The Pistoleer (39 page)

The Daily Democratic Statesman

(
AUSTIN, TEXAS
)

AUGUST
25, 1877

MORE GLORY FOR THE ADJUTANT GENERAL AND THE STATE TROOPS

——

WESLEY HARDIN ARRESTED AT PENSACOLA, FLORIDA

——

A DESPERATE FIGHT

——

ONE OF HIS CONFEDERATES KILLED AND THE OTHER TWO, WITH HARDIN, ARRESTED

——

General Steele and the efficient State Troops under him have for some time been quietly working for the arrest of the notorious and desperate John Wesley Hardin, the terror of the Southwest, and the glorious news of his arrest at Pensacola, Florida, is announced by dispatch to the Adjutant General from Lt. J. B. Armstrong, who left this city on this mission, accompanied by Private Duncan, on the eighteenth instant. The arrest of this notorious character with two of his men and the killing of another adds new laurels to the achieved honors of the State Troops…. The following is a copy of the dispatch received by Gen. Steele yesterday morning:

WHITING, Alabama, August 23.

Gn. Wm. Steele, Austin:

Arrested John Wesley Hardin at Pensacola, Florida, this afternoon. He had three men with him, and we had some lively shooting. One of their number was killed, and the others were captured. Hardin fought desperately, but we closed in and took him by main strength, and then hurried aboard this train, which was just starting for this place. We are now waiting for a train to get away on. This is Hardin’s home, and his friends are trying to rally men to release him. I have some good citizens with me, and I will make it interesting.

J. B. Armstrong

Lieut. State Troops

J
ohn wired me in Dallas saying he’d been put in charge of running down John Wesley Hardin and wanted my help. General Steele had authorized him to appoint me a “special Ranger” for the job. I sent a telegram right back saying I’d do it and he could expect me in Austin on the morning train. After making a reservation, I went to my boardinghouse and packed a bag, then went to Sally McGuire’s to celebrate with a Duncan Special. A Duncan Special was one girl to mount up on and another to lay on her back behind me with her face between my legs, doing whatever interesting things she could think of with her mouth and fingers while I rode her partner. Then they’d switch off and we’d do it some more. That particular night cost me a pretty penny, since we went at it till almost dawn. I just did make the train, looking like something the cat dragged aboard, and mighty aware of my reek of stale jissum and whorehouse perfume.

J
ohn met me at the station and gave a grinning snort at the smell of me. We went straight to the Red Rock saloon so he could fill me in. He was heavyset and going bald in front. The more hair he lost off his head, the thicker he grew his walrus mustache. He was a damn fine peace officer, quick and fearless. We’d worked together several times before, and he knew I was the best detective in Texas. I’d say I was the best in the country but it might sound like bragging. He also knew I’d jump at the chance to help him hunt Hardin. It wasn’t every day a man got the chance to get on the state payroll just to try and collect half of a four-thousand-dollar arrest reward.

He said he had a tip that Hardin was in Florida. I said I’d heard that rumor like everybody else, but Florida was a long way off and a damn big place to go searching just on account of hearsay. But John thought it was more than a rumor. He said that a year ago the Pinkertons had got a tip he was in Jacksonville and sent two men down to check it out. Three months later their rotted remains were found in a riverside warehouse. They’d both been shot. “Anybody might of killed them,” John said, “but I got a feeling it was our man.” He had a hunch Hardin was still in Florida, though he likely wouldn’t have stayed in Jacksonville. I put good store in John’s hunches, and even more in my own—and my hunch was he was right.

Family, I told him—family was the way to find him. A man on the dodge might never get in touch with his friends or his partners, but if he had family or other close kin, that’s who he’d contact if he contacted anybody at all. And Hardin had plenty of kin.

John had naturally thought of that. Hardin’s wife and child were said to be with him, wherever he was, but for weeks now John had had a man watching Hardin’s mother’s house up in North Texas, near Paris, where the family had moved after leaving Comanche. Preacher Hardin had died just a few months before, but there’d been no sign of Wes Hardin at the funeral. John’s man in Paris was bribing the postmaster to keep close track of the Hardins’ mail, but nothing had come from or been sent to Florida, and all the senders and recipients could be accounted for. None of them was Wes or Jane Hardin using a false name. John had other men spying on Hardin’s East Texas kinfolk, but they hadn’t turned up anything either. I said I didn’t think they ever would, not through Hardin’s people. But what, I asked him, about
hers?

W
e went down to the Sandies and snooped around on the sly. We learned that Neal Bowen, Jane’s father, had a country store for sale in Coon Hollow, and we came up with a plan. I’ll be the first to admit we were damn lucky in the way it worked out—but like the man said, I’d rather be lucky than good. While John laid low in Cuero, I went to Neal Bowen and introduced myself as Hal Croves from Austin and said I was looking to buy a store. We hit it off pretty well, and he naturally invited me to live in his house for as long as it took me to inventory the store and study his ledgers and make up my mind to buy the place or not.

It didn’t take long to learn his mail routine. He’d stop in at the post office in the mornings, read his letters at home before dinner, then store them in a trunk in the parlor. I checked in that trunk every day whenever I had the chance. There were bundles of correspondence in there, and it took me a week of peeking through them before I’d had a look at them all. There was nothing in there from Wes or Jane Hardin, nothing that even hinted at their whereabouts.

And then, just when I’d stretched the sham of taking inventory and examining books about as far as I could, Bowen received a letter from his son Brown, who’d written it from an Alabama backwater called Polland. Brown was still wanted in Texas for a murder he’d committed years earlier, but he didn’t interest me at all except as a possible lead to his brother-in-law. His letter was mostly about some property he owned in the Sandies that he wanted his daddy to sell for him. He hadn’t been faring well and was in need of money. It was a self-pitying letter, and I read it with a growing irritation until I reached its last lines. “My sister has just born a baby girl,” he wrote, “and they have called her Callie. She joins me in sending our love.”

Except for some things I’d done with naked women, I’d never felt such a nice rush up my backbone. I saw the future in a flash: we’d slip into the burg nice and quiet, and if we didn’t spot him right off we’d stake out their house and wait our chance and it would damn sure come and by God we’d have our man!

But first I had to take my leave of Neal Bowen without arousing his suspicions. John and I had arranged a ploy. I sent a telegram to “Bill Alworth” at the Duchess Hotel in Cuero, saying, “Bill, I like the store.” The next morning here comes John into Bowen’s store with his Ranger badge pinned on his coat and throws down on me with a shotgun and says I’m under arrest. You could’ve knocked Bowen over with a feather when John tells him my name ain’t Croves, it’s Harris Cobb and I’m wanted for horse theft in Travis County. He put the cuffs on me and got me mounted up and we trotted out of Coon Hollow with him cussing me good and loud and saying he’d blow me out of the saddle if I tried anything smart. Bowen and a bunch of other citizens watched us go with their eyes bugging in their heads.

We galloped straight to Cuero and took the next train to Austin. John took me with him when he reported to General Steele and told him what we’d found out. The general was impressed and congratulated me on my detective work, then went off to Governor Hubbard’s office and came back in an hour with the arrest warrant. That night we were on a train for Alabama. We played cards and sipped at a flask of rye as the dark countryside flashed past the coach window. Every once in a while we’d look each other in the eye and just grin and grin.

R
ather than get off the train in Polland and risk tipping him off that we were there, we went on to the last Alabama stop, eight miles farther east at Whiting. The place wasn’t anything more than a tiny station house, a water tank, and a few small houses set at the edge of the piny woods. The midday air was hot and heavy and smelled of wood pulp. We went in the depot to ask the stationmaster where we might rent ourselves some mounts and found a handful of men gathered around a short, hard-looking fellow with a fresh blue goose egg on his cheek. He was telling the story of the fight where he got the bruise.

He’d got into it with a bigmouthed peckerwood and had beat the rascal like a rug. We were a circle of grins around him as he acted out the whole fracas for us, punching and kicking the air and enjoying hell out of it all over again. “About the time I’ve got him looking like stomped-on sin,” he said, “the sonbitch turns tail and runs off till he sees I ain’t about to chase him for the pleasure of whupping him some more. So he stands over there across the tracks and hollers, ‘Just you wait till my brother-in-law gets back, Shipley! He’s John Wesley Hardin is who he is and he’ll shoot you dead as soon as spit!’” Everybody roared at that. Me and John just looked at each other, and I guess my eyebrows were up as high as his. You see what I mean about how our luck ran on this thing. “Sorry son of a bitch,” Shipley said. “Can you beat that? I hollered back, ‘Yeah!—and
my
brother-in-law’s Jesse James!’ I tell you, that fucking Bowen’s crazier’n my Aunt Reba, and that woman talks to the
trees
.”

“Pardon me, sir,” John says to him, and shows him his Ranger badge. “I wonder if we might have a private word?”

*    *    *

W
hen Shipley found out Swain really
was
Hardin, he got all excited and said he’d be glad to help us any way he could. “Hell, I like the fella fine as Swain,” he said, “except he’s the luckiest man with a hand of cards I ever saw. Takes me a week to win back from the sailors what he wins off me in one night. But hey, if that bastard Bowen really could sic him on me, well, I don’t need
that.
Besides, ain’t I heard something about a
reward?
”

I nearly laughed out loud at the look on John’s face. He and I had agreed that I was in for half the reward—two thousand dollars—and that if he cut in anybody else, the cut would come out of his half. He took Shipley aside and they dickered for awhile. I never did find out how much he gave him. For all I know, John shared out his whole half of the reward to everybody who helped us. But he never was after the money; he wanted the glory of bringing in Wes Hardin. For me, two thousand dollars was glory enough.

Whatever John paid Shipley, he was worth it. He was a mother lode of information. He knew for a fact that Hardin was in Pensacola just then. He’d gone to buy supplies for a timber camp he was operating upriver in Alabama. “He just sent the goods through today,” Shipley said, “and he’s bought a ticket for tomorrow’s train to Polland.”

He ordered a special engine and car for us and we rolled into Pensacola late that afternoon. A cool salt breeze was coming off the bay from under a high purple line of thunderheads. Our arrest warrant was for Alabama, but if we could take him in Florida we would, and damn the legalities. We’d leave that worry to General Steele.

W
e determined to take him when he boarded for Alabama. As much as he hated to do it, John decided we’d best get the local law to back us up, just in case the thing got mean. He went to the Escambia County sheriff, Will Hutchinson, and brought him in on the play, him and his deputy, Ace Purdue—and of course cut them in for some portion of the reward.

We stayed in the sheriff’s office all morning and afternoon, planning our moves. Hutchinson insisted on putting riflemen on the rooftop of the hotel adjacent to the depot. “We’re talking about a desperate killer,” the sheriff said. “I’ve read all about him, you bet. A few rifles on the roof will make a damn big difference if it comes to a shootout.” John argued against the riflemen but finally had to give in if he wanted the sheriff’s help. But he told Hutchinson that if any of his men opened fire for any reason except Hardin running out of the car with a gun in his hand, he’d hold him personally responsible. “Remember,” he told him, “this reward’s for his
capture.
If he’s killed, there’ll be no reward for anybody—and that would make Detective Duncan very angry.” I did my best to look menacing. “Don’t you boys worry none,” Hutchinson said. “It’s my cousin Nolan who’ll be in command of the shooters. I’ve used them boys before and they always done just fine. They can follow orders, you bet.”