Forty Times a Killer (5 page)

The man with the manacles was E.T. Stakes, the other, holding a rope that I thankfully noted didn't end in a noose, was Constable Jim Smalley. Alan Dillard, the cell key in his hand, stood behind them.

“We're taking a ride, John Wesley,” Stakes said, “so gather up what's your'n.”

For a moment, Wes's eyes were calculating, figuring his chances against three guns. He obviously decided against making a play. “Where are you taking me, and why?”

“Waco,” Stakes said. “Where you'll get a fair trial before you're hung.”

Stakes had pouched black eyes and the small, tight, intolerant mouth you sometimes see in elderly nuns. When he smiled, the effect was most unpleasant. “I'll hang bunting on the scaffold myself, John Wesley. Make it look festive for your send-off, like.”

“Waco is two hundred miles away,” Wes said.

“A hundred and seventy-five to be exact,” Stakes said. “But never fear, Mr. Hardin, I'll do everything I can to make your trip an enjoyable one.”

“You're a damned liar,” Wes said.

Stakes smiled with his lips shut, like a closed steel purse. “Ain't I, though?”

He turned to Alan Dillard. “You took his guns?”

The jailer nodded. “Yeah, they're locked in my desk.”

“Who is he?” Jim Smalley looked at me the same way a man does the sole of his boot after he's stepped in dog doo-doo.

“He's nobody.” Dillard turned to Stakes. ”I'll release the prisoner.”

Before the jailer stepped to the cell, I said, “I want to tag along with John Wesley.”

It was Stakes' turn to gut me with a withering stare. “What the hell for, boy?”

“Sir, Wes is a friend of mine and I've got nothing else to do.” Then I quickly added, “I'm a good trail cook.” That was only partially true, but indeed, I could boil coffee and dredge salt pork in flour and fry it with the best of them.

It seemed that I amused Stakes. “You got a hoss, boy?”

I nodded. “Sure do.”

He said to Smalley, “What do you say, Jim?”

The man's answer was to step in front of me and pat me down. “What's in the poke?”

“Molasses taffy. I like it, but Wes doesn't.”

Smalley turned to Stakes. “He's an idiot.”

“I know, but he's an idiot who can cook,” Stakes said. “It will take five, maybe six days to reach Waco. Do you want to rustle up the coffee and grub?”

“Hell, no.” Smalley thought for a moment, then said, “All right, let the idiot do it.”

“What's your name, boy?” Stakes asked.

“Folks call me Little Bit,” I said.

“All right, Little Bit, listen up,” Stakes said. “I'm a plain man, bacon and pan bread is what I want, and coffee strong enough to float a silver dollar. You got that?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good, then we'll get along.” Stakes nodded to Dillard. “Let Hardin out, jailer.”

Before the cell door swung open, Wes smiled at me and winked.

I knew what that meant.

He had killing on his mind.

 

 

I returned to the livery and saddled my horse, then started in on Wes's mount.

As I looked around for the blanket, Jas. Glee, prop. stopped me.

“Them lawmen already got a hoss fer John Wesley,” he said. “They requisitioned one of the mustangs you and him brung in.”

“What does that mean?” I said, never having tussled with the word
requisitioned
before.

“It means they took it in the name of the law, boy.”

“Wes's saddle is still here.”

“No matter,” Glee said. “He ain't going fur.”

“It's nigh on two hundred miles to Waco,” I said.

“He won't get there.”

“They mean to kill him?”

“That's my guess.”

“But Stakes promised him a fair trial.”

“What E.T. Stakes promises and what E.T. Stakes delivers are seldom one and the same thing, boy.” Glee put his hand on my shoulder, a fatherly gesture no man had ever done to me before. It felt strange.

“Listen, boy,” he said. “The Yankees who currently rule the great state of Texas have had enough of John Wesley and his kind—unreconstructed Johnny Rebs that claim the war didn't end at Appomattox. As far as the government is concerned, a trial would be a waste of time. Better to gun Hardin on the trail and, for the price of a few cents' worth of powder and ball, tie up everything nicely in a big blue bow.”

“What can I do?” I felt scared, lost, like a blind man trying to feel his way out of a burning building.

“How badly do you want to keep on living?” Glee said.

I shook my head, bewildered. “What kind of question is that to ask a man?”

“I'll answer it for you, boy. You ain't a man, not yet you aren't. As to the question I asked, if you want to remain above ground, stay here in Longview. If you want to take your chances on getting a bullet in the back, go with John Wesley.”

“I'll go. He's my friend.”

Glee smiled. “You're learning, boy. That was a man's answer.”

I led my horse back to the jail where John Wesley was already mounted on the mustang; his only saddle a ragged blanket, his legs lashed under the pony's belly with a rope.

“Dillard, sell me a saddle or let me get my own from the livery,” Wes said. “This hoss has a backbone like the thin end of a timber wedge.”

“Sorry,” Dillard said. “You'll be less likely to make a dash for it, John Wesley.”

“At least give him another damned blanket,” I said.

Nobody paid me the least mind.

Stakes gathered up the mustang's lead rope then swung into the saddle.

Jim Smalley followed suit, slid the Henry rifle from under his knee and laid it across the saddle horn. “Let's ride. We're burning daylight and we need to put two hundred miles of git between us and Longview.”

I mounted, and then Alan Dillard did something that surprised me.

He stepped off the boardwalk and slipped ajar into my coat pocket. “Pickles. For the trail.”

I was dumfounded, but managed to nod and mumble my thanks before I kicked my horse into motion and followed the others.

Since Alan Dillard drops out of my narrative here, let me mention that he didn't live to scratch a gray head. He died of jungle fever on Samoa in 1889 while working as a civilian contractor for the U.S. Navy. It is interesting to note that Dillard passed away in the parlor of the novelist Robert Louis Stevenson, author of
Treasure Island
, who was living in the island nation at that time.

We camped that evening under a disused railroad trestle, the temperature surprisingly cool after the heat of the day. Around us lay a world of broken ground, treeless hills and patches of thorny cactus. The moon rose fat and fair, its pale light banished by the crimson glow of our campfire.

After a hearty supper of strong coffee, salt pork, and sourdough bread, we sat around the fire and I wondered where Wes had hidden the Colt I'd given him.

Only later did I discover that he'd tied it under his arm and then covered the big revolver with his shirt and coat.

Stakes had untied Wes's legs, and it caused considerable merriment in Jim Smalley. “Here now, Hardin,” he said, staring at Wes over the rim of his coffee cup. “How far do you think you'd get if you stood up and made a break for it?”

Before Wes could make any kind of answer, Stakes grinned and said, “One step, Jim. I'd gun him for sure.”

“Well, E.T., I think I'd let him run for a spell and then go after him. Make it a chase, like.”

Stakes nodded. “It would be good sport.”

“I won't run,” Wes said. “All I ever did was try to obey the law. I'm in great fear that the kin of the men I killed in fair fights will lay for us on the trail and try to do for me.”

“Don't worry about that,” Smalley said. “We'll protect you, young feller. I mean, we want to watch you hang in Waco, hear that
snap!
when your neck gets broke.”

Stakes cackled. “Hell, Jim, it won't be like that.” He made a pantomime of a hanging man, his tongue lolling out of his mouth as he made horrible strangling sounds.

Then he smiled. “They don't break necks in Waco. It's too quick and robs the folks of a show.”

“I say, Hardin,” Smalley said, “when you're standing there on the gallows, piss and crap running down your legs, and the hangman asks if you've got any last words, here's what you say. ‘Fancy whores and strong drink led me to this pass, but I had a good mother.'”

Stakes grinned. “You're right, Jim. The women love that.”

“I don't want to hang,” Wes said, his voice a scared whine. Then, I swear, he squeezed out a single tear that trickled down his cheek like a raindrop. “This will break my poor mother's heart.”

“Aw, that's a shame, ain't it, E.T.?” Smalley said. “Even this piece of garbage, the lowest of the low, has a mother.”

“Please don't let them hang me,” Wes pleaded, his red-eyes fixed on Stakes. “I'm so afraid, Mr. Stakes.”

“Sure, sure, kid,” the lawman said. “I'll see what I can do.”

Smalley almost choked as he suppressed a giggle.

I remember sitting there in the chill of the night, the steel brace cold against the skin of my wasted leg, thinking that even the most naïve circuit preacher would have more sense than the two fools mocking John Wesley Hardin. The preacher would know all too well that it's dangerous to tease the devil.

As most of you will recall, winter came early that year of 1871, and by the time we reached the Sabine River we all shivered with cold.

The lawmen, taking no chances, lashed Wes's feet under his pony again and placed him in the middle of the procession as we prepared to cross the swollen waters.

Wes, playing his role of terrified youngster to the hilt, rambled on about death and life everlasting, and when we were midway across he even launched loudly and tunelessly into a grand old hymn.

“Shut the hell up,” Smalley yelled. His horse had stumbled and plunged him underwater and he was soaked to the skin and mad as a rained-on rooster.

“Sorry, Mr. Smalley,” Wes said. “As I get nearer to judgment and death, I feel a need for the comfort of religion.”

“Wail that damn song again, and you'll be a sight closer to death than you think,” Smalley said.

Wes grinned but said nothing. Taking my cue from him, I also kept my mouth shut.

By the time we reached the far bank of the Sabine we were all frozen and wet, but we rode for two more miles before Stakes called a halt and told us to dismount and prepare a camp.

There was a ramshackle ranch house in the distance, but Stakes said he wouldn't ask for shelter, since the rancher was likely to be kin of his prisoner. “Go ask him if we can borry an axe, and then chop up some kindling,” he told me. “Be quick. It's damn cold and we need a fire.”

I did as I was told, but when I reached the gate to the property I quickly drew rein.

A sign on the gate, badly printed with a brush and tar, warned:

And under that, in a neater hand was
There's a hell of a lot of shooting going on around here.

Stakes' fears were justified. I figured the rancher must be kin of Wes's, right enough.

I opened the gate, made sure to close it, and then rode at a walk toward the ranch house, expecting a bullet at any time.

The wind was cold and bladed through my soggy rags like a razor. The sky was grim, gray as slate, and under that gloomy tyrant the surrounding pines rustled and bowed, as though paying quaking homage.

I was yet ten yards from the house when the door threw open on its rawhide hinges and a one-legged man with a crutch under his armpit and a Sharps in his hands stepped outside.

“Stay right where you are.” He was a large, heavy man, his face a brown triangle almost hidden behind a beard and unkempt mane of black hair. His eyes were blue and hostile. “I got a possum in the pot, coffee on the bile, but none o' that's fer you, on account of how I only got enough for my ownself. So ride on. There's no grub here.”

Then, to make sure I got the point, he said, “This here rifle gun is both wife and child to me. Just so you know.”

I was scared, but I told him that a party of well-armed and determined state police and likely a town constable were camped to the west of his spread and needed to borrow an axe to cut kindling. Then I dropped John Wesley's name, but the rancher seemed unimpressed.

After a moment's thought, he said, “There's an axe in the woodshed over yonder. When you bring it back, leave it at the gate.”

He turned, stepped inside, and slammed the door shut on me.

Now, I'm sure the man had lost his leg in the war fighting for the Noble Cause, so I didn't fault him for his lack of hospitality then or now.

But he was a mean old cuss and no mistake. And not a one for sharing.

After I cooked supper, we huddled around the fire and gradually our clothes dried.

Smalley continued to tease Wes, describing the marks on a man's neck after he'd been hung with a hemp rope, and how long it took for the condemned to strangle to death . . . vicious, cruel stuff like that.

For his part, John Wesley stayed silent, although every now and then he forced out a tear and muttered the prayers he'd learned at his mother's knee.

But often I saw him glance sidelong at the lawmen. Then his eyes glittered in the firelight and his teeth gleamed, like a cougar anticipating a killing spree.

And they didn't see it! Idiots!

Those two fools Stakes and Smalley saw only what they wanted to see, and that was a boy demented by terror over the thought of a cruel death on the gallows.

Indeed, the fool does not see the same peril as the wise man, and there's truth.

 

 

The next day, we ferried across the muddy, sluggish Trinity then rode north into swamp country that was foreign and forbidding.

Gradually the pines, post oak, and black hickory of our own soil gave way to bald cypress, water tupelo, and shrubs like swamp privet and water elm.

The going across the wet country was exhausting and I felt sick. My face and hands were covered in insect bites. To my surprise Wes made no move, even when we were within a few miles of Waco.

Overtaken by darkness and used up, Stakes halted and we made camp.

He left to obtain fodder for the horses and cornmeal from one of the surrounding farmers, if such could be found in the wilderness. “Keep a close eye on Hardin, Jim,” he said from the saddle. “He's scared and he might bolt.”

“If he does, he's a dead man,” Smalley said. “Depend on it.”

Then Stakes said something strange that really upset me. “Hold up on the shooting until I get back. We've got to be in it together, mind.”

Smalley smiled and nodded. “He'll keep, E.T.”

Stakes' eyes and mine met, tangled, and what I saw in his cold, penetrating gaze chilled me to the bone.

He meant to murder Wes.

Soon.

That very night.