The Fourth Western Novel

by H. H. Knibbs

  The two days of John Wesley Hardin as a law enforcer were but a fleeting moment in his career of spectacular precocity. But he could have, and might have, gone ahead to a long and notable life as one who had put his talents to law enforcement rather than defiance. The trend was in the air. Many a skillful shot who had taken the wayward path was now being drafted to guard and protect cattle and other property acquired even in the most haphazard fashion. Such continued illegal appropriation could lead only to anarchy. Rustling and similar inroads had to be stopped if people were to settle down to steady work and trade. The star of the reformed bad man, pinned to shirt to make him a law man, was in the ascendancy. Undoubtedly Ben Thompson, usually a keen observer of such matters, took note of the way the wind was blowing.

  Little Seven-Up Hardin, Little Arkansas Hardin, the eighteen-year-old desperado and killer, wanted for murder, was sworn in as a deputy sheriff in Abilene on June 26, 1871, a few hours after Juan Bideno had shot and killed William Coran, his cattle herd boss. Most of the town, especially the Texans, were in a fury, on the verge of riot. Bideno took to the hills. Hardin, long-schooled in the ways of evading capture, picked up his trail in short order.

  Two days later, Hardin found Bideno, seated at a table, eating. Three other men were with Hardin, and one of them indulged in the formality of telling Bideno he was under arrest. Bideno was eating with his left hand, and the practiced eye of Wes saw Bideno’s other hand, on his lap, partly covered by the table. The fingers were looped around a pistol handle, which darted back and up, and aimed, but not fast enough. Hardin was standing over the seated man and the Texan’s gun blazed. A bullet struck Bideno square between the eyes, drilled through his skull and into his brain.

  Hardin’s return to Abilene on June 30 was triumphant. Cattlemen raised a pot of a thousand dollars to give him as a reward. Everywhere drinks were free, and the universal toast was “Little Seven-Up” or good old Wes. The kid with a price on his head in Texas had become a local hero. All of which did not find particularly enthusiastic reception in the city marshal’s office. But Wild Bill Hickok did not show any resentment. He publicly congratulated the young fellow he called “Little Arkansas.” The celebration continued through the night.

  Next day, July 1, 1871, Ben Thompson took the train for Kansas City. He told Phil Coe he would be back in a few days. He would say howdy to some old cronies around Market Square, take a turn or two around the saloons and the gambling halls and the variety theaters. He would drop in at some of the clothing stores and replenish his wardrobe. Then he would start back for Abilene with his wife and boy, all of them outfitted in store-bought clothes.

  By the following night, July 2, Hardin and most of his fellow-celebrants in Abilene had recovered from the big spree. He was sitting in the back room of The Bull’s Head with Jim Clements and Phil Coe, in a quiet friendly game of draw poker. Two waddies grimy with trail-dust stamped through the saloon, asked about Wes, and burst into the back room.

  Hardin was on his feet, a pistol in each hand, when he recognized his cousins, Gip and Manning Clements, brothers of Jim.

  “Manning’s in trouble,” Gip said.

  Then he told of the fight on the Newton prairie, where the two Clements brothers were part of the outfit bringing in a herd of cattle from Texas.

  “The word got out that Joe Shadden and Adolph Shadden were figuring on killing Manning,” Gip explained, “and we got them first. I got a bullet in my shoulder.”

  Meanwhile, news of the Newton prairie slaying had come to the rest of Abilene. Along the grapevine route, well-staffed with informers, Wild Bill Hickok heard that the Manning brothers had ridden into Abilene and were hiding out at The Bull’s Head.

  Hickok started for the saloon, sure he would run into trouble but ready for it. He had a clear case of the law on his side. Any interference in this act of duty would give him a free hand to kill anybody who got in his way.

  While he was en route, the Clements brothers had gone with Hardin to his room in the American Hotel. There they had called a doctor and were washing the wound in Gip’s shoulder. He had lost a lot of blood and was quite weak.

  Hickok called to Hardin from the outside, and his hands were empty and well clear of his sides when Wes came out to see him.

  “I’m here for Gip and Manning on that Newton prairie killing,” Hickok said.

  “Gip’s hurt and we got a doctor coming,” Wes said. “Can’t you let me go bond for them?”

  “Little Arkansas, there’s some things I can’t take no chance on,” said Wild Bill, “and the boss of the herd is plenty sore, and if the boys get away, what’d I have to say?”

  They finally agreed that Gip Clements could stay and be doctored. Hickok would take a chance on him. Hardin did a little thinking, then advised Manning to give up his six-shooter to Hickok and go along to jail. Wes went with them, to make sure Manning got safely to jail. More than one prisoner had been shot down “resisting arrest” or “trying to escape.”

  The situation at the jail took an ironic twist. Both Hickok and Hardin knew it. The Texans would never stand for this arrest, and Wild Bill would find himself with heavy odds to overcome. His fighting was not of that kind. So, Marshal Hickok held the key to the jail, and Manning Clements was locked up. But, in effect, Hickok was now a prisoner of Hardin’s, and he wasn’t taking any chances on drawing Little Arkansas into a play of pistols. He knew, too, that a word from Hardin would turn loose a mob of angry Texans.

  Hardin suggested they walk over to The Bull’s Head, and he posted a couple of cowboys to stand guard at the jail house, to keep Hickok’s deputies company. At the saloon, just across the street, they found that Phil Coe and Jake Johnson had already assembled fifty or more men, ready for action. Hickok’s only possible out now was to stall for time.

  “Let’s take a walk and talk this thing over,” Hickok suggested to Hardin.

  The marshal knew that other Texans, not in the Bull’s Head, would be ready to gang him anywhere. Wes by his side was a safe-conduct through town. He figured Little Arkansas would not try to kill him. But he didn’t know that Hardin had held off the other Texans by promising to do that very thing if Hickok didn’t give him the jail key by midnight.

  From one saloon to another, through the gambling halls and the brothels, the two men strolled in armed truce for several hours. At one parlor, Wild Bill asked for Betty, a very special friend of his. He was furious when told she had been arrested on a charge of drunkenness by Tom Carson, Hickok’s deputy. Later Hickok and Hardin met the deputy in front of the Applejack Saloon. Wild Bill felled Carson with a blow to the jaw, pulled him up and knocked him down again, and then stomped him with his boot heels.

  Just before midnight, Wild Bill handed Hardin a key.

  “You’re coming with me, Bill,” Wes insisted. That was to make sure he had not been given the wrong key.

  Manning Clements was freed, and rode out of Abilene a few minutes after midnight.

  The Texans had treed Wild Bill. But Hardin knew Abilene was no longer a safe place for him. He got ample proof of this conclusion several nights later. Hardin was awakened at his hotel room, where Gip Clements had been recovering. Wes heard a key turning in the door. He leaped from the bed and stood in a corner, pistol cocked.

  The shadowy figure of a man slipped into the room, went straight for Hardin’s bed. The man raised an arm and Hardin saw the glint of a steel blade reflecting a thin streak of moonlight. Hardin shot the man through the head, and left him dead. He and Gip dashed through the window that opened on a balcony roof. They slid down the pillars to the front of the hotel. Both men were in undershirts and drawers as they mounted their horses.

  Three marshal’s deputies pursued them in the night. They followed Hardin and Gip Clements all next morning and stopped to eat at noon. Wes and Gip circled the trail and returned, dismounting back of a clump of willows near the camp stream. They could see the d
eputies, but the officers could not see them. Halfway through the meal, Hardin and Gip moved in and covered the group with their pistols. They told the men to finish eating, after first dropping their guns. And then all three were forced to strip to their underwear.

  In that scant garb, the three deputies rode for more than thirty miles, across a naked prairie, broiling under the midsummer sun. They cantered into Abilene, and reported to Marshal Wild Bill Hickok that the Texans had gotten away.

  CHAPTER 30

  From Kansas City, Ben Thompson wrote to Phil Coe of a mishap that would delay his return to Abilene indefinitely. He was driving with his wife and son when the horse shied at a train and ran wild with the buggy, overturning it. All three were in the hospital. Ben had a broken leg, his wife would lose an arm, and the boy was badly injured. At Ben’s request, Phil sent him three thousand dollars to cover doctor bills and other expenses.

  One day, a few weeks later, Phil was sitting in the Gulf House Hotel, having a drink, thinking over recent happenings. He didn’t like the way things were shaping up. Phil was a brave man, a man of solid courage. But he missed the ready gun of Ben Thompson, especially since he himself rarely carried a weapon. He knew that since the Hardin fiasco, Wild Bill Hickok would spare no effort to embarrass, harass, and remove Texans. Since then he had taken to wearing his pistol at all times.

  Jessie Hazel joined him in the parlor, as they had planned, and they sat for a long time, drinking and talking. Jessie was brought up in the East, had trained as an opera singer, and then wound up with a variety troupe heading out west. But the ways of the West were still strange to her. She couldn’t understand, for instance, why there should be so much tension between Texans and the others. They were all part of the same general deal—a big deal involving beef and gold.

  In his own way, Phil Coe tried to give Jessie Hazel a glimpse into the psychology of the Texan, especially that of the cattle-driving Texan. He himself was as different from the trail-bitten waddies as night and day. Yet he felt a strong kinship. Phil Coe, with his elegant clothes and elegant manners, and his deep, soft voice, could picture for Jessie the rough-and-tumble life of the brush-popper, the cattle-hunter, the saddle-born Texan who rode point or swing or flank on a stubborn mossy-horn herd being escorted from the unfenced freedom of their home ranges. As he talked to her, Jessie Hazel began to understand a way of life totally unlike anything she had ever known.

  Phil Coe took her, in his talk, far from Abilene, to the mesquite and cactus and chaparral thickets of Texas. He described the roundup, in February and March, the roping and the hazing, the cutting-out and the scorch of the hide in road-branding. There was the gathering of the remuda, the breaking and grooming and saddling of horses, and the thousand and one details of getting the migration under way.

  Then the trek, cattle and horses and men, and wagons for chuck and supplies, slowly pushing out of the dark into the breaking daylight. Across the Colorado and the Brazos, over the Concho, and then miles and miles without water, the parched plains for days, until the Pecos offered oasis. And the wild rivers: the roaring, pounding Red, the swift torrent of the North Canadian, the rampage of the Arkansas and the Cimarron. And the quicksand, and the lightning and thunder of flash storms, and the blizzard’s icy grip, and the peril from plundering bands of outlaws and Apaches, Cheyennes, and Comanches, and the unrelieved threat of impending stampede.…

  Wild Bill Hickok, weaving drunk, crossed the hotel parlor to the table where Phil Coe and Jessie Hazel sat. He stood over them. A smirk twisted his oval face, its beauty almost feminine in the velvety texture of the fair skin framed by his long hair, glinting gold where the light played on it.

  Wild Bill bent forward from the waist in a sweeping bow of mockery, and in that same instant his right hand lashed out hard against Jessie’s mouth. He slapped her twice more, with the open palm and then with the back of the hand, quickly, a sharp stinging blow that snapped from the wrist and drew blood from her nose, and a tiny trickle from her lips.

  All this happened in the brief moment that Phil Coe was rising in his chair to greet Wild Bill. Jessie slowly shook her head, trying to catch Phil’s glance, to tell him to beware the killer.

  Now Phil Coe stood erect, drawn up to his full six-feet-four inches—a young man, twenty-five or twenty-six years old, a handsome man with dark wavy hair, dark eyes glowing, a short pointed beard on his jutting chin.

  And Wild Bill Hickok turned to face him, perhaps an inch or two shorter than Phil, but still a big man, a handsome man, nine or ten years older.

  ‘Things are different now with Hardin and Thompson gone,” Wild Bill said.

  The two giants stood there, a step apart, glaring at each other. Wild Bill swayed ever so gently, like an elm sapling in the breeze. Phil Coe’s feet were firmly planted on the floor, braced. He felt every muscle in his body tighten, co-ordinate in readiness. Each man waited for the other to make his play. The slightest motion of hand toward holster would bring the flare of two pistols.

  Phil’s keened senses brought him a flash of the situation. It was not a new one, and the man with the badge always had the upper hand: provocation, a word or gesture, a rise to the bait, swift retaliation, and another killing in self-defense.

  Phil Coe’s teeth clenched hard as he measured Wild Bill with his eyes. They gauged the slow sway, back and forth, as a hunter might draw a bead, leading a bird in flight with his gun.

  Phil’s long right arm whipped up and forward, swift as the lash of an uncoiling rattler. His fist crashed hard against the jaw of Wild Bill, glanced along the cheekbone as the marshal staggered back. Hickok shook himself back into action, and raised his clenched fists. The battle was joined. The play had been made. Not pistols, but bare knuckles. Knocking, they called it in the cow camps.

  Phil stepped toward Wild Bill and swung again. Hickok swung back. The men now braced their boot heels hard against the floor, and stood almost toe to toe. For a minute or more they pounded, punch after punch. No boxing, no dancing, no dodging or ducking. Face to face, they hammered at each other, taking the blows and then striking back. Phil punched with his left at Hickok’s head, then with his right at Hickok’s belly.

  Wild Bill drove his right fist hard against Phil’s chest and then his left to Phil’s cheek. Two automatons flailing at each other in a trial of brute strength. Then a pause, a break in the back-and-forth piston strokes, and Phil’s right arm whirled in a wide loop like a windmill blade, and his fist came up in a bone-cracking smash on the point of Wild Bill’s chin. The marshal rocked back on his high heels, tottered a split second, and then fell flat on his back.

  Phil dived to the floor and straddled Wild Bill’s chest as Hickok made an effort to rise. Phil’s hands were around Hickok’s throat, and he was banging the marshal’s head against the floor. His fingers were tightening their clutch, sinking into the flesh of the neck, which was bulging. Hickok’s face was turning purple.

  Jessie Hazel ran toward the two men and put a hand on Phil’s shoulder. She held a handkerchief against her lips and nose to check the oozing blood.

  “Please, Phil,” she pleaded, “you’re…don’t kill him.”

  She dropped to the floor in a faint, and Phil at once released his hold on the neck of the unconscious Hickok. Phil got up, stretched, then bent down, and lifted Jessie Hazel in his arms. He carried her upstairs to her room, and called a doctor. Then he went to his own room and washed up. Thirty minutes later he was out front, making himself available should Hickok wish to renew the battle.

  TEXAS HELLION, by J.H. Plenn (Part 2)

  CHAPTER 31

  Wild Bill’s public apology to Jessie Hazel and Phil Coe should have been a warning. Instead, Phil accepted it at face value. He expected to be seeing little of Hickok in the near future. The end of the cattle season was approaching, and within a few weeks the waddies would be cutting loose on their annual spree to mark the occasion, their last binge
before heading back to Texas. Then the long months in the brush, and not before next spring would they be clinking their spurs on the dance floors of Abilene again.

  Phil planned to head back to Texas at the end of the season. He would sell out his interest in The Bull’s Head, probably to Ben Thompson, if Ben was up and about then, or if not, just maybe close down. Abilene could be a dreary place in the winter.

  Ben Thompson had often warned Phil Coe, as he had John Wesley Hardin, to beware the cunning of Wild Bill Hickok—most especially when Wild Bill was smiling at you and extending a hand of friendship.

  “He never takes chances,” Ben used to tell him, “and he carries a couple of Derringers in his pockets.”

  On the day of the big celebration to close the season, Phil Coe left The Bull’s Head and milled around Abilene with the cowboys bidding a boisterous farewell. They had ceased to be tough, silent men, wary and on guard at all times. In a remarkable transformation, they were all boys again, having fun. A carnival spirit was in the air. They roamed the streets in groups, laughing, joking, and tearing the air now and then with a screeching Rebel yell.

  A highlight of the event each year was the “dressing down and dressing up” of somebody. They selected for this honor a man who might be unusually popular, or someone with whom they may have had difficulties. In the latter case, the ceremony would be symbolic of forgotten grudges and animosities, a sign that they bore no ill-will despite any previous fights or quarrels.

  Phil Coe was with the boys when they saw Marshal Wild Bill Hickok coming up the street. Phil nominated the marshal for the annual honor, and the choice was received with enthusiasm. As Hickok approached, he was engulfed by the crowd of laughing, shouting cowboys. Even if he had suspected a lynching bee, there was little he could do about it at this point.