The Pistoleer (12 page)

There’s never been a group of lawmen in Texas more despised than those black-hearted bastards. They was about half of them Nigra bullies, and the rest mostly the worst sort of mean-minded white trash to be found anywhere—the sort of fellas who if they hadn’t been made State Policemen would’ve been on the run from them their ownselfs. They had the authority to arrest you anywhere in the state, the local sheriffs be damned—though lots of sheriffs worked in cahoots with them, of course. It didn’t take long for the word to get around that you didn’t ever want to be pulled in by the State Police. Too many of their prisoners got shot dead for “trying to escape.”

Late that summer we got word they had a list of men they most wanted to run down and that Wes’s name was on it. A few nights later we saw the proof for ourselfs and came to know just what it really meant. We were all in The Palace, watching Wes win us some money at stud so we would all live it up at Kate Vine’s, when in comes Jules Forge with a state wanted list he’d pulled off a jail wall in Austin. There were ten names on it, with Bill Longley’s at the top and Wes’s right under it. It offered five hundred dollars for Longley, dead or alive, four hundred for Wes, and lesser sums for everybody else.

You should of seen how fast the idea of four hundred dollars changed the mood in the room as the list made its way from table to table. Four hundred dollars was a
mountain
of money. There were fellers in there who’d turn in their own sweet mommas for
forty
dollars, if they had the chance.

Jules had showed the paper to Wes first, and Wes had smiled and passed it on and kept playing like it hadn’t been nothing but a revival notice. But I watched him close and could see he wasn’t really as much at ease as he was making out to be. He began talking to me and Aaron a good deal more while he played his hands, joking and showing us his hole cards. We were sitting just back of him, and every time he turned our way I saw his eyes sweep the room behind us. We caught on quick and started keeping close watch on his back. Some of the hard cases kept looking his way out the sides of their eyes.

Just about then, Phil Coe came in, and I can’t say how I knew, but I knew he’d heard about the reward list. He stared at Wes for a second with no expression at all, then nodded to him and took a seat at a table against the wall just inside the door.

Wes played for about another ten minutes, I guess, even though he’d already won even more than usual, and I have to say they were ten of the most nervous minutes I’ve ever knowed. Finally Wes pockets his winnings and says, “All right, cousins, let’s go to Kate’s and tickle the elephant.”

I’d never heard it so quiet in The Palace as when we were walking out. The only sound was our heels on the floor. The damn door seemed a mile away. My back was twitching from all the eyes I felt on it, and I half expected Phil Coe to make a pull on Wes at any second. Four hundred dollars might be all the push he needed to risk his hand against Wes. But as we got closer to him, I saw that he was looking past us, watching our backs. Without looking at Wes as we went by, he smiled, and in a voice sounding extra loud in all that quiet, he said, “You take care now, John Wesley.”

Two days later Wes sold his share of the crop to Pa and said so long to us all. He’d been somewhat famous when he came to us, but thanks to that State Police poster he was a whole lot more famous when he left. A few months later we heard the reward for his capture was up to a thousand dollars. A thousand! It wasn’t all that surprising, though, since by then he’d killed a State Policeman.

B
ill Longley and Wes Hardin met just once, in Evergreen in the summer of’70. At the time we’re talking about, Evergreen
belonged
to Bill Longley. He was born and raised there, and at the time we’re talking about, it was one of the toughest damn towns in Texas. For years after the War it was chock-full of bad actors and hard cases of every sort you could think of.

Oh, we had us a sheriff. He wore a badge and carried a key to the rusty old chicken coop we called a jail. His name was Rollo Somebody and he was real good at the job. Some army patrol would show up with a warrant for one of ours, and Rollo would tell them the fella had just left town two days ago, headed north to the Indian Nations or south to Old Mexico. Whenever some lawman came by with a wanted poster, Rollo would oblige him and tack it up next to the front door of the jail. He’d promise to keep a sharp ear open for any word of the wanted man’s whereabouts. Then as soon as the law left, he’d tear the poster down and take it over to whatever saloon the wanted man was watching from. The hard case would use it for target practice and buy Rollo whiskey till it sloshed out his ears. I don’t believe Rollo ever had to pay for his own whiskey from the day he became sheriff of Evergreen till the sad night a few years later when he fell down drunk in the street one night during a hard rain and drowned in the mud.

The summer Hardin came to town, Bill already had a wide reputation as a pistol fighter, but Hardin’s was just starting to spread. Now I want to make something real clear about Bill:
he
was no bushwhacker. It’s lots who got theirselves a reputation mainly by back-shooting and dry-gulching. I’m not saying Hardin was one of them, but there
were
stories. You won’t hear any such tales about Bill except from liars and drunks. At the time I’m talking about, Bill had already killed over a dozen men, all of them straight-up. He had the smoothest, quickest pull I’d ever seen and could put six balls in a steady line down a porch post fifty feet away in less time than it takes to tell it. He was the best fanner there ever was. Took the triggers off his Dance revolvers and fanned the hammers to get off his shots.

It’s no trouble to remember the summer of ’70. That sonbitch E. J. Davis had just formed the State Police and we’d heard they had a wanted list with Hardin’s name up near the top with Bill’s. The word on Hardin was that he was hiding out with kin somewhere around Brenham. Bill tried not to show it, but it rubbed him raw to hear talk about what a deadeye Hardin was, or how fast he was said to be on the pull, or how he supposedly killed three bluebellies at one time all by himself up in Navarro County when he wasn’t but fifteen. Bill would usually just stare at whoever was doing the talking until the fool finally caught on and shut up. The way Bill saw it, Hardin hadn’t yet earned the right to be put in the same class with him. We all knew that. So you can imagine the stir when Hardin showed up in town all unexpected one day.

I ought to tell you that in the summertime in Evergreen we used to do our gambling out in the street. Set in the forest like it was, the town had plenty of cool shade outside. We’d put a table or a goods box under a tree and be all set to play. On Saturday, which was race day, there’d be every kind of game set up every few yards on both sides of the street—poker, faro, seven-up, dice, everything. If you wanted a little more privacy for some reason, there were plenty of corn cribs where you could put a box for a table and play in there. They raced the best quarter horses from four counties. There was cockfights and dogfights. On Saturdays the town was thick as fleas with gambling men from all over East Texas.

All right then, there we were at the bar in The Bear’s Den—Bill and me and Ben Hinds, Jim Brown, Jody Pinto, and Blacknose Bob—when in comes Sam Ott all worked up and tells us John Wesley Hardin was right that minute playing poker at Weldon Quinn’s table over by the livery. Bill went right on rolling a smoke without a change of expression. He don’t say a word till he gets the smoke rolled and lit and takes a couple of long puffs. Then he asks Sam: “How you know it’s him?”

Well, Sam says, he’d been sitting in on the game at Quinn’s table when Hardin walked up and asked if there was room for one more. Didn’t none of them know it was Hardin, though, till a few minutes later when Sheriff Rollo comes up, weaving drunk, and says to the new man that he liked to know the names of any strangers in his town and would he mind telling his. “John Wesley Hardin,” he said, “and I do admire the lively nature of your town, Sheriff.” He pulled a pint bottle of rye out of his coat pocket and asked the sheriff if he might care for a taste. Rollo gave a big lopsided grin and decided to join the game too. He was so drunk he was holding some of his cards backward. Sam stayed in for a coupla more hands just to be polite, then dropped out and hurried straight on over to the Den to let Bill know about Hardin.

When Sam’s all done talking, Bill looks at him a minute, then says, “How you
know
it’s him?”

It was a damn good question to repeat, for two reasons—the first being that none of us knew what Hardin looked like, and the second being that anybody could
say
he was somebody else. Bill knew that better than most, there’d been so many liars claiming to be him. The first time he heard of it, I think he was sort of proud to know his reputation was so fearsome that other men would use it to scare people and have their way with them. But after he heard of somebody else pretending to be him over in Waco, and then somebody else up in Bryan, and in Livingston and a bunch of other towns, it started to grate on him that any son of a bitch who took a mind to it could benefit himself by saying he was Bill Longley. “Look here, Cal,” he once said to me, “it’s took me some doing to earn my reputation, and I don’t much care for these shitheads making such free use of it instead of going out and earning one of their own.” By the time he heard about some hard case who was calling himself Bill Longley over in Walker County, he’d had enough of it. He saddled up and rode on over there and tracked the fella down. Found him in a saloon just a few miles south of Huntsville, talking loud and bulldozing everybody in the place, making Bill Longley seem like some kind of bigmouthed bully. Bill kicked a spittoon across the floor at him to get his attention, then said: “You are too dogshit ugly and too coarse in your ways to even dream of being Bill Longley, you son of a bitch.” The hard case tried to pull, but never cleared his holster before Bill fanned three rounds right through his wishbone. He fell face-first with so much blood pouring out of him he hit with a splash. “Take a good look at my face,” Bill told everybody, “so you won’t be played for such fools by the next fake who says he’s me.” He shot up the bar mirror for good measure, then mounted up and rode home. And still, every now and then, we’d hear of Bill Longley killing somebody in some town Bill had never been to in his life.

Anyhow, that’s why Bill’s question was a good one, and why Sam Ott’s answer wasn’t. All Sam could say was, “Well, hell, Bill, that’s who he
told
us he was.”

So Bill tells Ben Hinds to go over to Quinn’s and check the fella out, and me and Jody Pinto and Blacknose Bob decided to go along. Ben Hinds was a good one for Bill to send. He was big as a mule and near as strong—and about the same-looking, some of us thought. He’d shot men dead and gouged out eyes and bitten off at least one man’s nose that I knew of. He wasn’t afraid of a thing in this world except for a gypsy-woman fortune-teller named Madam Zodiac who lived a few miles outside of town.

Ben and Jody went down one side of the street and me and Blacknose Bob went down the other, the idea being to come up on Hardin from different angles and spread our positions as much as we could. But by the time we got there, Rollo had passed out and was curled up under a wagon, and Hardin had taken his seat, which put the livery wall at his back and gave him a clear view of the street. I figure he saw us coming before we even knew which one at the table was him.

One of the players quick gave up his chair to Ben, and Ben tossed in his dollar ante and told Quinn to deal him in. Quinn didn’t look glad to see him—or the rest of us, either, as we spread out around the table. Hardin was smiling, but he wasn’t missing a thing, and he took notice of where each of us was standing among the spectators.

On his first hand, Ben opened with a big bet and everybody but Hardin folded. Hardin raised big and Ben raised big right back and Hardin called and took the hand with three tens. Ben wasn’t holding but a pair of treys. He wasn’t wasting time trying to get things to a head. But Hardin suddenly stood up and started sticking his money in his pockets. “Thank you, gents,” he says. “Been a pleasure. Believe I’ll go buck the tiger for a while.”

“Hold on there, hightime,” Ben says. “A man don’t up and walk off winners without giving a feller a chance to win his money back. Sit your ass back down.”

Hardin says, “Well, maybe if you’d of sat in a little sooner, you’d of cleaned me out by now. But we ain’t never going to know because that ain’t what happened.”

Ben thumps his fist on the table and hollers, “Damn you, boy, don’t smart-mouth
me!
” He shoves back his chair and stands up—and
zip-click!
—Hardin’s got the Colt in his hand and cocked and pointed square at Ben’s face. Talk about
quick.
Ben freezes, naturally—and Hardin pulls his left-hand gun and hops back so his back’s against the livery wall and he’s got me and Blacknose Bob covered too. Jody put his hands half up—but Bob looked about to pull, and Hardin said, “Try it, you ugly-nosed bastard, and I’ll kill you quick.” Without looking directly at me he says, “You too, snake-head.” I wore a snakeskin band around my hat in those days, so there was no question who he meant. Hell, I wasn’t even thinking about pulling, not after seeing the way that pistola jumped into his hand. I didn’t get to be as old as I am by being rash in my youth. Bill didn’t make it past age twenty-eight.