The Pistoleer: A Novel of John Wesley Hardin

Dave put a shotgun and extra loads next to Wes’s bed, and every morning and afternoon him and the boys went out to work the fields, same as always. I kept a big pot of beef-and-bean soup simmering and would spoon some into Wes every time he awoke. By the fourth day it was clear how quick he was getting his strength back because he was feeling better enough to start peeping at me in a mischievous manner.

I was good-looking in my younger days, take my word on it—but I’m not and never have been a loose woman. I always did love my husband, first to last. I’m not making excuses for what I’m about to tell. I don’t think it needs any excusing, no matter what anybody else might think.

I was wearing a big loose shirt of Dave’s, and when I bent over Wes to adjust the bedclothes and his pillows, I knew he was getting a good look right down into it. He smiled up at me and I guess I smiled back. He put his hand up behind my neck and pulled my face down and gave me as good a kiss as ever I got, so wet and full of tongue it was like a living sin in my mouth. He slipped his hand up under my shirt while he was at it and my teats got tight with excitement. Then my shirt was bunched up under my arms and his mouth was at my nipples and I went dizzy from the sweetness of it. Next thing I knew, he was hard in my hand and his hand was all the way up under my skirt and we were panting like dogs against each other’s neck. He started twitching in my fist and it felt like hot wax flowing over my fingers just as a shiver slid up through me like a snake.

My tongue still gets a bit dry when I think on it.

We kissed and stroked each other real gentle, and a minute later he was back asleep. We never talked about it after that. I don’t know why I did it. I guess because I married so young and always thought I was missing some secret excitement in life. I’d get these yearnings. That small wickedness with Wes satisfied me of them for good. Later on, whenever I’d get to feeling the least bit restless, I’d recollect that time with Wes and feel a blush and then be just fine again. As for him, well, I reckon he’d just plain been taking pleasure in being alive.

Pretty soon he was getting out of bed by himself and getting dressed with only a little help from me. After breakfast he’d take a chair outside and sit propped against the front wall and whittle and sing softly till Dave and the boys got back from working the cotton patch, then he’d join them at the pump to wash up for dinner. One day I was at the stove listening to them all laughing and joshing each other out at the pump when suddenly they fell quiet. I looked out the window just as the first shots cut loose.

Wes was headed for the house, running hunched over as two policemen came riding hard out of the sweet gum grove a hundred yards away, shooting their repeating rifles as they came. I couldn’t see Dave or the boys, but I heard the horses nickering loud in the corral around back. A bullet ripped splinters off the edge of the window and whanged into a skillet of corn bread on the table and knocked it to the floor. Ten feet from the house Wes got a leg shot out from under him. He hit the ground hard but kept rolling right up to the door. I stepped out and grabbed him by the shirt collar with both hands and yanked with all my might as he scrabbled to all fours. A round passed through my hair and clanked on the stove. Wes tumbled in on top of me, then pulled me with him away from the open door.

The policemen reined up in front of the house and kept firing through the door and windows as fast as they could work the levers. Wes shouted, “Shotgun!” I was already running to get it from his bedside. I heard the slam of the rear door, and when I got back, Dave and the boys were hunkered down beside Wes. “Horse,” Dave yelled at him, “in back!” He had his pistol in his hand but I knew he hadn’t fired it at another living man since he’d been in the War. His face was pale and tight as a bare skull, and for the first time since the shooting started I felt scared. I shoved the gun and a handful of loads across the floor to Wes, then threw myself over the twins and held them down on the floor while bullets kept whizzing in and biting into the walls and blowing open the canned goods on the shelves and ricocheting off the stove and pans.

Wes scrabbled up next to the window, stood up with his back to the wall, and cocked both hammers. The new wound was low on his thigh and bleeding steady but not hard. It looked like the bullet had ripped clean through the muscle without hitting bone. But the wound in his side had opened again and was bleeding free all the way down to his boot.

The policemen were laughing like they were at a turkey shoot as they fired and fired into the house. A bullet ricocheted through the room and Dave yelped and grabbed his backside. Wes gave him a glance, then looked at me and winked. Winked!

Then—all in a heartbeat—he spun into the window and fired both barrels and jumped clear again as a bullet buzzed in and whacked the wall. A horse started screaming and the police let off shooting. One of them yelled, “Mike, help me! Help me, god-damnit!” I heard a horse galloping away.

Wes reloaded faster than I thought could be done, then leaned into the window and fired one barrel and the one policeman quit his hollering. The horse was still bellowing like blue blazes. Wes braced the shotgun against the window, aimed higher and more careful, and fired the other barrel. “Damnit!” he said.

He lowered the gun and stood staring out the window. Blood was running off his boot and spreading on the wood floor. All I could hear was the dying horse. The cabin was full of dust the bullets had knocked loose.

He turned to look at us and asked if everybody was all right. I was—the boys too—and I got off them. Dave stood up and felt of his backside, but the spent round had only stung him and not even torn his pants. “Reckon you’ll live?” Wes asked him. I couldn’t believe he was grinning! He saw my look and quit, then hobbled on outside.

Wes’s shotgun blasted and the horse finally stopped its horrible screaming. It was suddenly so unbelievably quiet. We went out and saw the dead animal laying within twenty feet of the house. A few feet over from it was the policeman, his belly blowed open and part of his head gone.

It was the first shot-dead man the twins had ever seen, and they ran over to him and studied him and nudged each other and pointed to this and that. Their wide-eyed excitement twisted my heart in an awful way I’d never felt before. Dave saw my face and quick called the boys back away from the body. Wes must’ve read my face too. He looked at me kind of sheepish. I can’t explain how I was feeling. I wanted to tell him I didn’t hold him to blame for my home getting shot up and my family being put in such terrible danger. But I just couldn’t.

We knew the policeman who got away would bring a lot more of them back real soon. Dave hitched a mule to the dead horse and dragged it into the bushes well back of the cabin, then did the same with the dead man. I did what I could for Wes’s wounds. He said he didn’t mean to bring all this trouble down on our family and he was awful sorry about it. “At least nobody got hurt except me,” Wes told Dave, “if we don’t count that slap you got on the ass from the ricochet.” That got a smile from Dave. He said he was proud to be able to say he’d fought next to him against the damn State Police. Men are such jackasses sometimes. It hadn’t crossed his mind yet how hard the State Police could be with them they saw as friends of fugitives.

By that evening the boys and I were in the wagon and bumping our way on the old trace toward my sister Millie’s farm some twelve miles away. Dave told me to stay put there until he came to take us home. Him and Wes had rode off in the other direction, toward Till Watson’s place, which was set even deeper in the forest than ours was.

“You’ll be safe there,” Dave had told Wes. “Till lives alone and he’ll be proud to take you, seeing how you hate the State Police almost as much as he does.”

Six days later Dave got back to Millie’s and told us Wes had surrendered to Sheriff Dick Reagan of Cherokee County and was under arrest in Rusk.