At least a man stood a better chance in a courtroom than with a mob, Wes said, and there was no arguing with that. He told us he was impressed with how smooth we’d pulled off his capture, and wanted to know how we’d tracked him down. When I told him, he said, “That stupid no-count sonbitch”—referring to Brown Bowen. “It’s God’s own wonder how him and Jane could of come from the same seed source.”
We had to spend the night in Decatur before catching the morning train to Memphis. In exchange for his promise not to try to escape, we allowed him to write a letter to his wife and send her some money. We would have let him write her anyway, even without his promise, which neither John nor I took to heart. Any man will naturally promise not to try to escape if he thinks it might get you to let your guard down. I’d make that promise. What man with any sense wouldn’t? And if the guard got careless and let me get the jump on him, I damn sure would. And if it was a rope he might be taking me back to, and there was no way to escape but to kill him, well then … you do what you have to do to keep alive. There’s no plainer truth on earth.
Anyhow, we cuffed his hands in front of him to let him write the letter and, later, to eat his supper, which we ordered brought up to the hotel room. But I never took my eyes off him for a second while he was cuffed in front—which proved to be wise, because when John handed him his supper plate and turned to say something to me, I saw Wes’s eyes cut to the revolver in John’s hip holster, not six inches in front of his face. I grabbed John and yanked him away from Wes so hard he fell over a chair and banged his head on the bedstead and cussed me out good. I stood there with my gun drawn on Wes and said to John, “You best take a bit more care with this young rascal.” Wes just looked at me all innocent and said, “Good Lord, Jack, you don’t think …? Hey, I gave my ” But his eyes couldn’t hide how ready he’d been to snatch John’s gun. Another half a second and John and I would’ve ended up in our own blood on the floor, I don’t doubt that one bit.word!
After that, John was a good deal more cautious with him, and Wes never got such a chance again the rest of the trip. From then on, whenever we brought his cuffs around in front to let him eat, I’d sit across from him with my pistol cocked and pointed at his head. “God damn, Jack,” he once said with a grin, “you sure know how to take the taste out of a meal. You still don’t trust me not to try to get away?” And I said, “Sure I do, Wes—as much as you trust me not to blow your head off if you try.” He smiled and said, “Me and you, Jack, we understand all about trust, don’t we?”
The news of his arrest preceded us to Memphis, Little Rock, Texarkana—all the stops on our way to Austin—and every station on our route was chock-full of people wanting to have a look at him. We had a private car and naturally kept the doors locked and the windows open only at the tops. We had our shotguns ready at every stop. Most of the spectators cheered and waved at him and held up signs saying, “Free Wes Hardin!” and “We Love You Wes!” and “Hardin is Innocent!”
But not everybody felt that way. At the Little Rock depot, a rough fight broke out between a group of young men with a banner saying “Hardin Is a Hero” and a group with a big placard saying “Hang the Mankiller.”
People gave goods to the conductor to pass on to him—baskets of food (we ate like kings on that trip), bottles of whiskey, good luck pieces ranging from rabbit’s feet to old coins to arrowheads, and envelopes of money, most with just a few dollars in them, but one with fifty dollars and a note saying, “Sorry it aint more, your a good man and god bless.”
I tell you, it was an amazing thing to behold, all those people rooting for him—all those pretty girls calling his name! “Damn, boy,” I said to him as we stared out the window at the mess of pretty things blowing him kisses at the Dallas depot. “I believe a man might smother to death under all that affection.” He grinned and said, “Maybe so—but what a damn fine way to go, don’t you think, Jack?” His face lit up every time he saw such crowds cheering for him. “Lookit them all,” he said. “You really think all them people can be wrong about me?”
There was a telegram for us in Waco, warning that the crowd waiting at the Austin station was too large to control. When Wes heard that he went a little pale and said, “You boys swore you wouldn’t let no mob get me.” John said it might be a mob wanting to hang him or one wanting to set him free, but either way he wasn’t going to take any chances.
He stopped the train a few miles outside of Austin and we rented a hack from a livery for the rest of the ride in. All of us were nervous now for different reasons. “Wes,” John said, “if you try to break, I swear I’ll kill you.” I didn’t say anything, but I had a picture of my two thousand dollars flying off in the wind if Wes got away. Wes just shook his head and said, “I ain’t gonna try a thing, John—you just keep the mob off me.”
We’d made the mistake of not holding the train back till we got into town, and it got there ahead of us—and so the crowd naturally found out real quick from the crew that we were coming in by hack. Just as we turned the corner toward the jail, we saw the horde rushing at us from the other end of the street.
John and I each grabbed Wes under an arm and ran him in through the jail-house door just barely ahead of the clamoring crowd. A deputy bolted the door behind us and the sheriff was quick about posting armed guards at every window. He’d already asked the governor for help to guard Hardin against mob action or a jailbreak attempt, and the governor had promised to reinforce the Austin police with State Rangers.
For the whole time Wes was in Austin, the crowds milled outside the jail day and night—some people wanting to lend support, some wanting to see him hang, most wanting just to have a look at him so they could tell their grandchildren they’d seen John Wesley Hardin with their own two eyes.
Austin had the strongest jail in Texas—solid rock outer walls, floors and interior walls of sheet iron, and a double set of steel bars as thick as my wrist around each cell. He didn’t lack for visitors. When he wasn’t giving an interview to one reporter or another, he was conferring with one or more of his lawyers. He’d retained two of the best criminal attorneys in Texas to defend him. I met an uncle of his named Bob Hardin, and a cousin named Barnett Jones. Together with Wes’s mother, they’d pooled their money to pay the lawyers.
For our part, John did all the talking to the newspaper boys who wanted the story of how we’d come to capture the most famous desperado in Texas. We’d become heroes of a sort ourselves, but nothing on the scale that Wes was. Lord, the good-looking girls in the crowd outside that jail! They sent him cakes and cookies and flowers and locks of their hair. They sent him love notes. Some sent him bits of their underclothes in boxes wrapped in fancy ribbon. When I went to see him to say so long, he was wearing a fresh red rose in his lapel and held up a lacy strip of white cotton for me to see. “The gal that sent this said in a note that it was from the shimmy she wears every night to dream about me.” He tossed it to me through the bars. It was scented with perfume to make you faint. “You best take it. I wouldn’t want my wife to ever find it among my laundry.” The guard let him out into the runaround so he could reach through the second set of bars and shake my hand. “You’re a damn good detective, Jack,” he told me. Best praise I ever got.