The Pistoleer: A Novel of John Wesley Hardin

It was their first time at sea and it showed. As soon as we reached open Gulf and the steamer started its easy pitching on the low swells, they got a little green around the gills. By the next day, however, they had their proper color again and were back at the railing like a pair of old salts, smiling at the sea and each other, telling their little girl not to be scared of the sea gulls fluttering and screeching over the deck.

Even as he talked and laughed with his family, his eyes didn’t miss a thing going on around him. He was a man with no use for surprises. His coat was open, the top two buttons of his vest were undone, and the left side of it bulged with a pistol. He was just starting a mustache. I had him figured for a Texan. We had plenty of them in Florida at the time. There were cattle wars going on from the upper St. John’s all the way to the southwest coast, and some of the big ranchers were importing pistoleros to protect their interests. The prisoner I’d just turned over to a Texas Ranger in New Orleans was such a man. We’d had a DeSoto County rustling warrant on him, and one evening I spotted him coming out of a Beaver Street whorehouse, so I slipped up behind him and gave him the butt of my shotgun in the head. A little later we received the Texas warrant on him for murder and I delivered him on the steamship. But this one had his family with him, so I figured he was likely more interested in staying out of trouble than looking for it.

The weather that afternoon was nice—bright sunshine and a gentle salt breeze. I was standing only a few feet from them at the railing when the woman suddenly pointed and cried out, “Oh, look—what are those?” A school of porpoises had surfaced and was rolling and blowing alongside the ship. I tipped my hat and told them what they were looking at. “They’re warm-blooded as you and me,” I told them. “See those blowholes on their heads they breathe through? Some say they’re smart and can talk to each other, though I can’t guess what about. Maybe what kind of fish make the best eating, or whether the water feels any cooler today than yesterday, or which boy porpoise has been chasing after which lady porpoise—beg pardon, ma’am.”

The man laughed and the woman blushed pretty. I introduced myself and put my hand out. “John Swain,” he said as we shook—“my wife Jane and daughter Molly.” Jane said she didn’t know how smart porpoises were, but they sure did look like the happiest things. “Just look at those great big smiles!” she said. The man said he’d smile all the time too if all he had to do was play and eat and chase after the ladies all day long. “Now, Wes, behave!” she said, blushing again—and then quick put her hand up to her mouth. And just like that, I knew who he was.

Jane gaped at him like she’d spilled coffee in his lap. He patted her hand and looked around to make sure we weren’t being overheard, then smiled at me and said, “Mr. Kennedy, you look like you might have something on your mind.”

Of course I was a little wary. I mean, John Wesley Hardin, the Texas mankiller! “Well, sir,” I said, “I’d say Miz Swain might be one to get names a little confused when she gets excited.”

He smiled and said, “That’s a fact. Just last week she called me Winston in the excitement of a horse race in Houston. Winston! I about died of shame.” Then his smile closed up. “What I’m wondering is what some lawman might do if he was to mistake a peaceable citizen like myself for a man on the dodge, a man who ain’t wanted in the lawman’s own state and for sure ain’t wanted on this boat.” I said before that his eyes didn’t miss much, but I was surprised he’d spotted me for a policeman. “I’m asking you man-to-man, Mr. Kennedy—what you aim to do now?”

“Mr. Swain,” I said, “I aim to enjoy this boat ride like I always do, and let sleeping dogs lie like I always do. I figure a policeman’s job is to protect a citizen’s person and property from them that’s trying to harm the one or steal the other. Beyond that, I got no use for a policeman myself.” It was the truth. I’d become a law officer by chance after getting my fill of the cow-hunter’s life on the prairie. Turned out I was a good one—I was big and probably a bit less fearful than most, and I had a sharp eye for what was going on around me. But I never used my badge to bully nor went looking for trouble.

He studied my face close for a minute, making up his mind, then gave me his hand with a grin. “Proud to know you, Gus.” And I said, “Proud to make your acquaintance … Winston.” And even Jane laughed.

I accepted their invitation to join them for supper that evening, and we took most our meals together every day after that for the rest of the voyage. Jane couldn’t get enough of talking about New Orleans, and John and I always accommodated her choice of topic at the table. In the afternoons, however, when she retired to their cabin to put the baby down for a nap, John and I went to the upper deck railing to smoke a cigar and talk about our adventures in the cow trade—and about horseflesh and gambling houses and parlor palaces where we’d taken our pleasure. We had many similar opinions and both loved games of chance. I told him that if he ever got up to Jacksonville, I’d take him to some poker houses where the stakes ran rich as mother lodes.

He said Jane had kin in the Alabama boot heel, and he thought he might go in the lumber business up there. But first he wanted to see an old friend of his from the trail-driving days, a fella named Bama Bill, who was running a saloon in Gainesville. He fancied the idea of running his own saloon and wanted to see if Bill could use a partner. He didn’t talk about his trouble with the Texas law but to say he wasn’t guilty of a thing except defending himself and his own. I said no honest man could fault him for that. By the time the steamer bumped up against the dock at Cedar Key, it felt like we’d been friends for years.

They about smothered in the humidity. “Good Lord,” Jane said, “we’ve got heat in Texas, but this!” Mosquitoes whined in our ears and horseflies stabbed the backs of our necks as our hack made its slow way around all the timber wagons delivering loads to the dock for shipment. After trading profanities with every teamster impeding our progress, our driver finally got us to the train station. But not till the train pulled out and gained enough speed to bring a breeze through the windows did we get some relief from the heat and the insects. Gazing out the coach window at the passing country of pine and cypress, John smiled and said it reminded him of the East Texas piny woods, which he loved. “Me too,” Jane said, only she looked sad and far from home. We said good-bye at the Gainesville station. As the train pulled out again, heading for Jacksonville, they stood on the platform and waved so long.

One night about ten months later I arrested a bullying big drunk of a seaman named Davison in a bad saloon over by the river docks, but when I pulled him out on the sidewalk a mean crowd followed us, including three of his shipmates, and the situation got tight real fast. The sailors pulled knives and backed me and my prisoner against the wall, saying I either let their friend go or they’d cut me up for fish bait. The crowd was egging them on, wanting a show. I’d cuffed Davison’s hands behind him, but he was putting up a hell of a fuss and it took both hands to hold him. I knew if I was forced to pull my gun I’d have to shoot—and with that crowd, no telling what could happen.

Then one of the sailors gave a grunt and his eyes rolled up and down he went. And there John stood, grinning at me and holding a big army Colt that he’d clubbed the fella with. “Stand fast, boys,” he told the other two, and they froze in place.

I grabbed Davison by the hair and rammed his head into the brick wall, putting an end to his nuisance and freeing my hands of him. John backed up beside me, still holding his gun on the other two, and said, “Evening, Gus. They said at the station you’d been sent here to settle a row, but damn if it don’t look like it’s trying to settle you.”

“Evening yourself, John,” I said. “Real good to see you. Excuse me a minute.”

I took the knives off the two tars and gave each one a hard backhand across the mouth, drawing blood both times. I told them to pick up their trash and get out of my sight before I cut their noses off. They didn’t waste any time hoisting up the one John coldcocked and making off down the wharf. I told the crowd the show was over and to break it up, and they started milling back into the bar, grumbling that nobody’d been killed. I took a mug of beer from one fella and poured it in Davison’s face to bring him around.

“Mr. Swain,” I said, “let me check this gentleman into the Crossbars Hotel and we’ll go sit ourselves down with a bottle so you can tell me why it’s taken you so damn long to come to our fair city.”

A half hour later we were drinking rye at a back table in Feller’s Club and he was telling me he’d found the saloon his old trail friend had owned in Gainesville—but Bama Bill himself had been dead for two months. He’d got into a drunken fight with the high yella woman he lived with just outside of town and she’d broke his head open with an iron skillet. She’d covered up her crime by burning down the house and claiming the fire killed Bill. But she was a good Christian woman and her conscience bothered her too much to live with, so she went to the sheriff and confessed. Two nights later, while the sheriff was at supper, a bunch of Bama Bill’s friends broke her out of the jail and took her out in the swamp and a few of them had their way with her and then they drowned her.

John heard this story from Sam Burnette, who’d come to own the saloon after Bill’s death. But Sam was champing at the bit to go prospecting for silver in Colorado, and he was ready to sell. In just a couple of days they’d made the deal and John had himself a saloon.

Shack Wilson, the Gainesville sheriff, became one of his regulars, not only at the bar but in the poker room John set up in the back. They started going bass fishing together. Shack introduced him to a neighbor of his named Salter who raised a kind of hunting dog called a Texas leopard, which is the best wild-hog hunting dog there is. The three of them would go into the forest every now and then and come out with enough pig for all their families to feast on for days.

One day when he was tending bar, in walks a couple of Texans he knew from his trail-driving days. They recognized him too, mustache and all. But before they could say anything, John put out his hand and said, “Name’s John Swain! Always glad to see new faces in here.” He took them to a table at the rear of the room and they had a quiet talk. The Texans were in town on some cattle deal and were mighty glad to see him. They said they’d been hearing all sorts of tales about him back in Texas for the last ten months—that he’d robbed banks in Waco and Dallas, that he’d killed the sheriff in Livingston last Christmas and two Texas Rangers in San Antone just last month and four possemen near Austin the month before that. Every time somebody got shot dead in Texas and there weren’t any witnesses, you could bet the blame would fall on John Wesley Hardin. “I guess it’s a compliment,” John told them, “to be so often remembered by my fellow Texans.” The two trail partners swore they wouldn’t say a word back in Texas about having seen him, and Wes told them he knew he could trust them. The Texans were in town a week and spent every night in John’s saloon, drinking and gambling and having a high time. Three days after they left back for Texas, John had sold the saloon and set out with his family for Jacksonville without letting anyone know where he was going. “It’s not that I don’t trust them old boys,” he said, “I just thought it’d be wise to proceed as if I didn’t.”

He did real well in Jacksonville—got into cattle shipping and bought himself a butcher shop, and both businesses prospered. Their little rented house on the bank of the St. Johns was shaded by palms and cooled by the river breezes. Jane loved living in the midst of all that lush greenery. They often took the wagon out to the beach with a picnic lunch and played in the breakers. Jane was rosy with sun and the glow of pregnancy, and Molly was dark as an Indian. In August “J. H. Swain, Jr.” was born, and for the next two weeks John handed a cigar to every man he met. I got into the habit of taking supper at their house two or three evenings a week. I taught John the fun of fishing in the surf, and we’d go hunting in the swamps for deer and pig. He shot a couple of good-size alligators one day and we dragged them out on ropes and had them skinned by an old Creek from the St. John backwater. John hung the skin of the sixteen-footer on the front porch of his house and had the fourteen-footer made into belts and hat bands and two fine pairs of boots, one for me and one for himself. We got to be damn fine friends and got to talking about going partners in the timber business up in the Panhandle.

Of course we did a little gambling every so often. We sat in on Bobby Chiles’s poker game on Tuesday nights in the back of his saloon, and in Fred Johnson’s game every Thursday. I always did all right, but John most always came out the big winner. The fellas used to cuss me half joking and half not for introducing him to our games. “Don’t seem we can do much about your luck, Swain,” Bobby Chiles said to him one time, “but we ought to take a damn horsewhip to Kennedy for bringing you around here in the first place.”

One night—he’d been in Jacksonville about a year, I guess—we came out of Bobby Chiles’s with a nice bourbon glow and bumped into a pair of strangers coming through the doors. They were big rascals and wore tight black suits and derby hats. One had a black handlebar and the other’s face was full of orange freckles. “Pardon me, friend,” I said to the handlebar, then saw the look he gave John and I knew they’d come for him. Freckles stood aside to let us pass and John nodded thanks.

We paused under the streetlight in front of the saloon to fire up cigars, and John whispered, “Looks like they’re on to me.” I glanced real casual up at the saloon window behind him and saw Handlebar peeking out. “Best go your own way, Gus,” he said. “It ain’t your fight.” Hell it ain’t, I told him. In my best copper’s voice I said I was an authorized agent of the law, sworn to protect the honest citizens of Jacksonville from those who would interfere with the exercise of their civil liberties. John smiled and said, “Well hell then,” and we headed off toward the deserted section of town by the old port on the river.

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.

But as time went by she found it harder to bear their separations. She complained she was lonely and that it was hard to raise the children properly when they hardly ever got to see their daddy. Why couldn’t he run a saloon again, or go back to cattle shipping or butchering like in Jacksonville? John would say that for now the logging business was the only safe way he had of making money. He reminded her that he was a seriously wanted man and nobody but her and me and a couple of her Polland kin knew who he really was. If he opened a saloon or went back to the cattle business, he’d be sure to be recognized by somebody, and next thing you know the law or the bounty men would be down on him. She might not see much of him now, but he reckoned she’d see a lot less of him if he was dead and buried. John was right about the whole thing, of course, and I’m sure Jane knew it, but that was still a hard way to put it to her, and it made her cry. We’d been logging for close to a year by then, and Jane was about to give birth to their third child, so I could see why she felt like she did.

One morning near the end of June, as we were finishing up a visit to Polland and about to head back to the timber camp, John’s brother-in-law Brown Bowen showed up. John had told me about him. He’d described him as one of those sorry creatures other men can’t stand to have around. He was always trying too hard to be one of the boys, to be included in the doings of men, but all his efforts to be liked had exactly the opposite effect. Nobody ever asked his opinion or laughed at his jokes or listened to his stories. The only claim to notice he’d had in his life was being brother-in-law to John Wesley Hardin. Then one day he shot a drunkard sleeping in an alleyway, an old rumpot most everybody had liked. He killed him for no reason except he was pretty drunk himself and feeling low because nobody liked him. John said the boys would have hung him on the spot if the sheriff hadn’t been right there to arrest him and hustle him off to the Gonzales jail. Even then, a mob would’ve got him that night for sure if Jane hadn’t pleaded with John to do something to save her brother from the noose. So John went to the sheriff and money changed hands and that evening Brown Bowen escaped. John put him on a midnight train to Florida with the warning that if he ever came back to Texas he’d let the boys hang him next time. And now here the fella was.

It didn’t take but five minutes to see how right John was about him. Brown’s smile was phonier than a medicine barker’s, and he never looked you square in the eye. He’d been drifting all over Florida since leaving Texas, following one trade after another—hunting for plumes and gator hides in the southern glades, wrangling for a cattle outfit on the Gulf coast, cutting logging trails in the cypress swamps, farming on the lower St. John’s, a few other things in a few other places. He tried to sound like he was an expert at all of it, but it was my guess he’d done so many different things because he couldn’t do any of them worth a damn.

When he heard we were logging up on the Styx, he wanted to throw in with us. John told him sorry, but we had a full crew. Brown Bowen said John just didn’t like him was why he wouldn’t take him on. John said, “You’re right, Brown. I shouldn’t of lied. The truth is I don’t like you and don’t want you near me, you’re right.” And that was that. Jane looked like she might want to scold him for being so hard on her brother, but she didn’t. She just folded her arms over her swollen belly and kept quiet. Brown stood there with his mouth open and watched us go.

We’d been back in camp a couple of weeks when word came up the river that Jane had given birth to their second daughter. John had told me that if the baby was a girl they were going to name her Callie, and he broke the news to me by sticking his head in the bunkhouse and yelling, “Callie’s home, Gus! She got there three days ago!” We all lit cigars and passed around a bottle to celebrate.

A few days later I came down sick and was either shitting or throwing up every ten minutes. All I was good for was laying real still in my bunk. I couldn’t even fart without soiling my pants. I tried to last it out, but after another few days I was full of fever and too weak to stand, so John had me loaded in a wagon and told Sweeny the Swede to take me to the doctor in Mobile.

As they loaded me in the wagon, John joked with me not to take too long about getting my sorry ass back to work. He and the boys Were about to make another run to Pensacola and he joshed about all the fun I was going to miss out on. Then he slapped me on the shoulder in farewell and Sweeny giddapped the team and we set out down the logging trail.

I was tended by a gap-toothed doctor named Amons. He gave me some god-awful medicine to drink five times a day and told me to stay in bed and eat nothing but mashed greens and in a few days I’d be fine. Sweeny checked me into a hotel that faced out on the bay and made arrangements with a restaurant down the street to bring me my greens every day. Then he wished me luck and headed off for Pensacola to catch up with John and the boys.

Doc Amons’s medicine might of been the worst stuff I ever tasted, but it surely did the cure. In fact, it stopped my runs so good I didn’t have a decent shit for the next six months. My fever broke after two days, and in two more I was back on my feet and able to walk down the street for my first real food since I’d took sick—a beefsteak the size of a saddlebag, best thing I ever tasted.

The next day I felt strong enough to get moving, so I paid up my hotel bill and went down to the depot to catch the early train to Polland. I figured John was either already there, after his run to Pensacola, or soon would be.

When the hack got me to the depot, there were hundreds of people mobbing the place. I asked the driver what was going on. “You ain’t heard?” he said. “John Wesley Hardin. They caught him yesterday in Pensacola. Texas Rangers. They brung him here and put every policeman in town around the jail house. Word is, they’re aiming to take him back to Texas today. Everybody’s waiting to have a look at him.”

I waited at the station with everybody else, waited to see for myself if he’d really been arrested. I didn’t believe it. He said he’d never be taken at gunpoint, he’d go down shooting first. If they nabbed someone, it wasn’t him.

An hour later we got word the Rangers had believed his friends were waiting at the station to free him, so before sunup they’d taken him by wagon to the rail station in Montgomery. I knew then it was all bullshit. Nobody’d captured John. It was just one more of the stories people were always making up about him all the way from Texas to Florida.

I took the late train to Polland. On the way I wondered if John would laugh at the story of his “arrest” in Mobile—or worry that such stories were being told too damn close to his hideaway. Then I got to Polland and found Jane in tears and I knew the truth of it.