The Pistoleer: A Novel of John Wesley Hardin

rest until they’d evened the score with every policeman on the detail. Or maybe just because the detail was under the command of Captain Frank Williams, who was said to be one of the few honest men in the Davis police. Whatever the reason, it’s a fact they delivered him alive to the Gonzales County jail.

Oh, he was a smart pup, that Hardin! Surrendering to Dick had been just plain foxy. He’d been bad wounded and had half the lawmen in Texas hunting for him. He needed doctoring and nourishment and time to heal up without fear of the law sneaking up on him. He got all that when he surrendered to Dick— and he got half of his own reward. And he got transferred to a jail he knew he’d be able to practically walk right out of. Like I say—smart.

And I’m glad he was. Let me tell you, I got to know Wes Hardin fairly well in the time we’d had him in Rusk, and I say he was a pretty good old boy who wasn’t guilty of a thing except defending himself and refusing to be dogwhipped by a bunch of damn Yankees or Davis’s crooked police.

They had him shackled to his horse and chained hand and foot, and two of them held shotguns at his back as they made their way through the crowd toward the Gonzales jailhouse. The people were cheering Wes and yelling for him to don’t worry, they’d have him out of that jail quick enough. They cussed that party of policemen up and down for the low bastards they were—them and all State Policemen—and that son of a bitch Governor Davis too. Wes wasn’t nothing but a hero to them. I know how they felt. He’d killed the worst Nigra police bully in the county and scared the rest of the black sons of bitches so bad they’d pretty much let Gonzales alone ever since.

Captain Williams signed him over to Sheriff W. E. Jones while Pancho the blacksmith cut the irons off him in the cell. “We might just as well hand him over to all his friends outside as leave him in this jail,” Williams said. W.E. tried to look offended by that remark. “We do our duty here, Captain,” W.E. said, “with the same devotion as you state boys. I’m a loyal Davis appointee myself, I’ll have you know.”

Part of that was true: W.E. was a Davis appointee, all right, but he always did have a somewhat lenient attitude about loyalty—and sometimes he’d lean to one side of it and sometimes he’d lean to its other, depending on which side would get him the most votes come election time. He wasn’t nothing but a natural-born politician.

The police detail no sooner left town than Manning Clements showed up. Him and W.E. had a quiet chat in the corner of the office, then came back to Wes’s cell where I was on guard. W.E. took me aside and said he wanted me to be sure to respect the prisoners privacy during his personal visits. He gave me a big wink and a slap on the shoulder and then went off to home to have supper. I dragged my chair well away from the cell so Wes and Manning could talk in private, and I didn’t do a thing to interfere with their visit, not even when Manning passed Wes a long hacksaw blade and both of them grinned over at me.

Every few days the district State Police patrol would come by to check on the prisoners we were holding for them until they got official orders to take them someplace else. The day after Wes was brought in they stopped by. The patrol leader was a nasty little runt of a redhead sergeant named Ward Wilcox, and he tried his best to rile Wes good. “I’m gonna be right in the front row and laughing like hell when they drop you through the door, “ he told him. “I’m gonna slap my leg laughing at the sight of your tongue sticking way out and your face turning all black and your eyes popping out of your head. Your legs’ll kick every which way and you’re gonna shit your pants! I’m gonna laugh and laugh at you, you lowlife son of a bitch.”

Wes leaned against the wall with his arms folded and smiled at him, but I could see the muscle working under his jaw, and his eyes were as hard-looking as the bars in front of him. He never said anything back until just as Wilcox was starting to leave, and then he said, “You best start sleeping with one eye open, you short pile of shit.” I think it was the way he said it as much as what he said that scorched Wilcox’s ass.

“What?” Wilcox said. “What did you say to me, you shit-eating son of a whore?” But Wes didn’t say another word. He just leaned on the wall and smiled at him. Wilcox cussed him for a solid minute straight, with the veins bulging in his neck and face nearly purple. You could see he wasn’t just mad, he was scared. I don’t think I’ve ever seen another man so scared by a threat. It’s a terrible thing to be that afraid, and the proof of it came two days later when the patrol returned to town and found out Wes had broken jail.

Wilcox went white as milk when W.E. gave him the news. He accused W.E. of conspiring in the prisoner’s escape, but of course W.E. could defend himself just fine against any such notion. He even wrote a letter to the State Police headquarters in Austin explaining how on the late night of October 10, a number of persons unknown had tied several lassos to the window bars of the prisoner’s cell and then used the force of their horses to rip the bars right out of the wall.

The bars surely did get pulled out of the wall—but it only took Manning Clements one small tug with both hands to do it because Wes had already just about sawed through them. His pals had made a real fine show of jailbreaking: hooting and howling and shooting up a storm—but only up in the air so as not to take any chance of hitting somebody by accident. They took the sawed-out section of window bars with them, but anybody looking close at the cell window the next morning might of been amazed to see just how smooth all the bars had broke off—so smooth a man with a saw couldn’t have done it better. Nobody but us saw that, though, because W.E. had his brother-in-law Lyle, a mason by trade, out to the jail just after sunup to put a new set of bars in the window.

Anyhow, W.E. was in the clear about the jailbreak, but Sergeant Ward Wilcox of the State Police was never the same again. The sorry bastard was terrified John Wesley Hardin would try to even the score for the tormenting things he’d said to him. The story goes that he couldn’t sleep at home, he was so worried about Wes bushwhacking him in his bed in the dead of night. His wife and two young sons volunteered to stay awake and keep watch so he could sleep, but he didn’t trust them not to doze off after he did. He started spending his nights in the police bunkhouse, but he’d have bad dreams about Wes sneaking up on him and he’d wake up screaming in the middle of the night. After a few nights of being woke up that way, the other policemen kicked him out. The lack of sleep on top of his fear made him so jumpy he started flinching and throwing up his carbine at every sudden sound. One night he was passing by an alleyway and heard a noise in the shadows and quick fired four rounds into a tethered horse before he knew what he was shooting at. The police didn’t want him shooting his own men, so they fired him.

He took his family to a cabin deep in the woods and fired warning shots at anybody who rode too near to it. He would holler for them to tell Hardin he was ready for him, by God. One day his wife showed up at her daddy’s house with one of the young ones in tow, all hysterical and half out of her mind with grief. She told a terrible tale of Wilcox waking up in the middle of the night and going crazy with fright when he saw a shadow crossing the room. Thinking it was Hardin come to kill him, he grabbed up his gun and fired. It was his older boy Robert, walking in his sleep as he had recently begun to do, and Wilcox blew his brains all over the cabin wall. He ran out into the black woods, firing his pistol and screaming, “Come out and fight like a man, you son of a bitch! I’m right here! I’m right here!” While he was ranting in the forest, his wife and the younger boy slipped off and made their way to the trace and walked all night and day to get to town. Mrs. Wilcox’s daddy came into town and told the story to the sheriff, and then W.E. and me went out to the cabin to arrest Wilcox.

We found him hung from the center beam of the ceiling. His face was all black and his tongue stuck out and his eyes bugged from his head. He’d shit his pants and the stink was awful. There was a note pinned to his shirt saying, “try geting me now harden.”

The story goes that a few months later when he was told Ward Wilcox of the State Police had gone crazy and hung himself for fear of being killed by him, Wes said, “Ward who?”

Even my grandpa, who’d lived in the Sandies all his life, wasn’t rightly sure how the Sutton-Taylor Feud began. There’d been bad blood between the clans for as long as anybody could remember. But whyever the bloodletting got started, it’s a fact it got worse than ever when Creek Taylor killed Fred Sutton. Creek was head of the Taylors at the time, the old granddaddy, and one day he caught Fred trying to steal a young hog