The Pistoleer (13 page)

“Listen here, damnit,” Hardin says, talking to the whole crowd that’s gathering around, everybody curious but skittish about those Colts in his hands. “I came to make the acquaintance of Bill Longley and pay my respects. I have been told he is a true son of the Confederacy and a sworn enemy of every carpetbagging Yankee sonbitch in Texas. But I was not told the people of this town are so lowdown as to gang up on a friendly stranger.”

Just then the crowd opened up and there was Bill, standing in the street and facing Hardin from twenty feet off in shirtsleeves and no hat on and his hand down loose by his tied-down Dance.

“I’m Longley,” he says, “and I don’t know that I much care to make the acquaintance of somebody who comes looking for me with his hands full of Colts.”

Everybody, including Ben and Jody and Bob, quick got out of their line of fire—and I admit I didn’t tarry in taking cover behind a wagon.

“And
I
don’t much respect a man who has to have all these back-shooters to watch over him,” Hardin says.

Bill gives a laugh and said, “Boys, any of you throw down on this desperado, I’ll shoot you myself.” Then he turns up his palms, like he’s saying, “You satisfied?” Hardin gives his Colts a spin and drops them in his hip holsters, then stands there holding easy to his vest flaps in the manner of some rich cotton grower. We all knew why he had his hands up there. We’d heard about that vest.

“Something else I don’t much care for,” Bill says, “is a fucken spy. And I heard you’re spying for McNelly.”

McNelly was a captain of the State Police, and I knew damn well nobody’d told Bill any such thing about Hardin.

“
Horseshit,
” Hardin says. “If you’re looking for a fight, bubba, you don’t need to tell no lie to get one.” His fingers twitched on his vest. I mean, he was
ready.

Later on, Bill admitted to me he’d been cussing himself for saying what he did. An accusation like that was nothing but fighting words, and Bill never was one to pick a fight for no good reason. He was just irritated by all the talk he’d heard about what a hero Hardin was for killing Yank soldiers—and a little jealous too, I figured, though I never said so—and his irritation had got the better of his mouth. Not that he was scared of Hardin, you understand; Bill Longley was never scared of any man alive. But there was no good reason to get to it with the boy and he knew it. Still, he had insulted Hardin, and Hardin couldn’t let it pass, and so the moment was feeling mighty tight.

So Bill says, “Whooooee! You just itching to hunt bear with a switch, ain’t you, boy? Pointing guns at everybody, talking nothing but fight. I don’t call that friendly nor respectful.”

“
You’re
the one called
me
a police spy!” Hardin says.

“So I did,” Bill says. “But I see you have too much sand to be a state bootlick, and I am enough man to admit when I am wrong. But if what
you
want is a fight …” And he gives a big hang-it-all shrug and stands ready.

That was the only time I ever heard Bill Longley even come close to apologizing to anybody about anything—and it was smooth as owl shit the way he was doing it without backing down. He was leaving it up to Hardin to call the play or not. For the next two or three long seconds you didn’t hear a thing but the birds in the trees and horses blowing. Then Hardin says: “I am man enough to admit my mistakes too. I did come to make your acquaintance, and I shouldn’t of let an ignorant jackass goad me into forgetting my own good manners.” Everybody turned to give Ben Hinds a look, but he was staring up at the treetops like there was something of uncommon interest to see up there. Then Hardin and Bill were both grinning, and Bill says, “I hear you like card games,” and Hardin says, “About as much as I hear you do,” and we knew the thing was done with.

A whole lot of breath got let out—but people being the way they are, I’d say more of it was in disappointment than in relief. It wasn’t every day you got to see two pistol fighters of high reputations pull on each other.

Ten minutes later Bill and Hardin were drinking beer and playing poker together in a crib at the far end of the street where they could have at least a little privacy from the crowds that kept following them around. Me and Jim Brown sat in with them, and I can tell you for a fact that they took a true liking to each other.

The last hand of the night is proof of it. They’d been playing pretty even till then, but on the last go-round, after the pot fattens up, Bill raises two hundred and everybody drops out but Hardin. He studies his hand like he’s expecting it to talk to him, then asks Bill how much he’s got left. Bill says about another hundred or so, and Hardin raises him all of it. Bill laughs and says, “Thank
you.
” Hardin says, “I hope you’re as sure of going to heaven as you are that you got me beat.”

“Beat
this,
” Bill says, and lays out a full house of aces over tens. He laughs and starts to pull in the pot, but Hardin says, “Hold on. I got two pair.”

“Two
pair!
” Bill says. “Two pair don’t beat shit!”

“I reckon it does,” Hardin says, “if it’s two pair of jacks.” And he lays them down soft as eggs, the whole jack family.

Bill stares at him a second and says, “You son of a bitch.” Hardin’s face tightened and he watched Bill without blinking. Then Bill grins and’ says, “You smart-ass
son
of a
bitch!
”—and leans back in his chair and laughs his head off. And Hardin busts out laughing right along with him. Two of a kind, them two.

They ate steaks at the Den that night and did some drinking and took a few turns at bucking the tiger. The place was so packed you couldn’t of fell to the floor if you’d been shot dead. You had to holler your conversations and the tobacco smoke was thick as a grass fire. Everybody was still hoping they’d go at it and wanted to be there if they did. Bill leaned in close to Hardin and I heard him yell, “Look at ’em! Sorry bastards just hoping we’ll give them something to talk about besides their saddle sores and dripping dicks. I tell you, amigo, sometimes I feel like a fucken circus freak!”

Hardin gave him a funny look and said, “Hell, Bill, it ain’t
that
bad.”
He
loved the attention. He wasn’t yet used to having so many strangers smile at him and holler “How doing, Wes!” and buy him drinks—being so friendly because they were afraid of him. It was still new to him, and exciting, and you could see him eating it up with a spoon. Bill gave him a look back and shook his head. He was about as used to it as he cared to be.

Bill invited him to join us at the races the next day, and Hardin said he’d be proud to. He met us at the track next morning, and I’ll be damned for a liar if he didn’t win on just about every race he bet. That sonbitch couldn’t lose at
anything
he laid his money on. By the time he rode out that afternoon he must of had half of Evergreen’s money in his saddlebags. Most of us weren’t sorry to see him go.

And that’s how it was, the only time Bill Longley and Wes Hardin ever got together. If you’ve heard different, you’ve heard bullshit.

T
hey hung Bill eight years later, in Giddings, over in Lee County, on the eleventh of October, 1878. He’d killed a lot more fellas by then, but the one they got him for was Wilson Anderson, who had killed his cousin Cale. Bill ran Anderson down and killed him with a shotgun, then went off to Louisiana to hide out. He called himself Jim Black and took up farming. After a time he fell in love with some Cajun girl. Sheriff Milt Mast of Nacogdoches tracked him down and got the drop on him and offered to blow his head off or bring him back to Texas in chains to stand trial for murder; Bill went with choice number two. Mast never would of caught him without the help of that coonass bitch. I never did find out why Bill told her who he really was, nor ever knew the reason she betrayed him. I guess a man in love is bound to do foolish things, and to a naturally treacherous woman one reason to betray a man is as good as another.

Giddings made a regular jubilee out of Bill’s hanging. They built a brand-new gallows for the occasion, and people came from everywhere, from Houston, Austin, from far off as San Antone. Four
thousand
of them, the newspapers said. They were crowded in the streets and up on the roofs. Every window with a view of the gallows had at least one head sticking out of it. Even the trees were full of spectators—men in the low branches and children in the high. There was hawkers of every kind selling to the crowd, and families with picnic baskets, and firecrackers and string bands and dancing. A real jubilee. It wasn’t nothing I wanted to witness with sober eyes, so I spent the better part of that morning as a serious customer in the saloons.

According to the newspapers Bill had said he was at peace, but I doubt that. He was too damn mad about being given the death sentence to be feeling peaceful. He’d wrote a letter to Governor Hubbard from his jail cell asking why was he being hung for killing a no-good son of a bitch like Anderson when John Wesley Hardin hadn’t got but twenty-five years for killing a damn
sheriff?
Not to mention that Hardin had anyway killed lots more men than he ever had. The governor never did write Bill back.

When they brung Bill out, a brass band struck up playing “We Shall Gather at the River.” Some of the folk cheered and some hooted and made fun. You’d of thought he was a politician. He surely looked it, in his Sunday suit and with his hair all combed and his imperial nicely trimmed. I’d never seen him looking so spruce. I was on the porch of the Saddlehorn Saloon and waved to him when he got up on the scaffold, but I don’t believe he saw me.

Some old yellow dog followed the hanging party up the steps and everybody laughed to see the sheriff and his deputy both nearly fall from the scaffold trying to run the mutt off. Finally Bill gave it a kick and sent it yipping off. “You’ll hang for that, Bill!” some drunk hollered, and the crowd laughed it up some more.

The newspapers reported his last words as being, “I deserve this fate for my wild and reckless life! So long, everybody!” That’s more bullshit. I was there. Even if they’d wanted to print what he really said, they couldn’t of. What Bill said was: “I never killed nobody in blood as cold as you’re hanging me, you shit-face sons of bitches! Fuck you all!”

They put the hood over his head and dropped him through the trap and he bounced hard at the end of the rope but couldn’t kick much because his legs had been strapped together so the frailer women and smaller children wouldn’t be upset by a lot of thrashing. He was hanging still as a bag of oats when a pair of doctors went up the underladder and listened to his heart. They shook their heads at each other and whispered some and wouldn’t let anybody else go up near him yet. Every now and then they’d listen to his chest some more, and after about twenty minutes they finally pronounced him dead.

Of course, there’s some who’ll tell you he
wasn’t
any more dead than you are. They’ll tell you he bribed the sheriff and the hangman and the two damn doctors and God knows who-all else—and that they rigged him with a special harness that only made it look like he was hanging by the neck but really wasn’t. I ain’t saying
I
believe them—I’m just telling what some say. They say he was buried in an oversize coffin that gave him enough air to breathe till his friends came out to the graveyard that night and dug him out, then reburied the empty box. They say he went down to Argentina and got himself a big cattle ranch and a beautiful wife with green eyes and tits like peaches and he lived a good long life. Go ask around Evergreen. There’s lots of folks who’ll tell you how Bill Longley outfoxed them all.

But now here’s a true fact. Remember Jody Pinto? Well, me and him was Rough Riders in Cuba with Teddy. Jody got shot in the stomach on San Juan Hill and suffered from it ever after. His daughter and son-in-law took care of him all these years up in New Jersey till he died about five months ago. Last year he sent me a newspaper clipping he thought would interest me. It was from
The New York Times.
It has a list of names of people who went down on the
Lusitania.
He sent it to me just a few weeks after the Huns sunk her, Well, sir—and this is a true fact now—one of the names on that list is W. P. Longley. Got him listed as a cattleman from South America. What you think of that? Right in the damn
New York Times.
I still got that clipping around somewhere—but hell, if you don’t believe me, go look it up your own damn self.

I
have taught legions of students in my long career as a bona fide professor of Law and the Liberal Arts, and the most dramatic exemplum I’ve yet seen of the dictum that character is fate was John Wesley Hardin.

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.