Forty Times a Killer (7 page)

A V of dirt spurted between John Wesley's legs, then, over the rack of a Henry rifle, a man's voice said. “Don't make a move, Hardin. I can drop you from here real easy.”

Without turning his head, Wes said. “How many, Little Bit?”

I glanced briefly behind me. “Three that I can see. Two shotguns.”

“They got the drop on me.”

“Seems like.”

Feet pounded behind me and a man pushed me aside, so roughly that I stumbled and fell.

Wes cursed and rounded on the man, his hand reaching for his gun.

Too late!

The walnut stock of the Henry swung and crashed into the side of Wes's jaw. He went down in a heap and lay still.

The man who'd pushed me and hit Wes raised his rifle, covering the people around the fire. “You folks kin of his?”

“Yes we are,” Isaac said.

“Then I'm arresting you all on the charge of harboring a fugitive from justice,” the man said. “There's an eleven hundred dollar reward on this man's head.”

From the ground, I said, “They're Contrarians.”

The man glanced at me. He had a huge, hooked nose and under it his gray mustache looked like the bow wave of a steamer. “What the hell does that mean?”

“They live backward and say the opposite of what they mean. They're no kin of Wes's.”

The man looked confused.

I explained. “We rode into their camp looking for coffee.”

“You wouldn't lie to me, boy, would you?” the man said.

I shook my head. “Not about them, I wouldn't. They're all crazy.”

Wes groaned and the man leaned over and relieved him of his revolver. “I'm Constable Chance Smith.” He nodded to the bearded men with him. “Constables Davis and Jones.”

I struggled to my feet.

Smith stared at me, measuring me. “Ned Stakes told me you're harmless, youngster. Looking at you, I'd say he was right.” He turned to one of the other lawmen. “Search him. I'd still like to know where Hardin got the gun he shot Jim Smalley with.” The constable shook his head as he stepped toward me. “He was mean as a snake in your drink.”

After patting me down, the lawman said, “He's clean.”

“Good, now you and Davis get Hardin on his feet,” Smith said. Then, as though he thought he owed Isaac and his crazy kin an explanation, he said, “We're taking this man to Austin where he'll get a fair trial and then be hung.”

Isaac shook his head, and the two women looked distressed.

“No, that is not right,” Estelle said. “You're doing that all wrong.”

“You got something agin hanging, lady?” Smith asked.

“She means it's not the Contrarian way,” Isaac said. “A man should be hung and then tried.”

Smith pulled a long-suffering face then nodded. “Whatever you say, mister.”

He pushed Wes toward his horse. “Mount up. We're riding.” He gave me a hard look. “You too, runt. Hell, I never hung a dwarf with a tin leg afore, but there's a first time for everything, I guess.”

 

 

As we rode through the darkness, the three lawmen passed a bottle back and forth. They seemed to be in good spirits, maybe because of the eleven hundred dollars reward posted by Hill County for John Wesley's apprehension.

After an hour, more than slightly drunk, Chance Smith declared that he could go no farther and needed some shut-eye. After some coffee, he'd take the first watch, Davis the second, and Jones the third. Wes was ordered to sit across the fire from Smith with his back against a pine.

“I see you even bat an eyelid, I'll blow a hole in you with this here scattergun,” he said. “You understand that, huh?”

Wes, perhaps tired of playing the scared youngster, said nothing. He leaned the back of his head against the tree trunk and pretended to sleep.

Smith motioned with his shotgun and indicated that I should sit next to Wes. “One barrel of buck each if you and your friend suddenly feel ambitious. You catching my drift, runt?”

“I ain't planning to do nothing but sleep,” I said.

Smith nodded. “Sleeping your life away, boy. If I was fixin' to get hung, I'd try to stay awake as much as I could.” He smiled. “Savor the moment, you might say.”

The lawman took another swig from the bottle then lifted his head. “You smell it, boy?”

“Smell what?” I said.

“There's death in the wind.”

“I don't smell it.”

Smith ignored that because, half drunk, he was talking to himself, not me.

“Smelled it once before, on the night afore the Battle of Champion Hill. Death walked through our camp and then ol' General John C. Pemberton ran around the tents asking everybody he met, ‘What's that smell, boys? What's that accursed smell?'”

Smith drank from the bottle and wiped off his mustache with the back of his hand. “The next day Grant and his Army of the Tennessee kicked our asses and piled our Confederate dead in heaps as high as a man.” His eyes sought mine in the darkness. “It was a great battle and the field of honor stank like a charnel house. It was the smell I'd smelled the night afore, the smell I smell now. Death just took a stroll through our camp, boy. But whose death?” He smiled. “Not mine, so maybe yours, huh? Or Hardin's.”

 

 

Beside me, I became aware that Wes's eyes were half open, studying Jones and Davis who, overcome by alcohol, were sound asleep. His eyes slanted under his lids, fixing the location of the lawmen's weapons.

Behind the glow of the crackling fire, Smith laid his shotgun across his knees and sang softly to himself.

Wes watched the lawman with wolf eyes.

Smith's head dropped on his chest and he jerked awake.

Wes tensed . . . a young man-eater getting ready to spring.

The lawman took another swig and sang again.

Smith's voice faded. His head bobbed, lower . . . lower....

The lawman's voice ebbed . . . died away . . . grew silent....

He snored softly.

And John Wesley Hardin descended upon him like the wrath of God.

 

 

Wes carefully lifted the shotgun from Smith's lap, then stepped to the sleeping constables and grabbed Davis's Colt.

He returned to Smith and let the snoring man have both barrels in the face.

Smith, his head practically blown off his shoulders, died without making a sound.

Davis and Jones woke and sat up. Davis yelled, “What the hell is happening?”

Expertly working the Colt, Wes thumbed two shots into him.

Davis screamed and fell back, sudden blood staining his mouth.

Jones, the youngest of the three, threw off his blankets and scrambled to his feet.

“For pity's sake, don't shoot me,” he called out. “I have a pregnant wife and a three young'uns at home.”

Wes hesitated, and I thought for a moment he felt inclined to show the young lawman mercy.

How foolish I was. How unspeakably stupid.

The concept of mercy was as alien to John Wesley as sin is to a cloistered monk. He smiled, then shot the crying, sobbing Jones between the eyes. Standing in the red glow of the firelight, gun smoke drifting around him, Wes looked like the devil incarnate.

At the time I said nothing. Nothing at all.

He turned to me then, his face like stone, his eyes lost in pools of darkness . . . and he pointed his
murderous revolver
at my head.

Sweet Christ save me!
I stood transfixed, terrified to move.

John Wesley smiled. “Did you think I'd shoot you, Little Bit?”

“I don't know.”

“I don't know either. Maybe I would. Maybe if you did me wrong I'd gut shoot you.”

“I would never wrong you. I'm your friend.”

Wes waved the Colt around the clearing. “Was this my fault?”

Fearing for my life I didn't hesitate. “No, Wes, not your fault. Smith said he smelled death. He said death walked through our camp.”

“He was right.”

“Wes, quit smiling like that and put the gun away,” I said. “You're scaring the hell out of me.”

He did neither.

“I smelled it too, Little Bit. Death walked close to me and it looked like a column of black mist and stank like a rotting thing. I've seen it before, you know. Sometimes it watches me and says nothing. It just stares and stares with its cold eyes.”

Now I was really boogered. I stood there and pissed myself. Warm urine streamed down my legs and trickled onto the toes of my shoes.

“It wasn't my fault. They should never have arrested me.” Then, like a man suddenly waking from a trance, Wes grinned and let the Colt drop to his side.

“Little Bit, how come you just pissed all over yourself?”

John Wesley armed himself with a brace of revolvers he took from the dead men, but he decided to leave their horses behind, as they'd attract too much attention to us.

We stuck to our original plan to stay with his folks in Mount Calm where we'd be safe and welcome and took to the trail at first light.

I must admit that I rode with a heavy heart, the deaths of the three constables, especially Jones, weighing on me. And consider this—the death of Smith put paid to the lie that Wes would not pull the trigger on a man who'd worn the gray. He knew Smith had been at Champion Hill, heard him say so, yet he blew off his head with a shotgun.

Need I say more?

And one more thing . . . I'm often asked how many men Wes had killed after he dispatched the three constables. I've heard it suggested that he'd killed one man for every year of his life; like that Billy Bonney kid did later, up New Mexico way.

Wes was seventeen when he gunned Smith, Davis and Jones, and by then I reckoned he was creepin' up on Bonney's twenty-one.

Some folks will tell you different.

But, hell, I know better because I was there.

 

 

Mount Calm lay in the middle of the east Texas hill country. A store, a school, and a handful of whitewashed houses were splattered across flat, sandy ground like spilled milk.

Wes said there was talk of the railroad laying a spur to the place, but nobody, including his pa, put any stock in that.

James Gibson Hardin was a tall, slender man, a Methodist minister by profession, who bore, I fancied, a resemblance to the great Jefferson Davis of blessed memory. The Reverend Hardin didn't exactly welcome his prodigal son with open arms, but neither did he send him away.

In contrast, Wes's mother, Mary Elizabeth, an attractive, stiff-backed woman, showered kisses on her son and called him, “My golden boy,” and “My dearest Johnny.”

After remarking how thin Wes had become, she hurried into the kitchen and left her husband with Wes and me in the parlor.

“Three state constables, you say, John?” Rev. Hardin's face was pale as death, his high, intelligent forehead wrinkled with emotion.

“It wasn't my fault, Pa,” Wes said.

“It never is, John.”

“They were damned Yankees and they arrested me only because I was a Texas boy. Said they were going to torture me and then see me hang.” Wes looked at me, his eyes pleading. “Ain't that right, Little Bit? Weren't they taking me to the gallows?”

I remembered Smith, who'd fought for the Cause, and I didn't answer right away.

The Rev. Hardin noted my hesitation and said, “Don‘t bring Little Bit into your lies, John. The Bible says, ‘Thou shalt not kill.' If I am to believe what I hear, you've already broken that dictate a score of times.”

“I was defending myself, Pa. The Yankees hate me and want to see me dead. It's not my fault.”

“Son, you're a liar and a killer,” the elder Hardin said. “I fear that there is no place for you in God's heart.” He paused for just a moment. “Or in mine.”

Mary Elizabeth opened the door and stuck her head into the parlor. “Johnny dear, roast beef and taters on the table, and plenty of it.”

She glanced at me and I saw that she was trying to be cheerful, even charming, I guess, but the strain in her blue eyes and the deepening lines on her face betrayed her true feelings. “You too, Little Bit. You need some weight on those skinny bones.”

Mary Elizabeth had been listening at the door. That much was obvious, and she'd been wounded by what she'd heard.

The meal was awkward to say the least—silent, like a wake for dead kin. But I ate heartily, by no means sure where my next grub might come from.

Mary Elizabeth tried, God bless her. She and the reverend had ten children together, though two had died young, and she chatted about the family and what they were doing.

But her husband's silence and John Wesley's slow-simmering anger was not conducive to polite conversation. Even when Wes mentioned his plan for a Wild West show, though his mother clapped loudly and declared, “How wonderful!” it was greeted by a stony silence from his father.

When the tense meal was over, the Rev. Hardin lit a cigar. “John, I've been thinking things over and have asked the Good Lord for guidance. I want you to go to Old Mexico and remain there for—”

“How long?” Wes interrupted, astonished.

“I don't know. Years maybe.”

“The Yankees never forget, Pa, They're mighty long on hatreds and short on forgiveness.”

“As we Texans are ourselves,” the reverend said.

“What the hell will I do in Mexico?” Wes asked.

“No profanity, John, please,” the reverend said, speaking behind a cloud of curling blue smoke. “Find honest work, I suppose.”

“As a laborer?” Wes said.

“If that's all you can do, then yes, that's the kind of work you must find.”

Wes sprang to his feet, his eyes blazing. “I'd die before I'd blister my hands on a damned shovel.”

“The boy is right, James,” Mary Elizabeth said. “Johnny's delicate constitution is not suited to the laborer's trade.”

“Then what is he suited for, my dear?” the reverend asked carefully.

It was a loaded question, mildly asked, and I awaited Mrs. Hardin's answer with some unease.

She rose to the challenge, exclaiming, “The stage! You heard Johnny say that he wants to put on a show. He has the looks, the poise, and the erudition to become a fine actor. Why, he might even perform in Shakespeare like the noble Booth brothers.”

She dragged me into the talk. “Is that not so, Little Bit?”

I hedged. “It's a Wild West show, ma'am.”

“Yes, and a most singular idea it is,” Mrs. Hardin said. She raised her pretty eyes to her son. “You'll be very good at it, Johnny, and, I declare, become rich and famous quicker than . . . well, quicker 'n scat!”

Before Wes could speak, his father rubbed his forehead and said, “I grow weary, Mary Elizabeth. I will retire to my study, reacquaint myself with Holy Scripture then seek my bed early.”

He rose to his feet. “John, Little Bit, there's a zinc bathtub out back. I strongly suggest you both use it.”

“And I have a fresh bar of Pears soap all the way from England,” Mrs. Hardin said. “I know how delicate your skin is, Johnny, dear.”