John and the sheriff went up on the platform at the rear of the smoking car and stood ready while Shipley and Purdue and I entered the car from the front. Shipley and Purdue were a few feet ahead of me. I kept looking out the windows and waving as we moved down the car, like I was bidding good-bye to somebody out on the station platform. “Say, Swain,” Shipley said, “you going to give me and Ace a chance to win some of our money back tonight?” Hardin laughed and said, “Sorry, boys. Got to tend to business for a while. I’ll be back next month with another fat poke you can try and take off me.”
John and Hutchinson came in through the rear door with their pistols in their hands. The two sitting with their backs to me, Campbell and Hardie, looked up at them. “Hey, Will—” one of them started to say, just as Hardin turned to look.
“Texas, by God!” Hardin yelled. He made a grab under his coat for his gun but John lunged forward and cracked him hard on the head with his pistol as Shipley and Purdue dove on him and grabbed his hand away from his coat and they all went tumbling to the floor in a struggling, cussing heap.
As Jim Mann jumped up and pulled his pistol, I shot him twice in the chest. He fired a wild shot into the back of the car and fell against the open window—and the riflemen on the roof opened up on him like a firing squad. Blood flew off his head and neck and he fell through the window and onto the platform as the rifles kept firing and firing. I dove for cover beside Campbell and Hardie, who’d already hit the floor. A storm of bullets whacked into the side of the car, thunked into the coach seats, twanged off the steel wheels. “Cease fire! Cease fire!” Hutchinson was screaming. “Cease fire goddamnit!”
The rifle fire eased off and finally quit altogether, but Hardin was still making a fight of it. He was on his back and Shipley and Purdue had pinned his arms out at his sides, but John and Hutchinson were having a hell of a time trying to get hold of his kicking legs. A kick caught Hutchinson flush on the mouth and knocked him back on his ass. I dove in and grabbed one of Hardin’s legs and managed to pin it down as John sat on the other one. He jabbed the muzzle of his pistol under Hardin’s jaw and said, “Surrender, you son of a bitch, or I’ll blow your damn head off!”
“Shoot, God damn you! Shoot!” Hardin said. He was breathing like a bellows and blood was running out of his hair where John had hit him. “You bastard!” Hutchinson shouted, wiping at his bloody mouth. He pushed between me and John and managed to whack Hardin in the face with his pistol before John shoved him away. “This man’s my prisoner!” John shouted. “Anybody mistreats him, it’ll be me!”
The whack in the face set the blood pouring from Hardin’s nose and took a good bit of the starch out of him. We hauled him up and sat him down and John cuffed his hands behind him and around the seat’s armrest. “Get this thing moving!” John yelled. “Now!”
Shipley ran out on the platform and signaled for the engineer to start the train rolling. As the car jolted and began to move, I yanked Campbell and Hardie off the floor and shoved them into a seat. They had their hands as high as their arms could stretch and looked scared shitless. “I don’t know what Swain’s done,” Hardie said, “but me and Neal ain’t done nothing, we swear!” I told them to shut up and patted them down to be sure they were unarmed.
Purdue sat on a seat arrest and held his pistol inches from Hardin’s head. I looked out the window as the depot fell behind us and saw the shooters on the hotel roof staring down at the bloody corpse of young Jim Mann as a crowd began closing around it like a pack of scavengers.
As soon as we were clear of Pensacola we all busted out laughing and yeehawing and clapping each other on the back. “We done it!” Hutchinson hollered, grinning like a keyboard through his swollen purple lips. “We damn sure done it!” Even John couldn’t keep the smile off his face.
Hardin had regained his senses, though his nose was still leaking blood and swollen like a fat strawberry. He kept insisting he was innocent. “Listen,” he said, “you boys got the wrong man. My name is John Swain and I run a timber camp on the Styx River. You can ask anybody.” John and I laughed. I sat down beside him with a grin I could feel all the way to each ear and said, “You’re John Wesley Goddamn Hardin is who you are, and you’re under arrest for the murder of Deputy Sheriff Charles Webb of Brown County, Texas. We’re taking you home, Wes.”
We stopped at Whiting so all the frightened passengers could get off the train. We released Hardie and Campbell, since we had no charges on them, and John got off a telegram to General Steele in Texas, telling him we’d made the arrest but weren’t in the clear yet. Hardin had plenty of friends between us and Mobile, and we figured they’d probably form up fast and try and rescue him. So what we did was highball right through Polland, his Alabama stomping ground—speeding right past all the surprised people on the depot platform who’d been waiting for the train—and straight on to Mobile.
We took him off the train in Mobile and clapped him in a cell while John sent a telegram to Texas requesting the proper extradition papers. The Mobile sheriff posted six deputies with shotguns all around the jail. A train to Florida came through an hour later, and Shipley and Hutchinson and Purdue got on it after receiving many reassurances from John that he’d be in touch with them about their shares of the reward.
When we got back to the jail we found out he’d talked the sheriff into bringing him the best lawyer in town, some fella named Watts, who’d listened to his story and gone straight to a judge with a writ of habeas corpus. Another ten minutes and he would’ve been long gone—and legally. John had to talk fast and furious to get the Mobile judge to give us till that evening to get the proper papers. “Boys,” the judge said, “you know good and well that what you done ain’t exactly legal. But if this man is John Wesley Hardin, I’ll be damned if I’m going to be known as the stupid son of a bitch who turned him loose on a technicality. I’m giving you till midnight to get the Texas requisition papers in front of me.” Twenty minutes before Hardin would’ve been released on the habeas writ, the papers came from Governor Hubbard’s office, and the way was clear for us to take him back to Texas all legal and aboveboard.
By then the whole town knew who we’d locked up in their jail, and the street out front was mobbed with people wanting to see him. What’s more, they’d all heard we meant to take him out on the early-morning train to New Orleans, and the depot was jammed with even more people waiting to catch a glimpse of the notorious Texas mankiller. “I ain’t about to take him out through that crowd,” John told the Mobile sheriff. “He’s got too damn many friends around here who could be hiding among all those people, just waiting for the chance to throw down on us.”
So we snuck him out the back door of the jail in the middle of the night, escorted by two deputies, and took him by wagon up to Montgomery and boarded a train for Decatur.
Once we had him on the train out of Montgomery, he finally admitted who he really was. But he never whined nor pleaded nor blamed anybody else for his troubles. He said he’d shot Webb in self-defense and would be able to prove it in a fair trial. The way he told the story, I thought he might come clear, but John said you never could tell what might happen in a courtroom. “I seen men I damn well knew were guilty walk out free as birds,” he said, “and I seen men I knew were innocent end up in the rock quarries or swinging from a rope.”