The Pistoleer: A Novel of John Wesley Hardin

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.

Not 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.

All right then, by eleven o’clock the place is packed. The pianola’s plunking one tune after another and the bar’s two deep from end to end. The smoke in the place is thick as Dublin fog. There’s already been a couple of fistfights, but nothing serious and not much broken except one fella’s arm and a beer mug or two. Behind the bar I’m as busy as a one-legged man in an arse-kicking contest.

All of a sudden it seemed the pianola was a good bit louder, and then I see most of the fellas have shut up and are staring hard at some Yank soldiers I never even saw come in—six of them, including a pair of woolies, moving slow and careful through the parting crowd, all of them armed with repeaters, heading for the rear of the room. I glanced at the back door and saw three more blues already there. Jerry and Vernon were staring big-eyed at the Yanks as they closed in on them. Frank had his head down on his pile of money and was singing loudly to the tune on the pianola—“My Darlin’ Clementine.” The Hardin fella was nowhere in sight.

The Yank in charge—a bloody big brute of a sergeant, he was—motioned for Jerry and Vernon to get away from the table, and they bolted like rabbits. The Yanks formed a half circle about Frank with their rifles raised and ready. Now the only sound in the room was the music and Frank’s awful singing. The sergeant gave the table a hell of a kick and some of the money went clattering to the floor. But the kick got Frank’s attention, all right. He looks up, his face all sodden with drink, and stares around at all the carbines pointed at him. “Well now, shit,” he says, and straightens up in his chair—and every one of the Yanks draws back the hammer on his weapon. At the sound of all those cocking rifles, I thought sure the floor would be running with Frank’s blood in the next instant.

But Frank wasn’t so drunk he couldn’t grasp how the thing stood. Any wrong move he made would be his last in the mortal world. Still, you had to hand it to Frank for brass. He says: “I ain’t gonna stand up and fucking salute, if that’s what you’re waiting for.” Looking right up the sergeant’s rifle when he says it.

They took his gun and yanked him to his feet, but they had to hold him up or he’d have fallen on his face, he was so drunk. Out in the street they roped him tight from his shoulders to his waist with his hands bound behind him. The whole while, the crowd’s jeering the bloody Yanks, cursing them for whoresons and bastards and such. The sergeant knows they’re all drunk and getting bolder by the minute, and he’s urging his boys to move fast.

They get him up on his horse at last—but the instant they set off, he tumbles from his saddle and lets out a hell of a yell. He’s shouting his shoulder’s broke. One of the niggers jerks him up to his feet and Frank howls like a banshee and curses him for a black son of a nigger bitch. The nigger grabs him by the hair to tug him over to his horse and Frank spits full in his face. He gets a fist in the mouth for it, and he spits another bloody gob at the nigger in return.

“Enough of this shit!” the sergeant shouts. He clouts Frank on the head with his carbine and takes the fight put of him. But while they’re tying him belly-down over his horse, he pukes on one of them. Didn’t that get a big laugh from the crowd!—and even from some of the Yanks. They left town at a canter, poor Frank bouncing on his belly and letting fly another streak of puke as they went.

As for the Hardin fella, we figured he either saw the blues coming or somebody tipped him and he was able to make his getaway. Nobody was faulting him for deserting Frank, either—not with Frank so damn drunk he couldn’t even walk. A situation like that, it’s every man for himself.

Early next morning, however, when I go to the facility behind the place for my morning ease, who do I find sitting over the hole with his trousers bunched around his shins and his head against the wall, snoring like a frog in that outhouse thick with flies and smelling like a dog that’s been dead a week? Sure it was the Hardin lad. So I gently wake the boy and tell him what happened with Frank and all. And he laughs, he does. Turns out he had come to the facility before the Yanks showed up and passed out in the middle of doing his business. Said it was the first time he’d been saved by a call from Mother Nature.

Anyhow, that’s how the Hardin fella escaped capture by the Yankees in Corsicana in the summer of ’69.

Frank went to prison for a time for killing that shopkeeper, but they say he was wild as ever when he got out. It must have been true. The way I heard it, he got into a poker game down in Limestone County and killed a fella at