by H. H. Knibbs
But it was an unstable peace, a fragile contentment, that Ben Thompson enjoyed during his months of service as marshal. The violence that had marked his explosive career was not to be dismissed by the magic of an official badge. The reservoir of his former way of life spilled over and surged in on Ben during his unguarded moments, reached for him with the insistence and inexorability of Banquo’s ghost. Men saw the surface change in Ben Thompson and marveled. Could a river change its course overnight? Such miracles of nature had occurred. Was there a man with a will so strong that he could elude his past as he matured? Perhaps part of the answer was in the stern discipline a man must exercise to let an opponent draw his pistol first.
The new Ben Thompson stood firm as a rock against the wave of the past that swirled around him. But beneath that rock was sand, and the sand was yielding to unrelenting pressure. The foundation was being sapped, imperceptibly, but as surely, as inevitably, as the protagonist of a Greek tragedy was beaten down by the forces of fate and circumstance that crowded in on him.
The deepest inroads on Ben Thompson’s tranquility were now being made by the events shaping up in San Antonio. The tension persisted in the wake of the dispute with Joe Foster. It was like an inextinguishable fuse, smoldering, the fire creeping along toward the explosive charge compounded of Ben’s turbulent days and nights, his emotions, his failures and triumphs, and the residue of encounters with others, the electrically charged dust that settles in a man’s soul through the years.
As principal dramatis personae in the conflict gathering about Ben Thompson were men he had known for many years:
Jack Harris, gambler, procurer, operator of the Vaudeville Variety Theater at Main Plaza and Soledad Street in San Antonio, a political power there, wielding influence in all the councils of government.
Billy Simms, Jack Harris’ right bower, the boyhood playmate of Ben Thompson in Austin; ambitious, plodding, driven by Ben from his gambling career in Austin to greener pastures in San Antonio, where all the power and glory that were Jack Harris’ beckoned to this understudy.
Joe Foster, a gambler by trade, an expert “mechanic” at faro, whose earning power depended not only on his skill at dealing, but on his reputation for honesty and on his courage to stand against abuse.
John King Fisher, deputy sheriff of Uvalde County, in line for the post of sheriff; deeply involved in the cattle-land intrigues of the fence-cutting war; former killer and desperado who terrorized a vast area of brush-land before he reformed; good friend of both Joe Foster and Ben Thompson.
Buck Walton, Confederate Colonel William M. Walton—Ben Thompson’s lawyer for many years, the legal brain that guided the gunfighter through treacherous courtroom terrain; a man removed from office as attorney general of Texas in 1866 because he was considered “an impediment to Reconstruction;” disfranchised because of his Confederate service, he practiced law under the name of W. P. de Normadie; chairman of the state democratic executive committee; author and publisher of The Life and Adventures of Ben Thompson, The Famous Texan, first published in 1884.
Ben Thompson and Jack Harris had served together in the Confederate army, “slept under the same blanket, marched side by side, fought shoulder to shoulder.” With his straggly mustache, Harris was not an unattractive man physically; his thick hair and his complexion were dark, he had a firmly set jaw, and was inclined to beefiness. His left hand was crippled, and he had a game leg, but his fastidious dress and his affability, his generosity in speech and in act, had created for him what was generally described as a pleasing personality. He was not a man inclined to violence, but he did not lack courage, and was ready to fight if matters had no other solution.
As Harris’ lieutenant in the command of the Vaudeville and other enterprises, puffy Billy Simms enjoyed the fullest confidence of his boss, and there was none who questioned his loyalty. Still, Billy Simms, as he had shown in Austin and as he proved later, was not one to accept permanently the role of subordinate. He had initiative and drive, ambition, self-reliance, and a strong, if temporarily suppressed, desire, to be his own boss. As second man in the Harris set-up, he exercised considerable authority, but it was not final.
Billy Simms made friends readily, and he and Harris were not only associates in business, but good friends as well. It was unstated, but generally accepted, that Simms was being groomed to succeed Harris, if and when the top man chose to retire from active participation in his various ventures. Billy’s devotion to Harris was not so complete that he neglected to build up his own prestige. Within the Harris orbit, Billy Simms had his own following, too, in a large measure among those who looked to the future, when Harris would be out of the picture and Simms would surely be the kingpin.
Billy Simms had been an admirer of Ben Thompson’s originally, and felt indebted to Ben for launching him on his career as a professional gambler in Austin. However, through the years the estrangement developed as Ben seemed to be showing resentment over Billy’s steady progress along the path of success. Eventually, as they became competitors, Billy came to fear Ben Thompson, more so than other men feared the Austin gunfighter. He knew Ben better than most and, rather than cross him, had acceded to the order to get out of Austin.
Billy’s perspective was the long one. He was a bider of his time, a man who could absorb punishment and not strike back aimlessly. As he grew in wealth and prestige in San Antonio, the spell cast over him by Ben Thompson did not remain a secret and was a constant thorn in his side. Even if Ben himself made no direct threats, there were always plenty of others who enjoyed repeating and embroidering the story of the two Austin playmates. As long as Ben Thompson lived and was seen around San Antonio at all, Billy Simms would be uneasy.
King Fisher was a tall, good-looking, lean and lithe young cowman reared in the saddle, often described as “pantherish” in his carriage and bearing. He was beholden to Joe Foster, with whom he had made friends early in Fisher’s career as a boss rustler. When the Rangers moved in on Fisher’s realm in the Nueces. River country, they had him locked up in the Bexar County jail at San Antonio for many months. During that time Joe Foster had sent meals in to Fisher in his cell and had arranged for other comforts that made the stay behind bars less painful.
For a multitude of favors, in and about Texas and trail towns, King Fisher was beholden to Ben Thompson and looked on him as a good friend. Ben had helped King through financial difficulties, with legal advisers, and had gotten-him out of other troubles. But there was something about Ben Thompson’s make-up, possibly what he interpreted as a tendency to conservatism and compromise, that rubbed the more flamboyant Fisher the wrong way.
During the height of his career, King Fisher liked to dress as a Mexican Charro. He wore a wide-spreading Mexican sombrero of the finest felt, a black leather jacket with gold trimmings and brocaded with silk and silver thread, a bright red sash, split-side trousers, and embossed calfskin boots. He carried, hung on a hand-tooled leather belt, two silver plated, ivory-handled .45s.
John King Fisher was born in Kentucky and was thirteen when he came to Texas with his father, who was killed near Fort Worth in a fight with federal troops. Young King Fisher hired out to Doc White, a cattleman who operated a ranch for a long time near Carrizo Springs, and learned to rope and tame wild horses. When he was sixteen, he killed his first man, during a fight in Goliad County, fled to the Mexican border, remained a fugitive for a while and then returned to help Doc White fight rustlers who were making inroads on his herds.
A short while later, King Fisher moved along toward Eagle Pass, took up cattle-rustling, and within a few years was the recognized boss of seven counties between Castroville and Eagle Pass. His immediate gang consisted of about a dozen crack-shots, almost equal to Fisher himself, and it was said that from fifty to a hundred more men in that wild brush country were ready to ride with him.
King Fisher fenced in some land on the Nueces, in Dim-mitt County, and it became
the headquarters for rustling and smuggling operations. In these pastures, King and his men fattened stolen cattle before driving them to market in the Devil’s River area. Along the approaches to his ranch, the main road forked. The shorter route was along the fork that went past Fisher’s ranch. He had put up a sign which read, “This is King Fisher’s road. Take the other.” Everybody, except Fisher’s gang, took the other. For if ever an area knew rule by fear and terror, it was King Fisher’s domain. With local law impotent, robberies and murders took place during daylight, none feeling the need of concealment.
By the time he was twenty years old, King Fisher had seventeen murder charges against him. All were dismissed. At one of the few trials to which he was subjected, he took twenty of his men with him to Laredo, all heavily armed, and fortified ten in each of two stables near the courthouse. Facing the bench in the courtroom, Fisher blithely told the judge there would be hell to pay if he were convicted, but it would be music to his ears if he heard a legal verdict of not guilty. He was treated to the music. It went well with the tiger-skin chaps he had made up to wear for such special occasions. They were fashioned from the hide of a Bengal tiger that had escaped from a circus.
The rise of Ranger law in Texas brought an end to the King Fisher empire. The Rangers began a systematic harassment of the Nueces county rustlers. They rounded up Burd Obenchain, the Brutons, Warren Allen, and others. The border practice of ley fuga—shot while trying to escape—was employed regularly to de-populate the Fisher personnel. Then the law tried to get the head man himself. Charge after charge was filed, but no prosecutor could get corroborating evidence to make a case. As Ranger J. B. Armstrong said, “You could not persuade a man in this whole country to testify against King Fisher or any of his clan.” But, as the Ranger strength grew, the fear of Fisher declined. Eventually, the law managed to land Fisher in the San Antonio jail for all of nine months, during which time he was devotedly befriended by Joe Foster.
Then, about the time that Ben Thompson ran for city marshal of Austin, King Fisher declared a truce with the law. The story went that he had fallen in love with a girl in Uvalde County and that he had decided to reform and settle down. Amazed south Texans next heard that the desperado King Fisher had become a deputy sheriff. During his second term, he prepared to run for the post of sheriff, and was regarded as having an inside track for the job.
During this time, the fence-cutting war developed, and the whole rankling dispute over illegal enclosure of public lands became a red-hot public issue. A bitter, no-quarter conflict developed, and King Fisher was in the big middle of it. King Fisher frequently visited San Antonio, and learned of the animosity that had developed toward Ben Thompson.
CHAPTER 45
Soon after his election, City Marshal Ben Thompson accompanied a group of legislators and city officials on an excursion to Laredo. On the return trip, when the party laid over in San Antonio for a day, Ben Thompson was told that Jack Harris was in the streets, carrying a shotgun and announcing he would kill the Austin man.
Ben’s first reaction, of course, was to start from his room at the Menger Hotel and seek out Harris. His Austin friends finally persuaded him to desist. At the same time, they asked the local sheriff to spot men who could keep an eye on Thompson and Harris. They did not want their good-will trip marred by bloodshed.
Next day, Harris and Ben Thompson met on the street. Deputy Sheriff Pablo Penalosa stood hard by, in accordance with instructions.
“Hello, Jack,” Ben said, “I hear that you were on the hunt for me last night with your shotgun.”
“No, Ben,” Harris replied, “I wasn’t hunting you—”
“Well, I’m glad to hear that—”
“But,” Harris added, “I was waiting for you, and if you had come around to my place, I would have filled you full of shot.”
“So that’s how it is, Jack,” Ben said, “so you’re taking up Joe Foster’s fight, and. I’ve been hearing stories that you and your crew are forted for me, and intend to shoot me if you can get the advantage.”
“All I’ve got to say, Ben, is just stay away,” Harris warned.
“Let me tell you,” Thompson answered, “that if you want to, you can go get your crew, and you can arm them with shotguns and Winchesters and if you’ll all come out on Main Plaza and make your play, I’ll run all of you back to your holes, but at least try to come out and fight like men.”
“I never ran from anyone, Thompson,” said Harris, heatedly, “and I’m not running from you, and if you want to have it out—”
Deputy Sheriff Penalosa stepped between the men, and a group of Austin visitors also approached, ending what the officer said looked like an imminent clash.
After Harris had left, Ben said:
“I feel like eating some Mexican food; I’m going over to the Chile Queens.”
He walked alone toward Military Plaza. As he entered the big square, Ben Thompson felt himself mellowing a bit with the familiar smells and the dancing lights from hundreds of candles and the open oil lamps. He seemed wrapped in a soothing nostalgia, giving comfort like that of a light wool blanket during a chilly night on the trail.
This part of San Antonio, the people who talked melodious Spanish, their dress, their food, their wholehearted involvement with all the physical side of life, their songs all tinged with a bit of melancholy—all this Ben Thompson had been able to absorb, and it always beckoned to him. He longed for it when he was away, and it brought memories of his days in Mexico. His craving at times was so strong he could almost taste it, and it was a feeling as deep as the hate he felt for the city’s sporting world. His hate was fashioned of frustration and fascination, but it was a hate he would surely not recognize, nor admit if he did.
For, although Ben Thompson was a big-time name all over the Southwest, a name instantly recognized anywhere, San Antonio was big-time among cow-towns, and among cities that had outgrown and overshadowed their cow-town past. It was a city that had proved itself bigger than any man or any group of men. Ben had never been quite able to get a foothold here, despite his yearning for it, and yet upstarts like Billy Simms had managed to climb to the top of the heap.
Against the weight of the centuries-old pattern of life here, Ben seemed to shrink like drying rawhide. He turned again into a lonely boy, and found solace in the role of being uninterested in business here. He came to San Antonio to have a good time, to spend, as did through the years many famous and notorious figures of the Old West: the fighting marshals, the fast-shooting sheriffs, the powerful cattle barons, the desperadoes seeking sanctuary from the law.
Ben Thompson threaded his way across the plaza, around the busy stands of the Chile Queens who held regal sway over the rows of steaming pots of meat and tamales, and the great red earthenware bowls of rice garnished with tomatoes and green chile peppers and saffron, and similar cazuelad bubbling over with frijoles cooking with onion and garlic and salt pork over a slow charcoal fire.
Ben ordered a plate of enchiladas and some beans at the stand run by Lolita, an old friend of his. As he finished his meal, and was just getting up from the rickety bench, Cocky Dugan approached, holding a fighting rooster under his left arm. For years now, Ben had known Cocky as one of the most devoted rooster men in the county, and his birds had ripped feathers with the best in the state, from Laredo to Dallas, from Corpus Christi to El Paso.
“Howdy, Ben,” Dugan said, “you oughta take in the matches tonight—got a real grudge fight on.”
“Got a winner?” Ben asked.
“Feel these feathers,” Dugan replied, holding out the trim red rooster, shiny in the lamplight. Ben rubbed fingers against the short, stiff feathers that hugged the bird’s skin. He took the rooster in his hands, stroked the small, erect head, and the long, strong neck, the firm, jet black breast, the broad shoulders, and the long legs pulled up close under green-tipped wings.
“Nice, long s
harp beak,” Ben observed, “but awful short ears. Who you fighting?”
“My Caesar here, Joe Martinez’s Gold Eagle,” Dugan said.
Ben dropped a gold coin into Lolita’s plump palm and waved to her to keep the change. The two men moved away toward the north side of the plaza, in the direction of the Western Star Saloon.
At the cockpit in the backyard of the Western Star, the fights had already started. A hundred men or more were crowded against the circular barrier, shouting, making bets, laughing, cheering every sharp thrust of the spur.
“A hundred dollars on Caesar,” Ben told the matchmaker, who was holding the birds out for examination: Dugan’s red beauty, and the graceful, high-combed palomino owned by Martinez, its yellow-gold neck feathers ruffed nervously.
Dugan and Martinez waited at opposite sides of the crowd, and at the signal wave from the matchmaker, each pushed his bird toward the center of the ring, directly under the hanging oil lamp which spread a pale amber glow over the pit. Long fingers of shadows swept around the excited faces as the roosters met and clashed, both rising at once from the hard-packed earth strewn with sand, their wings flapping with each furious drive of the spurs and the dagger thrust of their beaks.
The fight had gone on about a minute without a halt, when Caesar, instead of rushing toward Gold Eagle, staggered sideways, but for an instant, and then turned toward his adversary as before.
“It’s fixed,” Ben said in a flat voice.
The two birds in the ring clashed again, and a new clamor went up from the crowd. Ben drew his pistol and fired. The bullet struck both birds as they met in mid-air in a tangle of beaks. Caesar’s head was gone. Gold Eagle’s neck spurted crimson, and both whirled in a crazy, hopping dance, spraying red droplets, as the crowd swarmed in panic to the saloon door and to the back fence gates.