The Pistoleer (8 page)

F
UGITIVE
D
AYS

The El Paso Daily Herald,

20
AUGUST
1895

Frank Patterson, the bartender at the Acme Saloon, testified before the coroner as follows:

“My name is Frank Patterson. I am a bartender at present at the Acme Saloon. This evening about 11 o’clock J. W. Hardin was standing with Henry Brown shaking dice and Mr. Selman walked in at the door and shot him. Mr. E. L. Shackleford was also in the saloon at the time the shooting took place. Mr. Selman said something as he came in at the door. Hardin was standing with his back to Mr. Selman. I did not see him face around before he fell or make any motion. All I saw was that Mr. Selman came in the door, said something and shot and Hardin fell. Don’t think Hardin ever spoke. The first shot was in the head.”

(Signed) F. F. Patterson

The Life of John Wesley Hardin as Written by Himself

“I liked fast horses and would bet on any kind of a horse race, a chicken fight, a dog fight, or anything down to throwing ‘crack-a-loo’ or spitting at a mark.”

——

“I had been receiving letters from my father and mother urging me to quit my wild habits and turn to better ways.”

——

“I was young then and loved every pretty girl I met.”

——

“If there is any power to save man, woman, or child from harm, outside the power of the Living God, it is this thing called pluck.”

——

“Everybody … tried to help me and everybody was my friend, but the infamous police were after me and there were several mischief-makers about me.”

M
y wife, Slider, was cousin to Wes and introduced us at a get-together over at Jim Page’s place on the Brazos River, where Wes and his brother Joe were staying. They’d come down after visiting at Slider’s momma’s house in Hillsboro for a time and everybody was damn happy to know Wes was all right. We’d only recently heard of the Yankees’ back-shooting murder of Simp Dixon and had been worried the blues might of got to Wes too.

We hit it off right away, me and Wes, but Joe was standoffish and we never did cotton to each other much. When I found out how much Wes liked gambling and horse races, I told him he’d surely enjoy Towash, a small but high-kicking town a few miles from the Page place. It had plenty of loud saloons and gambling halls, and just outside of town was the Boles Track where they raced quarter horses. On race days that little town was just booming with action. Wes said he liked the sound of it, and we agreed to go to the track together on the coming Saturday.

Joe wasn’t keen on the idea at all. “Are you forgetting there are soldiers hunting for you?” he asked Wes. “Soldiers who intend to shoot you on sight?”

“To do that,” Wes said with a big smile, “they got to see me before I see them.” He tried to make light of Joe’s nagging, but I could see it irritated him. I don’t believe he was sorry when Joe headed on back home to Navarro County the next day.

During the next couple of weeks we spent plenty of time in Towash, me and Wes. Like I said, it was a wild place, and Wes took to it like a redbone to a hollow full of coon. That boy would gamble at anything. He was the best I ever saw at calling the turn at the faro table—at guessing the exact order of the last three cards in the tiger, the box the dealer deals the cards out of. Calling the turn pays four-to-one, and Wes won himself just fistfuls of money. We played mostly in The Alabama Star because it had the best table layout—and because they had a dealer there named Sad Horse Tom, whose real name was Tommy Flatt. He had the longest face you’ve ever seen, and every time somebody had a winning streak or called the turn oh him, that face would get even longer. You can imagine what he looked like whenever Wes had one of his good nights at his table. Poor fella’s face got so long and miserable-looking he looked like a horse about to cry. Wes started calling him Sad Horse Tom and pretty soon everybody called him that. One night, right after Wes had called the turn on him for the second time in an hour, Sad Horse Tom said to him, “Kid, you must have Jesus whispering the cards in your ear.”

Wes liked that, and from then on, every time the last turn came up, he’d cup his hand to his ear and look up and say, “All right, Lord, let me hear them.” He’d nod his head like he was listening real careful, then say, “All right, sir, I’ll do it.” If the turn came up the way he called it, he’d smile at the ceiling and say, “Thanks, partner.” But if he lost, he’d look around at everybody with a real exaggerated expression of disgust and say something like, “Well, hell, if that’s all the dependable the Good Lord Jesus is going to be, it’s no wonder so many folk are turning heathen nowadays.” He could always get a laugh from the boys at the table.

Except for Sad Horse Tom, most everybody was always glad to see Wes come in the Star. He was free and easy with his winnings, and I don’t recall a single time he didn’t buy the house a round after winning a big poker pot or calling the turn at faro. He was a damn good joke teller too, and just as good at laughing at the ones you told him. He smiled a lot and usually meant it when he did. He liked to sing along with the piano. He was just an easy young fella to like.

Besides gambling in the Towash saloons nearly every night, we went out to the Boles Track every Saturday. We both liked the races even more than the table games, and we both usually came out winners at the end of a day’s matches. But the more Wes saw of the Towash races, the more he hankered for a racer of his own, since neither his old paint nor my ornery buckskin was near good enough to run against the racers at Boles. Well, he was the sort to do whatever he set his mind to, so I figured he’d get a racer, all right—I just never expected him to show up with the one he did.

Come Christmas morning, I hear him halooing me out in front of the house, so I go to the door and there he is, sitting on this beautiful roan stallion I ain’t never seen before. I couldn’t help but stand there with my mouth open and admire it—I mean, it was a
fine
-looking animal! Wes just grinned down at me for a minute before he finally says, “I guess you
could
stand there all day letting the cold air in on your wife and child, or you might scrape up whatever money you got, saddle up, and go with me over to Boles to increase your holdings.”

It was a beautiful day—chilly but sunny, with no wind and not a cloud in the sky. As we rode over to Boles, Wes told me the horse belonged to his daddy, who’d got it as a present from a man in Polk County. He’d named it Copperhead in honor of its sire, a stud from Ohio. The Reverend had given everybody at the Page place a real Christmas Eve surprise when he showed up so unexpected. He’d written Wes a couple of letters since moving to Navarro County but hadn’t said anything about coming out to see him. What he
had
done in each letter was ask him to please quit the gambling life he’d taken up and get on back to his family where he belonged. “Joe sure must of gave him an earful,” Wes said. It was pretty obvious he was caught between a rock and a hard place—the rock being his daddy wanting him to lead a righteous life like Joe and start doing the family proud, and the hard place being his natural liking for the kind of life he was living, which pleasured him plenty but pained him too, because it disappointed his daddy.

He told me him and the Reverend had stayed up half the night, talking things over. His daddy said Yankee patrols had been scouting the countryside for him all over East Texas. His mother was eaten up with worry. The Reverend still believed Wes would be acquitted in a fair trial once the Union army ended its occupation of Texas, but there was still no telling when that might be. In another few weeks the Reverend would be the new schoolmaster in Mount Calm, a little place down at the south end of Hill County, and he wanted Wes to help him get the family moved and then stay put with them for a while. He figured Wes would be safer from Yankee patrols in a tiny out-of-the-way place like that.

Wes finally agreed to go with him, and the Reverend had been so pleased to hear it he’d said yes, of course, when Wes asked if he could borrow his horse to ride over to say Merry Christmas to me and show off the animal.

“I told Daddy I’d go with him,” Wes said as we came in sight of the Boles Track, “but hiding out in some two-dog town for who knows how long ain’t something I hanker to do.” Then he smiled and said, “But hell, it’s nothing to worry about till tomorrow, is it? Right now I’m smelling money from that track yonder. What say we get on over there and put some of it in our pockets, John?”

The race day had drawn its usual big crowd. Besides the aroma of money Wes mentioned, the chilly air was full of the smells of fresh fried chitlins and roast peanuts and cigar smoke and horse dung, with a tinge of whiskey weaving through it all. It’s no place on earth as exciting as a horse track on race day.

And
that
Saturday was the most exciting one of them all, let me tell you. Wes paid fifty dollars to a little nigger rider named Jerome—about four feet high and weighing all of ninety pounds—to ride Copperhead in a third-of-a-mile race against Honey Boy, belonging to Dave McIntyre. Honey Boy was the favorite because he’d already won a dozen races and lost only one—to Andy Jack, Merle Hornpiper’s horse, which everybody called the fastest in the county. Hornpiper’d agreed to run Andy Jack against the winner of our race with Honey Boy.

But goddamn, that Wes was one to run risks. He was so confident Copperhead could win that he took Jerome aside and said he’d pay him ten dollars extra if he’d make sure the race against Honey Boy was close. “You win,” he told Jerome, “just don’t win by more’n a half length or so. If you’re the rider they say you are, you ought be able to see to that.” Jerome was a strange little spook but nobody’s fool. He gave Wes a gold-tooth grin and said, “This here
some
hoss, cap’n—and I’s
some
rider. Make it
close
be hard work—’bout twenty more dollars hard.” Wes cussed him for a bandit but handed over the extra twenty, then gave him a boost up on Copperhead. He was a flashy little dude, Jerome. Wore a yellow silk scarf around his neck when he rode, and it streamed behind him like a flame. A few years later somebody hung him with it from a stable rafter.