Wes’s pistol cracked again and a horse went down screaming. The rider landed on his feet like a cat and grabbed hold of a loose horse bolting by him and somehow managed to drape himself across the saddle, holding on for dear life, his legs flapping and his head bouncing up and down as the animal hightailed back the way they came. The wounded horse on the ground was screaming and kicking every which way, trying to get to its feet, but it wasn’t going to make it.
All the Yanks were putting spurs to their mounts now and boom-pow!—Simp and Wes shot together again and blood flew off a soldier’s neck and he slumped forward but stayed in the saddle as his horse hit full gallop. Wes ran out for a clearer shot and fired twice more just as Simp got off another round himself.
“Got him!” Simp hollers. “You see the blood pop up where I got that one in the leg?”
“Bullshit!” Wes hollers. “That was one of mine hit that leg!”
The wounded horse was still making a hell of a ruckus, and Wes went over to it and put it out of its misery. While he was doing that, Simp started scalping. That’s when I was finally able to look away.
I’d been gripping my Henry so tight my hands hurt.
After a while I looked back and saw Simp stripping the Yanks of their guns and ammunition and going through their pockets. Their scalps hung from his belt and were dripping on his pants and boots. Wes was standing off a ways, rolling a smoke and paying him no mind. Up to now neither of them had looked my way. I sat on the rock I’d hid behind and felt lower than a dog.
Then Simp moseyed over to me, working the lever on one of the Yankee Spencer carbines. “I got to admit this bluebelly rifle is damn nice,” he said. “Ain’t got the punch of my Sharps, but it’ll hold seven rounds, so you don’t got to load and lock for every shot. And .56 caliber will make a big enough hole in a fella to let the moon shine through. What you think, Lenny? You think I ought to switch?”
The casual way he was talking, I knew he knew. I lifted my face to look him in the eyes, but there wasn’t any scorn or mean humor in them—and no pity either, which some was full of for me back in Nacogdoches and which I hated even more than the scorn and the ridicule. He was looking at me like a friend.
“Jim told us, Lenny,” he says softly. “He thought it best we knew. Hell, brother, any man who wore the gray and got tore up by cannonfire while he was killing Yankees can’t ever be nothing but a hero to us, don’t you know that? Me and Wes, Lenny, we’re proud to know you.” I guess my face probably got as red as his, then both of us just grinned and looked away. “Well, hell,” he said, “let’s catch that other Yank horse and get the hell back to Pisga.”
And that was it. They neither one said another word about it, not to me. If they said anything about it to anybody else, I never knew of it, but I know damn well they didn’t. You won’t find two men in a thousand like them. Not in ten thousand.
By the following evening they were both of them long gone out of Pisga, and I never saw either one again. I believe Wes laid low with kin in Hillsboro for a while before he went to Towash and got in that trouble everybody heard about.
As for Simp, I heard he rode with a band of Kluxers for a time before telling them it was a waste of time to go nigger-spooking and barn-burning when there were still so damn many bluebellies in Texas to kill. The Klan was out to avenge all of Dixie, but Simp was mostly interested in getting even for his own kin. Then I heard he’d taken up with a cut-nose Cheyenne squaw that had tits like whiskey jugs and an ass like a mule. They said she would of been pretty but for that cut nose, which is what a Cheyenne brave did to a cheating wife before kicking her out to fend for herself. A jawhawker brought her into a Fort Worth saloon on the end of a rawhide leash, and for some reason—maybe her—Simp and the hawker got into a fight. They say that when Simp got the hawker down and started putting the boot to him, the squaw ran up and got in some pretty good kicks of her own, which sounds like she was ready for a change of men. The way the story goes, Simp took her to live with him in a cabin deep in a woods by the Navasota. They say him and the squaw were completely bare-ass and humping like hell on the riverbank one evening when a Yank hunting party snuck up and shot them more than a hundred times.
FUGITIVE DAYS
The El Paso Daily Herald,
20 AUGUST 1895
Frank Patterson, the bartender at the Acme Saloon, testified before the coroner as follows:
“My name is Frank Patterson. I am a bartender at present at the Acme Saloon. This evening about 11 o’clock J. W. Hardin was standing with Henry Brown shaking dice and Mr. Selman walked in at the door and shot him. Mr. E. L. Shackleford was also in the saloon at the time the shooting took place. Mr. Selman said something as he came in at the door. Hardin was standing with his back to Mr. Selman. I did not see him face around before he fell or make any motion. All I saw was that Mr. Selman came in the door, said something and shot and Hardin fell. Don’t think Hardin ever spoke. The first shot was in the head.”
(Signed) F. F. Patterson
The Life of John Wesley Hardin as Written by Himself
“I liked fast horses and would bet on any kind of a horse race, a chicken fight, a dog fight, or anything down to throwing ‘crack-a-loo’ or spitting at a mark.”
——
“I had been receiving letters from my father and mother urging me to quit my wild habits and turn to better ways.”
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“I was young then and loved every pretty girl I met.”
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“If there is any power to save man, woman, or child from harm, outside the power of the Living God, it is this thing called pluck.”
——
“Everybody … tried to help me and everybody was my friend, but the infamous police were after me and there were several mischief-makers about me.”
My wife, Slider, was cousin to Wes and introduced us at a get-together over at Jim Page’s place on the Brazos River, where Wes and his brother Joe were staying. They’d come down after visiting at Slider’s momma’s house in Hillsboro for a time and everybody was damn happy to know Wes was all right. We’d only recently heard of the Yankees’ back-shooting murder of Simp Dixon and had been worried the blues might of got to Wes too.
We hit it off right away, me and Wes, but Joe was standoffish and we never did cotton to each other much. When I found out how much Wes liked gambling and horse races, I told him he’d surely enjoy Towash, a small but high-kicking town a few miles from the Page place. It had plenty of loud saloons and gambling halls, and just outside of town was the Boles Track where they raced quarter horses. On race days that little town was just booming with action. Wes said he liked the sound of it, and we agreed to go to the track together on the coming Saturday.
Joe wasn’t keen on the idea at all. “Are you forgetting there are soldiers hunting for you?” he asked Wes. “Soldiers who intend to shoot you on sight?”
“To do that,” Wes said with a big smile, “they got to see me before I see them.” He tried to make light of Joe’s nagging, but I could see it irritated him. I don’t believe he was sorry when Joe headed on back home to Navarro County the next day.