“None of them would say who started the shooting,” John said, “but I know it was that Stones bastard. He was scared they’d kill him one day for turning them in.” He took a big pull from the bottle. “Then I get back here,” he said, “and find there was a hell of a necktie party while I was gone.” Frank Wilson and a handful of Rangers had been on guard in the courthouse, but they all claimed the mob had taken them by surprise and forced them to give over the prisoners. They swore they didn’t recognize any of the vigilantes. All the other Rangers had been out on patrol with Captain Bill. “Ain’t that something,” Sheriff John said, staring at me with a face as sick as sin. “Well hell, Holden,” he said, and toasted me with the bottle. “Fuck ’em all!”
And now Comanche knew true fear. The lynchers had mostly been Brown County men, but the murders had taken place in Comanche, and the good citizens reasoned that Wesley would therefore take the worst of his revenge on them. Black rumors flew through town like frightened bats. They said he would kill twenty men for each of his two cousins, and thirty to get even for Joe. He would fill Comanche’s streets with blood to his stirrups. He would burn the town to the ground and scatter the ashes. Women kept to their houses and prayed for deliverance from the wrath of John Wesley Hardin. Children slept under their beds and woke shrieking in the night. For weeks a dozen armed guards walked the town square every night and kept great fires burning at every street corner, the better to see his terrifying specter when he came to murder the good people in their beds.
Fancy Frank and me were with a pair of girls at his cabin in the cedar brakes just north of Austin, and this buck-ass nekkid thing called Sandra Jean grabs up the whiskey bottle and runs out with it, laughing like a drunk redskin, which she partly was—redskin I mean; she was way more than partly drunk. Anyhow, I go out after her—twanger and balls flapping and bouncing as I chase her around back of the house—and wham, she runs smack into this tall rascal standing there in the shadows and falls on her ass. He throws down on me with a big Colt which I could see just fine in the moonlight, and I thought, Shit! Bandits! But no, the fella says “Frank Taylor?” and I say “Nosir, name’s Yarrow. Frank’s inside.” He looks down at Sandra Jean—who’s looking up at him with her little titties shining in the light of the moon and her big bush dark as sin twixt her legs—and he says with a grin, “Looks like a nice party.” It’s the sort of remark don’t need an answer, but I said, “Yeah, I guess.” You don’t know what it feels like to be nekkid till you’re nekkid in the out-of-doors and somebody fully dressed is holding a gun on you.
Sandra Jean got up and brushed her ass off with one hand while she held the other over her bush like some shy little schoolgirl instead of the free-and-easy waiter girl she was at Fancy Frank’s saloon in Austin. The girl in the house with Frank was a waiter girl too—Lola, a redhead with nipples you could hang hats on. “If nobody minds,” Sandra Jean says, “I will just retire to the indoors.” She turns on her heel and nearly loses her balance, then gets hold of herself and walks off twitching her pretty ass.
The fella says, “Listen, Yarrow, I got Frank’s cousin Jim here. He’s bad sick and I’m shot.” I’d never met Jim Taylor, but I’d heard all about him from Frank. Like everybody else, I’d heard about how him and his little brother Billy had gunned down Bill Sutton on the steamer Clinton in Indianola. “Might you be …?” I say—and he says, “John Wesley Hardin. Go tell Frank.”
Frank already had his pants on and his hand filled—and damn near shot me when I came through the door. Sandra Jean had told him there was a man with a gun behind the house and he’d thought the same thing I had, that we were being rousted by bandits. I told him who it was and we got dressed fast. Two minutes later Frank was patting the girls on their bottoms as he helped them into the buckboard while I hitched the team. The girls were still only half dressed and mad as wet hens to be getting such a fast shove out of there. Frank pressed some money on them to ease their upset. He gave Lola a kiss so long and a squeeze of her tit, then slapped the horse’s rump and said, “Git!” and the wagon rolled off down the trace toward the Austin road.
We went around back and there was Wes holding two horses. Jim was on one and coughing into a balled bandanna. While Frank and Wes got him in the house, I staked their horses back in the brakes with ours. When I got back, Jim was tucked in bed, looking sick as a dog and sweating with a rank fever. Frank got him to drink some of the juice off the stew wed supped on, then let him drift off to sleep.
He tore up an old shirt to make a bandage for Wes’s wound. We came to find out he’d taken the shot in some bad business him and Jim had got into up in Comanche. His family was still back there, and he was worried about how they were making out. He figured he’d lie low for a few days to let things cool off some, then slip on back and make sure they were all right. Frank told him he was welcome to stay as long as he liked. “Thanks kindly,” Wes said. He had a heavy growth of whiskers and his hair was all wild tangles and his eyes were bloodshot with pain and exhaustion. He fell asleep at the table before he finished eating his stew.
Over the next few days Jim mostly slept and got better. His fever broke and his cough eased up. Wes was doing good too. It was the first chance for his wound to start healing since they’d made their getaway from Comanche more than a week before, and after a few days it was knitting up nicely.
Then Alf and Charlie Day showed up. They were cousins to Jim Taylor and were supposed to be with Doc Brosius and the trail crew Wes had hired to move his herd. When Wes saw them coming out of the brakes, he said, “Oh, hell.”
Alf and Charlie were surprised to find Wes and Jim there, but they didn’t look real happy about it, and pretty soon we found out why. We sat at the table and had a drink while Alf did most of the talking. He told us Doc Brosius and three other of the crew were under arrest in Comanche, and the herd had been confiscated by the State Rangers.
He and Charlie had been on herd guard when they saw a gang of about two dozen riders coming at a gallop over a far rise—so they quick spurred their ponies into the woods and got out of sight. Pink Burns was already there, gathering wood for the cookfire. Doc Brosius had gone to Comanche the day before to find Wes and let him know the herd was at Hamilton, but he hadn’t come back yet.
They watched from the trees as Scrap Taylor and the other two men in camp threw up their hands in surrender. “We knew it wasn’t rustlers,” Alf said, “not a gang that size.” When half the riders headed back toward Comanche with the three trail hands and the other half stayed with the herd, Alf figured them for some kind of posse, but he couldn’t make heads or tails of what was going on. He and Charlie and Pink circled their way around and headed into town to see if they could find Doc Brosius to tell him what happened.
What they found was a town crawling with Rangers and vigilantes. “The place looked ready for war, there was so many guns about,” Alf said. They learned Doc was in jail too, and Wes’s brother Joe and his Dixon cousins—all because Wes and Jim had killed some deputy from Brown County. Wes’s whole family was under arrest in Joe’s house. The Rangers were arresting everybody connected to Wes by blood or friendship. There were posses crisscrossing the whole region. Alf convinced Charlie and Pink it’d be safer to stay put in the crowded town for a few days than try to leave Comanche County with so many posses on the lookout for suspicious characters.