The Pistoleer
The Pistoleer
A Novel of John Wesley Hardin
James Carlos Blake
Open Road Integrated Media ebook
To Old Bill, for the lessons;
Allen, for the encouragement;
Nat, for the faith
.
What though the field be lost?
All is not lost; th’ unconquerable will,
And study of revenge, immortal hate,
And courage never to submit or yield;
And what is else not to be overcome?
—John Milton,
Paradise Lost
Oh, I’m a good old rebel, that’s what I am …
I won’t be reconstructed, and I don’t give a damn.
—Innes Randolph (1837–87)
CONTENTS
——
PART ONE
——
——
PART TWO
——
——
PART THREE
——
——
PART FOUR
——
——
PART FIVE
——
——
PART SIX
——
PROLOGUE
He was the deadliest man in Texas, on that they all agreed. Otherwise, they might well have been talking about two different men
….
Some said he was nothing but a hero. Hellfire, didn’t he take up a gun against the bluebellies riding roughshod over Texas in the dark days after the War? He was hardly more than a boy and already fighting injustice. And when the damnable State Police was bullying innocent people all over Texas, didn’t he give those Davis devils plenty of their own brute hell? Didn’t he run them out of Gonzales County just about single-handed? Yes, sure, he killed men, a lot of men—men who were trying to kill him! Self-defense is the First Law of Life; everybody knows that. And it’s an art—an art all men wish they knew well. He’d done nothing but live by that law and master that art. Who wouldn’t do the same if he but had the courage and the skill? So some said
.
Others were of different opinion. He was a rebel by nature, they said, a bad seed. No, worse—he was much worse than that. He was Evil at Heart. A killer natural-born. He was a violent soul ruled by Pride, the worst of the Deadly Sins. To attribute noble cause to his murderous deeds was to set a false halo over the devil’s horns. So others said
.
And they all said much more. They said he killed his first man at the age of fifteen. That at eighteen he backed down the great Wild Bill on the main street of Abilene in front of a hundred witnesses. That he’d been shot so many times he carried a pound of lead in his flesh. That he’d killed forty men, maybe more, by the time he went to prison at the age of twenty-five
.
They said prison could not break his spirit, though it tortured his flesh for years. That he at last tamed down behind those walls to please his beloved wife. That he took up study of the law and won a pardon after sixteen years. That by then his darling Jane had been in her grave a year
.
They said he tried hard to lead an upright life thereafter but his nature would not permit it. He was sore in spirit, they said, he was desolate. He drifted west to the meanest town in Texas. He reverted to the recklessness of his youth, to the habits of whiskey and games of chance. He took a wild-hearted mistress and again carried loaded pistols. The shadow of death followed him everywhere
.
They said these things and more, those who had known him in some way or other during the forty-two years of his life: friends and enemies, kinfolk and strangers, soldiers, drifters, cowhands, lawmen and outlaws, gamblers and fancy ladies, judges and jail guards and convicts—witnesses, all of them, witnesses to the pistoleer
….
R
EBEL
B
OY
The El Paso Daily Herald
,
20
AUGUST
1895
Last night between 11 and 12 o’clock San Antonio Street was thrown into an intense state of excitement by the sound of four pistol shots that occurred at the Acme Saloon. Soon the crowd surged against the door, and there, right inside, lay the body of John Wesley Hardin, his blood flowing over the floor and his brains oozing out of a pistol shot wound that had passed through his head. Soon the fact became known that John Selman, constable of Precinct No. 1, had fired the fatal shots that had ended the career of so noted a character as Wes Hardin, by which name he is better known to all old Texans. For several weeks past trouble has been brewing and it has been often heard on the streets that John Wesley Hardin would be the cause of some killing before he left the town.
Only a short time ago Policeman Selman arrested Mrs. McRose, the mistress of Hardin, and she was tried and convicted of carrying a pistol. This angered Hardin and when he was drinking he often made remarks that showed he was bitter in his feelings toward John Selman. Selman paid no attention to these remarks, but attended to his duties and said nothing. Lately Hardin had become louder in his abuse and had continually been under the influence of liquor and at such times he was very quarrelsome, even getting along badly with some of his friends. This quarrelsome disposition on his part resulted in his death last night and it is a sad warning to all such parties that the rights of others must be respected and that the day is past when a person having the name of being a bad man can run roughshod over the law and rights of other citizens….
The Life of John Wesley Hardin as Written by Himself
(
SEGUIN
,
TEXAS
:
SMITH AND MOORE
, 1896)
“Our parents had taught us from our infancy to be honest, truthful, and brave, and we were taught that no brave boy would ever let another call him a liar with impunity; consequently we had lots of battles with other boys at school. I was naturally active and strong and always came out best, though sometimes with a bleeding nose, scratched face, or a black eye; but true to my early training, I would try, try, try again.… I always tried to excel in my studies, and generally stood at the head…. Marbles, roily hole, cat, bull pen, and town ball were our principal games, and I was considered by my schoolmates an expert. I knew how to knock the middle man, throw a hot ball, and ply the bat.”
——
“I was always a very child of nature, and her ways and moods were my study. My greatest pleasure was to be out in the open fields, the forests, and the swamps … to get out among the big pines and oaks with my gun and the dogs and kill deer, coon, possums, or wild cats. If any of those Sumpter boys with whom I used to hunt ever see this history of my life, I ask them to say whether or not our sport in those old days was not splendid.”
——
“I had seen Abraham Lincoln burned and shot in effigy so often that I looked upon him as a very demon incarnate, who was waging a relentless and cruel war on the South to rob her of her most sacred rights. So you can see that the justice of the Southern cause was taught to me in my youth, and if I never relinquished these teachings in after years, surely I was but true to my early training. The way you bend a twig, that is the way it will grow, is an old saying, and a true one. So I grew up a rebel.”
O
h, that baby born in a rush of blood, him. I midwife a thousand bornings, me, and I never seen none bring out so much blood from their mama like him. That poor woman
so
white. The sweat rolling on her skin like hot wax and soak her dress with a smell like low river. Her eyes big and red and blind with the pain. I put a stick in her teeth and she bite it right in two.
Two years before, I help with her first, him they call Joseph, and she hardly make a sound. But this one! Oh, how this one bring out the blood and make her scream. She scream the worst I ever hear from anybody not on fire. The lamplight jumping in the glass with her screaming, the walls shaking with the shadows. Hardly no air in that room to breathe, only the smell of smoke and pain sweat, and the blood pumping black out her sex and making the sheet dark under her.
I hold her knees and I try to help her push, push. I reach in and feel of him and he turn around all wrong, him. But his heart beating strong. He
want
to come out—he want to come out before she maybe die and kill him with her. He
know,
that little baby—he know he in big trouble before he see the light of his first day. But I feel his heart and I talk to him, tell him be strong little man, be strong—and I got his mama’s blood up to my elbows and her screams like big bells in my ears.
His daddy the Reverend, he walking around and around the room, him, praying and praying. When her screaming get louder he start to singing hymns, loud as her screams. Then her screaming get so loud I feel it like fingers on my face, and I don’t hear him no more. When he see my hands come out her all covered with the thick dark blood, he quick leave the room and I thank God for that. The way he singing so crazy, so tall and big, him, with a black beard and dressed in black like always, he look like Mr. Bones and he put the spook in me—especially on this night, the twenty-sixth night of May, a night when no gris-gris can keep away the dark spirits.
Finally I get that baby turn around and out he come, kicking and swinging his little red fists. His crying not like a baby’s crying, more like yelling—like the yelling a man make when he wild and happy with whiskey or with a woman, or when he wild and mad to kill something. This one born with his eyes open and looking all round to see where the trouble going to come from. Like he already know how this world is, him.