The Pistoleer: A Novel of John Wesley Hardin

The mob had halted in a clearing and was swarming before a tall spreading oak—howling, laughing, having a revel, their faces devilish with murderous glee. At the fringe of the crowd I spotted a local townsman. “The law!” I shouted at him. “Where’s the damn law?” He stared at me as if I were speaking Chinese. In the flickering light of the torches, he looked stricken and ghostly, as stunned by his helplessness as I was by mine to do anything but bear witness to the horror taking place.

The torchfires brightly lighted the underbranches of the tree. A noose sailed over a lower limb, and then another next to it. A third flew over a separate branch. The nooses danced macabrely as they were lowered to eager hands.

A great animal howl went up as Tom and Bud Dixon suddenly ascended into the mob’s full view—hanging side by side and kicking their bare feet crazily. Their faces were horrifying above the crushing nooses. The mob cheered wildly, laughed, and threw stones at the dying men.

A moment later they hanged Joe from the other branch and the cheering was greater yet, the laughter louder at his distorted face and his pale feet flailing the empty air under him. There were shrill whistles and piercing rebel yells, and he too was stoned as he died. A woman screamed—whether in anguish or celebration I could not say— and a child laughed in firelit delight from his perch on the shoulders of a grinning man.

In the morning a Ranger named Dick Wade told me the Hardin family women were wailing with such grief in Joe Hardin’s house it broke his heart to hear them. Preacher Hardin had asked if the report of the lynching was true, and Wade had confirmed the terrible truth. At dawn he had been to the site of the murders and seen for himself the three dead men dangling in the cold mist. “The old Preacher cried like a child when I told him,” Wade said. “The only good news I could give him was that his friend Matt Fleming and two of his niggermen took down the bodies after sunup and gave them a proper burial.”

Sheriff John had been out of town at the time of the lynchings. He got back late the next day. When I stopped in to see him that evening he was red-eyed with drink and despair. Bill Stones had come to him on the previous morning and told him Alec Barrickman and Ham Anderson had been hiding on his ranch out by Bucksnort Creek for the past two days after having separated from Hardin and Taylor. Stones said he’d let them stay at his place because they’d once helped him round up some loose calves in the thicket and seemed like nice fellas. But when he found out it was Captain Bill Waller looking for them, he got scared for his own skin. If Barrickman and Anderson were found on his place, Captain Bill might think he was part of the Hardin Gang too. So he’d come to Sheriff John to give them away.

Sheriff John went out after them with a posse of eight men, including Stones. They reached the ranch late that night and sneaked up to within twenty yards of the lean-to set against the rear of the house, where Ham and Alec were sleeping. Sheriff John spread the posse in a wide half circle around the back of the house in case Alec and Ham tried to run for it. He had given strict orders not to shoot unless the fugitives fired first—but before he could halloo Ham and Alec and tell them they were under arrest, somebody in the posse squeezed off a shot and ignited a blazing fusillade of rifle fire that went on for a good thirty seconds before John was finally able to make them desist. It was too late to do Ham and Alec any good. They found them lying dead on the floor, still wrapped in their blankets, shot all to bloody hell.

“None of them would say who started the shooting,” John said, “but I know it was that Stones bastard. He was scared they’d kill him one day for turning them in.” He took a big pull from the bottle. “Then I get back here,” he said, “and find there was a hell of a necktie party while I was gone.” Frank Wilson and a handful of Rangers had been on guard in the courthouse, but they all claimed the mob had taken them by surprise and forced them to give over the prisoners. They swore they didn’t recognize any of the vigilantes. All the other Rangers had been out on patrol with Captain Bill. “Ain’t that something,” Sheriff John said, staring at me with a face as sick as sin. “Well hell, Holden,” he said, and toasted me with the bottle. “Fuck ’em all!”

And now Comanche knew true fear. The lynchers had mostly been Brown County men, but the murders had taken place in Comanche, and the good citizens reasoned that Wesley would therefore take the worst of his revenge on them. Black rumors flew through town like frightened bats. They said he would kill twenty men for each of his two cousins, and thirty to get even for Joe. He would fill Comanche’s streets with blood to his stirrups. He would burn the town to the ground and scatter the ashes. Women kept to their houses and prayed for deliverance from the wrath of John Wesley Hardin. Children slept under their beds and woke shrieking in the night. For weeks a dozen armed guards walked the town square every night and kept great fires burning at every street corner, the better to see his terrifying specter when he came to murder the good people in their beds.

Fancy Frank and me were with a pair of girls at his cabin in the cedar brakes just north of Austin, and this buck-ass nekkid thing called Sandra Jean grabs up the whiskey bottle and runs out with it, laughing like a drunk redskin, which she partly was—redskin I mean; she was way more than partly drunk. Anyhow, I go out after her—twanger and balls flapping and bouncing as I chase her around back of the house—and wham, she runs smack into this tall rascal standing there in the shadows and falls on her ass. He throws down on me with a big Colt which I could see just fine in the moonlight, and I thought, Shit! Bandits! But no, the fella says “Frank Taylor?” and I say “Nosir, name’s Yarrow. Frank’s inside.” He looks down at Sandra Jean—who’s looking up at him with her little titties shining in the light of the moon and her big bush dark as sin twixt her legs—and he says with a grin, “Looks like a nice party.” It’s the sort of remark don’t need an answer, but I said, “Yeah, I guess.” You don’t know what it feels like to be nekkid till you’re nekkid in the out-of-doors and somebody fully dressed is holding a gun on you.

Sandra Jean got up and brushed her ass off with one hand while she held the other over her bush like some shy little schoolgirl instead of the free-and-easy waiter girl she was at Fancy Frank’s saloon in Austin. The girl in the house with Frank was a waiter girl too—Lola, a redhead with nipples you could hang hats on. “If nobody minds,” Sandra Jean says, “I will just retire to the indoors.” She turns on her heel and nearly loses her balance, then gets hold of herself and walks off twitching her pretty ass.

The fella says, “Listen, Yarrow, I got Frank’s cousin Jim here. He’s bad sick and I’m shot.” I’d never met Jim Taylor, but I’d heard all about him from Frank. Like everybody else, I’d heard about how him and his little brother Billy had gunned down Bill Sutton on the steamer Clinton in Indianola. “Might you be …?” I say—and he says, “John Wesley Hardin. Go tell Frank.”

Frank already had his pants on and his hand filled—and damn near shot me when I came through the door. Sandra Jean had told him there was a man with a gun behind the house and he’d thought the same thing I had, that we were being rousted by bandits. I told him who it was and we got dressed fast. Two minutes later Frank was patting the girls on their bottoms as he helped them into the buckboard while I hitched the team. The girls were still only half dressed and mad as wet hens to be getting such a fast shove out of there. Frank pressed some money on them to ease their upset. He gave Lola a kiss so long and a squeeze of her tit, then slapped the horse’s rump and said, “Git!” and the wagon rolled off down the trace toward the Austin road.

We went around back and there was Wes holding two horses. Jim was on one and coughing into a balled bandanna. While Frank and Wes got him in the house, I staked their horses back in the brakes with ours. When I got back, Jim was tucked in bed, looking sick as a dog and sweating with a rank fever. Frank got him to drink some of the juice off the stew wed supped on, then let him drift off to sleep.

He tore up an old shirt to make a bandage for Wes’s wound. We came to find out he’d taken the shot in some bad business him and Jim had got into up in Comanche. His family was still back there, and he was worried about how they were making out. He figured he’d lie low for a few days to let things cool off some, then slip on back and make sure they were all right. Frank told him he was welcome to stay as long as he liked. “Thanks kindly,” Wes said. He had a heavy growth of whiskers and his hair was all wild tangles and his eyes were bloodshot with pain and exhaustion. He fell asleep at the table before he finished eating his stew.

Over the next few days Jim mostly slept and got better. His fever broke and his cough eased up. Wes was doing good too. It was the first chance for his wound to start healing since they’d made their getaway from Comanche more than a week before, and after a few days it was knitting up nicely.

Then Alf and Charlie Day showed up. They were cousins to Jim Taylor and were supposed to be with Doc Brosius and the trail crew Wes had hired to move his herd. When Wes saw them coming out of the brakes, he said, “Oh, hell.”

Alf and Charlie were surprised to find Wes and Jim there, but they didn’t look real happy about it, and pretty