from a Taylor pen. Fred put up a good fight and cut Creek across the ribs with his Bowie before Creek shot him in the knee and took the vinegar out of him. Then Creek tied him up, slashed his belly open with the Bowie, and threw him in the hog pen. The pigs rooted in Fred’s guts while he screamed to high heaven and Old Creek laughed to see him getting gobbled up alive.
Old Creek was like that. He taught all his sons and grandsons to honor the family code: “Whosoever sheds Taylor blood shall by Taylor hand shed his.”
When the War came, everybody went off to fight the Yankees—but the Taylors brought the War back to DeWitt County with them. Appomattox didn’t mean jackshit to them. They refused to knuckle under to Yankee military law and kept on killing bluebellies every chance they got. Pitkin Taylor was now the head of a family of hard cases that included his sons Jim and Billy and his nephews Buck and Scrap. They were joined by friends and kin from all over the Sandies who were still as much Johnny Reb as ever. One Yankee patrol after another was sent into the Sandies to bust them up, but the Taylors bested them every time. They knew every rock and tree in the region and ran the Yanks in circles. They made fools or dead men of them all.
The Yank generals in charge of Texas got in a hellish fury with the Taylors, so they authorized a band of fifty hired guns called the Regulators to bring the whole Taylor bunch to heel. The Regulators didn’t have any trouble recruiting Bill Sutton, who knew the Sandies as well as the Taylors did. Sutton hated Yankees, of course, but he hated Taylors more. He signed on so many friends that the Regulators came to be known as the Sutton Party, even though Sutton wasn’t their leader. That was Jack Helm.
When the Yankee troopers finally left Texas, the Sutton-Taylor war was going on worse than ever—but Governor Davis had formed the State Police, and Jack Helm became a captain in it. He quickly got to be the most hated State Policeman of them all, which is saying something. He recruited a lot of other policemen into the Sutton Party, and the band grew to nearly two hundred strong. Besides Sutton, Helm’s lieutenants were Jim Cox and Joe Tom-linson.
The best way to describe Jack Helm is to tell about the Kelly brothers, Will and Henry. They were a pair of likable wildhairs who’d both married daughters of Pitkin Taylor. There wasn’t any question about whose side they were on in the feud, but neither one had ever killed a Sutton man, I know that for a fact. Anyhow, one day Jack Helm showed up at their homes with a troop of State Police and arrested them for having shot out the lights of a traveling show where they’d been drunk a couple of nights before. It seemed an awful small matter to call for the State Police. Everybody figured it was just one more of Jack Helm’s ways to irritate the Taylors. So Will and Henry let themselves be cuffed and taken away to the courthouse in Cuero, where they figured they’d pay a fine and then be let go. But they never made it to Cuero. Once Helm got them way out in the open prairie, he shot them both in cold blood.
The Kellys’ mother and Henry Kelly’s wife had followed the troop at a distance in a wagon and witnessed the murders with their own eyes. They filed charges at the State Police headquarters in Austin. It wasn’t the first time Jack Helm was accused of shooting prisoners, but it was the first time he was brought to trial for it. In court he said the Kelly women were lying. He swore he’d shot the Kelly boys because they’d tried to escape. Ten State Policemen backed up his story and he was acquitted in less than an hour. But the State Police had had enough of his maverick ways and bad publicity, and they fired him off the force.
Pitkin Taylor was at the trial. When Helm was acquitted, Pitkin had to be restrained from attacking him. He cussed Helm and swore he’d kill him for making widows of his two daughters. “There’s no place you can hide I won’t find you, whoreson bastard!” Pitkin shouted. Helm just stared at him with those cold eyes and spit at Pitkin’s feet.
Next thing we knew, he was sheriff of DeWitt County—which didn’t mean a damn to Pitkin. “I don’t care what badge he’s wearing or how many guns he’s got under him,” he said. “One of these days when he’s least expecting it, there I’ll be with my double-barrel in his face—and boom!”
One of these days wasn’t soon enough. A week later Pitkin’s wife woke him in the middle of the night, complaining that their milk cow had got loose and was tromping out in the high brush back of the house. She could hear its bell clanking. Pitkin grumbled and pulled on his boots and went out to put the animal back in its pen. It was a cloudy night and hard to see. Cussing loud enough for his wife to hear him from the door, he followed the sound of the bell toward the edge of the woods. Suddenly the brush was blasting bright with gunfire and Pitkin was spinning and jerking every which way and then fell. Pitkin’s wife didn’t hear herself screaming till the shooting finally stopped. The ambushers yahooed and flung the cow bell against the front of the house. “Death to all Taylors!” they hollered, and whooped off into the woods. Mrs. Taylor didn’t get a look at any of them, but there wasn’t any question they were Sutton men.
Even though they’d put sixteen rounds in Pitkin, they didn’t kill him, not right away. He was tough as a longhorn bull and refused to give up the ghost for nearly two months. He lay in bed all that time, seeping blood and pus from just about every pore, and slowly turned into a gasping yellow skeleton. He finally whispered to his wife one night, “To hell with it,” and died.
If anybody’d had doubts about who his killers were, they didn’t after the funeral. He was buried in the Taylors’ big family graveyard overlooking the Guadalupe River. The preacher was in the middle of the eulogy when a bunch of riders showed up on the opposite bank. It was Bill Sutton and his boys. They cussed us and laughed and said the worms that fed on Pitkin were like to die of poisoning. “You there, Miz Taylor!” Bill Sutton called over. “If you’d like a fair replacement for Pit, I got a mean-tempered, high-smelling old hog I’d be willing to sell you cheap!” The veins in Jim Taylor’s forehead looked about to pop. His brother Billy grabbed him before he could pull his gun. “This ain’t the time or place, Jim,” he said. “We got Ma here. We got women and young ones.” Sutton and his riders yeehawed awhile longer, fired in the air a few times, then rode off laughing. The Widow Taylor looked about to go insane. “I swear to you, Ma,” Jim said, “I swear to you I’ll water Daddy’s grave with Bill Sutton’s blood.”
A few days later Jim was drinking with friends in a Cuero saloon when somebody told him Sutton was playing billiards in Foster’s down the street. Sutton hardly ever showed his face in town anymore, so the opportunity was too good for Jim to pass up. But he’d been drinking, like I said, and he was a natural-born hothead, and so his excitement got the better of him. Instead of sneaking up quiet and getting the edge on Sutton, Jim and his friends charged into Foster’s cussing a blue streak and shooting wild. One of Sutton’s men was killed and one wounded badly. One of Jim’s friends got shot in the balls. Sutton got his left thumb blown off but escaped through the back door.
All the Sandies was now one big battleground. Every man went armed and ready, walked careful and spoke low—even strangers passing through. Newspapers all over Texas condemned the violence in Gonzales and DeWitt and cautioned citizens to stay away from the region until such time as law and order was restored to it.
That is how things stood at the time I met Wes Hardin. Like everybody else in the Sandies, I knew he’d been living on the Duderstadt property—him and his pretty wife Jane—ever since he broke jail on Gonzales. And like everybody else, I couldn’t help wondering which side of the Taylor-Sutton war he leaned toward. Jim Taylor was especially interested in finding out. “With him on our side, him and the Clementses,” Jim said, “Sutton’s two hundred men wouldn’t look like near so many.” I’d met Manning Clements at a cattle auction the year before and had taken a drink with him in Gonzales a time or two since then—so Jim sent me out to his ranch on Elm Creek to sound him out about siding with the Taylor Party.
Manning was polite as a man can be about saying no. He said he sympathized with the Taylors and had much admired them for the proud way they’d stood up to bluebelly law and against the State Police. “And everything I’ve heard about Bill Sutton,” he said, “has made me want to spit. And Jack Helm, well, that sorry son of a bitch best give me wide passage. “ Just the same, he was sorry but he didn’t want to get involved in the feud: “The plain and simple of it is, it ain’t my fight. I’ve got my own family to look out for and my cattle business to tend. As long as neither party harms me or mine, I got no cause to side with one or the other.” I said I supposed his cousin Wes felt the same way. He said he couldn’t speak for Wes, but he and Jane were coming to visit that night, and if I’d stay to supper I could ask him myself.
Wes seemed as glad to make my acquaintance as I was to make his. They’d brought their newborn baby daughter with them. They’d named her Mary Elizabeth but called her Molly, and Wes showed her off as proud as any new poppa. Then he and Manning and I sat in the parlor with whiskey and cigars, and Manning didn’t beat around the bush in telling him there was something I wanted to know. So I went ahead and asked. Wes studied my face real close for a minute, then gave me pretty much the same reasons Manning had for staying out of it. “You just met those two darlings of mine,” he said. “What sort of husband and daddy would I be if I made one a widow and the other an orphan by fighting somebody I got nothing against personally?”
