Then Preacher Hardin and his family—as well as Jane and young Molly—were taken to Joe’s house and there kept under arrest, together with Joe’s wife and children. Alec Barrickman’s family was also put under heavy guard and not permitted to leave the premises or receive visitors.
Wesley must’ve thought his family was still at his daddy’s, however, because he tried sneaking up to the house one evening. He was spotted by one of the dozen guards posted around the property and all hell broke loose. In the poor twilight visibility, the excited and confused guards mistook each other for members of the Hardin Gang and shot it out for several furious minutes. Wesley escaped—and without having fired a shot, he left two dead and five wounded possemen behind him. Captain Bill’s rage was apoplectic.
Now Doc Brosius showed up. He had arrived at Hamilton with the herd as planned, and then, wholly oblivious to the situation in Comanche, he had come to town to find Wesley. When he said he was looking for his boss, Wes Hardin, he was promptly arrested. He was interrogated for hours, then put behind bars. In the meantime, Waller sent a posse to Hamilton to apprehend the rest of the crew and take possession of the herd. Three of the cowhands eluded capture, but three others were brought back in handcuffs and locked up with Dr. Brosius.
Then even the weather turned mean. Daily thunderstorms flashed and blasted. Water tumbled down the gullies and the Leon River overflowed. Creeks swamped their banks. The bottoms flooded. The sky turned to iron and the rooftops clattered all night long under the relentless rain. The world was sopping and made of mud. Posses rode in and out of town around the clock. Sightings of the Hardin Gang came from every corner of the county.
A posse headed by Waller himself ran up on Wesley and Jim Taylor in the south prairie and gave them chase in a ferocious rainstorm. “I still don’t know how in the hell they got away,” a Ranger told me that night over a bottle of bourbon in Jack Wright’s. “We must of fired a hundred rounds at them while they was gutting it up the slippery side of a gully we’d boxed them in. We hit everything but Hardin and Taylor theirselfs. I saw Hardin’s horse hit three times and that damn animal didn’t hardly flinch. I know I hit Hardin’s saddlebags, and I saw him get a damn boot heel shot off. One shot knocked Taylor’s hat over his eyes—and the sonbitch laughed, I swear. You could hear him laughing like some kind of damn demon over the gunfire and the thunder. They had a hundred-yard lead on us by the time we made the top of the gully, and in another minute they were flat out of sight. I don’t know what they paid for them racers they was riding, but they damn sure got every last nickel’s worth, tell you that.”
In town the mob grew restless. Its mood worsened in the sudden cessation of news of Wesley. For three days after the Rangers lost them on the south prairie, not one reliable sighting of the Hardin Gang was reported. Hunting parties continued to comb the stormy countryside, but there was no sign of Wesley anywhere. The possibility that he might have fled Comanche County for parts unknown added to the possemen’s black rage. When they were not in the saddle, the vigilantes kept to the saloons, drinking resolutely and cursing the killers of that good man Charlie Webb—whose memory grew more venerable by the day. They drank and glared through the rain at the courthouse across the square and growled more and more murderously.
Shortly before midnight on the evening of June fifth, I was awakened by a clamor in the square. I stumbled to the window of my quarters directly above the Chief’s office and saw a mob surging at the courthouse door. The clouds had broken, and the scene was illuminated by a bright moon and a host of flaming torches. Shadows leapt and quivered on the courthouse wall.
The crowd roared as Bud and Tom Dixon were hauled outside by several men holding them fast by the arms. The brothers were spat upon and struck with clubs, and their hands were swiftly bound behind them. Another knot of men brought out a struggling Joe Hardin and shoved him into the clutches of the mob. His hands too were bound, and someone punched him full in the face. Then the three prisoners were swept into the square as if on a river current. My heart thumped in my throat. I could not spot Sheriff John or any of his deputies in the swirling crowd.
I hastily pulled on my trousers and boots and, still in my nightshirt, plunged headlong down the stairs and out into the street. I ran toward the mob, shouting I know not what. A pair of grinning men with clubs came toward me as the mob crossed the square and headed into the oak grove at the edge of town. “This is murder!” I yelled. I was clubbed on the neck and knocked to my knees. I recognized the man who hit me as a Brown County deputy. As I started to get up I was kicked in the stomach. I sagged on all fours and vomited while my assailants hurried away to rejoin the mob. Gasping, I got to my feet and staggered after them.
The mob had halted in a clearing and was swarming before a tall spreading oak—howling, laughing, having a revel, their faces devilish with murderous glee. At the fringe of the crowd I spotted a local townsman. “The law!” I shouted at him. “Where’s the damn law?” He stared at me as if I were speaking Chinese. In the flickering light of the torches, he looked stricken and ghostly, as stunned by his helplessness as I was by mine to do anything but bear witness to the horror taking place.
The torchfires brightly lighted the underbranches of the tree. A noose sailed over a lower limb, and then another next to it. A third flew over a separate branch. The nooses danced macabrely as they were lowered to eager hands.
A great animal howl went up as Tom and Bud Dixon suddenly ascended into the mob’s full view—hanging side by side and kicking their bare feet crazily. Their faces were horrifying above the crushing nooses. The mob cheered wildly, laughed, and threw stones at the dying men.
A moment later they hanged Joe from the other branch and the cheering was greater yet, the laughter louder at his distorted face and his pale feet flailing the empty air under him. There were shrill whistles and piercing rebel yells, and he too was stoned as he died. A woman screamed—whether in anguish or celebration I could not say—and a child laughed in firelit delight from his perch on the shoulders of a grinning man.
In the morning a Ranger named Dick Wade told me the Hardin family women were wailing with such grief in Joe Hardin’s house it broke his heart to hear them. Preacher Hardin had asked if the report of the lynching was true, and Wade had confirmed the terrible truth. At dawn he had been to the site of the murders and seen for himself the three dead men dangling in the cold mist. “The old Preacher cried like a child when I told him,” Wade said. “The only good news I could give him was that his friend Matt Fleming and two of his niggermen took down the bodies after sunup and gave them a proper burial.”
Sheriff John had been out of town at the time of the lynchings. He got back late the next day. When I stopped in to see him that evening he was red-eyed with drink and despair. Bill Stones had come to him on the previous morning and told him Alec Barrickman and Ham Anderson had been hiding on his ranch out by Bucksnort Creek for the past two days after having separated from Hardin and Taylor. Stones said he’d let them stay at his place because they’d once helped him round up some loose calves in the thicket and seemed like nice fellas. But when he found out it was Captain Bill Waller looking for them, he got scared for his own skin. If Barrickman and Anderson were found on his place, Captain Bill might think he was part of the Hardin Gang too. So he’d come to Sheriff John to give them away.
Sheriff John went out after them with a posse of eight men, including Stones. They reached the ranch late that night and sneaked up to within twenty yards of the lean-to set against the rear of the house, where Ham and Alec were sleeping. Sheriff John spread the posse in a wide half circle around the back of the house in case Alec and Ham tried to run for it. He had given strict orders not to shoot unless the fugitives fired first—but before he could halloo Ham and Alec and tell them they were under arrest, somebody in the posse squeezed off a shot and ignited a blazing fusillade of rifle fire that went on for a good thirty seconds before John was finally able to make them desist. It was too late to do Ham and Alec any good. They found them lying dead on the floor, still wrapped in their blankets, shot all to bloody hell.