The Pistoleer: A Novel of John Wesley Hardin

in it for no reason at all except we was strangers in town. We’d only stopped to warm our innards with a touch or two of whiskey in a saloon, for it were a bitter cold winter’s day.

Now I ain’t saying we didn’t end up having more than a couple and getting a little brain-stung. And I ain’t saying we didn’t have words with a few of the local jaspers at the bar after one of them passed an unkind remark about the way South Texans laugh. “Down South Texas you never know if you’re hearing a feller laughing or a mule with a cob up its ass” is exactly how the jasper put it. Now it so happens me and Judson hail from South Texas, as they damn well heard us tell the perfessor behind the bar. It also happens to be a fact I had just got through laughing at a joke Judson’d told me about a traveling preacher and the daughter of a dumbshit East Texas sawyer.

So I ain’t saying things didn’t get a little out of hand when Judson said real loud that East Texas probably had the most experts in the world when it came to knowing about cobs in a mule’s ass. I ain’t saying there wasn’t some glasses and chairs got busted, and I ain’t saying one of the local jaspers didn’t get his arm broke and another didn’t lose most of his top teeth and still another didn’t lose an eye to the gouging nail on Judson’s thumb. I ain’t saying none of them things didn’t happen.

But I will say that the damage we did them hardly compares to what them boys did to us. They stomped up and down on Judson and busted his cheekbone and so many of his ribs he couldn’t hardly draw a painless breath for the next few weeks. Some son of a bitch bit a piece out of his right ear. They busted most the fingers on both his hands so he couldn’t even wipe his ass for more’n a month. And me! You think my nose always set way over to the side like this? Think I was born with this scar across my lip? I was a good-looking fella till that sorry night. I got hit so hard on the head with a damn spittoon I still get spells of ringing in my skull. I got a big front tooth knocked out, and some one of them bastards kicked me in the balls so hard I thought sure they’d be stuck in my throat forever. Me and Judson, we took a tromping.

Then along comes the sheriff and puts the arm on us. Me and Judson, we’re the ones on the bottom of the damn pile, we’re the ones getting the worst of it, and he arrests us for being drunk and disorderly. That’s how it is when you’re the stranger in town. A local fella can shoot you for no reason whatever and you’re like to get charged with disturbing the peace for hollering too loud with the pain—or with dirtying the floor by bleeding on it. Hell, they’re like to charge you with trying to steal the bullet the son of a bitch put in your hide.

Anyhow, that’s how me and Judson come to be in the Marshall jail that night they brung in Hardin: we were in for no reason a-tall except being the strangers in town.

The sheriff wasn’t really a bad sort, as sheriffs go. He didn’t rob us of our money and horses like lots of sheriffs I could name you. They called him Cookie because he kept his coat pockets full of gingersnaps to munch on. Anyhow, like I said, it was colder than a witch’s tit out, and wasn’t much warmer in the jail. There was a potbelly stove over by a desk in the corner, and the sheriff and his deputy, a jasper called Shithead because that’s exactly what he was, sat right next to it, drinking coffee with bites of whiskey in it. They kept the stove red-hot but it didn’t carry a lick of warmth over to the cell, where we could see our breath. I’d begun to sober up some by that evening and I don’t mind saying I wasn’t feeling any too fine. Judson was laid out cold on one of the bunks and didn’t come to until the next morning, so he missed the whole thing with Hardin.

There was another jasper in the cell with us, a local by the name of Lowell. He said he’d had a bad set-to with his wife, who was prone to go loco at the full moon. She’d gone for him with a carving knife and he’d been obliged to shoot her in the foot to slow her down enough to make his escape. Sheriff Cookie was letting him spend the next few nights in the hoosegow till his wife regained her wits with the waning of the moon. “If I’d knew it was gonna turn so cold,” he said, “I’d of brung my buffalo coat. But hell, a man can’t plan for everything.”

They brung in Hardin early that evening. The Longview sheriff and a deputy brung him over to be held for the State Police in a stronger jail than they had in Longview. The sheriff had spotted him in a restaurant and got the drop on him. The funny thing is, he thought Hardin was somebody named Garlits, who he had a paper on for killing a jasper in Waco. He read the papers out loud to Sheriff Cookie, and I have to admit the description fit Hardin like a tailor-made suit.

Hardin, however, was mighty put out. He insisted they had the wrong man, that his name was Josephson and he was a horse dealer from Shreveport. He sure looked the part in his good quality range clothes and expensive- looking boots. “There must be two dozen fellers within twenty miles fit that description,” he said. If I hadn’t known better, I’d of believed him, he was that convincing.

Sheriff Cookie looked inclined to believe him too, but Hardin was the Longview sheriff’s prisoner, and Cookie told him he was sorry but he’d have to hold him for the State Police. The Longview sheriff had already notified the nearest State Police station that Garlits would be waiting for them in the Marshall jail, and they’d wired back that a team was on its way to take him into custody.

I knew it was Hardin because I’d seen him once before, about two months earlier, in a gambling saloon in Williamson County. Me and Judson had stopped in to cut our thirst and wondered why the place was so crowded and excited. Up at the bar I asked a one-armed jasper in a Confederate cavalry jacket what the hullabaloo was about, and he said, “It ain’t nothing but John Wesley Hardin his ownself sitting there behind you, mister.”

He was at a poker table not ten feet from us, pulling in a big pot, and everybody was talking to him at once and offering him drinks from their bottles. He had his hat pushed back on his head and was smiling big but not saying much. He looked damn well pleased.

“Hell, he don’t look so all-fired fearsome to me,” Judson said. That’s how Judson was, always letting his mouth run ahead of his good sense.

“Is that so?” the old rebel says, looking at Jud like he was some kind of softbrain. “You prob’ly right. Hell, all he’s done is kill more bluebellies than you got hair on your balls. Shit! What you done, hard case?” He moved off down the crowded bar like he couldn’t stand the smell of us. Judson watched him for a minute, wondering if he ought take things personally, then just said, “That ole boy best get control of what’s eating on him before it eats more of him than his damn arm.”

I wasn’t about to say nothing to Sheriff Cookie about who Hardin really was. The law had its own business to tend to and I had mine. Momma didn’t raise no snitches.

Sheriff Cookie shut him in with us and told Shithead to go get our suppers. Then him and the two Longview badges went off to get something to eat. Before Shithead left to fetch our grub, Hardin gave him a double eagle to buy a bottle and some tobacco for everybody in the cell.

So there we were, me and John Wesley Hardin, staring each other in the face in that cold iron cell. He looks at me real close and I felt like he was reading my mind just as easy as big letters on a barn wall. “You think you know me?” he says. I say no, I sure don’t. “You reckon I’m this fella Garlits?” he says. I say, “No, I reckon your name’s Josephson, like you said.” He smiles and claps me on the shoulder. He looks at me close again, then looks over at Judson, then says, “Damn, bubba, you boys look like you been in a hatchet fight and everybody had a hatchet but you two.”

Just then, Lowell shifts around on the mattress he’s sitting on and Hardin fixes on him like a hawk spotting a rabbit. “Hey now,” he says in a low voice, “if that ain’t a pistola you got under your jacket, mister, I’m a three- legged jackass.”

And be damn if Lowell didn’t have a fully loaded .44 hogleg in his belt under his leather jacket. Sheriff Cookie never even thought to ask him if he had a gun on him—most likely because he wasn’t a real prisoner, and because when Cookie put him in the cell, there wasn’t anybody else in it.

He had a plan laid out in less than a minute. When Shithead brought our suppers to us, Hardin would throw down on him with the pistol and tell him to unlock the cell. We’d tie and gag him, lock him in, and make our getaway before Sheriff Cookie and the others got back. He laid it all out quick and cool, like it was the sort of thing a man might have to deal with every day.

“Whoa, boy,” Lowell said, looking rattled. “I ain’t having a thing to do with any of that. Hell, I escaped into here to get away from my moonstruck wife.”

Hardin looked at him like Lowell was the one moonstruck. Then he looks at me, “What about you, bubba?”

All I could think to do was point to Judson and say I couldn’t leave my brother behind.

“Well, hell,” Hardin says, “carry him.”

That’s how simple he made it all seem. And that’s the exact moment I knew just how almighty different his