The Pistoleer (32 page)

When none of the Sutton men was returning fire anymore, we finally eased off. It seemed like we’d been shooting for hours but it was probably no more than a minute. One of the horses was still kicking and bellowing and I had to shoot it twice more before it stopped. Manning and Jim took careful aim and put another round in each of the fallen Suttons just in case anybody was playing possum. Then we came out from behind our cover and went down to them. The air was full of the itchy scent of powder and the sharp metal smell of fresh blood.

There were nine dead horses and we counted eight dead men—and then we found the last one, halfway between the road and the river, crawling for the water. He was wounded badly, and he begged us not to kill him. Manning said, “Sorry, bubba, way too late for that.” And dispatched him.

N
ot long afterward we got a report that Jack Helm was secretly on his way to Wilson County, just west of us, to try to recruit some old State Police pals of his into the Regulators. Wes and Jim figured he’d have some men with him but probably not many, as he wouldn’t expect a Taylor ambush in territory so friendly to Suttons. They decided to see if they could hunt him down. George and I went with them. Manning and Huck stayed back to keep rounding up a herd and to ramrod the guards watching over our homes. According to our spies, a couple of Helm’s old State Police pals lived in Floresville, so that’s where we headed.

Shortly after we crossed into Wilson County, Wes’s horse threw a shoe, so we detoured about a mile over to a town called Albuquerque, where there was a blacksmith’s. It was a little two-dog town with one street and about eight buildings. The only people on the street were a knot of men sitting on their heels in the shade of an oak by the blacksmith shop, and a handful of boys about to drop a mean-looking black tomcat into a burlap sack already holding another cat. “I got five dollars says that black comes up winners,” Wes said to Jim. A redhead boy was clutching the cat by its scruff and back paws, and it hissed at us as we went by. “What’s the other one like?” Jim asked the boys. “One-eyed calico,” a boy said. “Won the most sack fights of any of them.” Jim grinned at Wes and said, “You got a bet.”

George and I reined up and dismounted to watch the sack fight while Wes took his horse into the blacksmith shop a little farther down the street. “Y’all tell me how it turns out,” Jim said to us, and went to join the men in the shade of the oak.

Two boys held the sack up between them and a third dropped the black inside—then they quickly tied it off and hung it on a low tree limb. You’ve never heard shrieking till you’ve heard a sack fight between two big toms. George and I were so caught up in watching that howling sack tossing and twitching on the tree limb that neither of us paid any attention to the horsemen who rode into town behind us.

A minute later a shotgun blasted and we spun around and saw Wes standing in the doorway of the blacksmith shop with both barrels of the scattergun smoking. Jack Helm was sitting in the middle of the street with the whole front of his shirt bright red with blood and a coil of shiny blue intestine bulging out of his torn belly. His pistol lay a few feet from him. The three men who’d ridden in with him were reining in their spooked horses, and Jim Taylor was covering them with a pair of pistols, yelling something I couldn’t make out through the caterwauling still going on alongside me. The Sutton men dismounted and put their hands up high. Wes grabbed up their horses’ reins and swung up into a saddle.

Just then, Jack Helm got up on his feet and went at Jim Taylor with a skinning knife.

I couldn’t believe my eyes. He was trying to hold his guts in with his free hand as he staggered toward Jim, but they were slipping through his grip and hanging wetly against his thighs. His face was pale as pig fat. Jim shot him in the chest twice and Helm dropped to his knees and his guts rushed out into the dust. He threw the knife at Jim as awkwardly as a girl. Jim shot him again and Helm fell forward on his intestines. Then Jim went and stood over him and shot him three times in the head. I’d never before seen a man so thoroughly killed.

Helm had spotted Jim as soon as he and his men rode in—and he got the drop on him before Jim even looked over and recognized him. He’d dismounted and started walking toward him with his pistol aimed right in his face, cussing him as he came. He never knew Jim wasn’t alone until Wes stepped out of the shadows of the blacksmith shop and blew his belly wide open. To this day, every time I hear a cat screech I see Jack Helm lying dead with his guts in the dirt.

We galloped out of there trailing the Sutton horses on a rope, and a few hours later we sold them to a dealer in Smiley. That night we spent every nickel from the horse sale on whiskey in a Gonzales saloon. “Drinks are on the Sutton Party!” Wes announced with a loud laugh. The news had spread fast, and men kept coming to our table all evening to congratulate us for killing Jack Helm. I heard that for months afterward Wes received letters of gratitude from people who’d hated Helm. Many of the letters were from women Jack Helm had made widows.

A
nd still the feud went on—until finally Wes and Jim met with Joe Tomlinson and his lieutenants and everybody at last agreed to the terms of a peace treaty. They had it drawn up in a law office in Clinton, the seat of DeWitt County, and everybody signed it, including Bill Sutton, who had it brought to his guarded home by a lawyer who witnessed his signature. He knew better than to show himself to Jim Taylor, who had signed the treaty with the stipulation that it did not apply to him and Bill Sutton. The treaty group agreed that henceforth the feud was a matter strictly between the two of them.

A
nd so, with the State Police a thing of the past, and with the feud settled by treaty, life in the Sandies turned fairly peaceful for the first time in a long time. Sutton rarely showed himself anymore, conducting most of his cattle business from the safety of his home. Jim Taylor was eager as ever to kill him, but he’d pledged his word to keep the fight between the two of them and he meant it.

We turned our attention back to the cattle business and helped Manning finish rounding up a herd for Kansas, and then we helped Wes put a herd together for movement to the Cuero rail yard. All in all, it was a sweet and peaceful summer, and the peace carried over into the fall. When we weren’t working, we were racing horses and gambling and dancing down the barn roofs. Jim Taylor kept his ear cocked for news of Sutton, but Old Bill wasn’t relaxing his guard in the slightest, and the stalemate between them stretched out for month after month.

Shortly after the New Year, Wes took his wife and baby to visit Comanche, where his daddy and momma had gone to live near his brother Joe, who’d been practicing law there for a few years. I recall how truly excited Wes was about that family reunion. When he bid me and George good-bye, he looked as happy as I’d ever seen him.

A few weeks later George and I received notification of our father’s death in Houston. He’d been a college-educated man, a district manager for the railroad, and his will provided George and me with two thousand dollars each. And just that simply, my life changed forever. By the time Wes got back from visiting his family in Comanche, I was on my way to enroll in college in Houston. Eventually, I became an attorney-at-law and today I have a thriving practice in Galveston. George had planned to use his inheritance to buy a small ranch, but he never did. Just a few months after I left the Sandies, he was murdered by Sutton Regulators.

C
omanche was a small community less than twenty years old on the edge of the West Texas frontier. The town square was built around a stone courthouse and shaded with live oaks. The nearest rail tracks were a hundred miles away. The roads were difficult. Except for an occasional cattle crew passing by, the place had few visitors.

I’d spent the previous six years reporting and editing for a San Antonio newspaper, but a whiskey habit as relentless as a bulldog finally got me fired. I was also in pressing financial circumstances at the time—
and
under the dark shadow of an ugly legal suit for breach of matrimonial promise to a young lady who’d proved to be neither as young as she’d led me to believe nor as much of a lady as I had presumed. Thus, when the editorship of the
Chief,
Comanche’s weekly newspaper, was offered to me by its devil-may-care publisher one besotted evening in a Castroville cantina, I accepted the position on the spot and accompanied him to Comanche the following morning without even a rearward glance at San Antone. And that is how I came to be there when John Wesley Hardin made his fateful trip to Comanche in the spring of 1874.

By that time his brother Joe had been a resident of the town for three years. His first child—Dora Dean Belle Hardin—had been born there, and his second, Joe Hardin, Jr., was soon to be. He practiced law and sold real estate, served as the town postmaster, belonged to the Masons, and was a member of the Friends of Temperance. But although he was generally popular and admired, he did not lack for a strong core of critics. It was rumored that he was in league with corrupt agents of the state land office in Austin who were getting rich from the sale of worthless titles to unclaimed Texas land grants. Further, a stockman in neighboring Brown County had recently claimed he’d been defrauded by Joe Hardin in a cattle deal. Joe simply ignored all such mean talk and carried on in his usual gregarious fashion.

The Reverend and Mrs. Hardin and all the rest of their brood now lived in Comanche, as well. So too did John Wesley’s Anderson and Dixon cousins.

W
esley had first visited Comanche in January, and Sheriff John Carnes had been apprehensive about it. But when Joe introduced him to his famous brother on the gallery of Jack Wright’s saloon, Sheriff John was much relieved to find that he was a personable young man who wished only to enjoy a short stay with his family before returning to his cattle business in Gonzales. For his part, Sheriff John assured him that state warrants were of no consequence in Comanche, which preferred to tend to its own legal business and let the rest of the counties tend to theirs. Wesley said that was an enlightened judicial attitude if ever he heard one and offered to buy Sheriff John a drink. I bellied up next to them at the bar and Sheriff John introduced me. Wesley gave me a sharp look. He said he’d been the victim of many a false newspaper story and had come to distrust all pen pushers. I said I didn’t blame him a bit. “I don’t trust a damn one of them myself,” I told him, which was the truth. That got a laugh out of him and he stood me to a drink. Thus did we become acquaintances.

His wife Jane and daughter Molly came with him on that first visit. So did a cousin named Gip Clements and a rough-hewn little man named Dr. Brosius, who had recently hired on as his cattle crew foreman. Toward the end of January they all returned to the Sandies, and a few weeks later Joe went to visit him.

Before we saw either of them again, we got the news that Jim and Billy Taylor had murdered Bill Sutton in broad daylight at the Indianola docks. Billy Taylor had been arrested shortly thereafter and was locked up in the Galveston jail. Jim Taylor was said to be hiding out at John Wesley’s cow camp in the Sandies. Rumor had it that both Joe and Wesley had been involved in the killing, although not directly. Supposedly, the Taylors had learned of Bill Sutton’s intention to take a steamer to New Orleans, but their informant had not known the exact date of his departure, and so Wesley had prevailed upon Joe—the only one among them not known to Bill Sutton—to go to Indianola to try to get that information. Joe, the rumor had it, was successful. He sent this information to Wesley, who relayed it to the Taylors, who boarded Sutton’s steamer as it was about to leave the dock and shot him two dozen times in front of a terrified crowd.

It was nothing new to hear such tales about Wesley Hardin, the notorious mankiller and ally of the Taylors. But
Joe?
The attorney-at-law and upstanding citizen? The Mason? The Friend of Temperance? The
postmaster?
Who could believe such a thing about him? The few who did were the same people who already thought him guilty of land swindles and cattle fraud. Most Comanche citizens scorned the idea that he’d had anything to do with Sutton’s assassination. Joe
might
be a bit of a legal hornswoggler, they said, but he wasn’t one to take part in a murder plot.

When Joe returned from the Sandies, he brought Jane and Molly back with him. Over coffee and honey biscuits in the Coop Cafe, he informed me that Wesley had already dispatched one herd north in charge of his cousin Joe Clements, and was busy rounding up another. While the crew finished with the branding, Wesley would come to Comanche for another visit, and then, when Doc Brosius brought the herd up to Hamilton, a little town southeast of us, Wesley would join the crew for the drive to Wichita. Jane and Molly would live at Preacher Hardin’s while Wesley was away.

A
nd so in April Wesley showed up—accompanied by Jim Taylor, who had a five-hundred-dollar price on his head for killing Bill Sutton. It was unlikely anyone in Comanche would try to collect the reward. These were not men to let down their guard. Even in the midst of drunken frolic, they were ever vigilant for danger. Moreover, the entire “Hardin Gang”—as Wesley and his usual entourage of Taylor, the Andersons, and the Dixons had come to be known—would certainly retaliate on the instant if any among them were attacked. Yet I never once saw them bully anyone or present a deliberately menacing aspect. To the contrary, they took special care not to antagonize the townfolk and were generous about buying a round for the house wherever they went. They were popular with the town’s saloon crowd, and they had a friend in Sheriff John, and it certainly behooved them to keep it that way. Wes bought a beautiful racehorse named Rondo from a local breeder and kept busy overseeing the animal’s training.