The Pistoleer (40 page)

I
f any of them had taken a look up at the hotel roof, they would have spotted the shooters for sure. Those stupid peckerwoods kept peeking over the top of the wall to see what was going on, instead of keeping their heads down like they’d been told to do. But Hardin and his friends were joking and laughing and not paying much attention around them. Hardin had been living in that region for over a year by then without a bit of trouble from the law. He’d gotten to feeling safe there. That was our big advantage.

There were maybe eight or nine other passengers boarding for Alabama. Hardin was accompanied by three fellas who worked with him at the timber mill. Shipley said the youngster named Mann was tough as he looked and would be quick to fight if he had the chance. The other two—Shep Hardie and Neal Campbell—had never been known to even carry a gun.

John and Hutchinson stood over by the baggage car, smoking cigars and chatting like a pair of old pals. I was standing with Shipley and Purdue near the ticket agent’s window. As Hardin and his party headed for the smoking car, he looked our way and Shipley and Purdue smiled and raised a hand to him. “What say, John,” Purdue said. He’d sat in on plenty of poker games with him at Shipley’s. Hardin smiled at him and Shipley and said, “Hey, gents,” and gave me a quick look-over and a nod, and I nodded back. They went aboard and we watched them through the big coach windows as they made their way to the rear of the car. Jim Mann took a seat on the window, facing front, and Hardin sat beside him, on the aisle. The other two sat in the facing seat. I looked over at John. He tossed his cigar under the baggage car and tugged down his hat. It was the signal to make our move.

John and the sheriff went up on the platform at the rear of the smoking car and stood ready while Shipley and Purdue and I entered the car from the front. Shipley and Purdue were a few feet ahead of me. I kept looking out the windows and waving as we moved down the car, like I was bidding good-bye to somebody out on the station platform. “Say, Swain,” Shipley said, “you going to give me and Ace a chance to win some of our money back tonight?” Hardin laughed and said, “Sorry, boys. Got to tend to business for a while. I’ll be back next month with another fat poke you can try and take off me.”

John and Hutchinson came in through the rear door with their pistols in their hands. The two sitting with their backs to me, Campbell and Hardie, looked up at them. “Hey, Will—” one of them started to say, just as Hardin turned to look.

“Texas, by God!” Hardin yelled. He made a grab under his coat for his gun but John lunged forward and cracked him hard on the head with his pistol as Shipley and Purdue dove on him and grabbed his hand away from his coat and they all went tumbling to the floor in a struggling, cussing heap.

As Jim Mann jumped up and pulled his pistol, I shot him twice in the chest. He fired a wild shot into the back of the car and fell against the open window—and the riflemen on the roof opened up on him like a firing squad. Blood flew off his head and neck and he fell through the window and onto the platform as the rifles kept firing and firing. I dove for cover beside Campbell and Hardie, who’d already hit the floor. A storm of bullets whacked into the side of the car, thunked into the coach seats, twanged off the steel wheels. “Cease fire! Cease fire!” Hutchinson was screaming. “
Cease fire
goddamnit!”

The rifle fire eased off and finally quit altogether, but Hardin was still making a fight of it. He was on his back and Shipley and Purdue had pinned his arms out at his sides, but John and Hutchinson were having a hell of a time trying to get hold of his kicking legs. A kick caught Hutchinson flush on the mouth and knocked him back on his ass. I dove in and grabbed one of Hardin’s legs and managed to pin it down as John sat on the other one. He jabbed the muzzle of his pistol under Hardin’s jaw and said, “Surrender, you son of a bitch, or I’ll blow your damn head off!”

“Shoot, God damn you! Shoot!” Hardin said. He was breathing like a bellows and blood was running out of his hair where John had hit him. “You bastard!” Hutchinson shouted, wiping at his bloody mouth. He pushed between me and John and managed to whack Hardin in the face with his pistol before John shoved him away. “This man’s
my
prisoner!” John shouted. “Anybody mistreats him, it’ll be me!”

The whack in the face set the blood pouring from Hardin’s nose and took a good bit of the starch out of him. We hauled him up and sat him down and John cuffed his hands behind him and around the seat’s armrest. “Get this thing moving!” John yelled. “
Now!
”

Shipley ran out on the platform and signaled for the engineer to start the train rolling. As the car jolted and began to move, I yanked Campbell and Hardie off the floor and shoved them into a seat. They had their hands as high as their arms could stretch and looked scared shitless. “I don’t know what Swain’s done,” Hardie said, “but me and Neal ain’t done nothing, we swear!” I told them to shut up and patted them down to be sure they were unarmed.

Purdue sat on a seat arrest and held his pistol inches from Hardin’s head. I looked out the window as the depot fell behind us and saw the shooters on the hotel roof staring down at the bloody corpse of young Jim Mann as a crowd began closing around it like a pack of scavengers.

A
s soon as we were clear of Pensacola we all busted out laughing and yeehawing and clapping each other on the back. “We done it!” Hutchinson hollered, grinning like a keyboard through his swollen purple lips. “We damn sure done it!” Even John couldn’t keep the smile off his face.

Hardin had regained his senses, though his nose was still leaking blood and swollen like a fat strawberry. He kept insisting he was innocent. “Listen,” he said, “you boys got the wrong man. My name is John Swain and I run a timber camp on the Styx River. You can ask anybody.” John and I laughed. I sat down beside him with a grin I could feel all the way to each ear and said, “You’re John Wesley Goddamn Hardin is who you are, and you’re under arrest for the murder of Deputy Sheriff Charles Webb of Brown County, Texas. We’re taking you home, Wes.”

We stopped at Whiting so all the frightened passengers could get off the train. We released Hardie and Campbell, since we had no charges on them, and John got off a telegram to General Steele in Texas, telling him we’d made the arrest but weren’t in the clear yet. Hardin had plenty of friends between us and Mobile, and we figured they’d probably form up fast and try and rescue him. So what we did was highball right through Polland, his Alabama stomping ground—speeding right past all the surprised people on the depot platform who’d been waiting for the train—and straight on to Mobile.

W
e took him off the train in Mobile and clapped him in a cell while John sent a telegram to Texas requesting the proper extradition papers. The Mobile sheriff posted six deputies with shotguns all around the jail. A train to Florida came through an hour later, and Shipley and Hutchinson and Purdue got on it after receiving many reassurances from John that he’d be in touch with them about their shares of the reward.

When we got back to the jail we found out he’d talked the sheriff into bringing him the best lawyer in town, some fella named Watts, who’d listened to his story and gone straight to a judge with a writ of habeas corpus. Another ten minutes and he would’ve been long gone—and legally. John had to talk fast and furious to get the Mobile judge to give us till that evening to get the proper papers. “Boys,” the judge said, “you know good and well that what you done ain’t exactly legal. But if this man is John Wesley Hardin, I’ll be damned if I’m going to be known as the stupid son of a bitch who turned him loose on a technicality. I’m giving you till midnight to get the Texas requisition papers in front of me.” Twenty minutes before Hardin would’ve been released on the habeas writ, the papers came from Governor Hubbard’s office, and the way was clear for us to take him back to Texas all legal and aboveboard.

By then the whole town knew who we’d locked up in their jail, and the street out front was mobbed with people wanting to see him. What’s more, they’d all heard we meant to take him out on the early-morning train to New Orleans, and the depot was jammed with even more people waiting to catch a glimpse of the notorious Texas mankiller. “I ain’t about to take him out through that crowd,” John told the Mobile sheriff. “He’s got too damn many friends around here who could be hiding among all those people, just waiting for the chance to throw down on us.”

So we snuck him out the back door of the jail in the middle of the night, escorted by two deputies, and took him by wagon up to Montgomery and boarded a train for Decatur.

Once we had him on the train out of Montgomery, he finally admitted who he really was. But he never whined nor pleaded nor blamed anybody else for his troubles. He said he’d shot Webb in self-defense and would be able to prove it in a fair trial. The way he told the story, I thought he might come clear, but John said you never could tell what might happen in a courtroom. “I seen men I damn well knew were guilty walk out free as birds,” he said, “and I seen men I knew were innocent end up in the rock quarries or swinging from a rope.”

At least a man stood a better chance in a courtroom than with a mob, Wes said, and there was no arguing with that. He told us he was impressed with how smooth we’d pulled off his capture, and wanted to know how we’d tracked him down. When I told him, he said, “That stupid no-count sonbitch”—referring to Brown Bowen. “It’s God’s own wonder how him and Jane could of come from the same seed source.”

W
e had to spend the night in Decatur before catching the morning train to Memphis. In exchange for his promise not to try to escape, we allowed him to write a letter to his wife and send her some money. We would have let him write her anyway, even without his promise, which neither John nor I took to heart. Any man will naturally promise not to try to escape if he thinks it might get you to let your guard down.
I’d
make that promise. What man with any sense wouldn’t? And if the guard got careless and let me get the jump on him, I damn sure would. And if it was a rope he might be taking me back to, and there was no way to escape but to kill him, well then … you do what you have to do to keep alive. There’s no plainer truth on earth.

Anyhow, we cuffed his hands in front of him to let him write the letter and, later, to eat his supper, which we ordered brought up to the hotel room. But I never took my eyes off him for a second while he was cuffed in front—which proved to be wise, because when John handed him his supper plate and turned to say something to me, I saw Wes’s eyes cut to the revolver in John’s hip holster, not six inches in front of his face. I grabbed John and yanked him away from Wes so hard he fell over a chair and banged his head on the bedstead and cussed me out good. I stood there with my gun drawn on Wes and said to John, “You best take a bit more care with this young rascal.” Wes just looked at me all innocent and said, “Good Lord, Jack, you don’t think …? Hey, I gave my
word
!” But his eyes couldn’t hide how ready he’d been to snatch John’s gun. Another half a second and John and I would’ve ended up in our own blood on the floor, I don’t doubt that one bit.

After that, John was a good deal more cautious with him, and Wes never got such a chance again the rest of the trip. From then on, whenever we brought his cuffs around in front to let him eat, I’d sit across from him with my pistol cocked and pointed at his head. “God
damn,
Jack,” he once said with a grin, “you sure know how to take the taste out of a meal. You
still
don’t trust me not to try to get away?” And I said, “Sure I do, Wes—as much as you trust me not to blow your head off if you try.” He smiled and said, “Me and you, Jack, we understand all about trust, don’t we?”

T
he news of his arrest preceded us to Memphis, Little Rock, Texarkana—all the stops on our way to Austin—and every station on our route was chock-full of people wanting to have a look at him. We had a private car and naturally kept the doors locked and the windows open only at the tops. We had our shotguns ready at every stop. Most of the spectators cheered and waved at him and held up signs saying, “Free Wes Hardin!” and “We Love You Wes!” and “Hardin is Innocent!”

But not everybody felt that way. At the Little Rock depot, a rough fight broke out between a group of young men with a banner saying “Hardin Is a Hero” and a group with a big placard saying “Hang the Mankiller.”

People gave goods to the conductor to pass on to him—baskets of food (we ate like kings on that trip), bottles of whiskey, good luck pieces ranging from rabbit’s feet to old coins to arrowheads, and envelopes of money, most with just a few dollars in them, but one with fifty dollars and a note saying, “Sorry it aint more, your a good man and god bless.”

I tell you, it was an amazing thing to behold, all those people rooting for him—all those pretty girls calling his name! “Damn, boy,” I said to him as we stared out the window at the mess of pretty things blowing him kisses at the Dallas depot. “I believe a man might smother to death under all that affection.” He grinned and said, “Maybe so—but what a damn fine way to go, don’t you think, Jack?” His face lit up every time he saw such crowds cheering for him. “Lookit them all,” he said. “You really think all them people can be wrong about me?”

There was a telegram for us in Waco, warning that the crowd waiting at the Austin station was too large to control. When Wes heard that he went a little pale and said, “You boys swore you wouldn’t let no mob get me.” John said it might be a mob wanting to hang him or one wanting to set him free, but either way he wasn’t going to take any chances.

He stopped the train a few miles outside of Austin and we rented a hack from a livery for the rest of the ride in. All of us were nervous now for different reasons. “Wes,” John said, “if you try to break, I swear I’ll kill you.” I didn’t say anything, but I had a picture of my two thousand dollars flying off in the wind if Wes got away. Wes just shook his head and said, “I ain’t gonna try a thing, John—you just keep the mob off me.”