Forty Times a Killer

by William W. Johnstone

  The older man got up to do as he was told, but the younger man, hard-faced and defiant, his eyes reckless, said to Wes, ”I’ll remember you. There will be another place and another time.”

  That was not a wise thing to say to John Wesley Hardin when his blood was up and his eyes were cold as a killing frost.

  Wes raised his Colt and shot the man just where his hat met his forehead. His suspenders cut, the youngster hit the floor with a thud and lay still.

  “For God’s sake, Wes!” I yelled. “For God’s sake!”

  “This was not my fault.” Wes’s eyes flicked from me to the older man, who was ashen and looked like he might puke at any second. “He threatened me and I will not leave a sworn enemy on my back trail.” He glared at the fellow Texan. “Now you have three men to bury.”

  The man had bark on. He dug deep and rediscovered his courage. “I hope I’m around when they bury you.”

  Wes smiled. “You figure on living another fifty years, huh?”

  “You won’t live that long,” the man said. “One day you’ll run into a man who’s just as hard as you, and he’ll kill you. You’ll get it in the back and die on a saloon floor with your face in a spittoon.”

  Wes shook with anger, or maybe a goose flew over his grave. “All right, I’ll turn my back on you right now. Then shuck the iron, old man, and we’ll see who bites the ground.”

  “Kid, you go to hell.” The man turned away, his talking done.

  Then, with the help of the Mexican, he dragged the dead men out of the saloon and into the dusky gloom of the dank, drizzling day.

  Our food lay cold on the table, but I’d lost my appetite anyway. I picked up the dark blue bottle. “What the hell is this stuff?”

  “Mescal. It’s made from some kind of cactus.” Wes absently studied the three blood trails that smeared across the floor like the tracks of snails. His eyes held nothing. No regret. No interest.

  “Is it good?” I asked.

  “How should I know?” Wes said. “Try it.”

  The mescal poured into my cup like a glittering river of gold and smelled like the smoke from a campfire in Paradise. Saliva jetted from the back of my tongue as I put the cup to my lips and drank.

  Oh, heavenly elixir! My lover! My new companion!

  Thus was born my love affair with alcohol that burns just as passionately today as it did then. Although I no longer drink (The Sisters of Charity frown on alcohol) I remain in constant mourning for the loss of my dearest, but most treacherous friend.

  I drank and drank again.

  Wes said, “Go easy on the busthead, Little Bit. We got riding to do.” He looked at me with a puzzled expression. “I never known you to indulge in liquor before.”

  “I never knew how good liquor was before,” I said.

  Indeed, the booze was working its magic quickly on my tiny body. My leg no longer hurt and I felt that I was drifting on a pink cloud three feet above the floor. For the first time in my life, I realized that the world was a wonderful, shining place and that I’d at last found my niche in it.

  I’d let the genie out of the bottle and I vowed never to cork him up again.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  A Terrible Wound

  “Give me that!” John Wesley snapped. He grabbed the bottle from the table and threw it into a corner where it smashed into pieces, the golden liquid spilling like angel’s blood over the floor. “Now, listen up. We’re heading back across the border and heading for Gonzales County. I got huggin’ kin there, the Clements brothers. Fine, upstanding folk.”

  My brain was fuzzy and I’m sure I had a silly grin on my face. “But your pa—”

  “I know what’s best for John Wesley, not my pa,” Wes said.

  “But, Wes, you promised—”

  “Damn you, I promised nothing.” He stared hard at me, then waved a hand around the cantina. “I crossed the border to get away from trouble, but all it did was follow me, like, like some kind of plague. Lookee, three men dead through no fault of my own. Hell, we’ve only been in Mexico an hour and we’ve already worn out our welcome.”

  Before I could say anything, Wes waved the Mexican over. He’d been jabbering away to a couple peons who’d just walked in. All three regarded us with fearful eyes.

  “Hey you, get over here,” Wes yelled.

  The little man shuffled over to our table.

  Wes said, “You want to invest in my Wild West show?”

  The Mexican was confused. “I-I don’t understand, senor.”

  “Hear that,” Wes said, directing his attention to me. “How are we going to raise money for my show in greaser towns?” He turned to the Mexican. “Get lost.”

  The little man scurried away, no doubt thanking his lucky stars that he was still alive.

  “On your feet, Little Bit. We’re heading back to civilization.”

  I rose and staggered a little.

  With that casual cruelty that came so easily to him, Wes said, “Hell, just what I need, a drunken cripple.”

  “I’ll be all right,” I said.

  “Sure you will, once the bug juice wears off. You’d better be. The Clements boys don’t suffer fools gladly.”

  “I’m not a fool, Wes,” I said with all the dignity I could muster.

  I saw the flipside of the John Wesley Hardin coin.

  “Of course you’re not, Little Bit.” He smiled, his hand on my shoulder. “I was just joshing you. Hell, you’re going to be my business manager one day, aren’t you?”

  “Sure thing, Wes.” The alcohol had made me mellow.

  We recrossed the Rio Grande and camped that night in a stand of post oak and bois d’arc, a stone’s throw from a willow-lined stream where blue and silver fish jumped.

  It was way down in the fall. The rain, though intermittent, seemed widespread. Every now and then a shower rattled through the trees. Urged on by a north wind, it soaked everything.

  For the first time in my life, alcohol, my beautiful new mistress, showed what hell she could cause. The mescal hangover she inflicted on me was the ninth circle of Dante’s Hell.

  Wes, of course, was highly amused, and teased me constantly. He made a masterful show of bolting down the cold tortillas and beef he’d brought from the cantina and expressed the wish that he had a bottle of mescal to wash it down.

  In addition to a churning belly and my other miseries, my bad leg ached. Once when I moved it closer to the fire, I cried out from the sudden pain.

  “What the hell was that?” Wes said.

  “My leg hurts real bad,” I said.

  “Which one?”

  “Which one do you think?”

  “Let me have a look at it.”

  “I got to take off my pants,” I said.

  “Lord a mercy, can I bear the shock?” Wes grinned.

  Raindrops ticked from the oak branches and I heard the rumble of distant thunder as I pulled down my pants. The leather and steel contraption around my wasted limb gleamed in the firelight.

  “That leg is thin, by God,” Wes said. “Like a stick.”

  “Don’t you think I already know that?”

  “How the hell does it hold you upright?”

  “It doesn’t. The steel does.”

  “Where does it hurt?” Wes asked.

  “Up here, right at the top of my thigh.”

  Wes’s strong, nimble fingers undid the buckles that strapped the cage to my leg, then he set it aside. He looked at my leg again and his eyes flew wide open. “Damn. Take a look at that.”

  I looked down and saw what Wes saw. A huge sore—raw, red, deep, and streaked with yellow pus—had formed under the leather strap, caused by its constant rubbing against my skin. The ulcer was about twice the size of a silver dollar and it smelled bad, like rotten fish.

  “How long have you had this?” Wes looked queasy.

  “It started just after we left Longview. And it’s been getting worse since.”

  Wes said nothing.

  I said,
“What can we do about it?”

  “I don’t know. I’m not a doctor.” Wes picked up the steel brace, rusty in spots. “You can’t wear this. The leather will rub on the sore again and make it worse.”

  “I can’t walk without it.” I felt sweat bead on my forehead.

  “Then I’ll carry you to your horse. The Clements brothers have womenfolk up in Gonzales County and they’re known to be good at patching up wounds.”

  “This isn’t a bullet hole.”

  “I know, Little Bit. It’s a sight worse.”

  But the worst was still to come. That night the fever struck.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Talk of the Chisholm Trail

  I was burning up, out of my mind with fever as we made our way to the cousins. Time meant nothing to me, but I learned later it took almost two weeks. Wes wasn’t happy about it, but he never left me by the side of the trail. The concerned triangle of John Wesley’s face drifted in and out of my consciousness.

  He held wet leaves to my forehead, and from the far end of a scarlet tunnel I heard him say over and over, “You’ll be fine, Little Bit, just fine.”

  I remember (or did I imagine?) grabbing him by the front of his coat, babbling to him about the pale men who stood in the shadows, watching us.

  And Mage was there. But, unlike the rest, his face was black as mortal sin and his eyes glowed with a sable fire.

  They were all there . . . all the men Wes had killed. They stood still as graven statues.

  Watching.

  Silent as the grave.

  “Look! Look, Wes!” I yelled.

  A white mule stepped among the trees, a gambler’s ghost. On him sat a man who held a walking cane across the saddle horn. The man smiled and made a gun of his fingers and thumb and he fired at the back of Wes’s head.

  I heard the bang of the pistol as the man’s thumb fell, and blood, bone, and brain haloed around Wes’s shattered skull.

  I cried out in my terrible fear. “Oh merciful Jesu!”

  “It’s thunder, Little Bit,” Wes said. His face ran scarlet with thin streams of blood and rain. “It’s only thunder.”

  I clutched at Wes again. “Don’t leave me. Wes, I’m sore afeerd.”

  “It’s the fever. The fever makes a man see things.” He held a cup to my mouth. “It’s water. It will help cool you down.”

  I drank greedily and noisily. “Did you see Mage? Over there by the post oak. He’s come back from hell, Wes.”

  Wes smiled. “Hell, you can’t see a black man in the dark.”

  “And I saw a white mule.”

  “A gambler’s ghost . . . just passing through.”

  I grabbed for him again. “Beware of the man with the cane, Wes.”

  “I surely will, Little Bit.”

  I lifted my face to the cool rain and opened my mouth to catch the drops. Then I lapsed into a troubled sleep again, my dreams filled with dead gamblers and pretty, laughing saloon girls in rainbow-colored dresses and the man with the cane who pushed me aside with a terrible curse.

  Him I feared most of all.

  “You cut it close, Little Bit,” the man’s voice said. “For a spell there, I figured you were gonna cash in fer sure.”

  The face of a young man I didn’t know swam into focus.

  “Where am I?” My voice was thin as a wafer.

  The young man answered. “At my brothers’ ranch in Gonzales County. We’re south of a town called Smiley if’n you feel inclined to go on a tear with the whiskey and gals.”

  “Not hardly,” I said.

  “Figured that.” The man smiled. “The name is Gip Clements. My brothers James, Mannen, and Joe own this ranch, including the bed you’re lying in.”

  “How long?”

  “A week since Wes brought you here more dead than alive.”

  “For sure it’s winter then. Where is Wes?”

  “Talking with my brothers. He plans to help them drive a herd up Kansas way.”

  I felt a spike of panic and tried to sit up in the bed. “My leg—”

  “Is doing just fine,” Gip said. “Brother Joe’s lady says you’ll be up and about in no time. Another month, maybe so.”

  I pushed down the sheet, terrified of what I might see, and pulled up the borrowed nightshirt. The sore on my leg had shrunk in size and was no longer red and angry. When I touched the puckered skin around the wound there was only a little pain.

  “You got Mae Ellen to thank fer that,” Gip said. “She says looking after you was like caring for a little, hurt dickie bird.”

  “Thank her from me. Thank her most kindly.”

  “You can thank her your ownself. She’ll bring you some rabbit and onion soup right soon.”

  “When does the herd leave?” I asked. My heart thumped in my chest. If Wes was going, I didn’t want to be left behind.

  “The gather isn’t finished, but I reckon Wes and my brothers will head ’em north by the middle of next week.”

  “I’ve got to be on the drive. Tell Wes I need to talk to him. Better still, bring me my leg brace and I’ll go tell him my ownself.”

  Gip smiled at me. “Hell, Little Bit, your leg ain’t fully healed yet. Strap on all that damned steel and it will open right up again.” He gave me a sympathetic look, or tried to. “Besides, a scrawny little feller that keeps as poorly as you ain’t gonna be much help on a two month cattle drive up the Chisholm. That’s rough country, to say nothing of fire, flood, an’ wild Indians.”

  Well, that was a boot in the teeth. But I managed to keep a brave face.

  “I’m a good cook,” I said.

  “We got plenty of them, good and bad. And assistant cooks.”

  “Then I could be the assistant cook to an assistant cook,” I said.

  “You’d better talk with John Wesley. He’s the one doing the firing and hiring.” Gip shook his head. “Don’t get your hopes up.”

  The door opened and he said, “Ah, here’s Mae Ellen with the grub. Put meat on them scrawny bones o’ your’n.”

  Gip left and Mae Ellen said, “How are you feeling, Little Bit?”

  “Good enough to go on the trail drive,” I said.

  Mae Ellen, a pretty, worn girl who probably looked older than her years, smiled. “Not this time, Little Bit. You’ve got to rest up and get your strength back.”

  As she put the tray on my lap, I said, “I want to thank you for taking care of me.”

  “You were no trouble. Just like a little sick animal.” She straightened up and worked a kink out of her slim back.

  I tried the soup, but it was still too hot. I didn’t want Mae Ellen to leave, so I said a stupid thing. “You saw me naked, huh?”

  She smiled. “I’ve seen worse.” She stepped to the door. “I’ll be back to look at your leg. Old Ma Atsa is a Navajo witch woman and she gave me a new salve to try.”

  “Will it work fast?” I asked.

  Mae Ellen laughed. “We’ll see.”

  Then she was gone and all that remained was a lingering scent of lavender and a lonely, empty space where once a woman stood.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  I Join the Cattle Drive

  “Damn it all, Little Bit, I had to kill another man. After I shot him, he lingered for a couple days and I just heard he died an hour before sunup this morning.” John Wesley sat on the edge of the bed. “And you can’t pin this one on me. It wasn’t my fault.”

  “What happened?” I said, not really wanting to know.

  I mean, Wes was Wes. When a man did or said something he didn’t like, Wes killed him.

  Simple as that.

  “Well, me and a couple Clements boys fell in with some vaqueros, as Joe Clements called them, and one of them suggested a card game.”

  “Poker?”

  “Nah. Some greaser game called Spanish Monte,” Wes said. “I’d never heard of it before.”

  “I saw it played years ago by a couple Rangers,” I said. “Now that I study on it, one of those boys said he
was quarter Mexican, something like that.”

  Wes looked irritated. “Hell, Little Bit, is this your story or mine?”

  “Yours, Wes. Proceed.”

  “Well, we played a couple hands and I started to get the hang of it.” Wes held up his left hand and showed the silver ring on his little finger. “I don’t wear this ring for nothing, you know.”

  But he did.

  Wes had no claim to the professional gambler’s ring, since he didn’t play cards for a living. The few times he tried, he invariably lost and for a while would become sullen and dangerous.

  “So we played another hand. All the while them Mexicans are jabbering away in that heathen language of theirs that nobody understands but them—”

  “We never had any dealings with Mexicans before,” I said.

  “That’s because they’re all flannel-mouths,” Wes said. “I don’t like them.”

  “So you played another hand . . .” I prompted.

  “Yeah, and I had a queen. I tapped my card and said, ‘Pay the queen.’”

  “The queen loses in Spanish Monte, as I recall.”

  “Damn it, Little Bit. That’s the position the Mex dealer took,” Wes said.

  I cut to the chase. “So you shot him.” The rabbit and onion soup lay sour in my belly.

  “Hell no, not the dealer. Two other fellers,” Wes said. “Him, I just chunked over the head with my gun and cleaned his plow real good.”

  I opened my mouth to speak, but Wes held up a silencing hand.

  “The two fellers with him rose up and started in to shuck iron. Well, I shot one of them in the gun arm, near took the damned thing off, and t’other through the lungs.”

  “And what happened after that?”

  “I told you. The Mex I shot through the lungs died this morning. They cut the arm off the other one, but he ain’t expected to live either. Lost too much blood, like.”

  “What about the law?”

  “Hell, there ain’t no law in this part of Gonzalez County, except for what a man makes for himself. But the white folks around had a good laugh with me afterward and told me I did a fine thing shooting them two. They got no liking for Mexicans, especially the kind that cheat at cards.” Wes rose to his feet and stretched. “Wasn’t my fault, Little Bit,” he said through a yawn. “They should have paid the queen.”