The Pistoleer: A Novel of John Wesley Hardin

by James Carlos Blake

  In the autumn of 1870 his elder brother Joseph had enrolled in my school of preparatory legal studies at Round Rock and had persuaded John Wesley to do likewise. John Wesley was, however, a legally declared outlaw with a price on his head. I was fully aware 6f his situation, yet also in full accord with Joseph’s view—and the Reverend James Hardin’s—that the state was unjustly persecuting John Wesley for actions of self-defense, and not, as it charged, for deliberate criminal conduct. The fact remained, however, that, as a wanted man, John Wesley could not risk attending my lectures in person.

  But he was both determined and resourceful. He made a secret camp in the woods just a few miles from Round Rock, and every evening Joseph took a different and roundabout route to it, lest he be followed by agents of the damnable State Police—or worse, by one or more members of the legions of bounty men in pursuit of the reward for John Wesley’s capture. While John Wesley prepared their supper, Joseph summarized the day’s lecture for him. Later, after Joseph departed for home, John Wesley would study by firelight deep into the night. No student of mine ever matriculated under more difficult conditions than did John Wesley during the apprehensive weeks that followed. I was immensely pleased when they both passed their examinations at the end of the term and earned their diplomas.

  And yet … character is fate, sayeth Heraclitus.

  John Wesley Hardin was a highly intelligent young man of good education and sound moral upbringing. It could hardly have been otherwise with a father like the Reverend James Hardin and a mother like Mary Elizabeth Dixon. And yet … there is something in a man’s soul that has no tie whatever to the influence of bloodkin or books, yet is the very essence of his nature. I herewith embolden to suggest that, for John Wesley, that essence manifested itself as a lack of clear perception of The Good, of a sense of worthy endeavor. He was possessed of many superlatives of mind and spirit, and would certainly have achieved greatness—of that I am entirely convinced—had not, for whatever unfathomable reason, the darker angels of his nature held sway. That sway constituted nothing less than a tragic flaw.

  Tragic, yes. As a lifelong student of the works of Euripedes, Seneca, the Glorious Bard—all the great tragedists of our heritage—I am well versed in the nature and design of tragedy, and “tragic” defined his character … and thereby sealed his fate. Alas.

  The jail in Marshall was a big log cabin with a cell of iron bars set in the center of it like a cage. I don’t recollect too many jailhouses in East Texas as serious as that one. Me and my brother Judson got shut in it for no reason at all except we was strangers in town. We’d only stopped to warm our innards with a touch or two of whiskey in a saloon, for it were a bitter cold winter’s day.

  Now I ain’t saying we didn’t end up having more than a couple and getting a little brain-stung. And I ain’t saying we didn’t have words with a few of the local jaspers at the bar after one of them passed an unkind remark about the way South Texans laugh. “Down South Texas you never know if you’re hearing a feller laughing or a mule with a cob up its ass” is exactly how the jasper put it. Now it so happens me and Judson hail from South Texas, as they damn well heard us tell the perfessor behind the bar. It also happens to be a fact I had just got through laughing at a joke Judson’d told me about a traveling preacher and the daughter of a dumbshit East Texas sawyer.

  So I ain’t saying things didn’t get a little out of hand when Judson said real loud that East Texas probably had the most experts in the world when it came to knowing about cobs in a mule’s ass. I ain’t saying there wasn’t some glasses and chairs got busted, and I ain’t saying one of the local jaspers didn’t get his arm broke and another didn’t lose most of his top teeth and still another didn’t lose an eye to the gouging nail on Judson’s thumb. I ain’t saying none of them things didn’t happen.

  But I will say that the damage we did them hardly compares to what them boys did to us. They stomped up and down on Judson and busted his cheekbone and so many of his ribs he couldn’t hardly draw a painless breath for the next few weeks. Some son of a bitch bit a piece out of his right ear. They busted most the fingers on both his hands so he couldn’t even wipe his ass for more’n a month. And me! You think my nose always set way over to the side like this? Think I was born with this scar across my lip? I was a good-looking fella till that sorry night. I got hit so hard on the head with a damn spittoon I still get spells of ringing in my skull. I got a big front tooth knocked out, and some one of them bastards kicked me in the balls so hard I thought sure they’d be stuck in my throat forever. Me and Judson, we took a tromping.

  Then along comes the sheriff and puts the arm on us. Me and Judson, we’re the ones on the bottom of the damn pile, we’re the ones getting the worst of it, and he arrests us for being drunk and disorderly. That’s how it is when you’re the stranger in town. A local fella can shoot you for no reason whatever and you’re like to get charged with disturbing the peace for hollering too loud with the pain—or with dirtying the floor by bleeding on it. Hell, they’re like to charge you with trying to steal the bullet the son of a bitch put in your hide.

  Anyhow, that’s how me and Judson come to be in the Marshall jail that night they brung in Hardin: we were in for no reason a-tall except being the strangers in town.

  The sheriff wasn’t really a bad sort, as sheriffs go. He didn’t rob us of our money and horses like lots of sheriffs I could name you. They called him Cookie because he kept his coat pockets full of gingersnaps to munch on. Anyhow, like I said, it was colder than a witch’s tit out, and wasn’t much warmer in the jail. There was a potbelly stove over by a desk in the corner, and the sheriff and his deputy, a jasper called Shithead because that’s exactly what he was, sat right next to it, drinking coffee with bites of whiskey in it. They kept the stove red-hot but it didn’t carry a lick of warmth over to the cell, where we could see our breath. I’d begun to sober up some by that evening and I don’t mind saying I wasn’t feeling any too fine. Judson was laid out cold on one of the bunks and didn’t come to until the next morning, so he missed the whole thing with Hardin.

  There was another jasper in the cell with us, a local by the name of Lowell. He said he’d had a bad set-to with his wife, who was prone to go loco at the full moon. She’d gone for him with a carving knife and he’d been obliged to shoot her in the foot to slow her down enough to make his escape. Sheriff Cookie was letting him spend the next few nights in the hoosegow till his wife regained her wits with the waning of the moon. “If I’d knew it was gonna turn so cold,” he said, “I’d of brung my buffalo coat. But hell, a man can’t plan for everything.”

  They brung in Hardin early that evening. The Longview sheriff and a deputy brung him over to be held for the State Police in a stronger jail than they had in Longview. The sheriff had spotted him in a restaurant and got the drop on him. The funny thing is, he thought Hardin was somebody named Garlits, who he had a paper on for killing a jasper in Waco. He read the papers out loud to Sheriff Cookie, and I have to admit the description fit Hardin like a tailor-made suit.

  Hardin, however, was mighty put out. He insisted they had the wrong man, that his name was Josephson and he was a horse dealer from Shreveport. He sure looked the part in his good quality range clothes and expensive-looking boots. “There must be two dozen fellers within twenty miles fit that description,” he said. If I hadn’t known better, I’d of believed him, he was that convincing.

  Sheriff Cookie looked inclined to believe him too, but Hardin was the Longview sheriff’s prisoner, and Cookie told him he was sorry but he’d have to hold him for the State Police. The Longview sheriff had already notified the nearest State Police station that Garlits would be waiting for them in the Marshall jail, and they’d wired back that a team was on its way to take him into custody.

  I knew it was Hardin because I’d seen him once before, about two months earlier, in a gambling saloon in Williamson County. Me and Judson had stopped in to cut our thirst and wondered why the place was so crowded an
d excited. Up at the bar I asked a one-armed jasper in a Confederate cavalry jacket what the hullabaloo was about, and he said, “It ain’t nothing but John Wesley Hardin his ownself sitting there behind you, mister.”

  He was at a poker table not ten feet from us, pulling in a big pot, and everybody was talking to him at once and offering him drinks from their bottles. He had his hat pushed back on his head and was smiling big but not saying much. He looked damn well pleased.

  “Hell, he don’t look so all-fired fearsome to me,” Judson said. That’s how Judson was, always letting his mouth run ahead of his good sense.

  “Is that so?” the old rebel says, looking at Jud like he was some kind of softbrain. “You prob’ly right. Hell, all he’s done is kill more bluebellies than you got hair on your balls. Shit! What you done, hard case?” He moved off down the crowded bar like he couldn’t stand the smell of us. Judson watched him for a minute, wondering if he ought take things personally, then just said, “That ole boy best get control of what’s eating on him before it eats more of him than his damn arm.”

  I wasn’t about to say nothing to Sheriff Cookie about who Hardin really was. The law had its own business to tend to and I had mine. Momma didn’t raise no snitches.

  Sheriff Cookie shut him in with us and told Shithead to go get our suppers. Then him and the two Longview badges went off to get something to eat. Before Shithead left to fetch our grub, Hardin gave him a double eagle to buy a bottle and some tobacco for everybody in the cell.

  So there we were, me and John Wesley Hardin, staring each other in the face in that cold iron cell. He looks at me real close and I felt like he was reading my mind just as easy as big letters on a barn wall. “You think you know me?” he says. I say no, I sure don’t. “You reckon I’m this fella Garlits?” he says. I say, “No, I reckon your name’s Josephson, like you said.” He smiles and claps me on the shoulder. He looks at me close again, then looks over at Judson, then says, “Damn, bubba, you boys look like you been in a hatchet fight and everybody had a hatchet but you two.”

  Just then, Lowell shifts around on the mattress he’s sitting on and Hardin fixes on him like a hawk spotting a rabbit. “Hey now,” he says in a low voice, “if that ain’t a pistola you got under your jacket, mister, I’m a three-legged jackass.”

  And be damn if Lowell didn’t have a fully loaded .44 hogleg in his belt under his leather jacket. Sheriff Cookie never even thought to ask him if he had a gun on him—most likely because he wasn’t a real prisoner, and because when Cookie put him in the cell, there wasn’t anybody else in it.

  He had a plan laid out in less than a minute. When Shithead brought our suppers to us, Hardin would throw down on him with the pistol and tell him to unlock the cell. We’d tie and gag him, lock him in, and make our getaway before Sheriff Cookie and the others got back. He laid it all out quick and cool, like it was the sort of thing a man might have to deal with every day.

  “Whoa, boy,” Lowell said, looking rattled. “I ain’t having a thing to do with any of that. Hell, I escaped into here to get away from my moonstruck wife.”

  Hardin looked at him like Lowell was the one moonstruck. Then he looks at me, “What about you, bubba?”

  All I could think to do was point to Judson and say I couldn’t leave my brother behind.

  “Well, hell,” Hardin says, “carry him.”

  That’s how simple he made it all seem. And that’s the exact moment I knew just how almighty different his kind are from the rest of everybody in the world.

  “What if Shithead won’t unlock the cell?” I say.

  “He will if he don’t want to get himself shot.”

  “It might be he’s too dumb to know what’s best for him,” I say. “What if he still don’t open it?”

  “Then he’ll get himself shot and we’ll figure out what to do from there.”

  I knew he meant it, so I had to tell him the truth. “Listen,” I said, “me and Judson are in for a drunken fight is all. I can’t go along with killing a lawman to break jail for that. Besides, it’s two sheriffs down the street, and two deputies and four damn shotguns, and a team of State Police heading this way. I know it’s a risk you got to take, but I can’t throw in, I just can’t.”

  He didn’t get hot about it like I thought he might. He only give me a sorrowful look. I don’t blame him. When I told Judson about it later on, he chided me good and said he’d of throwed in with Hardin and dragged me along by the collar if I’d been the one out cold. I know that’s true, and it’s partly why I felt so low. Until then, I’d always thought I had a right amount of sand.

  Shithead came back with our suppers and the tobacco and whiskey Hardin had given him the money for. Hardin asked for the difference he had coming, and Shithead said there wasn’t no difference. “The difference is my fee for doing your fetching,” he said. The difference was more than fifteen dollars. It’s why he was called Shithead.

  During supper, Hardin and Lowell made a quiet bargain for the gun. Lowell let him have it for twenty dollars in silver and Hardin’s long overcoat, which Hardin didn’t need anyway, since he was wearing a wolfskin vest and a short sack coat—and besides that, he had a heavy coat of bearskin he’d brung in all rolled up and slung around his shoulder with cord. He said he’d won the coat in a card game in Tyler just a few days before.

  Lowell made Hardin give his word he wouldn’t use the gun to try to break the Marshall jail, not while any of us was still in there with him. Hardin agreed. He said he’d already figured another plan anyhow. He opened up his sack coat and vest and pulled up his shirt and used the cord from the bear coat to rig the pistol up high under his arm. He worked slow and careful, so as not to arouse Shithead’s suspicions. But he didn’t hardly have to worry about that son of a bitch, who wasn’t interested in nothing but hugging close to the stove to keep his fat ass warm. Hardin tied the gun so it set under his arm with the muzzle pointing down and the butt facing front, then pulled his shirt down over it, laced up his wolfskin vest, and buttoned up the sack coat. When he put on his bear coat over all that, you never could of guessed he had that big gun in there. Then we passed the bottle around and warmed ourselfs with sips of whiskey.

  The State Police showed up just before dawn. It was three of them, with a warrant for Harold Garlits, wanted for murdering some barber named Huffman in Waco. The leader was the oldest of the three, a lieutenant named Stokes who looked to be fifty or so. He sent Shithead running to fetch Sheriff Cookie from home. Hardin started explaining to him that they had the wrong man, his name was Josephson and so on, but Stokes told him to save it for the judge.

  Sheriff Cookie came in looking displeased about being woke up so early in the day. He gave the lieutenant’s warrant a quick onceover, then let Hardin out of the cell. The biggest of the policemen, a nigger breed of some sort with a bad white scar across one eye, put a pair of cuffs on him.

  “Hey, bubba, not so tight!” Hardin said to him.

  The breed socked him full in the mouth, knocking him back against the cell bars and nearly off his feet. It was so sudden I flinched back from the bars. Sheriff Cookie looked riled, but he kept his mouth shut. Most sheriffs did, when they dealt with the State Police.

  “Now, boy,” the lieutenant said to Hardin, “Sergeant Smolley here don’t much care for back-sass. Me neither. Don’t be giving us no more of it.” He said it the way a man might say he hoped it wouldn’t rain.

  Hardin licked the blood off his mashed lips and said, “No, sir.” He gave the breed a fearful look. Hell, I don’t blame him. That was one scary son of a bitch.

  The lieutenant told the third policeman to search the prisoner. He was a young jasper who didn’t look too happy to be there.

  “That ain’t necessary,” Sheriff Cookie said. “Don’t you think I done that before locking him in? I got his guns right here.” He went to the desk to get them. The lieutenant told the youngster to search Hardin anyway.

  When the boy dug his hands under Hardin’s bear coa
t, I thought sure he’d find the gun. Maybe he just wasn’t any good at searching, or maybe there was some other reason, I don’t know. All I know is, he patted Hardin from his neck to his boot tops, then told the lieutenant, “He’s unarmed.” Sheriff Cookie handed over Hardin’s pistols. Then the breed pulled Hardin on outside and that was the last I saw of him.

  When we went to Marshall to pick up Wes Hardin, we didn’t know that’s who he was. The warrant said he was somebody named Garlits, wanted for killing a man in a Waco barbershop, and our orders were to take him to Waco for trial. It was early morning when we got there—and so goddamn cold I thought my teeth would crack. Icicles hung from the eaves and our horses stepped careful on the icy patches in the street. The weather put Smolley and Stokes in even worse tempers than usual. When Hardin complained his cuffs was on too tight, Smolley punched him one in the mouth for back-sassing. Stokes had me pat him down for a weapon just to irritate the sheriff by showing he didn’t trust him to’ve done the job right, so I only went through the motions of a search. It’d be a different tale I’m telling if I’d of searched him proper.

  We took Hardin out and hobbled his feet under his mount—an ornery old black mule Stokes got for him through some kind of deal he made with the Longview sheriff who’d arrested him. The mule didn’t have a saddle, and Hardin had to ride on a blanket, injun style. The Longview sheriff was looking on, and Hardin told him he wanted his own horse. “I rode in on a fine roan stallion,” he said. “My saddle’s Mexican leather. I got goods in the saddlebags, including a vest my sister made me that I’m special fond of.” The Longview sheriff said for Hardin not to worry, he’d take real good care of his property for him. He said, “You be sure and come see me about your horse and goods if you don’t get hung, or when you get out of prison in about thirty years.” Stokes and Smolley gave a loud laugh at that. It was lots of thieves wearing badges in those days. Hardin started to argue about it, but Stokes told him he’d best remember what he told him about back-sass, and Hardin quit complaining.