Forty Times a Killer (24 page)

A penitentiary is a wheel within a wheel and together they grind slowly . . . inexorably . . . a motion that's unrelenting, unalterable and pitiless. The purpose of a penal institution is to crush a man between the turning wheels, pulverize his soul, his mind, his being, while keeping his useless carcass alive so that he can remain only healthy enough to suffer his just punishment in full measure.

The man I met in Huntsville was no longer the John Wesley Hardin I knew.

A man can't be whipped, beaten, and starved into submission without it leaving a mark on him. Wes had served less than six years of his sentence, but already, he was broken by the wheels.

We met in a Huntsville Penitentiary visiting room during a thunderstorm, my affluent appearance and the hired carriage at the gates allowing me immediate access. The room was furnished with a table and two wooden chairs. A barred window high in one rock wall glimmered with lightning and allowed inside the sullen roar of the thunder.

Clanking iron shackles bound Wes hand and foot.

The prison guard pushed him into a chair. “Ten minutes,” he said to me. “And make no physical contact with the prisoner.”

The guard carried only a billy club. Judging by Wes's bruises, he had made its acquaintance recently.

I smiled at him, prepared for the usual polite
how-are-you?
exchange.

But Wes grabbed my wrist. “Did you hear?”

“Hear what?” I asked.

“A damned scoundrel by the name of Buffalo Bill Cody has started a Wild West show on the North Platte, up Nebraska way.”

“I'm sorry to hear that, Wes.”

“He stole my idea, and, by God, he'll pay for it.” Wes leaned closer to me and dropped his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “As soon as I get out of here, and it could be any day now, you and me will ride up to the North Platte and shoot that thief.” He leaned back in his chair, his shackle chains chiming. “And then we'll take over his show and get rich, just like we planned.”

I didn't like Wes's eyes, the odd way he stared at me. In the flickering light of the thunderstorm, he seemed much older. The bright, inner glow of his golden youth was gone. He was a man old before his time.

Every time I looked at him I died a little death.

Out of nowhere, he said, “Did you hear about Jane?”

“Yes I did. She was a fine woman and you have my deepest sympathy. Alice also passed away.”

Wes ignored what I said. “Why are you all dressed up like a dude?” It was as though he saw me for the first time.

I smiled. “Why, to meet you of course.”

“Are you a spy?”

“I don't understand.”

“You ain't Little Bit.”

“I was Little Bit.”

“He wasn't much.”

“He was your friend.”

“I don't have any friends. Nobody comes to visit me.”

“I've come,” I said.

“Have you brought tobacco?”

“No. But I'll bring some next time.”

“Get Passing Clouds Navy Cut. Accept no substitute.”

“I'll remember that.”

Then, as he'd so often done in the past, Wes surprised me. “Little Bit, I can't take another twenty years of this hell.”

He'd finally remembered who I was and I took that as a good sign.

“Wes, I'll do everything in my power to get you out of here,” I said.

“Make it soon.”

“It may take a little while. In the meantime, just don't kick against the system any more or it will destroy you. Play their game, Wes. Toe the line.”

“I don't want to be whipped again.”

“Then don't try to escape again or refuse to work. I'll see you're freed. Trust me on that.”

“Bear it with Christian fortitude,” Wes said.

“Yeah, that's the ticket.” I almost said
And the years will fly by
, but I bit my tongue.

After my visit, Wes took my advice and became a model prisoner. He managed the library and led Sunday devotions for his fellow cons and, as far as I am aware, was never punished again. In addition, he studied law and by all accounts became very learned in all its twists and turns.

Thank God, I didn't know then that, despite all my efforts on his behalf, John Wesley would spend a total of fifteen years, eight months, and twelve days in Huntsville.

Finally, at my urging and that of other prominent citizens, his lawyer W.S. Fly met with newly appointed Texas governor James B. Hogg. He was said to be, “All for the underdog when the underdog has a grievance.”

I ask you, who was more sinned against than John Wesley?

Fly met with Hogg and declared, “I can get a thousand men in Gonzales County who will sign an application demanding that John Wesley Hardin get a full pardon. I have faith in his integrity and manhood and believe it is not misplaced.”

Petitions soon poured into the governor's office from all over Texas, signed by judges, businessmen, politicians, and twenty-six sheriffs. In addition, a flood, nay, a deluge, a torrent, a cascade of letters came from private citizens.

“Parole granted!” a delighted Hogg declared on February 7, 1894.

John Wesley walked out of Huntsville, a free man, ten days later. He was forty years old.

I had a carriage and pair waiting for him at the gates.

 

 

When Wes was released, the frontier he had known no longer existed . . . except in isolated communities like the wild border town of El Paso. Even so close to the beginning of the twentieth century it still had more than its share of resident gunmen.

Of course, the town would eventually attract Wes like a moth to a flame.

“Gentlemen, I now declare to you that my future life will be one of peace and goodwill toward all men.”

Thus, on July 21, 1894, did Wes address the District Court of Gonzales County after it allowed him to practice law in any of the state's district and lower courts.

W.S. Fly was so moved, he jumped up and in a loud, stentorian voice, addressed the court. “You have all read Victor Hugo's masterpiece,
Les Miserables
. It paints in graphic terms the life of a man so like Mr. John Wesley Hardin, a man who tasted the bitterest dregs of life's cup, but whose Christian manhood rose, godlike, above it all and left behind a path luminous with good deeds.”

The audience cheered and no huzzahs were louder than my own.

I didn't realize it then, but it was the last time I'd ever feel proud of Wes and bask in the dazzling radiance of his glory.

Restless as ever, Wes ran for sheriff of Gonzales County, lost by a mere eight votes, then closed up his law practice and relocated to Kerrville in the hill country around the Guadalupe River. Before he left, he sent me a letter explaining the move. He said that one of his kin, Jim Miller, needed help with a legal wrangle.

But what really drew him west was a woman.

Callie Lewis was a flighty fifteen-year-old who'd fallen in love with the Hardin legend. She apparently admired desperadoes and their deeds of derring-do and thought it would be a hoot to wed and bed one.

What she didn't realize was Wes was a man old beyond his years, his bullet-scarred body stiff and not easy to get going in the morning.

But he wanted her. She was a flashing, vibrant, beautiful girl who reminded him of his own reckless youth, He hoped he could recapture all those lost Huntsville years if he made Callie his wife.

And so vivacious Callie played Catherine Howard to John Wesley's stooping, stumbling, aging Henry Vlll and the end result was just as tragic.

The happy couple wed in London, Texas, on January 9, 1895, and parted forever early the next morning, a few hours after they'd exchanged their vows.

Callie never said what caused the split, but to me it was obvious—the sickly, middle-aged man she married fell far short of the legend.

To me later in the day, he tried to make light of what had happened. “She took one look at me, standing nekkid as a jaybird by the bed, and promptly fainted. Hell, every time I tried to wake her up, she took one look at me and fainted again. Come morning, she threw on her duds and skedaddled out of there.”

“Sorry to hear that, Wes,” I said, though I had no liking for Callie. She was air-headed as they come and not very intelligent.

We were seated at a table in the Black Bull saloon. My artificial leg became intolerable if I stood at the bar for too long. I poured us both whiskey from the bottle we shared and glanced around me. The saloon was busy since evening was coming down, but no one paid us any heed.

Once well-wishers would have crowded around Wes and slapped his back, told him what a fine fellow he was, and the saloon girls would have vied for his attention.

But that night . . . nothing.

I felt a pang of sadness, almost painful in its intensity, and a deep sense of loss.
John Wesley you are a man of your time and that time is over.

“Maybe it's just as well,” Wes said.

I was shocked. Had he read my mind? “What's just as well?”

“When I go after Bill Cody, Cassie would just slow me down.” Wes leaned across the table, his face within inches of mine. “I think she was in on it. That's why she left me. She was scared I'd find out.”

I frowned. “Wes, I don't think that's the case. I don't think Cassie even knew about the Wild West show.”

“How the hell do you know that, Little Bit? You know nothing and you never did.”

“Buffalo Bill is an important man,” I said, refusing to take offense. “You can't gun him.”

“Yeah I can, because I'm an important man myself. Watch this.”

Wes turned in his chair and yelled, “Which one of you rubes will buy John Wesley Hardin a drink?”

He got blank stares and no takers.

I watched anger flare in him. “Take it easy, Wes.”

He ignored me and rose to his feet, staggering a little. He yanked a blue Colt from his waistband and yelled, “Do I have to leave men dead on the floor to get a drink?”

Standing there, half drunk, he did not look the heroic figure of old.

He was what he was—a sickly, rapidly aging man whose day was past. The owlhoot trails he once rode were scarred by the slender shadows of telephone wires and the tracks of horseless carriages.

Then I witnessed the start of John Wesley's terrible downfall.

The bartender, a massive brute with a bullet head and hairy forearms the size of rum kegs, stepped from behind the bar, strode up to Wes, and wrenched his revolver from him so roughly I heard Wes's trigger finger break.

Yes, it was that swift and that easy.

The brute tossed the gun to me. “Get him the hell out of here before he gets hurt.”

Twenty years before, the bartender would have been dead on the floor and Wes would have ordered a round of rum punches for the house. Now, he clutched his broken finger to his chest and meekly allowed me to guide him into the pale blue light of the gas-lit street.

I had discovered two truths that night. The first was that my knight in shining armor was no more. The second was that I was finally free of him.

I returned to Austin and resumed my writing career. I'd always been an admirer of Poe, and in later years I kept up a lively correspondence with Bram Stoker of
Dracula
fame. With Frank Starr's blessing I wrote my first horror novel in June 1895.

I'm sure you've read the work.
The Phantom of Yellow Fork, A tale of Western terror.
If you haven't, I believe it's still available . . . after thirteen printings.

In July I got a letter from John Wesley. He stated that he'd hung his shingle in El Paso and was walking out with a married lady and sometimes prostitute named Beulah M'Rose.

Two weeks later, I received a second missive. Wes said that his lady's husband, Martin M'Rose, had just been murdered under mysterious circumstances and that he was the prime suspect. He wrote:

Then a postscript that deeply troubled me:

There is no witness so dreadful, no accuser so terrible, as the conscience that dwells in the heart of every man. I had abandoned John Wesley to his fate and turned my back on him when he needed me most. Our years of friendship were
gone for nothing
.

I could not live with that.

Whatever slender claim to manhood I possessed would be forever crushed under the jackboot of treachery and I would never be the same again.

This I knew, even as I lied to myself that a trip to El Paso would be an excellent opportunity to do some research for my next book. Almost without thinking about it, I found myself hurriedly throwing my things into a valise, including the Colt revolver that the London bartender had taken from Wes.

Why I packed the weapon I'll never know. Its blue, oily sheen and cold black eye told me nothing.

But I did, and there's an end . . . and a beginning . . . to it.

 

 

I arrived in El Paso on the morning of August 19, 1895. It was a hot, dusty town surrounded by the Chihuahuan Desert with a distant view of purple mountains against a sky that stayed blue almost the entire year. The place was booming. Ten thousand people crowded its streets.

During my short walk from the train station to my hotel, I rubbed shoulders with priests and prostitutes, gamblers and gunmen, businessmen and beggars, and more Mexicans than I'd ever seen in one place in my life.

The throngs made the town noisy. Rumbling drays and spindly carriages vied for road space. Their drivers cursed each other and street vendors hawked their wares in loud, raucous roars from the boardwalks.

The town smelled of dust, beer, smoke, Mexican spices, and sweaty people.

But, by God, it had snap.

After I checked into my room, I came back downstairs and asked the desk clerk to direct me to the law office of Mr. J.W. Hardin.

The man looked at me as if I was an insane person. “What law office? Hardin hasn't set foot in the place for months.”

“Then where can I find him?”

The clerk smiled. “Mister, there are a dozen saloons in El Paso and the same number across the border in Juarez. He could be in any one of them.”

“This early?” I said, more from shock than curiosity.

“Hell, man. He's the town drunk. Where else would he be this early?” The voice came from my right side.

I turned and saw a stocky man of medium height with hard gray eyes glaring at me. He wore a holstered revolver, supported himself on a cane, and had a lawman's shield pinned to the front of his vest. “You a friend of his? Kin of his maybe?”

“I'm John Wesley's friend,” I said.

The man nodded. “When you find him, give him a message from me. Tell him the only curly wolf in El Paso is me. Nobody else. You got that?”

I felt a spike of anger. “And who are you?”

“Constable John Selman. Your friend Hardin has been messing with me and mine for too long.”

I said nothing.

Selman said, “Watched you walk here. You some kind of gimp or something?”

“Or something,” I said.

“Don't forget what I told you.” Selman limped to the door, then turned to me and said, “If Hardin doesn't leave El Paso, I'll kill him.”

After Selman left, the clerk gave me a worried look. “If Hardin is your friend, I'd get him out of El Paso. Selman is a hardcase and he's put more in the grave than I can count on one hand.”

“He'd like to be known as the man who killed John Wesley Hardin. That's what I think.”

“Mister, you need to catch up with the times. Hardin might have been somebody once, but that was a long while back. Now he's a drunk and a laughingstock. To prove how good he is with a gun, he shoots holes in playing cards at five paces and sells them to folks for whiskey money. He misses a lot more than he hits.” The clerk shook his head. “Get him out of El Paso or take the next train to anywhere yourself.”

“I'll find him.” I stepped toward the door.

The clerk said to my back, “Try the Wigwam first. He's usually there this early. And another thing—”

“You sure are a talking man,” I said.

“Maybe so, but listen to this—Selman has you marked. If I was you, I'd be looking over my shoulder”—he spun the register and glanced at the last entry—“Mr. Bates.”

 

 

As the desk clerk had predicted, Wes was at the Wigwam saloon. He wasn't mean drunk, or silly drunk . . . just drunk.

Unnoticed, I stood inside the doorway and studied him for a few moments.

He sat at a table with his back to the wall. His face was red-veined and bloated and he looked every day of his hard, forty-two years. I'd seen his like many times before, men who were used up, had a past, but no present and less future.

All that's left for men like that is to die with as little fuss, bother, and inconvenience as possible.

When Wes looked up and saw me step toward him, his hand dropped from inside his coat. “Little Bit, you again. You keep showing up like a bad penny.”

“Just passing through, Wes. I thought I'd stop and see my old friend.”

“I don't have any friends, old or new,” Wes said.

“That's a hell of a thing to say to me, Wes.”

He motioned to a chair. “Sit down.”

After I did, Wes said, “I didn't mean that. I guess I've got old friends, just no new ones.” His voice dropped. “A lot of men want to kill me.”

“You're square with the law. Those killing days are over.”

“Maybe. But wouldn't you like to be the man who killed John Wesley Hardin?”

I shook my head. “No, I wouldn't like that one bit.”

“Well, there are them who'd revel in it.”

“Are you talking about John Selman?”

Wes stiffened. “You heard about him?”

“He talked to me at the hotel. He said you've got to leave El Paso.”

Wes rubbed a trembling hand across his mouth. “I'm scared, Little Bit. I'm real scared.”

His words hit me like a shotgun blast to the belly. “No! John Wesley, you're afraid of no man.”

“I'm afraid of John Selman. I think he can shade me.” Wes grabbed my hand. “Little Bit, I want out of this town. Take me with you.”

“Sure, Wes, you can come with me. But you'll have to leave the bottle behind.”

“I will, Little Bit. We'll leave tomorrow.”

“No, Wes. We'll leave on the next train out of El Paso.”

That should have ended it, but it seemed there was no end to Wes's humiliation. He called for more whiskey.

Instead the bartender brought a ledger bound with black leather. “Hardin, I'm getting mighty sick and tired of this.” He pointed a thick finger to an underlined entry. “Pay the thirty-eight dollars and ten cents bar bill you owe or you'll get no more whiskey in this house.”

“Damn you, Matt,” Wes said. “I'm part owner of this establishment.”

“The hell you are. You drank away your share a long time ago.”

A second man stepped up to the table. He looked big enough and mean enough to be a bouncer. “Got some trouble here, Matt?” He rested a huge, clenched fist on the table in front of Wes.

It was an aggressive play, but Wes didn't seem to recognize it as such.

“No trouble. I'll pay Mr. Hardin's bill,” I said.

The bartender had huge side-whiskers that curled around his cheeks like billy goat horns. I was dressed well, looked prosperous, but it seemed that being in the presence of John Wesley did not engender trust.

“Show me your shilling, mister,” the bartender said.

I reached into my coat for my wallet and gave him two twenty-dollar bills. “Now, coffee for two.”

“The hell with that,” Wes said. “Bring me whiskey. We're in the money!”