Forty Times a Killer

by William W. Johnstone

  “By all means,” Webb said, smiling.

  Wes turned to reenter the saloon—and I saw Webb’s hands drop for his guns.

  “Look out, Wes!” I shrieked.

  John Wesley turned as Webb fired. The lawman’s bullet burned across Wes’s ribs on his left side, ripping a gash in his coat and his skin.

  Wes instantly returned fire and his ball hit Webb in the face, just below his left eye.

  Cursing, his mouth running blood, Webb took a step back and fired again.

  His bullet splintered wood from the sidewalk between Wes’s feet.

  Jim Taylor and Bud Dixon cut loose. Their .44 balls tore great holes through Webb’s body and he fell dead.

  Thus perished an arrogant man whose gun skills fell far short of his ambitions. I shed no tears for him.

  Within a couple minutes of Webb’s death, all hell broke loose. The news of Webb’s death was carried through the town like a fiery cross. Comanche spawned a ravening pack of vigilantes yelling, “Hang the killers!” The bloodthirsty mob rushed Wes and his stalwarts, myself included, only to be driven off by a rattle of pistol fire.

  Recently appointed Comanche sheriff John Carnes rushed to the scene, just as the vigilantes launched another attack.

  Believing, I’m sure, that a fine man like John Wesley didn’t deserve to be the guest of honor at a hemp party, Carnes held off the mob with a scattergun.

  Fearlessly, Wes handed his gun to Carnes. “It was not my fault, John. Webb tried to murder me, but I didn’t think things would come to such a pass.”

  “Get the hell into the saloon and stay there. This situation could get out of hand real fast.” Carnes turned to me. “You too, Peckerwood, go with them. And if you’ve got any prayers, this would be a good time to say them.”

  Scared, my weak bladder betrayed me as I scrambled into the saloon after Wes and the others. I was almost knocked over as the crowd inside stampeded for the door and a saloon girl with yellow hair and big blue eyes pushed me aside and yelled, “Get the hell out of my way, gimp!”

  From somewhere inside I heard Wes shout, “The side door!”

  The noise in the street had risen to a roar as men demanded Wes’s head. I heard Carnes plead with them to calm down and he vowed that he would see justice done.

  Throwing tables and chairs aside, I limped to the side door in time to see Wes and Jim Taylor in the alley outside, swinging into the saddles of horses they didn’t own.

  “Wes!” I screamed. “Wait for me!” I was terrified of hanging, and my despairing wail sounded frantic, even to my own ears.

  Wes saw me, heard me, ignored me. He galloped out of the alley into the street, but Jim Taylor, a big and strong man, leaned from the saddle, grabbed me by the back of my coat and threw me on a horse. Then he too was gone.

  The paint I straddled didn’t like the feel of my steel leg and he bucked a few times. But I managed to grab the reins and leave the alley at a dead run.

  Bullets split the air around me as I followed Wes’s dust, a billowing cloud tinted orange by the street’s reflector lamps. I glanced behind and saw John Wesley’s wife in the street, a handkerchief to her eyes. Beside her stood his father with his brother Joe, both holding shotguns.

  Then I was beyond the town, galloping into the night.

  I allowed the paint to pick his way since I don’t see real well in darkness. After half an hour I caught up to the others who sat their blown horses outside a burned out cabin.

  Wes grinned at me. “You made it, Little Bit.”

  “No thanks to you,” I said, feeling mean and petty as I uttered the words.

  “In a situation like that, it’s every man for himself,” Wes said. “If you didn’t know that before, you sure as hell know it now.”

  “Truer words was never spoke,” Jim Taylor said.

  A strange thought popped into my head as I sat silent in the saddle after listening to Wes and Dixon. How many of his precious cattle would Wes give to save my life?

  No matter how I studied on it, up, down, sideways, I came to the same conclusion.

  The answer, that liked to break my heart, was none.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  Wes Plans Revenge

  Anger over the killing of Charlie Webb was out of all proportion to the worth of the man himself.

  Wes had shot Webb in self-defense. Everybody knew that except the town fathers of Comanche and their damn, foaming-at-the-mouth citizens. The imbeciles even sent a letter of complaint to Governor Coke demanding a strong force of Texas Rangers to rid their county “of murderers and thieves led by the notorious John Wesley Hardin.”

  Wes was no murderer and although he lifted stray cattle and horses now and then, he was not a thief. However, he had managed to rope in a couple cousins who supported him in this matter.

  The authorities, aided and abetted by vengeful Yankees, thrust Wes into the same category as the Mexican bandits who came up from the Rio Grande to kill and plunder.

  It was an outrage.

  But worse was to follow.

  A force of fifty Rangers arrived in Comanche with orders to hunt down “the John Wesley Hardin gang of murderers who are preying on the citizens of this county.”

  Wes was enraged. “Call those Rangers what they are. A vigilante band leading a mob composed of the enemies of law and order.”

  We were living rough in the brush, every man’s hand turned against us, when Wes got news that his wife and many of his relatives and friends had been taken into “protective custody” and were locked up in a two story rock house in Comanche.

  That was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

  Wes huddled with Jim Taylor and they made war plans.

  After a while, they called the rest of us over and we sat around a spitting fire in a cold, drizzling rain, surrounded by a tangle of scrub oak, thorn briar, and thickets of poison ivy.

  “We follow the lead of the great Bloody Bill Anderson and raid into Comanche,” Wes said. “We’ll free my wife and my father, then teach those turncoats and Yankees a lesson they’ll never forget.”

  “He was a rum one, was Bill,” Wes’s cousin Ham Anderson said. “He’d kill them all, like he done in Lawrence, Kansas that time.”

  “And so will we,” Wes said. “Except the women and children. We’re Southern patriots fighting Yankee tyranny, not the murderers of innocents.”

  “Hear, hear,” Jim Taylor said.

  And me, caught up in the moment, exclaimed, “Huzzah!”

  Anderson glared at me, the skin of his young face tight to the bone. He didn’t like me. “You only get to say that when you bear arms like a man.”

  Wes smiled. “Let him be, Ham. Little Bit is one of us.”

  “To the death,” I said.

  But nobody listened to me or cared.

  “When do we hit them, Wes?” Taylor asked.

  “In a couple days. We need a few more men.”

  “Once the word gets around, they’ll come in,” Taylor said. “I guarantee we’ll have two score fighting men soon. When our boys open the ball, they’ll play Comanche such a tune they’ll remember it forever.”

  Days passed, but the volunteers never materialized.

  Men stayed close to their homes and loved ones as lynch mobs roamed the countryside, hanging or shooting any man they deemed an outlaw or just a damned nuisance.

  The Rangers, in their eagerness to root out anyone connected with John Wesley Hardin, seed, breed, and generation, turned a blind eye to the mayhem and the murder of patriots.

  Then came the day that Ham Anderson, and Alec Barekman, another young Hardin cousin, weighed the odds against them and decided to cut and run. Their intention was to surrender to the authorities in Comanche, but within twenty-four hours they were both in shallow graves . . . gunned down by the Rangers.

  Dead men tell no tales, and when the Ranger fusillade was over, both Anderson and Barekman weighed about five pounds heavier deceased than they did when they were alive. Those
poor boys took a lot of Ranger lead, and their deaths plunged Wes into a deep depression.

  All talk of a raid on Comanche ceased and Wes took to compulsively reading a Bible that someone had brought to camp.

  “Wes,” I said to him, “we have to ride north and live among the savage Canadians for a spell. With no Yankee law chasing us, we can sit back and make plans for the Wild West show, big plans.”

  Wes looked up from the Good Book and regarded me with lusterless eyes.

  “And there’s gold up there,” I said, talking into his silence. “Nuggets big as a man’s fist just lying on the ground for the taking.” I smiled. “Within a few months, maybe just weeks, we’ll have enough gold to fund the show and have plenty to spare. Hell, you could ride back into Comanche in a carriage and pair. A rich man can thumb his nose at everybody, including the Yankee law.”

  “Who told you there’s gold for the taking?” Wes asked.

  “I read it in a book.”

  “There’s only one book a man should read—the holy book I’m holding in my hand.”

  “At least let’s get out of Texas,” I said. “We’ll head to the New Mexico Territory. No one will find us there.”

  Wes stared at me with quizzical eyes. “What’s this ‘we’ and ‘us’ business? There’s only me and you. There’s no ‘we’ and ‘us.’ If I decide to leave Texas, I’ll go by myself. A cripple would only slow me down.”

  Wes dropped his eyes to the Bible again and read, his lips moving. Without looking up, he said, “Get away from me, Little Bit. Leave me the hell alone.” After a pause, he added, “And take a bath sometime, huh?”

  Wes was worried about his wife and kinfolk, and I forgave his harsh words. Besides, later that day he gave me whiskey and a cigar and said I was “a stout fellow.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  Men Without Mercy

  Since I talked about John Wesley’s new interest in the Bible, it’s somehow appropriate that terrible news reached our camp carried by a rider on a pale horse . . . and his name was death and hell followed close behind him.

  The rancher Long Tom Lee swung off his lathered gray and walked directly to Wes. “John Wesley”—he breathed hard like a man in pain—“I don’t have the words.”

  Wes’s face took on a stricken, blotched look. “Jane? Is it Jane?”

  Long Tom held his battered Stetson in his hands. “Jane is fine and so is your daughter.”

  “Then find the words, Tom,” Wes said. “And find them damn quick.”

  “They’re harsh, John.”

  “Damn it, say them,” Wes said.

  Long Tom, a veteran of Stonewall’s brigade, was a tall beanpole of a man with a bloodhound’s face and the tired, seen-it-all eyes of an Inquisition executioner. “Your brother Joe is dead, John Wesley, and with him Bud Dixon and his brother Tom.”

  “How?”

  “Hung.”

  That was a punch in the guts.

  Wes rose to his feet, his face drained of color. He loved his brother Joe, the quiet one of the family, and the news of his death devastated him. “Tell it, Long Tom. Every last word of it.”

  “Hung is hung, John,” the rancher said. “There ain’t no more to tell. Let it go. Pick at it, and you make the wound worse.”

  Wes’s jaw muscles bunched and his teeth gritted. “Tell it all, Long Tom.”

  “All right, I’ll say what I know.” His hat crushing in his twisting hands, Long Tom told how it had been. “Twenty nightriders, all of them masked, rode into Comanche about the one o’clock hour. There was a full moon and the town looked like it was lit by silver lanterns.” Long Tom flushed. “I mean, that’s how I saw it.”

  “Go on,” Wes said.

  “The vigilantes rode to the rock building where your wife and family were held, and overcame the guards.”

  “Name them,” Wes said.

  “Does it matter?”

  “Name them.”

  “John James and the county clerk, a man called Bonner,” Long Tom said. “They’re not lawmen, John.”

  “Names to remember,” Wes said. “But I know Bonner. He and Joe were brother Masons.”

  “Well, the way it was told to me, Bonner did nothing to save Joe,” Long Tom said. “And he should’ve. Joe was a mighty shady lawyer all right, everybody knew that, but he did nothing that deserved getting hung.”

  “Joe did nothing that other lawyers don’t do,” I said. “He was hung only because he was John Wesley’s brother.”

  “That’s a natural fact,” Long Tom said. “I can’t argue with that.”

  “The vigilantes overcame the guards, or so they say. Then what happened?” Wes said.

  “John . . .”

  “What happened?”

  “Joe and the Dixons were drug to a tree and hung,” Long Tom said.

  Wes lifted his head and for long moments stared at the clear blue bowl of the sky where a few crows wheeled like charred pieces of paper. Finally, without looking at Long Tom, he said, “Did . . . did Joe . . . was it quick?”

  The rancher’s face was grim. “I’m not a lie-telling man, John.”

  “Then say it.”

  “Joe died hard. He pleaded for his life as he strangled to death and he kicked for a long time. An awful long time.”

  At first Wes showed no reaction and stood as still as a statue. Then he drove his fists into his belly and doubled over, screaming. His mouth agape, he fell to his knees, but the screaming did not stop.

  I feared it never would.

  Long Tom replaced his hat then looked at me. “Is there anything I can do?”

  I shook my head.

  “Then I’ll leave.” He cast a final look at Wes in a paroxysm of grief, swung into the saddle, and galloped away.

  Jim Taylor stepped beside Wes, put his hand on his shoulder, and whispered, “Wes, don’t go to that dark place. Come back, now.”

  The screaming stopped, and Wes kneeled with his head on his knees and made no sound, no movement. He stayed in that position until night fell.

  None of the vigilantes were ever identified or brought to trial.

  The Texas Rangers wrote the murders off as a necessary evil, unworthy of their notice.

  As their captain said, “Why all the fuss? Often violence is the only way to get rid of undesirables.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  Revenge of the White Knights

  Now begins what I call the “wandering time,” when John Wesley was cast out and forced to flee Texas, his ancestral home.

  “And he will be a wild man; and his hand will be against every man and every man’s hand against him; he shall live to the east of all his brethren.” Thus the Bible speaks of Ishmael the Wanderer, and I use those same words to speak of John Wesley, since he too was an outcast condemned to wander the earth.

  Jim Taylor was dead, murdered by Suttonite vigilantes, and I was the only one to join Wes in his bitter exile.

  After a brief reunion with his wife and daughter in New Orleans in the late summer of 1874, Wes fled to Gainesville in Florida, a rough and tumble settlement in the middle of the state.

  Wes was appalled at the number of blacks in the town, brought in to harvest the cotton crop. He soon joined the local branch of the Young Men’s Democratic Club, a Ku Klux Klan organization, and pledged to uphold white supremacy and the American way.

  Wes bought a saloon that just about wiped out all of his money, and he lived in a room at the back. I worked as swamper and slept on the billiard table at night.

  He’d become John H. Swain by then, adopting the last name of Jane’s kin. His intention was to earn enough money from the saloon to establish his Wild West show in Great Britain where he could live in peace, unmolested by Yankee law.

  “I bet old Queen Vic will come and watch,” I said one night as we sat at a table sharing a bottle after closing. “She’s real interested in wild Injuns and such.”

  “How do you know that?” Wes asked.

  “Read it in a book. T
his one,” I said, pulling the book out of my pocket. “It’s called The Visitors Guide to Great Britain, and tells us everything we need to know about living over there.”

  “We’ll need a special box for the queen and her court,” Wes said. “She can sit beside Jane.”

  “And me,” I said.

  Wes shook his head. “Queen Vic won’t want to sit beside you, Little Bit. You’re low class and you smell.”

  I took exception to that. “I’ll have a bath before I sit with Jane and the queen.”

  “You’ll still be low class.”

  “Maybe she’ll surprise you and make me a knight like Quentin Durward,” I said.

  Wes nodded. “Maybe, if she likes the show enough.”

  I was about to say more, but Wes raised a silencing hand.

  “An argument going on out there. It sounds like them uppity blacks from around here.” He rose to his feet and got a long-barreled revolver from behind the bar, one of those new cartridge Colts that were becoming all the rage.

  The saloon door slammed open and a young man wearing a star on his vest stepped inside. “Mr. Swain, I need help. Luke Wilson, remember me?”

  Wes recognized the sheriff as a fellow member of the Democratic Club. “The blacks rioting?”

  “Arguing with me,” Wilson said. “They want to come inside and drink more alcohol and I said no.”

  “Don’t they know better than to give a white man sass and backtalk?”

  “Not the blacks around here,” Wilson said. “The Yankees got them uppity, telling them that they rule the roost.”

  “Not in my saloon, they don’t,” Wes said. “And not in my town.”

  “Good,” Wilson said. “I now appoint you as my deputy.”

  I followed Wes and the sheriff outside into the humid, tropical heat of the Florida night. Cicadas and frogs carried on an endless, chattering, croaking argument and out in the swamps alligators bellowed their opinion.

  Five black men stood outside the saloon, illuminated by the lanterns that hung on each side of the saloon door. They looked angry and one of them wore an old Union army blue jacket with a sergeant’s chevrons on the sleeves.