shoulders and gave the reins a little flick. A mile or so later, he leaned over in the saddle and said, ‘He was English, you know?’

  Hart just looked at him.

  ‘Wesley.’

  ‘Oh yeah?’

  ‘John Wesley. Lived back in the last century. Started a whole new religion, more or less.’

  ‘What of it?’

  ‘That’s where the name comes from.’

  ‘Whose damned name?’

  ‘Wesley.’

  Hart shook his head. ‘Not mine, it don’t.’

  ‘Uh-uh. His. Hardin’s. John Wesley Hardin. That’s for John Wesley. His father bein’ a preacher. Methodist. That’s the religion this first John Wesley started up.’

  ‘What’s so all-fired different about it?’

  ‘Methodism?’

  ‘Yeah,’

  Lefty considered the question for a few hundred yards. He was skinned if he knew the answer and he said so.

  ‘They still use the book, don’t they?’ asked Hart.

  ‘The book?’

  ‘The Bible.’

  ‘I guess so.’

  Hart grinned. ‘Maybe that makes us Methodists, too.’ He reached back and patted one of his saddle bags. When a man joined the Texas Rangers he was presented with two Bibles; one was the real thing and the other contained a list of wanted men whose duty it was for the Rangers to bring to justice.

  Neither man said anything further until Lefty signaled they should turn off the road towards a small creek that was running down from the foothills to the north-east and give their horses a breather. When the saddle cinches were loosened and the animals had drunk their fill and were grazing patches of coarse grass and clumps of shrub, Lefty drew out a metal flask and offered it to Hart.

  ‘Ain’t just Charlie Webb as keeps a supply,’ he grinned, easing his long frame down to the hard ground.

  ‘Thanks.’ Hart took a pull from the flask and handed it back, squatting down close and pulling the makings of a cigarette from his vest pockets. He rolled two, one for Lefty and one for himself. When both were lit and drawing well, Lefty leaned on one long arm and said, ‘Funny, ain’t it. Young feller with a preacher for a father, turning out wild the way Hardin’s done.’

  Hart thought about it, shrugged, the thin cigarette cupped in the fingers of his right hand. ‘Sometimes I heard it can turn a boy the other way, overmuch prayin’ and suchlike. Send him real wild.’

  Lefty’s eyebrows were raised. ‘Looks like that’s what happened with Hardin. Though that don’t seem reason enough.’ He pursed his lips together and let a smoke ring drift upwards, catching on the breeze and dispersing until no trace could be seen. ‘Maybe you don’t need a reason. Maybe some are born that way and what their folk do, the way they’re brung up, that don’t have a mess to do with it.’

  Hart was thinking about the war and the way that had changed folk, not the ones it maimed or blinded or whose land it burnt, but the ones it changed in other ways, changed inside. He thought about reconstruction and the way in which that seemed to be dragging much of Texas into two opposing factions, of which the Sutton-Taylor feud was but one small, vicious part. He thought these things and half of him wanted to speak them out loud, while the rest of him didn’t want to get involved, couldn’t be bothered, the time for talking about them might come but it wasn’t now.

  ‘What you thinkin’?’ asked Lefty.

  Hart shook his head. ‘Nothin’,’ he said.

  The next time they stopped Lefty asked him about his own folks, about his own father and if he wasn’t some kind of preacher or at least keen on religion that he should name his son after a
famous Englishman who spent most of his life stumping around the land giving sermons and thumping the good book.

  Hart didn’t want to talk about that either. Not a great deal. But Lefty wasn’t about to let it alone that easy. Finally, Hart reckoned it was easier to talk than stay silent.

  ‘Tell the truth,’ he said, ‘I don’t remember him at all. Not really. I wasn’t but three when he died and I guess I was a couple of years older than that before I figured out what that meant. I always figured I must’ve seen it as somethin’ like goin’ into town to the store, only a longer trip on account of the time it took him to come back with the candy and licorice. Two long, cold winters before I got it into my head there weren’t goin’ to be no licorice. Not from him, anyway.’

  ‘You got no picture of him?’ asked Lefty, leaning forward. ‘No memory back of your head some place?’

  Hart wasted the remainder of his cigarette between his fingers. ‘There’s somethin’ there, but it ain’t clear. Never was. More like a shape off to one side, bendin’ down. Down to me, I guess. Could be to hand me that damn twist of black licorice, I don’t know. But that’s all there is, this dark ...’Hart gestured vainly with his hands, as if that might help him to find the word, ‘... thing somewhere there at the corner of my eye, only when I turn towards it, it’s gone.’

  Lefty breathed out lightly, smoke drifting up from the center of his long, drooping moustache. ‘What happened?’ he asked in a flat voice.

  ‘He was fightin’ for the Californias. Wanted to keep California independent from the Union.’

  ‘Like a Civil War before the Civil War,’ put in Lefty.

  Hart nodded. ‘Somethin’ like. Anyhow, I never knew for certain what happened and if my ma did she never told me. We just rode out there one day in the wagon, that was when I was 58

  five, that was when I knew, knew for certain, and she showed me this plot of raised ground and the marker. Writin’ on it she said was my father’s name, only I couldn’t make no sense of it. But that was where he lay and he weren’t travelin’ anywhere else. No candy. No licorice.’

  Lefty grunted into the silence that followed and made as if to stand up and move on, but now that Hart had begun there were other things on his mind that needed saying.

  ‘Same year she took me out to my father’s grave, same day, we went on out to this place Folsom way. Right in the foothills of the Sierras. Some shack there with tumble-down rockers for siftin’ gold from the dirt that rolled down stream and all of a sudden my ma was pointin’ out this feller to me, whiskers and a battered old bowler hat, and sayin’ this is your new pa.

  ‘I can remember that clear enough. Standin’ there like the fool kid I was just lookin’ up at him, not understandin’. Ma tryin’ to fix some kind of smile on her face that would mean it was goin’ to be all right, though when I thought back about it later, I could see that she weren’t certain at all. This feller he says things to me that I didn’t hear and then he grabs me and I struggle and kick on account of I’m sure he’s goin’ to wallop me one. He laughs and my ma, she gets all worried and shouts for me to calm down, and then this big whiskery face comes in real close and kisses me and amongst all the sweat and dirt I can smell the drink already.’

  Hart stretched his head backwards until all he could see was the flat blue of the sky. He stared at it for several moments, aware that Lefty was tending to the mounts, making them ready to travel on.

  ‘You okay?’ Lefty said after a few minutes.

  Hart brought down his head and nodded, got up fast and smooth and took his reins from Lefty’s hand.

  ‘Let’s ride,’ Hart said, slotting his boot into the stirrup. ‘Let’s get the hell out of here.’

  The Hardin place was a long, flat-roofed building with a low fence out front which was supposed to give some protection to the vegetable garden that someone was struggling to breathe life into. The doors and windows had had their frames painted recently, a bright green color that contrasted oddly with the grey-brown shades of the planking and split logs from which the place was made. One of the windows sported glass and back of it two narrow strips of red curtain material hung down. The other windows were tacked over with loose sacking. Smoke drifted through the lopsided tin chimney at the center of the roof.

  Off to the side someone was half-way through building a lean-to, the frame set firmly in place and one wall almost there. A couple of mares were corralled at the back and close by there was a hen house with a rooster flapping his wings from the nearest arch. A few chickens pecked absent-mindedly at the dirt and ignored him for now.

  Lefty and Hart exchanged glances and Hart loosed the rifle in its bucket holster to the left of his saddle.

  A face appeared between the strips of red curtain and peered out. They heard a bolt being slammed shut on the far side of the door.

  ‘What d’you reckon?’ asked Lefty.

  Hart shook his head. ‘I reckon he ain’t here.’

  Lefty motioned for Hart to stay where he was and walked his horse round the property, taking his time and keeping his hand close by the gun at his belt. The rooster crowed up a storm like Lefty was somehow challenging him for his territory. It was the only thing that happened.

  ‘Anythin’?’ asked Hart when the other Ranger got back.

  ‘Nothin’.’

  ‘You want to wait around? Ride out? What?’

  ‘I ain’t sure.’

  Hart looked at the house, glanced at the neatly spaced pieces of stick that were holding up nothing much in the garden. ‘I think we should talk with her,’ he said.

  Lefty nodded. ‘Okay.’

  ‘Best cover me,’ said Hart and climbed down.

  He was but three paces inside the fence when the dark grey barrel of a rifle poked underneath the sacking of one of the windows. Hart looked directly at it and raised both hands so that they were level with his shoulders, but spread out before him. He kept on walking. Back of him, he heard the triple click of Lefty’s Colt hammer locking back.

  The rifle barrel poked out a little further; it was almost steady.

  ‘You don’t come no further!’

  Hart took precisely two more paces and stopped. The rifle was fixed to hit him right about the breast bone, allowing for an upward jerk when it recoiled.

  ‘You say your piece from there.’

  ‘Mrs. Hardin?’

  No answer: no movement.

  ‘Mrs. Hardin, ma’am

  From inside, the sound of a child suddenly waking, beginning to cry.

  ‘Mrs. Hardin, I’m Wes Hart. Me and my partner, we’re Texas Rangers. We’d like to talk to your husband if he’s home.’

  The noise of the child rose to a keen edge. The rifle wavered.

  ‘Ma’am …’

  Hart took another step forward and the woman shouted for him to stop.

  He stopped; the child didn’t. The rooster set up in competition.

  ‘Ma’am, if we could talk

  ‘You know my husband ain’t here.’

  ‘Yes, ma’am, but if we could—’

  ‘Ride back where you come from and leave us alone!’ Anger made her voice shake but she kept the rifle steady. Almost still. Anger and maybe the beginning of tears. The child was screaming.

  ‘Mrs. Hardin, if you want to tend to the child I give you my word I won’t come any closer’n I am now.’

  ‘Your word!’ she spat back at him.

  ‘Yes, ma’am.’

  He knew that she was staring at him through a narrow slit in the sacking, trying to make up her mind whether she could believe him, wanting to, wanting to comfort her baby.

  Hart kept his hands spread, fingers just separated. The child’s screams dipped down and he thought for a moment that she was going to lay quiet, but right off they rose up again, lustier than ever. The rifle barrel pulled quickly back through the sacking and almost at once the sounds of shouting caught and stammered and then were all but gone.

  Hart lowered his hands to his side but othe
rwise he made no movement.

  The bolt back of the door was slid back.

  She was smaller than Hart imagined, the woman who had been called Jane Bowen. No more than medium height at best and slender, with her hair cut short and dark so that she might pass for a boy. The child in her arms was perhaps a year old, already obviously a girl. Fairer hair than her mother and curly, long enough to suggest that as she grew so it would wind down at her back. For an instant Hart considered how the woman might look like that, her hair long, dark, curled down her back. The way it had been, perhaps, when she and John Wesley Hardin had stood side by side, the one hand over the other and the preacher’s words...

  ‘What is it you want?’

  Her eyes, dark, flicked past Hart to the tall, mustached man in the saddle then back to Hart again.

  ‘Your husband—’

  ‘I told you he ain’t here.’

  ‘I know, ma’am. But that was why we rode out an’—’

  ‘And now you know he isn’t here?’

  ‘I figured, if we spoke with you—’

  ‘You’d what?’

  Hart wiped his forefinger and thumb down either side of his mouth. The little girl stirred and snuggled against her mother’s almost flat bosom.

  ‘You know where your husband is, ma’am?’

  ‘Of course I do.’

  ‘And

  ‘And it’s none of your business.’

  ‘We wanted to talk with him ’bout a shootin’ in Albuquerque.’

  Her dark eyes flickered, all but smiled.

  ‘A peace officer was shot,’ said Lefty from back of the fence.

  The eyes changed and she laughed but there was no humor in it. ‘A peace officer! Is that what you call him? Jack Helm was a drunken braggart who took his pay out of Sutton’s pockets. Is that what you call peace officer?’ She looked at Lefty, then at Hart. ‘Is that the kind of peace officers you are?’

  ‘We don’t take nothin’ from Sutton, ’said Lefty smarting. ‘Not him nor anyone else.’

  ‘Then you’re the first lawman I ever heard of as didn’t,’ she snapped back.

  ‘In that case, ma’am,’ said Lefty, ‘We’re the first Texas Rangers you ever met.’