The Pistoleer: A Novel of John Wesley Hardin

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.

They 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.

But he was both determined and resourceful. He made a secret camp in the woods just a few miles from Round Rock, and every evening Joseph took a different and roundabout route to it, lest he be followed by agents of the damnable State Police—or worse, by one or more members of the legions of bounty men in pursuit of the reward for John Wesley’s capture. While John Wesley prepared their supper, Joseph summarized the day’s lecture for him. Later, after Joseph departed for home, John Wesley would study by firelight deep into the night. No student of mine ever matriculated under more difficult conditions than did John Wesley during the apprehensive weeks that followed. I was immensely pleased when they both passed their examinations at the end of the term and earned their diplomas.

And yet … character is fate, sayeth Heraclitus.

John Wesley Hardin was a highly intelligent young man of good education and sound moral upbringing. It could hardly have been otherwise with a father like the Reverend James Hardin and a mother like Mary Elizabeth Dixon. And yet … there is something in a man’s soul that has no tie whatever to the influence of bloodkin or books, yet is the very essence of his nature. I herewith embolden to suggest that, for John Wesley, that essence manifested itself as a lack of clear perception of The Good, of a sense of worthy endeavor. He was possessed of many superlatives of mind and spirit, and would certainly have achieved greatness—of that I am entirely convinced—had not, for whatever unfathomable reason, the darker angels of his nature held sway. That sway constituted nothing less than a tragic flaw.

Tragic, yes. As a lifelong student of the works of Euripedes, Seneca, the Glorious Bard—all the great tragedists of our heritage—I am well versed in the nature and design of tragedy, and “tragic” defined his character … and thereby sealed his fate. Alas.

The jail in Marshall was a big log cabin with a cell of iron bars set in the center of it like a cage. I don’t recollect too many jailhouses in East Texas as serious as that one. Me and my brother Judson got shut