The Pistoleer (37 page)

They about smothered in the humidity. “Good Lord,” Jane said, “we’ve got heat in Texas, but
this
!” Mosquitoes whined in our ears and horseflies stabbed the backs of our necks as our hack made its slow way around all the timber wagons delivering loads to the dock for shipment. After trading profanities with every teamster impeding our progress, our driver finally got us to the train station. But not till the train pulled out and gained enough speed to bring a breeze through the windows did we get some relief from the heat and the insects. Gazing out the coach window at the passing country of pine and cypress, John smiled and said it reminded him of the East Texas piny woods, which he loved. “Me too,” Jane said, only she looked sad and far from home. We said good-bye at the Gainesville station. As the train pulled out again, heading for Jacksonville, they stood on the platform and waved so long.

O
ne night about ten months later I arrested a bullying big drunk of a seaman named Davison in a bad saloon over by the river docks, but when I pulled him out on the sidewalk a mean crowd followed us, including three of his shipmates, and the situation got tight real fast. The sailors pulled knives and backed me and my prisoner against the wall, saying I either let their friend go or they’d cut me up for fish bait. The crowd was egging them on, wanting a show. I’d cuffed Davison’s hands behind him, but he was putting up a hell of a fuss and it took both hands to hold him. I knew if I was forced to pull my gun I’d have to shoot—and with that crowd, no telling what could happen.

Then one of the sailors gave a grunt and his eyes rolled up and down he went. And there John stood, grinning at me and holding a big army Colt that he’d clubbed the fella with. “Stand fast, boys,” he told the other two, and they froze in place.

I grabbed Davison by the hair and rammed his head into the brick wall, putting an end to his nuisance and freeing my hands of him. John backed up beside me, still holding his gun on the other two, and said, “Evening, Gus. They said at the station you’d been sent here to settle a row, but damn if it don’t look like it’s trying to settle you.”

“Evening yourself, John,” I said. “Real good to see you. Excuse me a minute.”

I took the knives off the two tars and gave each one a hard backhand across the mouth, drawing blood both times. I told them to pick up their trash and get out of my sight before I cut their noses off. They didn’t waste any time hoisting up the one John coldcocked and making off down the wharf. I told the crowd the show was over and to break it up, and they started milling back into the bar, grumbling that nobody’d been killed. I took a mug of beer from one fella and poured it in Davison’s face to bring him around.

“Mr. Swain,” I said, “let me check this gentleman into the Crossbars Hotel and we’ll go sit ourselves down with a bottle so you can tell me why it’s taken you so damn long to come to our fair city.”

A
half hour later we were drinking rye at a back table in Feller’s Club and he was telling me he’d found the saloon his old trail friend had owned in Gainesville—but Bama Bill himself had been dead for two months. He’d got into a drunken fight with the high yella woman he lived with just outside of town and she’d broke his head open with an iron skillet. She’d covered up her crime by burning down the house and claiming the fire killed Bill. But she was a good Christian woman and her conscience bothered her too much to live with, so she went to the sheriff and confessed. Two nights later, while the sheriff was at supper, a bunch of Bama Bill’s friends broke her out of the jail and took her out in the swamp and a few of them had their way with her and then they drowned her.

John heard this story from Sam Burnette, who’d come to own the saloon after Bill’s death. But Sam was champing at the bit to go prospecting for silver in Colorado, and he was ready to sell. In just a couple of days they’d made the deal and John had himself a saloon.

Shack Wilson, the Gainesville sheriff, became one of his regulars, not only at the bar but in the poker room John set up in the back. They started going bass fishing together. Shack introduced him to a neighbor of his named Salter who raised a kind of hunting dog called a Texas leopard, which is the best wild-hog hunting dog there is. The three of them would go into the forest every now and then and come out with enough pig for all their families to feast on for days.

One day when he was tending bar, in walks a couple of Texans he knew from his trail-driving days. They recognized him too, mustache and all. But before they could say anything, John put out his hand and said, “Name’s John Swain! Always glad to see new faces in here.” He took them to a table at the rear of the room and they had a quiet talk. The Texans were in town on some cattle deal and were mighty glad to see him. They said they’d been hearing all sorts of tales about him back in Texas for the last ten months—that he’d robbed banks in Waco and Dallas, that he’d killed the sheriff in Livingston last Christmas and two Texas Rangers in San Antone just last month and four possemen near Austin the month before that. Every time somebody got shot dead in Texas and there weren’t any witnesses, you could bet the blame would fall on John Wesley Hardin. “I guess it’s a compliment,” John told them, “to be so often remembered by my fellow Texans.” The two trail partners swore they wouldn’t say a word back in Texas about having seen him, and Wes told them he knew he could trust them. The Texans were in town a week and spent every night in John’s saloon, drinking and gambling and having a high time. Three days after they left back for Texas, John had sold the saloon and set out with his family for Jacksonville without letting anyone know where he was going. “It’s not that I don’t trust them old boys,” he said, “I just thought it’d be wise to proceed as if I didn’t.”

H
e did real well in Jacksonville—got into cattle shipping and bought himself a butcher shop, and both businesses prospered. Their little rented house on the bank of the St. Johns was shaded by palms and cooled by the river breezes. Jane loved living in the midst of all that lush greenery. They often took the wagon out to the beach with a picnic lunch and played in the breakers. Jane was rosy with sun and the glow of pregnancy, and Molly was dark as an Indian. In August “J. H. Swain, Jr.” was born, and for the next two weeks John handed a cigar to every man he met. I got into the habit of taking supper at their house two or three evenings a week. I taught John the fun of fishing in the surf, and we’d go hunting in the swamps for deer and pig. He shot a couple of good-size alligators one day and we dragged them out on ropes and had them skinned by an old Creek from the St. John backwater. John hung the skin of the sixteen-footer on the front porch of his house and had the fourteen-footer made into belts and hat bands and two fine pairs of boots, one for me and one for himself. We got to be damn fine friends and got to talking about going partners in the timber business up in the Panhandle.

Of course we did a little gambling every so often. We sat in on Bobby Chiles’s poker game on Tuesday nights in the back of his saloon, and in Fred Johnson’s game every Thursday. I always did all right, but John most always came out the big winner. The fellas used to cuss me half joking and half not for introducing him to our games. “Don’t seem we can do much about your luck, Swain,” Bobby Chiles said to him one time, “but we ought to take a damn horsewhip to Kennedy for bringing you around here in the first place.”

O
ne night—he’d been in Jacksonville about a year, I guess—we came out of Bobby Chiles’s with a nice bourbon glow and bumped into a pair of strangers coming through the doors. They were big rascals and wore tight black suits and derby hats. One had a black handlebar and the other’s face was full of orange freckles. “Pardon me, friend,” I said to the handlebar, then saw the look he gave John and I knew they’d come for him. Freckles stood aside to let us pass and John nodded thanks.

We paused under the streetlight in front of the saloon to fire up cigars, and John whispered, “Looks like they’re on to me.” I glanced real casual up at the saloon window behind him and saw Handlebar peeking out. “Best go your own way, Gus,” he said. “It ain’t your fight.” Hell it ain’t, I told him. In my best copper’s voice I said I was an authorized agent of the law, sworn to protect the honest citizens of Jacksonville from those who would interfere with the exercise of their civil liberties. John smiled and said, “Well hell then,” and we headed off toward the deserted section of town by the old port on the river.

They followed us down the lighted streets, keeping half a block back. Music twanged from the swinging doors of every saloon. We went around a corner and onto a dark street of empty warehouses facing a line of rotted piers that hadn’t been used by the river steamers in years. The lots between the empty warehouses were littered with shipping debris. “Fill your hand,” John whispered—but I’d drawn my revolver as soon as we’d turned the corner, and I held it cocked under my coat. “I’ll take the street-side one,” he said, “you the inside.” The saloon music was fainter now, and I thought I heard their footsteps crunching up behind us in the broken glass. My back muscles quivered. Then one of them called out, “Mr. Swain! Hold on, sir!”

We stopped and turned. They were thirty feet away and closing, silhouetted against the glow of a street lamp just off the corner. They had their hands in their coats too. As they closed in, the Handlebar said, “Mr. John Swain of Texas?” He started to take his hand out and John shot him square in the forehead. Freckles and I fired at the same time and I felt his bullet tug through the loose flap of my coat. He dropped his gun and fell forward and I knew he was dead by the way he hit the ground. It was over just that quick.

I expected the whole damn world to come running to see what the shots were about, and I was already putting a story together in my head about us being attacked by these two strangers, hoping like hell they weren’t U.S. marshals. But there were no cries of alarm, no sound of running feet—only the sudden splashing of a school of mullet in the St. John’s and the distant music from the saloons around the corner.

We went through their pockets and stripped them clean, then dragged the bodies into one of the warehouses and covered them up with a rotted canvas sail. We piled broken crates on top of that. It’d be days before the corpses worked up a stink strong enough to be smelled beyond the warehouse—and even then they might not draw much attention. Then again, some scavenging tramp might uncover them the very next day, you never knew.

We cut through the back streets to my boardinghouse room. As soon as we shut the door behind us, I poured us a drink. Then we went through their papers and found out they were Pinkertons. The Handlebar was James Kelleher and Freckles was Francis Connors. They had ticket stubs off that morning’s train from Atlanta—and a Texas reward poster offering four thousand dollars for the capture of John Wesley Hardin.

T
he next morning he put Jane and the children on the westbound train. He’d bought their tickets for New Orleans in case somebody came nosing around the depot asking where the Hardin family had gone. But he’d told Jane to get off the train at Pensacola and hire a hack to Polland, a small settlement just across the border in Alabama where her kin were living.

John stayed in Jacksonville a few days longer to give them time to get away safely, and in that time nobody discovered the bodies. I told the police chief I was quitting the force to go gold hunting in the Dakota Territory with John Swain, and a bunch of the coppers made a lot of jokes about it—which was good, because it meant they believed me.

Two days later we were met at the Pensacola depot by Jane’s Uncle Harris, just like John and Jane had arranged, and by nightfall we were in Polland.

*    *    *

A
nd so we got into the logging business, me and John. We went partners with a lively buck-toothed fella named Shep Hardie and his nephew, an eighteen-year-old asskicker named Jim Mann. They owned some prime timberland about thirty-five miles up the Styx River but were short of the capital to log it. John and I put up the money for the necessary machinery and wagons and to hire four more loggers. The eight of us went upriver to the property and set up a work camp, and that’s where we spent most of the following year, cutting timber and logging it. Some of it we floated down the Styx to the sawmills on the Perdido fork, and some of it we sold to companies that used mule teams to haul the logs to the railway west of us. It was damn hard work but it turned us a pretty fair profit.

Every now and then we took a day off and went to Mobile to put some of that profit to work on the card tables—and so those among us who had the notion could buy themselves a good time at one of the swell pleasure houses to be found in that lively, lowdown town. Mobile always smelled to me of low tide, pine tar, magnolias, and puke. It was full of hard trade—sailors and shipworkers and sawyers, card sharps and whores. I don’t recall a time we went there that two or three of us didn’t get a broken nose or cut hand or some other kind of barfight memento. Jim Mann always came back sporting fresh cuts and bruises. He was a fine wild-hearted boy who wore a black eye like a badge of honor. He would grin through his puffy lips and make some joke about how we ought to see what the other fella looked like.

One time in Mobile, John and I got into a saloon row with a couple of timber teamsters named Lewis and Kress, and a little later—and unfortunately for us—they somehow or other ended up shot dead in an alley. We were arrested and wrongly charged with murder, and we spent two long miserable days and nights in jail before we finally got things all cleared up—with a little help from our contribution of two thousand dollars to the Mobile Police Department. After that, we mostly stayed clear of Mobile and took our pleasures in Pensacola.

Pensacola was anyway where we always took on camp supplies. We’d send the goods by rail to Pensacola Junction—Whiting, as some of the locals called it—and a freight boat would take them up the Styx to our camp. After shipping the goods, we’d stay in Pensacola another couple of days for a bit of fun. Shep Hardie had grown up there and knew all the poker rooms in town. The best was run by Alston Shipley, the regional railroad manager who’d been a logging contractor before going to work for the railroad. He still cussed like a logger and was strong as a mule.