The Pistoleer (6 page)

I had him working roundups with Big Len Richards and Joe O. And there was plenty to round up out there too. For years after the War there were more longhorns wandering loose all over Texas than you could shake a branding iron at. Most of them were mavericks, but lots of them were just strays—cows that once upon a time belonged to ranchers who went off to fight the Yankees and either never came back or came back long after their ranches had gone to hell and their herds had scattered all over the countryside. It was only a matter of time before some of them strays started getting rounded up by fellas who couldn’t stand the temptation of seeing so many of them running around loose. Besides, it didn’t take a whole lot of artwork with a branding iron to change a brand. I ain’t saying we ever did that sort of thing at
my
camp, mind you—only that you couldn’t help but hear of it being done here and there and yonder, every now and then, by somebody or other.

Anyhow, Wes already knew a good bit about roping by the time he came to work for me. He had real quick fingers, which you have to have to be any good with a lariat. You got to be able to size the loop—make it bigger or smaller—with just your throwing hand, while your other hand’s paying out rope and working the reins. And you got to be able to do this while you’re riding at full gallop. You got to be able to do it as natural as you spit and breathe. You watch a roper’s hands real close sometime when he’s working and you’ll see just how fast and smooth his fingers move. Quick and sure as a banjo picker’s.

After his first few days at the camp, he was roping longhorns like he’d been doing it all his life. Big Len showed him how to lasso a calf with a heel catch so you could drag it behind your horse right up to the fire to get cut and branded. Joe O showed him how two riders could team up to bring down a big steer with what we call a head-and-heel catch, and inside a week he was even making over-and-under catches, which some cowhands never get the hang of even after years of trying.

Wes learned everything real good and real quick. I showed him how to cut the balls off a calf as slick as peeling a potato and how to heat an iron just right so it leaves a good clear brand but doesn’t burn too deep and set the hide on fire. I taught him the proper way to saw a pair of horns, which you sometimes had to do to cows with horns so long they couldn’t help but stab other cows when they got bunched up tight. I showed him how to use an ax for the job when the horns were too hard for the saw. There wasn’t anything about cattle that boy didn’t want to know. He even had me show him how to doctor a cow for screwworms and lumpy jaw and other such troubles. He said he figured to have his own herds someday and ought to know how to take care of them. He had a head on his shoulders.

I
t wasn’t all work, of course. Every now and then we’d go into town to see a horse race and wet our snouts and try our luck at the card tables. If there’s a man alive who don’t like horse racing I never met him. To see a couple of fast horses come galloping hard between two long lines of spectators all jumping up and down and yelling their lungs out as the horses go rumbling past, kicking up clods of dirt, huffing and big-eyed and showing their teeth, the big muscles stretched in their necks and their riders hunched down low and whipping at them with the reins and shouting in their ear—well, hell, if that don’t make your heart hop faster I’d say you were ready for burial. It’s something about a horse race that gets my blood jumping long before the animals even get to the starting line. Wes was the same way. He was always talking about buying himself a racer someday soon.

He’d surely be able to afford one, the way he raked in the winnings at the gaming tables. That boy was the luckiest gambler I ever saw. And I don’t mean at just one particular kind of game. He won at
everything
—poker, dice, faro, chuckaluck, seven-up, you name it. If the house offered it, he played it—and he’d win at it a good deal more than he’d lose. I’ve always been a fair hand at poker, if I say so myself, but even after sitting in on many a hand with Wes I never did learn to read his game. In stud and draw both, he played fast and loose. I couldn’t believe some of the reckless hands I saw him play. He’d see a whopping big raise to stay in a hand, and then call for
four
cards. He’d raise you twenty dollars on a pair of treys. I never knew anybody so ready to draw to an inside straight—or to fill so many.

I won’t ever forget the night he filled two of them on Frank Polk. Simp had introduced them earlier that same day and they’d taken a shine to each other, partly because they were both wanted by the Yankee army, just like Simp. I liked Frank all right, and had hired him on, but he was near as crazy as Simp in a lot of ways, another fella you had to tread lightly with. He was a big-chested, black-bearded rascal who’d shot and wounded two soldiers in a fight in Dallas a few weeks earlier and was naturally claiming self-defense. But the word on Frank was that he’d also pulled a few robberies here and there in North Texas and had killed a store clerk in one of them. The word was, the clerk had been unarmed. But that was just the word, which is wrong about as often as it’s not.

Anyhow, on this particular night I’m talking about, me and Frank and Wes and Terry Threefingers and Joel Knapp were in the Tall Hat playing stud and drinking straight whiskey—all except Terry, who was drinking Grizzly Milk, a mix of whiskey and milk and sugar, because his stomach had been ailing him lately. None of the pots was big enough to talk about till an hour into the game when suddenly we were looking at one of about two hundred dollars. Wes drew to a straight and got it to take the hand, and Frank cussed and beat his fist on the table. He was about half drunk by then and had been losing heavy, and he was steamed because he’d been holding kings up over tens and had thought sure the hand was his. Wes smiled at him and said, “Tough one to lose, Frank. But hell, ain’t they all?”

Except that he was fairly red-eyed himself, you never would of known Wes had put down at least as much whiskey as Frank had. Wes could drink. I don’t remember whiskey ever tangling his tongue or making him do the hard-wind walk.

Frank wouldn’t even look at him, he was so steamed. He growled at me, “Your deal, Newman—so deal the damn things.”

Half an hour later Wes did it again. He filled a straight flush to beat Frank’s full house of aces over jacks and took in nearly three hundred dollars.

“Goddamnit!” Frank yells. He shoves his chair back from the table with a loud scrape and puts his hand on the butt of his gun. Looking hard at Wes, he says, “I have never seen such goddamn luck of the draw in all my whole life.” His face and voice were just full of accusation.

Things got quiet downright quick. Wes kept his eyes on Frank and his right hand was out of sight under the table as he pulled in the pot with his left. “Well, Frank,” he says, “I hope you keep on seeing it for as long as I’m sitting here.”

When you’re at the table at a time like that, you want to get away from it as quick and as far as you can, but you’re afraid any move you make might set things off like a spark to powder, so you sit still as a stone and hope for the best. All around us the barflies were scooting for cover. I’d seen Wes shoot those Colts of his a few times by then and I knew he was a deadeye, but I hadn’t seen him fast-draw. I’d heard he was quick as a snake. Frank was a damn good shot too, but only fair on the draw—but he had a nerve of flint and wasn’t afraid of the devil himself. The thing is, whenever a pair of fellas got into it with only three feet of space between them, they almost always both got hit for sure and usually both got killed.

Just then I see past Wes to where Simp’s coming in the back door from taking a piss outside, his rifle in the crook of his arm. I can see he catches wise to what’s happening at the table, and as he heads toward us he cocks the hammer on the Sharps. Wes and Frank are locked up in a staring match and don’t see him coming. When he gets within two feet of the table, Simp gives me a wink and fires a round into the floor.

Sweet Christ almighty! You ever
hear
a Sharps go off indoors? There we all were, wound up tight as cheap clocks, and
BOOM!

Frank jumps straight up out of his chair like he’s been stung in the ass and his pistol goes twirling out of his hand like he’s doing some kind of trick and it comes down on the table and goes off—BLAM!—and he falls back into his chair and crashes over backward and lays there on the floor, stock-still.

I never saw Wes move—but there he was, turned half around in his chair with his cocked Colt in his hand and square in Simp’s chest.

For a second nobody moved—then Wes hollers: “You stupid dumb jackleg asshole! You looking to get shot?”

“Say now, cousin,” Simp says, grinning like the damn crazy man he was. “Mite jumpy, ain’t you?” He looks at Frank laying on the floor and says, “You don’t reckon he’s done killed hisself with his own gun?” And he
laughs.

That’s for damn sure what
I
thought happened. But then I notice a thin cloud of dust floating down on the table, so I look up and see where the ball of Frank’s pistol went through the ceiling and shook the dust loose. Now everybody else is looking up there too. Then Frank lets out a low groan and stirs some, then sits up and rubs the back of his head and looks all around like he ain’t real sure if he’s dead or alive. Simp points at him and says, “Lookit here, boys, it’s Lazarus come back from the dead.”

Not a one of us could keep from laughing, not even Frank, he was so damn glad to find out he wasn’t dead. He’d just lost his balance, was all, and knocked himself silly when he landed on the back of his head. But for years afterward, those who’d been there—and a whole lot who hadn’t—would tell the story of the time they saw Frank Polk beat himself to the draw and shoot himself down.

N
ot too long after that, Frank got drunk and careless in a Corsicana saloon and was taken prisoner by a Yank posse. Wes had been taking his pleasure at Mary LaBelle’s sporting house at the time and said he didn’t learn about Frank’s capture till the next day. I was sorry to hear about it myself, but I won’t deny it was a relief to have one less worry at my cow camp.

I
served up more than a few glasses to Frank Polk in the Empress Emporium, I did. First met the rascal when he came to Corsicana on the run for shooting some soldiers—in Dallas, I think that was. And there was a rumor about him shooting some shopkeeper. But hell, there was always rumors about Frank and all fellas like him. Sure, he had a temper when he was in his cups—but don’t most other fellas as well? A bit quick with his mitts sometimes—and not afraid to fill his hand, as they used to say, when that was what was called for. But mostly he liked a good laugh and a hand of cards and a sweet time with the ladies. Just a regular fella, he was.

It was Frank who introduced me to the Hardin lad. They came in the Empress one afternoon when I’m back of the bar, see. They’d just brought over a herd of steers from Pisga, so they had gold in their pockets and were looking for a bit of fun before heading back. So I set out a bottle of the good stuff and hand over the dice cup, and they while away a few hours sipping that good whiskey and rolling the dice. Some friends join them by and by, and they’re all drinking and rolling and swapping whoppers loud enough for everyone in the place to get some pleasure out of all the lying.

Well now, by that evening the whole lot of them are drunk as lords and playing poker at a table at the back of the room. They’re all laughing and talking at once and so drunk they keep losing track of who’s dealing and whose bet it is, everything. One time I hear Jerry Ostermann yell, “Blackjack! I got blackjack!” Everybody else laughs and curses him for a damn fool. “How do you reckon we’re playing
blackjack,
you asshole,” Frank says, “when you got
five
fucking cards dealt to you? Answer me that.” Well, Jerry thinks it over for a moment, his face all twisted in hard thought. Then he brightens and says, “Well, hell, I thought it was a sporting new way of playing the game!”

A half hour later Frank suddenly jumps up and hollers that he’s by God had enough of Vernon Leaky’s cheating. Now Vernon, he owns the Hotel Lee up the street and is one of the few truly honest men I ever met. How he got into a game with fellas such as these I can’t say—except that he’d been drinking harder than usual, which is sufficient explanation for almost any stupidity a man might do. He turns white as his collar, he does, when Frank calls him a cheat.

“Frank,” he says in his high voice. “Frank,
I’m
not cheating.” Frank stands there, swaying a bit and looking hard at him, and says, “Last time I heard some sorry sonbitch say that, turned out he had three aces up his sleeve.” The Hardin fella’s watching all this with his chin in his hand and a big smile on his face.

“But, Frank,” Vernon says, “how can you think I’m cheating?
You’re
doing all the winning!” Frank looks at his own stack of money and sees it’s for sure the biggest on the table, so he grins a bit sheepish, he does, and says, “Be goddamn.” He sits down and says, “Hell, maybe
I’m
the one’s doing all the damn cheating.” Like I say, drunk as lords, the bunch of them, and it’s still early yet.