The Pistoleer: A Novel of John Wesley Hardin

He stayed at Fred Duderstadt’s place for a while when he first got back. His children had been living there ever since their momma died. Even before they’d moved in with Fred and his family, they’d been neighbors for years and years. For most of their life Fred had been the main man in it, the one to always help them out when they needed helping. Considering that Wes had been in the penitentiary for the last fifteen years, it’s only natural that they saw Fred as more their daddy than they did him. It had to be some awkwardness among them when Wes finally came back to them and said something like, “Hello, children—Daddy’s home!”

By the time he got out of Huntsville, Molly was a full-grown woman of twenty-one and was engaged to marry young Charlie Billings. The talk was that Wes didn’t much approve of the match but couldn’t make Molly back down from it, nor Charlie either. His boy Johnny I knew real well. He was one of Fred’s cowboys, and a danged good one. He rode like he was born to the saddle. I heard that Wes tried to talk both him and Molly into going to study at college in Austin, but they neither one wanted anything to do with college. Little Jane didn’t hardly know him at all, having only been but about a year old when he went to prison. But he was set on them all living together like the family they were. He rented a nice little house in Gonzales—he’d always liked the town and it had always liked him, and he’d decided it was where he wanted to try and make his living as a lawyer. None of his children were happy about the move to town, but he was their daddy, and they did love him and want to please him, and so they went to live in Gonzales with him.

It wasn’t long before he passed his State Law Examination and had his license to practice. He opened an office, in the Peck & Fly Building across from the courthouse. I met him after church one Sunday. Him and his children attended services regularly, most often with Charlie Billings in their company, since he’d come to town to visit with Molly nearly every week. On this particular Sabbath, Wes was asked by Preacher Kinson if he’d lead the congregation in a prayer, and he’d done it as good as any preacher could. I went up to him after the service and told him so. He invited me to dinner and I gladly accepted, and from then on I had dinner at his house almost every Sunday. We’d sit out on the gallery afterward and have good talks over cigars and some of Molly’s fine coffee. I tell you, if you didn’t already know who he was, you’d never guess that once upon a time he’d been the most feared mankiller in Texas. He was knowledgeable and well mannered, and most always dressed in a clean black suit and tie. It was obvious he enjoyed being the daddy of the family, even though it was sometimes just as clear that, grown as they were, Molly and Johnny and Jane didn’t much care for being treated like children.

One day I asked him to join me for a drink in the Glass Slipper Saloon, but he said, “No, thank you, Cicero, you go on ahead. I don’t associate with John Barleycorn any longer myself.” It might of been true: nobody saw him take a drink the whole nine months he lived in Gonzales. Nor do any gambling either. And far as I know, he didn’t make so much as a single visit to either of the pleasure houses at the edge of town. He said he intended to be an upright citizen and, by God, he was surely a better one than most.

I don’t recall him having but about a dozen cases the whole time he lived in Gonzales, and they were just small matters having to do with contracts and such as that. He had plenty of free time to stop by the jail-house gallery every afternoon to jaw with us—me and Sheriff R. M. Glover and Deputy Bob Coleman and a bunch of regulars who liked to get together to argue politics and tell stories and pass along the latest jokes. Wes fit right in. He told dandy stories and everybody liked him. Naturally, there were lots of things we all would of liked to hear him tell about—like the killings he’d done, and the time he backed down Hickok in Abilene, and what Bill Longley was really like, and what it’d been like in Huntsville all them years, and … oh, hell, a hundred things. But you don’t just up and ask a man about such personal things as that. You might hint around the subject a little, but that’s all. If a fella wants to tell a personal thing he will, and if he don’t, well, it’s his right to keep it to himself.

One afternoon, though, he did show us something we’d all been damn curious about. The talk had somehow got around to the old cap-and-ball revolvers which had long since given way to the cartridge loaders. R.M. and Bob and me all carried Peacemakers, and asked Wes what he thought of them. He said they were fine pistols, all right, and owned one himself, but he still believed the old army Colt .44 was the best gun he’d ever used. Then he says, “Ain’t I seen one of those cappers on your gun wall, R.M.?”

R.M. went in his office and got it. Wes checked to see it was unloaded and then twirled that piece as pretty as a pocket watch on a chain. He spun it up in the air and caught it in his left hand and kept it right on twirling. He tossed it over his shoulder and turned around quick and caught it in his right and held down the trigger and fanned the hammer with his left hand so fast all you saw was a blur. He handed the piece back to R.M. with a grin. “They say Bill Longley could fan six rounds that way faster’n you can sneeze.”

I tell you he had some mouths hanging open. Who would of thought a man could handle a gun that way after fifteen years in prison? No question he’d been practicing at home—but still. After Wes left for supper with his children, Bob Coleman said, “I believe that man is everything with a gun I heard tell he was.” I don’t recall anybody disagreeing.

Wes never showed it, but he had to’ve been unhappy about not getting many cases. I don’t think the wolf was at his door, but he might of been hearing it getting close by. Things weren’t going all that well in the family, either. Molly couldn’t stand being separated from Charlie as much as she was and her moping was getting worse by the day. Finally she just up and went back to the Duderstadt ranch. Wes didn’t like that one bit and went out there to retrieve her. But when he got there and they all talked it over, he decided to let her stay at Fred’s. What else could he do? If he’d made her come back to Gonzales, she would of been constantly miserable. More than anything, he wanted the family to be together, but not if it meant making his children unhappy.

With Molly gone, things at home got worse. Little Jane missed her sister and pleaded with Wes to let her go back to Fred’s too. She wanted to be with Molly, she said, she wanted to be with her friends. So Wes let her go too. His boy Johnny didn’t like living in town any more than the girls did, but he was a good and loyal son, and if his daddy wanted him at his side, then that’s where he’d be. The truth is, he was blazing at the bit to go back to cowboying with Fred. Fred would come to town fairly often to visit with him and Wes, and Johnny couldn’t ever get enough of hearing all about how things were going at the ranch. The fact is, Fred missed Johnny as much as Johnny missed him. I know this because Fred used to tell us so when he’d stop by the jailhouse and have a drink with me and R.M. before heading back home. It was a sad situation all around. I couldn’t help thinking how bad Wes must of felt to know his son really preferred to live with Fred than with his daddy. But he did know it, and because Wes Hardin was never a bully nor a selfish man, and because he loved his boy enough to want him to be happy, he finally gave him permission to go back to Fred’s. Johnny never asked to go, mind you. Wes gave the permission on his own. I can still see them riding out of town, Johnny and Fred, with Wes standing in front of the livery and watching him go.

I don’t believe Wes had ever been so alone in his life as he was after Johnny left. Even while he was inside those prison walls, he knew he had somebody waiting for him to get out and come home to, and so he wasn’t alone, not really, not in the way I’m talking about. But now, with Jane dead and buried and his children grown and gone from him, well, I reckon his heart had to been feeling hollow in a way that just can’t be filled by anybody’s consolations. I know what I’m talking about. I lost my wife Martha to the smallpox when I wasn’t but twenty, and not all the friends and kinfolk in the world could fill the hole she left in my heart like an open grave. I guess I tried to drink myself to death. After a while I didn’t feel much of anything; and once you reach that point, you either stop breathing or you start making your way back to the living. All I’m saying is loneliness can be worse than any sickness, and there ain’t a thing that can be done about it except to last it out if you can. That means trying to find something to do with yourself—besides drinking and picking fights, I mean—till you get over it or till you don’t.

What Wes found to do with himself was to get involved in the next election for sheriff. R.M. wasn’t running again, and it looked to be a close race between the two candidates wanting to take his place—Bob Coleman, the Populist Party nominee, and Old W. E. (Bill) Jones, the Democratic candidate, who’d been sheriff once before, back in the ’70s. When Wes found out Old Bill was running, he wrote an article in The Drag Net (one of the town’s two newspapers, whose motto was “We Admire No One in Particular”). In it, he said that Old Bill Jones had helped him to escape from the Gonzales jail back in ’72. He said Old Bill was a crooked lawman back then and would surely be as crooked again if he got elected. If Gonzales wanted an honest sheriff, he said, they’d cast their votes for Bob Coleman.

Lord, what a ruckus he stirred up! Practically overnight the election became a contest between Old Bill and Wes Hardin, who wasn’t even a candidate. Old Bill responded with some articles of his own in The Gonzales Inquirer. Who in his right mind, he asked the readers, would take the word of a damn convict who’d murdered dozens of people? He called Wes and Bob Coleman a pair of liars, and he accused Bob of recruiting Wes on his side of the campaign by promising to make him his chief deputy if he won the election. Old Bill asked the good citizens of Gonzales to consider if they were ready to hand Wes Hardin a badge and give him armed legal authority over themselves.

Tempers boiled all over town, and most political arguments ended in a fistfight. Some men thought that even if Wes’s accusations against Old Bill were true, it was low of him to make them after all these years. If Bill had helped him to break jail, it was a mean way of thanking him for it to tell the tale now. Others argued that if Old Bill had been a crooked lawman, nobody, not even Wes, was obliged to keep it a secret. By telling the truth about Jones, Wes was showing just how completely he himself had reformed.

Then Wes announced that he wouldn’t stay in Gonzales County if W. E. Jones won the election. If Old Bill got voted sheriff, he said, the enforcers of the law in Gonzales would be more dishonest than those who openly violated the law, and he himself would not live in a county that would accept such corruption.

It was the closest election we ever had. Over four thousand votes were cast and carefully counted. And when the dust all settled, the winner—by eight votes—was Old Bill Jones.

A couple of weeks later, Wes went out to the Duderstadt ranch and said his good-byes to his children and to Fred and his family. The next morning he loaded his trunk on a wagon, hitched his saddle horse to the back of it, and giddapped the team on out of Gonzales County, heading west.