Jane was buried near her childhood home of Coon Hollow, and Wesley’s children were taken in by Fred Duderstadt and his family. Except for quite brief letters to the children, Wesley shunned contact with the outside world. He answered no letters—perhaps did not even read them. He would receive no visitors. The guards reported that he simply lay in his bunk and stared at the stone ceiling.
But one cannot grieve forever, after all. One either recovers or goes mad and that’s the end of it. Over the next few months he slowly came back to life. He wrote letters of gratitude to Billy and to me and, I’m sure, to many others who had expressed their condolences and offered to help in his time of deep sorrow. And then he resumed work on his petition for pardon.
He submitted an early draft of the petition to me for critique, and I was most impressed by its clarity and cohesion, as well as by its astute legal references. With but minimum guidance from me, he had crafted a legal instrument of no less quality than those composed by attorneys of long practice. Indeed, it was in some ways superior. Unlike most legal documents, his was informed by a general semantic clarity and ease of style. In November of 1893 he forwarded the completed petition to me and asked that I deliver it personally to the governor, with whom I had by then become warmly acquainted through several audiences on various matters of law and politics.
John Wesley Hardin was released from the Huntsville Penitentiary on February 17, 1894. He was forty years old and had been in prison for fifteen years, four months, and twelve days. One month later, his petition for pardon was granted by Governor Hogg. I forwarded it to Wesley with the following letter:
THE PISTOLEER IN EL PASO
To All to Whom These Presents Shall Come:
In testimony whereof I have hereto signed my name and caused the seal of the State to be affixed at the city of Austin, this 16th day of March, A.D.1894.
J. S. HOGG,
GEO. W. SMITH,
“Readers, you see what drink and passion will do. If you wish to be successful in life, be temperate and control your passions; if you don’t, ruin and death is the inevitable result.”
He stayed at Fred Duderstadt’s place for a while when he first got back. His children had been living there ever since their momma died. Even before they’d moved in with Fred and his family, they’d been neighbors for years and years. For most of their life Fred had been the main man in it, the one to always help them out when they needed helping. Considering that Wes had been in the penitentiary for the last fifteen years, it’s only natural that they saw Fred as more their daddy than they did him. It had to be some awkwardness among them when Wes finally came back to them and said something like, “Hello, children—Daddy’s home!”
By the time he got out of Huntsville, Molly was a full-grown woman of twenty-one and was engaged to marry young Charlie Billings. The talk was that Wes didn’t much approve of the match but couldn’t make Molly back down from it, nor Charlie either. His boy Johnny I knew real well. He was one of Fred’s cowboys, and a danged good one. He rode like he was born to the saddle. I heard that Wes tried to talk both him and Molly into going to study at college in Austin, but they neither one wanted anything to do with college. Little Jane didn’t hardly know him at all, having only been but about a year old when he went to prison. But he was set on them all living together like the family they were. He rented a nice little house in Gonzales—he’d always liked the town and it had always liked him, and he’d decided it was where he wanted to try and make his living as a lawyer. None of his children were happy about the move to town, but he
It wasn’t long before he passed his State Law Examination and had his license to practice. He opened an office, in the Peck & Fly Building across from the courthouse. I met him after church one Sunday. Him and his children attended services regularly, most often with Charlie Billings in their company, since he’d come to town to visit with Molly nearly every week. On this particular Sabbath, Wes was asked by Preacher Kinson if he’d lead the congregation in a prayer, and he’d done it as good as any preacher could. I went up to him after the service and told him so. He invited me to dinner and I gladly accepted, and from then on I had dinner at his house almost every Sunday. We’d sit out on the gallery afterward and have good talks over cigars and some of Molly’s fine coffee. I tell you, if you didn’t already know who he was, you’d never guess that once upon a time he’d been the most feared mankiller in Texas. He was knowledgeable and well mannered, and most always dressed in a clean black suit and tie. It was obvious he enjoyed being the daddy of the family, even though it was sometimes just as clear that, grown as they were, Molly and Johnny and Jane didn’t much care for being treated like children.
One day I asked him to join me for a drink in the Glass Slipper Saloon, but he said, “No, thank you, Cicero, you go on ahead. I don’t associate with John Barleycorn any longer myself.” It might of been true: nobody saw him take a drink the whole nine months he lived in Gonzales. Nor do any gambling either. And far as I know, he didn’t make so much as a single visit to either of the pleasure houses at the edge of town. He said he intended to be an upright citizen and, by God, he was surely a better one than most.
I don’t recall him having but about a dozen cases the whole time he lived in Gonzales, and they were just small matters having to do with contracts and such as that. He had plenty of free time to stop by the jail-house gallery every afternoon to jaw with us—me and Sheriff R. M. Glover and Deputy Bob Coleman and a bunch of regulars who liked to get together to argue politics and tell stories and pass along the latest jokes. Wes fit right in. He told dandy stories and everybody liked him. Naturally, there were lots of things we all would of liked to hear him tell about—like the killings he’d done, and the time he backed down Hickok in Abilene, and what Bill Longley was really like, and what it’d been like in Huntsville all them years, and … oh, hell, a hundred things. But you don’t just
