The Pistoleer (41 page)

We’d made the mistake of not holding the train back till we got into town, and it got there ahead of us—and so the crowd naturally found out real quick from the crew that we were coming in by hack. Just as we turned the corner toward the jail, we saw the horde rushing at us from the other end of the street.

John and I each grabbed Wes under an arm and ran him in through the jail-house door just barely ahead of the clamoring crowd. A deputy bolted the door behind us and the sheriff was quick about posting armed guards at every window. He’d already asked the governor for help to guard Hardin against mob action or a jailbreak attempt, and the governor had promised to reinforce the Austin police with State Rangers.

For the whole time Wes was in Austin, the crowds milled outside the jail day and night—some people wanting to lend support, some wanting to see him hang, most wanting just to have a look at him so they could tell their grandchildren they’d seen John Wesley Hardin with their own two eyes.

A
ustin had the strongest jail in Texas—solid rock outer walls, floors and interior walls of sheet iron, and a double set of steel bars as thick as my wrist around each cell. He didn’t lack for visitors. When he wasn’t giving an interview to one reporter or another, he was conferring with one or more of his lawyers. He’d retained two of the best criminal attorneys in Texas to defend him. I met an uncle of his named Bob Hardin, and a cousin named Barnett Jones. Together with Wes’s mother, they’d pooled their money to pay the lawyers.

For our part, John did all the talking to the newspaper boys who wanted the story of how we’d come to capture the most famous desperado in Texas. We’d become heroes of a sort ourselves, but nothing on the scale that Wes was. Lord, the good-looking girls in the crowd outside that jail! They sent him cakes and cookies and flowers and locks of their hair. They sent him love notes. Some sent him bits of their underclothes in boxes wrapped in fancy ribbon. When I went to see him to say so long, he was wearing a fresh red rose in his lapel and held up a lacy strip of white cotton for me to see. “The gal that sent this said in a note that it was from the shimmy she wears every night to dream about me.” He tossed it to me through the bars. It was scented with perfume to make you faint. “You best take it. I wouldn’t want my wife to ever find it among my laundry.” The guard let him out into the runaround so he could reach through the second set of bars and shake my hand. “You’re a damn good detective, Jack,” he told me. Best praise I ever got.

T
en months later I got into a drunk argument with Sally McGuire about who-knows-what and that high-strung bitch shot me. In the
balls.
Took one of them clean
off.
I nearly bled to death on the floor of that damn whorehouse before the sawbones got to me and saved my life. But I was left a one-walnut man. A few weeks later I got a note from Austin saying, “Jack, I hear your children will only be three feet high. Coulda been worse—you could be squatting to piss. Take care. JWH.”

The Daily Democratic Statesman

(
AUSTIN
),
29 AUGUST 1877

JOHN WESLEY HARDIN

——

THE PRISONER INTERVIEWED IN JAIL

——

A reporter of the STATESMAN called on … Hardin in the Travis County jail, where he is confined in one of the lower cages near the entrance. He was found in a quiet but pleasant humor, and showed but little objection to being interviewed and making himself agreeable … in his own words:

… I am a prisoner and must stand trial. All I want is to be allowed to appeal to the law of the land, and I hope the officers of the law will protect me for this end. My relatives and friends have met death at the hands of mobs and I want protection, while helpless, against anything of a similar nature. I am satisfied that there are those who would, if opportunity permits, not allow the law to take its course with me. I want to stand trial. I am sick and tired of fleeing from it and would go away if I could. I must see the end of it, and all I ask is that a mob not be permitted to

MURDER ME,

for I believe I can show that I did not have anything to do with the killing of Webb. Had my friends not killed him I might have done so, but it would have been in self-defense.

HIS PERSONAL APPEARANCE

Hardin is only 25 years old, and has quite a youthful appearance. He is of light complexion, wears a modest mustache and imperial, is 5 feet 10 inches high and weighs 155 pounds. He is mild-featured and mild-mannered, with a mild blue eye, and talks pleasantly enough. He says he has no fear of the law, and that he is ready for execution if condemned, but he claims to be innocent, and he is charged with much that he never thought of. He wants the authorities to protect him against mobs, for it is mob violence alone that he fears.

The Daily Democratic Statesman

(
AUSTIN
), 29
AUGUST
1877

CASTING OUT OF DEVILS—HOW TEXAS DOES IT

Murderers and thieves have suffered fearfully of late in Texas. Two notorious scoundrels, Ringgold and Gladden, are imprisoned or dead. King Fisher is incarcerated or has been released on bail remaining under the surveillance of the state troops. Scott Cooley was arrested and died in a spasm of rage and chagrin. Bill Longley sweats and sweats in the Giddings jail. Ham White, the famous stage coach robber, makes cigars for life in the West Virginia penitentiary. Jim Taylor, of the Taylor gang of desperadoes, was killed when resisting arrest at San Sabas last Thursday. His pal Hoy was killed under like circumstances the day before. Both fell before the guns of the state troops. Bill Taylor, brother of Jim, breathes hard and is nervous to the last degree, with three of the Sutton gang here in the Travis County jail…. Wesley Hardin, the most reckless murderer ever known in Texas, is committed to our jail. He has killed, so the story goes, twenty-five or thirty white men, besides Mexicans and Negroes.

… Between Bell and Coryell counties there is a tree of death. Beneath one great, sturdy, bended branch there have been suspended, a prey to eagles and carrion birds, like the sons of Rizpeh, seven admirable devils thus “cast out” of Texas. In Lee County, within a few months, twelve or fourteen scoundrels have been remorselessly hanged by the people and danced on nothing into eternity…. But the facts we state show that the end of desperadoism and lawlessness has come, and all the terrible facts recited tell the bloody-handed, cowardly villains who still wear pistols and knives girt about their bodies that this of Texas is no longer a healthful atmosphere. They should migrate. The people are surfeited with devilish deeds, juries are now doing their duty, and sure and swift justice is meted out. The frontier of Texas is no longer a proper place of refuge for continental knavery. Mexico must be its receptacle, and fortunate for Texas will be the day when the use of the pistol and the knife is more rigorously punished here than in Massachusetts.

I
n all my days as a Ranger we never put a prisoner under heavier guard than we did Hardin when we transferred him to Comanche for trial that hot September. The two biggest rumors were that his gang would try to free him on the road to Comanche—and that a huge vigilante mob had sworn to string him up before he ever set foot in court. Our whole outfit—Ranger Company 35, under Lieutenant N. O. Reynolds, as good a lawman as I ever knew—was assigned to escort Hardin to trial and repel rescuers and lynchers both, whoever came at us. We put him in irons from neck to ankles and propped him on the seat of a barred prison wagon. Half the company rode in front of it and half brought up the rear. We had a chuck wagon too, and an arms and ammunition wagon, and a remuda as big as you’d see in most cattle outfits. In addition to regulation sidearms and carbines, each of us was carrying extra saddle revolvers and a shotgun with buckshot loads. I mean we were ready for
war.

At every town along the way, people came out in droves to have a look at him. No matter how far from the nearest town we might make our camp, they’d show up by the hundreds. Most of them would stand well away from the wagon and talk about him like he was some sort of wild animal exhibit, but the gawking didn’t seem to bother him much. I guess he’d gotten used to it by then. Some would tell him good luck, and he’d say thank you very much, always real polite. Plenty wanted to shake his hand, and he never refused. One old fella pressed right up to the bars of the prison wagon and said, “Why, son, there ain’t a bit of bad in your face. Your life has been misrepresented to me.” At another place, a real pretty red-haired gal said to him, “I wouldn’t have missed seeing you for anything—not even for one hundred dollars.” Hardin winked at her and said, “I hope you think it’s worth it, pretty thing.” She said, “Oh, my, yes! Now I can tell everybody I have seen the notorious John Wesley Hardin and he is
so
handsome!” Hardin laughed and said, “Yes, well, my wife thinks so.”

We didn’t have any real trouble on that trip. Things didn’t get truly tense until we arrived in Comanche. We had so much chain on Hardin he couldn’t even stand up, never mind walk. It took six strong men to lift him out of the wagon and carry him bodily into the jail. There was a huge crowd of spectators, of course—some calling out encouragement and some calling him a lowdown killer who deserved nothing but a rope. There were plenty of cussing matches and now and then a fistfight broke out. Our scout brought word that a mob of two hundred vigilantes, most of them from Brown County, was camped just on the other side of town, ready to ride in and take Hardin out and lynch him.

Sheriff Wilson was plenty worried about a mob action against his jail, and he’d deputized thirty-five local citizens to help repel any attack. His idea was for his men to be inside the jail and the Rangers to guard the outside, but Hardin told Captain Reynolds he didn’t trust the local deputies. “If a mob does attack,” he said, “who’s to say these local boys won’t side with them and let them in? They sure enough let my brother hang. It’d be a whole lot smarter if
your
men were inside and the sheriff’s men outside, don’t you think?” Reynolds did think so, and that’s how he set up the guard details. It chafed the sheriff that Reynolds put more faith in Hardin than in the Comanche lawmen.

The next day the town was buzzing with a rumor that the vigilantes were about to storm the jail and take Hardin by main force. So Captain Reynolds put out a word of his own: if the jail was attacked, he would not only order his men to shoot to kill but would turn Wes Hardin out of his cell with a loaded pistol in each hand. He truly meant it—and he told Hardin so. Hardin thanked him and said justice in Texas would be a lot better served if it had more lawmen like him working for it. Some citizens were outraged that a Ranger officer would threaten to do such a thing, but I reckon the mob believed him, because they never did attack.

*    *    *

I drew assignment as a courtroom guard, so I got to witness the whole proceeding. I’ve since seen a lot of legal trials, but not many as hostile to the defendant as that one in Comanche. The night before it began, me and some other Rangers took a few drinks in the company of a newspaper editor named Quill, and he told us five men on the jury had taken part in lynching Hardin’s brother Joe three years before. The barkeep, a fella named Wright, said he knew for a fact that the presiding judge had once been hoodwinked by Joe Hardin in a land deal.