They followed us down the lighted streets, keeping half a block back. Music twanged from the swinging doors of every saloon. We went around a corner and onto a dark street of empty warehouses facing a line of rotted piers that hadn’t been used by the river steamers in years. The lots between the empty warehouses were littered with shipping debris. “Fill your hand,” John whispered—but I’d drawn my revolver as soon as we’d turned the corner, and I held it cocked under my coat. “I’ll take the street-side one,” he said, “you the inside.” The saloon music was fainter now, and I thought I heard their footsteps crunching up behind us in the broken glass. My back muscles quivered. Then one of them called out, “Mr. Swain! Hold on, sir!”
We stopped and turned. They were thirty feet away and closing, silhouetted against the glow of a street lamp just off the corner. They had their hands in their coats too. As they closed in, the Handlebar said, “Mr. John Swain of Texas?” He started to take his hand out and John shot him square in the forehead. Freckles and I fired at the same time and I felt his bullet tug through the loose flap of my coat. He dropped his gun and fell forward and I knew he was dead by the way he hit the ground. It was over just that quick.
I expected the whole damn world to come running to see what the shots were about, and I was already putting a story together in my head about us being attacked by these two strangers, hoping like hell they weren’t U.S. marshals. But there were no cries of alarm, no sound of running feet—only the sudden splashing of a school of mullet in the St. John’s and the distant music from the saloons around the corner.
We went through their pockets and stripped them clean, then dragged the bodies into one of the warehouses and covered them up with a rotted canvas sail. We piled broken crates on top of that. It’d be days before the corpses worked up a stink strong enough to be smelled beyond the warehouse—and even then they might not draw much attention. Then again, some scavenging tramp might uncover them the very next day, you never knew.
We cut through the back streets to my boardinghouse room. As soon as we shut the door behind us, I poured us a drink. Then we went through their papers and found out they were Pinkertons. The Handlebar was James Kelleher and Freckles was Francis Connors. They had ticket stubs off that morning’s train from Atlanta—and a Texas reward poster offering four thousand dollars for the capture of John Wesley Hardin.
The next morning he put Jane and the children on the westbound train. He’d bought their tickets for New Orleans in case somebody came nosing around the depot asking where the Hardin family had gone. But he’d told Jane to get off the train at Pensacola and hire a hack to Polland, a small settlement just across the border in Alabama where her kin were living.
John stayed in Jacksonville a few days longer to give them time to get away safely, and in that time nobody discovered the bodies. I told the police chief I was quitting the force to go gold hunting in the Dakota Territory with John Swain, and a bunch of the coppers made a lot of jokes about it—which was good, because it meant they believed me.
Two days later we were met at the Pensacola depot by Jane’s Uncle Harris, just like John and Jane had arranged, and by nightfall we were in Polland.
* * *
And so we got into the logging business, me and John. We went partners with a lively buck-toothed fella named Shep Hardie and his nephew, an eighteen-year-old asskicker named Jim Mann. They owned some prime timberland about thirty-five miles up the Styx River but were short of the capital to log it. John and I put up the money for the necessary machinery and wagons and to hire four more loggers. The eight of us went upriver to the property and set up a work camp, and that’s where we spent most of the following year, cutting timber and logging it. Some of it we floated down the Styx to the sawmills on the Perdido fork, and some of it we sold to companies that used mule teams to haul the logs to the railway west of us. It was damn hard work but it turned us a pretty fair profit.
Every now and then we took a day off and went to Mobile to put some of that profit to work on the card tables—and so those among us who had the notion could buy themselves a good time at one of the swell pleasure houses to be found in that lively, lowdown town. Mobile always smelled to me of low tide, pine tar, magnolias, and puke. It was full of hard trade—sailors and shipworkers and sawyers, card sharps and whores. I don’t recall a time we went there that two or three of us didn’t get a broken nose or cut hand or some other kind of barfight memento. Jim Mann always came back sporting fresh cuts and bruises. He was a fine wild-hearted boy who wore a black eye like a badge of honor. He would grin through his puffy lips and make some joke about how we ought to see what the other fella looked like.
One time in Mobile, John and I got into a saloon row with a couple of timber teamsters named Lewis and Kress, and a little later—and unfortunately for us—they somehow or other ended up shot dead in an alley. We were arrested and wrongly charged with murder, and we spent two long miserable days and nights in jail before we finally got things all cleared up—with a little help from our contribution of two thousand dollars to the Mobile Police Department. After that, we mostly stayed clear of Mobile and took our pleasures in Pensacola.
Pensacola was anyway where we always took on camp supplies. We’d send the goods by rail to Pensacola Junction—Whiting, as some of the locals called it—and a freight boat would take them up the Styx to our camp. After shipping the goods, we’d stay in Pensacola another couple of days for a bit of fun. Shep Hardie had grown up there and knew all the poker rooms in town. The best was run by Alston Shipley, the regional railroad manager who’d been a logging contractor before going to work for the railroad. He still cussed like a logger and was strong as a mule.
When we’d done with our good-timing in Pensacola, Jim Mann would take the rest of the crew back to camp while John and I stopped at Polland for a couple of days so he could visit Jane and the children. It was on one of these visits that Jane’s Uncle Harris informed us that Wild Bill Hickok was dead. He’d read about it in a New Orleans newspaper a couple of months old. It happened in a saloon up in Dakota. Hickok was playing cards, sitting with his back to the door for some damn reason, and some tramp shot him in the back of the head. “It’s a damn low shame,” John said. “Bill deserved better than to get it like that.” He was down in the mouth the rest of the evening.
Jane had use of a house belonging to her Uncle Harris, and I’d sleep in a small side room whenever John and I were visiting. I always did my best to mind my own business, but the house was small and the walls were thin. Jane had never cared much for John living way off in the timber camp so that she didn’t get to see him more than once or twice a month. She’d get visits from her Polland kin, but most of the time she was alone with just the children for company. To keep the law from tracing them through the post office, they’d been careful not to write any letters back home, so she hadn’t been in touch with her family since leaving Texas. Still, she’d been a good soldier during the first few months of our logging operation, and their reunions were always full of affection. Late at night I’d hear their bed creaking and thumping with all the affection they’d stored up since they’d last seen each other.