Forty Times a Killer Read online

  “My point exactly,” Wes said. “I want to bring that kind of frontier excitement to audiences back east and even beyond, to Europe.”

  When he put his mind to it, Wes could talk like a lawyer, even to a Negro.

  Luck brushed bread crumbs off his lap and without looking up said, “No one has come up with an idea like yours before, Mr. Hardin, and it just might work.”

  “It can’t fail,” Wes said.

  Luck raised his eyes. “Any business can fail. I just lost money on a Mississippi plantation that I was sure I could resell at a profit. Somebody burned down the big house and I was left with six hundred acres of land, half of it swamp.”

  Wes wouldn’t say it, but I did. “Sorry to hear that.” My face was empty.

  Again Luck’s smile was slight and fleeting. “Yes, I’m sure you are.”

  “Well,” John Wesley said, “what do you think of my proposition?”

  “It interests me, young man,” Luck said. “I believe your Wild West show idea has potential.”

  “Good,” Wes said, beaming. “How much do you want to invest?”

  “Not so fast. First I want to see a business proposal from you.”

  “What’s that?” Wes asked.

  Luck steepled his fingers and cocked his small head to one side. “You will draw up a cover letter, executive summary, business and market feasibility analyses and studies, financial data, and supply me with the curriculum vitae for all the members of your management team.”

  “Hell, is that all?” Wes blinked like an owl.

  “For the time being, yes,” Luck said. “Have it on my desk by the end of next week.”

  Wes nodded, then turned to me. “You heard the man, Little Bit. Have all that stuff on his desk by the end of next week.”

  My face said, “Huh?” but I heard the croak of my voice say, “Sure thing, Wes.”

  “Very well, our business is concluded,” Luck said. “Now, if you gentlemen will withdraw and allow me to finish my lunch?”

  Wes rose to his feet and I did the same.

  “Don’t worry, we’ll get you all that . . . stuff,” Wes said.

  Luck nodded. “Good. In the meantime stay clear of Custer. He can be a dangerous enemy.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  The Wrath of Custer

  “Well, what do you think?” John Wesley asked me.

  “Hell, I don’t know anything about that business stuff.”

  “You read books.”

  “Not about being a tycoon and the like.”

  Wes thought about that for a spell. “Well, just do what you can.”

  “I’ll need a pencil and paper,” I said.

  “There’s a general store across the way. It’ll have what you want.”

  We stopped in the middle of the street to let a heavily loaded dray drawn by an ox team trundle past.

  The wagon kicked up a cloud of yellow dust and when it cleared three men stood staring at us. One of them was Custer and he had his plumed hat set at a fighting angle. He jabbed a finger at Wes. “That’s the scoundrel who threatened my life, Constable.”

  One of the men with the general, a tall, rangy fellow with a magnificent, black cavalry mustache that rivaled Custer’s, had a shotgun leveled at Wes’s belly, both hammers eared back.

  Beside him, a smaller, slighter man, was similarly armed. He had the eyes of a snake and his fingers were crooked on the Greener’s triggers. “You are under arrest.”

  John Wesley tensed, a thing I’d seen before when he was determined to draw down on a man.

  But he was bucking a stacked deck and I think he knew it.

  It’s a hard thing to die in the street when you’re but seventeen years old with a great business idea.

  “Let it go, Wes,” I said. “They’ll cut you in half.”

  “Truer words was never spoke,” the rangy man said. “We have reason to believe you are John Wesley Hardin, the man killer. Give us any kind of excuse to gun you right where you stand and we’d sure appreciate it.”

  A dust devil spun between us and Custer and them, then collapsed. People had gathered in the street and judging by the eager expressions on their faces, they hoped Wes would make a play.

  “We’re in a hell of a fix, Wes,” I whispered.

  John Wesley knew that as well as I did.

  As I said, a man who hopes to have a Wild West show one day doesn’t brace a couple hardcases with scatterguns. Not at a range of three or four feet, he doesn’t.

  Wes tried to brazen it out. “The soldier boy I’ve already met. Who the hell are you two?”

  “I’m not in the habit of giving out my name to low persons,” the rangy man said. “But since I’m arresting you and expect to watch you hang, I’m Lieutenant E.T. Stakes of the state police and this here is Constable Jim Smalley.”

  “What’s the charge?” Wes asked.

  Stakes’ grin was unpleasant. “Don’t worry about that, Hardin. You’re facing enough murder charges to send you to the gallows.”

  “My name is Wesley Clements,” Wes said. “You got the wrong man.”

  “Let’s go ask Sam Luck about that,” Custer said.

  I guess that’s when Wes knew he was running out of room on the dance floor.

  “Go to hell,” he said.

  “Constable Smalley, the ruffian has two murderous revolvers under his armpits,” Custer said. “Do your duty and relieve him of those.”

  Stakes raised the muzzle of his shotgun. “Be careful, Jim. He can make fancy moves.”

  Smalley slapped the butt of the Greener. “I got the cure for fancy moves right here, Lieutenant.”

  Later, John Wesley told me that he’d had a passing fancy to go for his guns and that Custer would get the first ball. But when the muzzles of Smalley’s scattergun pressed into his belly and he looked into the man’s cold, reptilian eyes, Wes decided it was not the time to make a play.

  After Smalley removed the Colts from their holsters, Stakes slapped a pair of massy, iron handcuffs on John Wesley’s wrists.

  General Custer then stepped forward, his face like thunder. “You damned Texas cur.” His lips curled into a snarl as his riding crop slashed across Wes’s left cheek, leaving an angry red welt and drawing blood from the corner of Wes’s mouth.

  Wes took the blow without a sound, then leaned forward and spat a mix of blood and saliva onto the chest of Custer’s beautiful coat, right between the parallel rows of gilt buttons.

  Enraged and foaming at the mouth, Custer wielded his riding crop and rained cut after cut back and forth across Wes’s unprotected face.

  I heard Smalley as though he yelled at the far end of a tunnel.

  “Hell, General, leave enough of him for us to hang!”

  By then I was already moving. I limped as fast as I could to Custer and threw my fist into his face.

  Small and stingily built as I was, my punch did little damage, but it made the general back off a step. I followed him, my puny arms windmilling as I tried to land another blow.

  Something hard slammed into the back of my head and I saw the ground cartwheel up to meet me.

  Then I saw nothing at all.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  A Pathetic Creature

  I woke facedown in the street, my mouth full of dirt and clots of blood in my nose. How long I’d lain there I had no way of telling.

  The business of Longview proceeded around me. People stepped past me on the street and wagons and horses detoured around my prostrate body.

  I felt something wet at the back of my head and explored it with my fingers. They came away bloody and stained with manure. At one point, a horse must have crapped on my head as I lay unconscious. No doubt it had occasioned considerable mirth in the passersby.

  I attempted to rise but my head spun and I sank slowly back into the dust and dry manure of the street. To add to my misery, a cur dog, as mangy a brute as ever cocked a leg, decided to bark at me and tug at my clothes . . . as though they weren’t ragged enough al
ready.

  “Git the hell off’n him!” The man’s voice came from above me.

  I turned my head and beheld Jas. Glee, prop. aim a kick at the dog’s ribs. The wily canine dodged expertly and lit a shuck.

  “Let’s get you on your feet, young feller,” Glee said.

  “John Wesley has been taken,” I said.

  “Yeah, I know. There’s nothing you can do for him now, boy.”

  The man helped me to rise and his nose wrinkled. “Lordy, but you smell bad. You got hoss crap in your hair.”

  “And blood,” I said.

  “Yeah, that too. I’ll take you back to the livery and get you cleaned up.”

  “They got Wes,” I said again.

  Glee nodded. “You told me that already.”

  “They plan to hang him.”

  Glee nodded. “Seems like. Pick up your hat.”

  I did as he said and he half-carried, half-dragged me to the stable.

  A rain barrel stood at one corner. Glee took off my hat, grabbed me by the scruff of the neck, and plunged my head into the green, scummy water. He dunked me again and again until I thought I must surely drown.

  Then he raised my head for the last time and, my hair dripping, guided me into the livery where he tossed me a scrap of towel. “Dry yourself good, boy, then let me take a look at your head. I think you’ve got a bad cut back there.”

  “Somebody hit me with something, maybe a shotgun butt,” I said, rubbing my thin hair with the towel.

  “Seems like.” Glee shook his head. “You’re a pathetic-looking creature for sure.”

  The cobwebbed clock in Glee’s office claimed it was two in the afternoon as I sat eating his stew, my head wrapped in a fat, fairly clean, white and blue striped bandage torn from one of his old shirts. Around a mouthful of beef and onions I said, “I reckon I’ll go visit with Wes.”

  “If they’ll let you,” Glee said. “Them state lawmen are hard characters.”

  The wind had picked up and outside sand was blowing. The sky was the color of mustard and the sun a hazy, orange ball. In their stalls, the two mustangs we’d brought in were restless.

  Glee walked to the door of the livery and stared down the street. “Custer is leaving, getting into the stage, him and his wife. I reckon she’s a right pretty gal, at least from this distance.”

  “I hope the savages do for him,” I said. “Scalp them yellow ringlets from right off’n his head.”

  Glee turned to me and smiled. “No use in hoping fer something that ain’t got a chance of happening, boy. Custer is an Injun-killer from way back. The Sioux, Cheyenne, all them raggedy-assed tribes are terrified of him. One look at the general on his white hoss and they’ll cut and run.”

  “Before the Indians, he was a Reb-killer.”

  Glee nodded. “Yup, he was real good at it, an’ no mistake. That’s why they made him a general and him just a lad.”

  I scraped up the last of my stew, set the bowl aside, and got to my feet. “I’m going to see Wes.” I balanced my hat on top of my bandaged head.

  “Seems like there’s a sandstorm blowing up,” Glee said, looking at the sky and not at me. “If’n I was you, I’d step real careful.”

  Longview seemed a dark, joyless place as I walked along the boardwalk to the town lockup, my steel-caged leg clumping on timber with every step. Maybe it was because of the wind-driven sand that lifted off the street in tattered yellow veils, found every rip and hole in my clothing, and rasped like sandpaper against my skin that the town seemed so bleak.

  But more likely it was the melancholy fact that the Yankee law had John Wesley in its talons and would drag him all the way to the gallows.

  In those days, the Longview jail was a low, log structure with a single timber door with three massive wrought iron hinges, each hammered into the shape of what the French call a fleur de lis.

  Above the door was a rectangular painted sign. FIAT JUSTITIA RUAT CAELUM

  In keeping with the door, I figured the motto must be written in French, and I had no idea what it meant.

  It was only many years later when Wes became a lawyer that he told me it was Latin for Let justice be done though the heavens fall.

  Like me, he never forgot that sign.

  To the left of the door was the window of the jailer’s office. On the other side was a barred window, one of the panes spider-webbed by a stray bullet.

  To this day, jailhouses make me uneasy, but I swallowed hard and pushed on the door. It swung open on oiled hinges and I stepped inside.

  A tall man rose from the desk opposite from where I stood and his ice blue eyes warned Stay right where you are and don’t make any fancy moves.

  The jailer had a close-cropped square head, like a Prussian soldier’s, and a waxed mustache that curled up at the ends in magnificent arcs. But his forehead was disappointing, low and brutish with massive brow ridges that gave him the appearance of the lowest form of Negro.

  Nonetheless, his voice was pleasant enough. “What can I do for you?”

  He was a good four inches over six feet and I felt intimidated, like a puny David getting his first glimpse of Goliath.

  “I’m here,” I said, my voice breaking, “to see John Wesley Hardin.”

  “State the manner of your business,” the lawman said.

  “No business. John Wesley is my friend and I’m here to visit.”

  “Comfort him like.”

  I nodded. “If he needs comforting.”

  “He does. Any man facing the gallows needs comforting.” The jailer ran his eyes over me from the crown of my battered hat to the fat bandage around my head and then to my down-at-heel shoes. His gaze lingered for a moment on the outline of the steel brace that showed through my pants.

  “You can see him,” he said. “God knows you’ve got enough to contend with without me giving you another problem. What’s your name, son?”

  “Most folks call me Little Bit, but my given name is William, William Bates. Bates by name, Bates by nature, my ma always told me.”

  “Uh-huh.” The jailer lifted the keys from a hook on the wall behind his desk and said, “Ten minutes.”

  “Thank you kindly,” I said.

  Perhaps lest I thought him too friendly, the man then said, “Name’s Alan Henry Dillard and I’m a hundred different kinds of hell in a fight.”

  “I imagine you are.”

  Dillard nodded. “Just so you know . . . you and John Wesley Hardin.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  A Daring Plan

  “Did Dillard search you?” Wes asked.

  I shook my head.

  “Good, then he trusts you.”

  “What’s your plan, Wes?”

  There was only one cell, furnished with an iron cot and a straw mattress, a bucket that stank and a framed, embroidered motto on the wall that read HAVE YOU WRITTEN TO MOTHER?

  It seemed that the town fathers of Longview were big on instructing the criminal classes.

  Wes wrapped his long, fine fingers around the black iron bars of his cell and pushed his face closer to mine. “Little Bit, bring me a pistol. I can break out of here real easy.”

  I felt like pinching myself to make sure I was awake. “Wes, that’s nigh on impossible, This here jail is built like the First National Bank of Texas.”

  “Listen, and listen good,” Wes said. “Dillard said a Negro woman will bring me grub twice a day. Once I have the gun, I’ll squeeze out tears, pretend I’m broke up about hanging an all, and set them at ease, figuring I’m just a scared kid. But when the woman brings in the tray I’ll”—he made a gun of his thumb and forefinger—“Pow! Pow!—kill her and then Dillard.”

  “It’s way too thin, Wes.” In fact, I was horrified. John Wesley’s words were emotionless, as though murdering two people meant nothing to him.

  “The hell it is thin. Just bring me the Colt and I’ll do the rest.”

  I had to unload the thought churning in my head. “Wes, you’re talking about killing a
lawman . . . and a woman.”

  “So what?”

  “It ain’t right, Wes. It can’t be right.”

  “Would you rather see me hang?” Wes asked.

  “No, I—”

  “Then it isn’t my fault. Dillard and the black woman are just two more damned traitors shoving me toward the gallows. They both need killing.”

  The jailhouse was a solid building, but I heard the relentless rush of the wind, the hiss of driving sand, and the curses of a muleskinner in the street, his team balking at the storm.

  I looked into Wes’s eyes, so cold to be almost colorless, like ice in winter.

  “Well, Little Bit, will you help me or will you help drag me to the gallows with all the rest?”

  My guilty conscience was the joker in the deck, but nonetheless I decided to play the hand Wes dealt me. “I’ll bring the pistol,”

  The ice in John Wesley’s eyes melted away in the sun of his smile. “I knew I could depend on you, Little Bit. Come back tomorrow morning and bring the gun.” Wes thought for a spell, then said, “And a bag of sour drops.”

  “Sour drops?”

  “Sure. Dillard won’t suspect that a kid with a bad leg and a bag of sour drops in his hand is hiding a pistol, now will he?”

  The key rattled in the door that led to the cell, and Wes said urgently, “Make sure all six of the Colt’s chambers are charged. I’ll have some fast shooting to do.”

  I nodded and turned away from Wes as Dillard said, “Time’s up, son.”

  “I’ll see you tomorrow, Wes,” I said. “I’ll bring you some sour drops.”

  Dillard didn’t even blink. He had no way of knowing that the words I’d just uttered sounded his death sentence.

  I slept that night at the livery and next morning bought candy at the general store. They had no sour drops so I substituted molasses taffy, long a favorite of mine.