The Pistoleer (5 page)

“I think we best get these bluebellies out of sight quick as we can, don’t you, Mr. Morgan?” John Wesley said. I said I thought we damn sure should, and I sent Will off to the DuBois place, which was down the creek and into the woods a ways. Gerard DuBois and his boys were good people and I knew they’d be glad to lend us a hand.

The Nigra’s bullet hadn’t taken but a small bite out of John Wesley’s arm, but it was bleeding real free. I tore a strip off his shirtsleeve and used it to tie off the wound, then we got busy stripping down the Nigra. If anybody ever did find the bodies, we didn’t want anything on them to identify them as soldiers.

Just as we’d got back to the creek and started in on the other two dead Yanks, Gerard DuBois and his boys showed up. They’d been in the middle of stringing trotlines across the river, but when Will told them what happened, they hustled right on over to help us out. They about busted John Wesley’s shoulders, pounding them so much in congratulations.

We toted the bare-ass bodies way on down the creek to a special place and buried them deep in the clay. There was lots of wash down at that spot and every rain from then on helped to bury them deeper. It was more than one dead man had been buried around there. We burned all their clothes to ashes. John Wesley didn’t want any of the dead men’s goods, so the DuBois boys rode off with the Yank horses, heading for the Thicket, where there was a fella always ready to pay top money for good horseflesh without a question of where it came from, not even if it carried the U.S. brand. Gerard DuBois took two of the Yankee carbines and I took the other. I couldn’t pass up that Spencer.

The sun was down in the treetops by the time we got back to the house. When my old woman saw the Yankee rifle, she didn’t say anything but she got awful tight in the face, knowing what it would mean if the wrong person ever caught a look at it. I kept it next to the bed but never did take it outside to shoot till long after the Yanks pulled out of Texas.

But even though she was too mad to say anything, she got right to work stripping the binding off John Wesley’s wound and then bandaging it up proper. John Wesley could see how upset she was, and I think he was more uncomfortable about that than about the pain in his arm. When she finished up with him, he said he reckoned he’d best go back home and let his daddy know what happened.

During supper he said he’d leave as soon as it got dark. My old woman wrapped up some corn bread for him. She started to leave the room, then quick came back to him and touched his face and said, “God bless you, boy.” Then she went into the other room and didn’t come out again. I never understood her and never will.

The boys offered their hands and he shook them as seriously as if they were grown men. He hugged the girls and kissed their cheeks. They started to cry, but I told them if they were going to do that they could leave the room, so they quit. We sat around till the last of the daylight faded, then went out to the stable. He saddled up, thanked me again for my hospitality, and rode off. It was a full moon out, but he cut over close to the trees and we lost sight of him in their deep shadow.

Next we heard, his daddy’d got him a schoolteacher job in Navarro County. They say he was a natural-born good teacher of reading and lettering and ciphering. For sure he’d of had a more peaceful life if he’d stayed at it rather than turn cowboy like he did.

T
he very first time he walked into the schoolroom and said, “Good morning. My name’s Wes Hardin and I’m your new teacher,” I thought to myself,
Well now, Mr. Wes Hardin, I might could teach
you
something too.
I knew just by looking at him he hadn’t ever done it, not yet.

I’d been teaching boys things they were mighty glad to learn since just before I turned thirteen—which was when my Uncle Andy introduced me to the original sin, as some call it, on a pile of hay at the back of his barn. I didn’t begrudge Uncle Andy for plucking my cherry—I wanted him to do it as much as he did. All these women who say they never have liked it, I don’t understand them. I loved it right from the first.

The first time Johnny and me did it back there in Pisga was on a blanket under a cottonwood by the lake with a big silver moon blazing through the branches over our heads. Like most boys on their first time with a girl he was quick as a gunshot about it. But then he was ready to go again—and again and again. Lord, there was no quit to that boy. I didn’t keep count, but I bet we did it more than a half-dozen times that night. Like a lot of the tall skinny ones, he was hung like a horse. I mean, he could of cracked pecans with that big thing of his. And talk about a fast learner! That boy wanted to know
everything
—how’s this feel to you here, how’s that feel to you there, how you like if it I do this, or this, or this? What if I do this here with my tongue? What if I do that there with my finger? He wanted to learn everything all at once. I know I taught him everything
I
knew at the time—and he damn near wore me out with all his learning and practicing.

He liked to talk too—I mean while we were at it. And laugh. And make
me
laugh. I remember how, right after one of the first few times we did it, he raised up on his hands and knees and looked at me like he was about to say something really serious, then said, “You know what, Miss Hannie? I believe a man could learn to enjoy this sort of thing.” He tickled me with silly jokes about bucking broncos and saddle sores and God-knows-what-all. He was fun. And he was really and truly nice. He talked so sweet and kissed so soft and stroked my hair so gentle. But best of all—the thing about him I’ll always remember, the thing that made me think I was in love with him at the time—was that he kept right on treating me with respect in public. He’d call me
Miss
Hannie whenever we met in front of other people. He always tipped his hat to me. The fact is, he was a gentleman. I guess his momma wouldn’t have approved of me in a million years, but I surely do approve of the way she raised him.

When he gave up teaching to join his crazy cousin Simp Dixon in the cattle trade, he went to live out at Jim Newman’s cow camp and only came to Pisga now and then. Once in a while I’d see him in town, usually in the company of Simp and other rough characters like Frank Polk. Whenever he saw me, he’d say hello and smile sweetly, but that was all. He never whispered in my ear anymore to meet him out by the lake late at night. I heard that him and his friends were taking their pleasures with the painted cats in Jennie Ann’s sporting house. For a while I pined for him so hard I thought my heart would fall to pieces—but I swore I’d never pine for a man again and I never have.

I
got out of Pisga with a fella named Pierson who came to town one day with his two girls in a blazing-red covered wagon and gave me a wink while he hawked patent medicine to the crowd. Charlie Leamus, one of the boys I’d fooled with, told me Pierson was really a whoreman and would be peddling the girls in the wagon after dark, out at Jackson’s Hollow, a mile or so out of town. That night I snuck out of the house and walked on out there and hid in the bushes until the last of the men who’d been standing in line had gone in the wagon and done his business and left. Then I went up to Pierson as he was tying everything down tight and had a talk with him. And when they rolled away from Pisga before sunup, I went too.

I worked my way north with them and then went on my own when Pierson cheated me once too often. I ended up in a house in Abilene, Kansas, the wildest town I ever worked. The first gunfight I ever saw was right in the middle of Texas Street—two drunk cowboys who missed each other six shots each from twenty feet apart. They busted windows and killed a horse and hit a dog, but missed each other every time—and then while one was busy reloading cap and ball, the other pulled out an extra pistol and walked up to him and shot him square in the face from about two feet away.

I saw a dozen fistfights a night. I saw two men cut each other up with knives till they both fell down from the loss of blood and died with faces white as powder. I saw a madam named Stella Raye shoot a man in the ear with a derringer for cutting a nipple off one of her girls. The girl wasn’t too bright and had laughed at the hardass because he was too drunk to get it up. Funny thing is, after that she got to be one of the most popular girls in the house. Everybody wanted to fuck the girl with only one nipple. Oh, hell, the things I saw back then, the things I learned.

But the thing I’ll always remember best about Abilene is the time Wild Bill came up to the rooms and right there with him was none other than Johnny, who I’d thought I’d never in my life see again. Ain’t life a damn wonder!

S
imp Dixon had been cowboying for me off and on for a couple of years when he came into the Tall Hat Saloon one day with this young lean honker at his side and they bellied up next to me at the bar. This was in the spring of ’69. He laid that damn Sharps of his on the bar and said, “Hey, Jim, this here’s my cousin Wes Hardin. Wants to be a cowhand. Reckon we can make him one?”

I was running a cow camp for Luke Matthews a few miles west of Pisga in those days. Luke was a big drover out of San Antonio. Every year, toward the end of spring, he’d start driving cattle north along the Chisholm, a new herd every few weeks, bringing them up by way of our camp. It was my job to have more cows ready to add to every herd he sent by. Early in the spring, when there was still frost in the mornings, I’d already have a crew out popping the brush for wild cows and mavericks. We’d bring them back to camp, burn them with Luke’s Bar-M, cut them, and herd them up in the grassland near the trail, ready to join the next big herd.

I always hired Simp on because he always asked for the job and I wasn’t about to tell him no. The man was crazy. He’d killed a dozen or so Yankee soldiers by then and carried their scalps strung on his saddle horn. Made me queasy just to look at them. I touched a scalp at a tent show one time and had the night sweats for two days after. Anytime Simp was in my camp—hell, anytime he was
near
me—I was always half expecting a battalion of bluebellies to come charging out of nowhere with their guns blazing, shooting at us all and sorting out their mistakes later. And now here he was with his cousin Wes, who I’d heard was wanted by the Yankee army too.

We had a few drinks and talked things over. It so happened I was short a man, and Wes did seem serious to learn the trade, so I said I’d try him on. And that’s how I came to know Wes Hardin, and how he came to be a cowboy.

He made a damn good one. Took to it like a frog to a pond. He could ride as good as any white man I ever saw who wasn’t a bronc buster by trade—and I know about bronc busters because we’d sometimes break horses for Luke’s remudas. Whenever Luke sent word that he was going to be needing extra mounts, I’d buy some wild ponies from a mustanger I knew and hire Terry Threefingers out of Hillsboro to saddle-break them. Luke paid well for those horses, and I always turned a nice profit on them. Terry was the only one I paid to break the ponies, but there were always a few wildhairs in the crew who wanted to try their hand at it too, just for the fun of it.

You have to be a lot tough and at least a little loco to try to bust a mustang, and Wes was both. The first one he tried to bust throwed him every which way—including smack into the corral rails and even all the way over them. Christ Almighty, that boy took a thumping. He got knocked cold on one try and Terry Threefingers had to souse him with a bucket of water to bring him around. The rest of the boys gathered at the corral and ribbed him plenty about how he ought to quit bronc busting and become an acrobat in the circus since he liked to spend so much time flipping through the air. Wes took all their joshing real good. Every time he get throwed, he’d get up grinning, shake his joints back into place, hitch up his pants, tug down his hat, and mount right back up again. That bronc was as mean as they come and throwed him at least a dozen times before Wes finally broke the ornery jughead. The next morning Wes was walking stiff-legged and rode with his face all pinched up, he was so sore—which naturally made the boys josh him some more. They said the cayuse musta finally got so bored with throwing him, it decided being saddle-broke might be a more interesting life. The truth is, they admired the hell out of him for sticking with that horse the way he had. Wes Hardin had sand, no question about it.