The Pistoleer: A Novel of John Wesley Hardin

He was the deadliest man in Texas, on that they all agreed. Otherwise, they might well have been talking about two different men….

Some said he was nothing but a hero. Hellfire, didn’t he take up a gun against the bluebellies riding roughshod over Texas in the dark days after the War? He was hardly more than a boy and already fighting injustice. And when the damnable State Police was bullying innocent people all over Texas, didn’t he give those Davis devils plenty of their own brute hell? Didn’t he run them out of Gonzales County just about single-handed? Yes, sure, he killed men, a lot of men—men who were trying to kill him! Self-defense is the First Law of Life; everybody knows that. And it’s an art—an art all men wish they knew well. He’d done nothing but live by that law and master that art. Who wouldn’t do the same if he but had the courage and the skill? So some said.

Others were of different opinion. He was a rebel by nature, they said, a bad seed. No, worse—he was much worse than that. He was Evil at Heart. A killer natural-born. He was a violent soul ruled by Pride, the worst of the Deadly Sins. To attribute noble cause to his murderous deeds was to set a false halo over the devil’s horns. So others said.

And they all said much more. They said he killed his first man at the age of fifteen. That at eighteen he backed down the great Wild Bill on the main street of Abilene in front of a hundred witnesses. That he’d been shot so many times he carried a pound of lead in his flesh. That he’d killed forty men, maybe more, by the time he went to prison at the age of twenty-five.

They said prison could not break his spirit, though it tortured his flesh for years. That he at last tamed down behind those walls to please his beloved wife. That he took up study of the law and won a pardon after sixteen years. That by then his darling Jane had been in her grave a year.

They said he tried hard to lead an upright life thereafter but his nature would not permit it. He was sore in spirit, they said, he was desolate. He drifted west to the meanest town in Texas. He reverted to the recklessness of his youth, to the habits of whiskey and games of chance. He took a wild-hearted mistress and again carried loaded pistols. The shadow of death followed him everywhere.

They said these things and more, those who had known him in some way or other during the forty-two years of his life: friends and enemies, kinfolk and strangers, soldiers, drifters, cowhands, lawmen and outlaws, gamblers and fancy ladies, judges and jail guards and convicts—witnesses, all of them, witnesses to the pistoleer….