The Pistoleer: A Novel of John Wesley Hardin

room, so they quit. We sat around till the last of the daylight faded, then went out to the stable. He saddled up, thanked me again for my hospitality, and rode off. It was a full moon out, but he cut over close to the trees and we lost sight of him in their deep shadow.

Next we heard, his daddy’d got him a schoolteacher job in Navarro County. They say he was a natural-born good teacher of reading and lettering and ciphering. For sure he’d of had a more peaceful life if he’d stayed at it rather than turn cowboy like he did.

The very first time he walked into the schoolroom and said, “Good morning. My name’s Wes Hardin and I’m your new teacher,” I thought to myself, Well now, Mr. Wes Hardin, I might could teach you something too. I knew just by looking at him he hadn’t ever done it, not yet.

I’d been teaching boys things they were mighty glad to learn since just before I turned thirteen—which was when my Uncle Andy introduced me to the original sin, as some call it, on a pile of hay at the back of his barn. I didn’t begrudge Uncle Andy for plucking my cherry—I wanted him to do it as much as he did. All these women who say they never have liked it, I don’t understand them. I loved it right from the first.

The first time Johnny and me did it back there in Pisga was on a blanket under a cottonwood by the lake with a big silver moon blazing through the branches over our heads. Like most boys on their first time with a girl he was quick as a gunshot about it. But then he was ready to go again—and again and again. Lord, there was no quit to that boy. I didn’t keep count, but I bet we did it more than a half-dozen times that night. Like a lot of the tall skinny ones, he was hung like a horse. I mean, he could of cracked pecans with that big thing of his. And talk about a fast learner! That boy wanted to know everything—how’s this feel to you here, how’s that feel to you there, how you like if it I do this, or this, or this? What if I do this here with my tongue? What if I do that there with my finger? He wanted to learn everything all at once. I know I taught him everything I knew at the time—and he damn near wore me out with all his learning and practicing.

He liked to talk too—I mean while we were at it. And laugh. And make me laugh. I remember how, right after one of the first few times we did it, he raised up on his hands and knees and looked at me like he was about to say something really serious, then said, “You know what, Miss Hannie? I believe a man could learn to enjoy this sort of thing.” He tickled me with silly jokes about bucking broncos and saddle sores and God-knows-what-all. He was fun. And he was really and truly nice. He talked so sweet and kissed so soft and stroked my hair so gentle. But best of all—the thing about him I’ll always remember, the thing that made me think I was in love with him at the time—was that he kept right on treating me with respect in public. He’d call me Miss Hannie whenever we met in front of other people. He always tipped his hat to me. The fact is, he was a gentleman. I guess his momma wouldn’t have approved of me in a million years, but I surely do approve of the way she raised him.

When he gave up teaching to join his crazy cousin Simp Dixon in the cattle trade, he went to live out at Jim Newman’s cow camp and only came to Pisga now and then. Once in a while I’d see him in town, usually in the company of Simp and other rough characters like Frank Polk. Whenever he saw me, he’d say hello and smile sweetly, but that was all. He never whispered in my ear anymore to meet him out by the lake late at night. I heard that him and his friends were taking their pleasures with the painted cats in Jennie Ann’s sporting house. For a while I pined for him so hard I thought my heart would fall to pieces—but I swore I’d never pine for a man again and I never have.

I got out of Pisga with a fella named Pierson who came to town one day with his two girls in a blazing-red covered wagon and gave me a wink while he hawked patent medicine to the crowd. Charlie Leamus, one of the boys I’d fooled with, told me Pierson was really a whoreman and would be peddling the girls in the wagon after dark, out at Jackson’s Hollow, a mile or so out of town. That night I snuck out of the house and walked on out there and hid in the bushes until the last of the men who’d been standing in line had gone in the wagon and done his business and left. Then I went up to Pierson as he was tying everything down tight and had a talk with him. And when they rolled away from Pisga before sunup, I went too.

I worked my way north with them and then went on my own when Pierson cheated me once too often. I ended up in a house in Abilene, Kansas, the wildest town I ever worked. The first gunfight I ever saw was right in the middle of Texas Street—two drunk cowboys who missed each other six shots each from twenty feet apart. They busted windows and killed a horse and hit a dog, but missed each other every time—and then while one was busy reloading cap and ball, the other pulled out an extra pistol and walked up to him and shot him square in the face from about two feet away.

I saw a dozen fistfights a night. I saw two men cut each other up with knives till they both fell down from the loss of blood and died with faces white as powder. I saw a madam named Stella Raye shoot a man in the ear with a derringer for cutting a nipple off one of her girls. The girl wasn’t too bright and had laughed at the hardass because he was too drunk to get it up. Funny thing is, after that she got to be one of the most popular girls in the house. Everybody wanted to fuck the girl with only one nipple. Oh, hell, the things I saw back then, the things I learned.

But the thing I’ll always remember best about Abilene is the time Wild Bill came up to the rooms and right there with him was none other than Johnny, who I’d thought I’d never in my life see again. Ain’t life a damn wonder!

Simp Dixon had been cowboying for me off and on for a couple of years when he came into the Tall Hat Saloon one day with this young lean honker at his side and they bellied up next to me at the bar. This was in the spring of ’69. He laid that damn Sharps of his on the bar and said, “Hey, Jim, this here’s my cousin Wes Hardin. Wants to be a cowhand. Reckon we can make him one?”

I was running a cow camp for Luke Matthews a few miles west of Pisga in those days. Luke was a big drover out of San Antonio. Every year, toward the end of spring, he’d start driving cattle north along the Chisholm, a new herd every few weeks, bringing them up by way of our camp. It was my job to have more cows ready to add to every herd he sent by. Early in the spring, when there was still frost in the mornings, I’d already have a crew out popping the brush for wild cows and mavericks. We’d bring them back to camp, burn them with Luke’s Bar-M, cut them, and herd them up in the grassland near the trail, ready to join the next big herd.

I always hired Simp on because he always asked for the job and I wasn’t about to tell him no. The man was crazy. He’d killed a dozen or so Yankee soldiers by then and carried their scalps strung on his saddle horn. Made me queasy just to look at them. I touched a scalp at a tent show one time and had the night sweats for two days after. Anytime Simp was in my camp—hell, anytime he was near me—I was always half expecting a battalion of bluebellies to come charging out of nowhere with their guns blazing, shooting at us all and sorting out their mistakes later. And now here he was with his cousin Wes, who I’d heard was wanted by the Yankee army too.

We had a few drinks and talked things over. It so happened I was short a man, and Wes did seem serious to learn the trade, so I said I’d try him on. And that’s how I came to know Wes Hardin, and how he came to be a cowboy.

He made a damn good one. Took to it like a frog to a pond. He could ride as good as any white man I ever saw who wasn’t a bronc buster by trade—and I know about bronc busters because we’d sometimes break horses for Luke’s remudas. Whenever Luke sent word that he was going to be needing extra mounts, I’d buy some wild ponies from a mustanger I knew and hire Terry Threefingers out of Hillsboro to saddle-break them. Luke paid well for those horses, and I always turned a nice profit on them. Terry was the only one I paid to break the ponies, but there were always a few wildhairs in the crew who wanted to try their hand at it too, just for the fun of it.

You have to be a lot tough and at least a little loco to try to bust a mustang, and Wes was both. The first one he tried to bust throwed him every which way—including smack into the corral rails and even all the way over them. Christ Almighty, that boy took a thumping. He got knocked cold on one try and Terry Threefingers had to souse him with a bucket of water to bring him around. The rest of the boys gathered at the corral and ribbed him plenty about