up and ask a man about such personal things as that. You might hint around the subject a little, but that’s all. If a fella wants to tell a personal thing he will, and if he don’t, well, it’s his right to keep it to himself.
One afternoon, though, he did show us something we’d all been damn curious about. The talk had somehow got around to the old cap-and-ball revolvers which had long since given way to the cartridge loaders. R.M. and Bob and me all carried Peacemakers, and asked Wes what he thought of them. He said they were fine pistols, all right, and owned one himself, but he still believed the old army Colt .44 was the best gun he’d ever used. Then he says, “Ain’t I seen one of those cappers on your gun wall, R.M.?”
R.M. went in his office and got it. Wes checked to see it was unloaded and then twirled that piece as pretty as a pocket watch on a chain. He spun it up in the air and caught it in his left hand and kept it right on twirling. He tossed it over his shoulder and turned around quick and caught it in his right and held down the trigger and fanned the hammer with his left hand so fast all you saw was a blur. He handed the piece back to R.M. with a grin. “They say Bill Longley could fan six rounds that way faster’n you can sneeze.”
I tell you he had some mouths hanging open. Who would of thought a man could handle a gun that way after fifteen years in prison? No question he’d been practicing at home—but
Wes never showed it, but he had to’ve been unhappy about not getting many cases. I don’t think the wolf was at his door, but he might of been hearing it getting close by. Things weren’t going all that well in the family, either. Molly couldn’t stand being separated from Charlie as much as she was and her moping was getting worse by the day. Finally she just up and went back to the Duderstadt ranch. Wes didn’t like that one bit and went out there to retrieve her. But when he got there and they all talked it over, he decided to let her stay at Fred’s. What else could he do? If he’d made her come back to Gonzales, she would of been constantly miserable. More than anything, he wanted the family to be together, but not if it meant making his children unhappy.
With Molly gone, things at home got worse. Little Jane missed her sister and pleaded with Wes to let her go back to Fred’s too. She wanted to be with Molly, she said, she wanted to be with her friends. So Wes let her go too. His boy Johnny didn’t like living in town any more than the girls did, but he was a good and loyal son, and if his daddy wanted him at his side, then that’s where he’d be. The truth is, he was blazing at the bit to go back to cowboying with Fred. Fred would come to town fairly often to visit with him and Wes, and Johnny couldn’t ever get enough of hearing all about how things were going at the ranch. The fact is, Fred missed Johnny as much as Johnny missed him. I know this because Fred used to tell us so when he’d stop by the jailhouse and have a drink with me and R.M. before heading back home. It was a sad situation all around. I couldn’t help thinking how bad Wes must of felt to know his son really preferred to live with Fred than with his daddy. But he did know it, and because Wes Hardin was never a bully nor a selfish man, and because he loved his boy enough to want him to be happy, he finally gave him permission to go back to Fred’s. Johnny never asked to go, mind you. Wes gave the permission on his own. I can still see them riding out of town, Johnny and Fred, with Wes standing in front of the livery and watching him go.
I don’t believe Wes had ever been so alone in his life as he was after Johnny left. Even while he was inside those prison walls, he knew he had somebody waiting for him to get out and come home to, and so he wasn’t alone, not really, not in the way I’m talking about. But now, with Jane dead and buried and his children grown and gone from him, well, I reckon his heart had to been feeling hollow in a way that just can’t be filled by anybody’s consolations. I know what I’m talking about. I lost my wife Martha to the smallpox when I wasn’t but twenty, and not all the friends and kinfolk in the world could fill the hole she left in my heart like an open grave. I guess I tried to drink myself to death. After a while I didn’t feel much of anything; and once you reach that point, you either stop breathing or you start making your way back to the living. All I’m saying is loneliness can be worse than any sickness, and there ain’t a thing that can be done about it except to last it out if you can. That means trying to find something to do with yourself—besides drinking and picking fights, I mean—till you get over it or till you don’t.
What Wes found to do with himself was to get involved in the next election for sheriff. R.M. wasn’t running again, and it looked to be a close race between the two candidates wanting to take his place—Bob Coleman, the Populist Party nominee, and Old W. E. (Bill) Jones, the Democratic candidate, who’d been sheriff once before, back in the ’70s. When Wes found out Old Bill was running, he wrote an article in
Lord, what a ruckus he stirred up! Practically overnight the election became a contest between Old Bill and Wes Hardin, who wasn’t even a candidate. Old Bill responded with some articles of his own in
Tempers boiled all over town, and most political arguments ended in a fistfight. Some men thought that even if Wes’s accusations against Old Bill were true, it was low of him to make them after all these years. If Bill
Then Wes announced that he wouldn’t stay in Gonzales County if W. E. Jones won the election. If Old Bill got voted sheriff, he said, the enforcers of the law in Gonzales would be more dishonest than those who openly violated the law, and he himself would not live in a county that would accept such corruption.
It was the closest election we ever had. Over four thousand votes were cast and carefully counted. And when the dust all settled, the winner—by eight votes—was Old Bill Jones.
A couple of weeks later, Wes went out to the Duderstadt ranch and said his good-byes to his children and to Fred and his family. The next morning he loaded his trunk on a wagon, hitched his saddle horse to the back of it, and giddapped the team on out of Gonzales County, heading west.
They met at a Christmas party and were married two weeks later—and they saw each other for the last time just a few hours after that. Merciful Jesus! I have heard of whirlwind romance, but that of my little sister Callie and Mr. John Wesley Hardin was a fools’ tornado! It was an astonishing episode from first to last, and I’m sorry to say they deserve the ridicule they received for it.
He was
The Christmas party was given by the Dennisons, neighbors of ours in London, and was partly in honor of Mr. Hardin, who had very recently moved to Kimble County from Gonzales and opened a law office. He had not yet been out of prison a year. The Dennisons were related to the Hardins and quite close to Jefferson Davis Hardin, Mr. Hardin’s younger brother, who lived in Junction, about fifteen miles south of London. But, until the party, they had never met Mr. Hardin himself.
It is important to know that Callie had always been a willful and rebellious girl with a taste for stories of adventurous outlaws. She was an avid reader of dime novelettes. I used to chide her for her silly interest in such lurid literature, but my disapproval—as well as Mother’s—only seemed to increase her enjoyment of it. Willful—she was simply willful. Father, who is said to have been a bit of a rapscallion in his youth, did not seriously object to Callie’s reading such trash—but then Father never objected in any way to Callie. She was his favorite. Mother always said they were cut from the same rebellious cloth.
Not that Callie lacked for feminine wiles—she was an incorrigible coquette. The truth will out and I must be