A few days later Williams said Hardin had finished his keys. He’d had Williams test them on the locks and they all worked perfectly. “That boy’s a right wonder with his hands,” Williams said. “I believe he could make him a pocket watch from a tin can if he wanted.” The break was set for Christmas Eve.
Just after Williams locked down the row that evening, I posted guard details with shotguns at both ends of the row, and then Ballinger and Meese and I rushed into Hardin’s cell. He’d just taken off his ball-and-chain and was retrieving his keys from under a floor stone. He fought like a wildcat, breaking Meese’s nose and nearly biting off one of Ballinger’s fingers. I kept clubbing at him with my hickory stick, but it was hard to get a clear swing at him in all the rolling and tumbling. I finally landed some hard ones square on his head and took enough fight out of him for Ballinger and Meese to get him pinned and cuff his hands behind him. The rest of the row had been roused by the sounds of the fight and was roaring like a zoo at feeding time.
The lanterns in the drafty whipping room threw trembling shadows on the stained stones. It was so cold our breath showed in pale puffs. Wales was waiting for us, his sleeves rolled up on his muscular arms and the whip coiled in his fist. Ballinger and Meese each held Hardin by an arm and Lawrence had him in a choke hold from behind. It was all he could do to breathe. The warden had ordered us to give him a full whipping, then throw what was left of him in the hole for a week.
We stripped him naked and tied the end of one rope around his wrists and the end of another around his ankles, then stretched him facedown on the stone floor, Ballinger tugging on one rope and Lawrence on the other. He wriggled like a fish on a line and cursed us in a fury. Wales stepped up and uncoiled the whip with an easy twitch of his wrist. “You already got you some good scars, boy,” he said, “but you ain’t seemed to learn much by way of getting them.”
The whip consisted of four leather harness straps, each about three feet long and two inches wide, attached to a foot-long hickory handle. Wales was a master with it and made every lick crack like a pistol shot. He’d snap his wrist one way to cut into the flesh, and another to pull the wounds open wider. The limit on lashes was thirty-nine, which was enough to kill a man. I knew because I’d seen it happen. But if a man couldn’t take it, that was his bad fortune. He should not have done whatever he did to bring the whipping on himself. The convicts had a saying: “Don’t make a slip if you can’t take the whip.” It was an admonition worth heeding.
With the first twenty-five licks, Wales opened him up from shoulder blades to tailbone. His ribs showed through in several places, and we’d all been spotted with his blood. I told Wales he would kill him if he persisted in hitting him in the same places. He glared at me and said he didn’t need anybody to tell him how to do his job. His face was dripping sweat and his shirt was soaked through. He was in a temper because he’d been unable to make Hardin cry out until the seventeenth lick. No con had ever before lasted past the twelfth stripe before screaming, and none had ever taken all thirty-nine without losing consciousness. Only Meese had thought Hardin would go past twelve without yipping, and he won big in the betting among the guards. Nobody had been foolish enough to bet he’d be conscious at the end.
After one more to his ribs to remind me who the whipping boss was, Wales gave him the rest across the buttocks and the backs of his legs. When it was over, Hardin had fainted and looked like he’d been attacked by wolves. We took the ropes off him and poured water over his head, then pulled him to his feet and half dragged and half carried him down the hall to the hole. He left a smeared trail of blood behind him. On our way back to the block, Lawrence said, “He don’t look all that good. No salve on them bad wounds, nothing to eat the next seven days hardly, nothing to drink? I don’t reckon he’ll make it.” Ballinger said he didn’t think so, either, and they both looked at Meese, who smiled and said, “Five dollars says he does.”
Meese won again, though not by much. When we took Hardin out of solitary he couldn’t walk on his own. His back was a massive ugly wound, oozing pus and blood and festering with maggots. He was on fire with fever and half out of his head. The warden thought he was exaggerating his pain and refused to admit him to the prison hospital, but he did permit the doctor to treat him. It was a month before he was up on his feet again—with a fresh new set of scars to carry to the grave.
For years he wouldn’t quit trying. He took more beatings than any con I can recall. And then one day we got a new deputy warden, a former Ranger named Ben McCulloch. It so happened he and Hardin knew each other from some ten years or so before when they drove cattle together. He told Hardin he was sorry to see how poorly fortune had treated him. Hardin laughed and said it hadn’t treated him as poorly as it had McCulloch. “Ain’t much lower a man can get than a damn prison hack,” he said. “You must of displeased the Lord a good bit more’n I have.” Some guards took offense at such talk about our profession, but not McCulloch. He laughed along with Hardin and said, “Maybe so, Wes, maybe so.”
I’m convinced McCulloch saved Wes Hardin from dying in prison. He had a good many long conversations with him and advised him many a time to quit trying to escape and to instead apply himself toward being a good convict and cutting time off his sentence. His argument to him was real simple: “If you keep doing like you been doing,” he told him, “you’ll die in here for sure. You’ll die of a beating or a bullet or just plain choke to death on your own mean rage. And even if you somehow manage to stay alive all the twenty-five years, what then? You’ll be old and broken and not worth shit. Your wife will be older than her years, Wes, for all her worrying over you. You’ll never know your kids. They’ll be grown and long gone before you leave this place.”
It must have sounded to Hardin like he was being advised to surrender, which just wasn’t in his nature to do. But he was no ordinary con—he wasn’t stupid—and I think it goes to show how damn tough he really was that after his talks with McCulloch he never tried another break, not once in the next ten years.
* * *
He nearly died anyway—of an old wound, a chronically infected patch of raw flesh on his side, the result of a shotgunning he’d received more than ten years before. It suddenly abscessed so severely he could not stand up. It was an awful-looking thing—high-smelling and full of rank yellow pus and thick, constantly oozing, half-clotted blood. The doctor treated the wound the best he could. The rest, he said, was in the hands of God. With the warden’s approval, he assigned an inmate nurse to tend to Hardin in his cell till he recovered or he died.
At first his condition worsened by the day. Every morning, I arrived at the row expecting to be told he had died in the night. He was sopping with fever and out of his head. His hair was plastered to his head like riverweed. His bloodshot eyes receded into deep black wells. His nurse was an effeminate little convict named Maylon Donaldson—whom the convicts had called Sister May until he was made a nurse, and then they called him Florence. He tended the wound as the prison doctor had instructed him—he mopped Hardin’s brow, he spooned broth to his mouth, he sang softly to him. Sometimes Hardin would loudly address his wife, declaring his love for her, praising her eyes and breasts and the feel of her skin. Florence told me he sometimes laughed like a crazy man and babbled about the way he got his wound. “Goddamn tinhorn”—Florence said he once shouted—“shoots me then and kills me now.” I heard him speak many other names in his delirium besides his wife’s and children’s. He often mentioned Joe, and somebody named Simp.