The end of Wes’s good days on our farm came with the news that Ed Davis had formed up the State Police. Davis was a son of a bitch who got himself made governor back the previous December in the crookedest election ever held in Texas. He did it with the conniving help of the carpetbaggers and the scalawags and President Useless Ass Grant himself, who was the biggest son of a bitch of them all—except for maybe Lincoln.
The only good thing about Davis’s election was that Useless Ass took it to mean Texas was “reconstructed,” and he pulled all the Yankee troops out of the state. That was the good news. The bad news was that we now had the State Police.
There’s never been a group of lawmen in Texas more despised than those black-hearted bastards. They was about half of them Nigra bullies, and the rest mostly the worst sort of mean-minded white trash to be found anywhere—the sort of fellas who if they hadn’t been made State Policemen would’ve been on the run from them their ownselfs. They had the authority to arrest you anywhere in the state, the local sheriffs be damned—though lots of sheriffs worked in cahoots with them, of course. It didn’t take long for the word to get around that you didn’t ever want to be pulled in by the State Police. Too many of their prisoners got shot dead for “trying to escape.”
Late that summer we got word they had a list of men they most wanted to run down and that Wes’s name was on it. A few nights later we saw the proof for ourselfs and came to know just what it really meant. We were all in The Palace, watching Wes win us some money at stud so we would all live it up at Kate Vine’s, when in comes Jules Forge with a state wanted list he’d pulled off a jail wall in Austin. There were ten names on it, with Bill Longley’s at the top and Wes’s right under it. It offered five hundred dollars for Longley, dead or alive, four hundred for Wes, and lesser sums for everybody else.
You should of seen how fast the idea of four hundred dollars changed the mood in the room as the list made its way from table to table. Four hundred dollars was a mountain of money. There were fellers in there who’d turn in their own sweet mommas for forty dollars, if they had the chance.
Jules had showed the paper to Wes first, and Wes had smiled and passed it on and kept playing like it hadn’t been nothing but a revival notice. But I watched him close and could see he wasn’t really as much at ease as he was making out to be. He began talking to me and Aaron a good deal more while he played his hands, joking and showing us his hole cards. We were sitting just back of him, and every time he turned our way I saw his eyes sweep the room behind us. We caught on quick and started keeping close watch on his back. Some of the hard cases kept looking his way out the sides of their eyes.
Just about then, Phil Coe came in, and I can’t say how I knew, but I knew he’d heard about the reward list. He stared at Wes for a second with no expression at all, then nodded to him and took a seat at a table against the wall just inside the door.
Wes played for about another ten minutes, I guess, even though he’d already won even more than usual, and I have to say they were ten of the most nervous minutes I’ve ever knowed. Finally Wes pockets his winnings and says, “All right, cousins, let’s go to Kate’s and tickle the elephant.”
I’d never heard it so quiet in The Palace as when we were walking out. The only sound was our heels on the floor. The damn door seemed a mile away. My back was twitching from all the eyes I felt on it, and I half expected Phil Coe to make a pull on Wes at any second. Four hundred dollars might be all the push he needed to risk his hand against Wes. But as we got closer to him, I saw that he was looking past us, watching our backs. Without looking at Wes as we went by, he smiled, and in a voice sounding extra loud in all that quiet, he said, “You take care now, John Wesley.”
Two days later Wes sold his share of the crop to Pa and said so long to us all. He’d been somewhat famous when he came to us, but thanks to that State Police poster he was a whole lot more famous when he left. A few months later we heard the reward for his capture was up to a thousand dollars. A thousand! It wasn’t all that surprising, though, since by then he’d killed a State Policeman.
Bill Longley and Wes Hardin met just once, in Evergreen in the summer of’70. At the time we’re talking about, Evergreen belonged to Bill Longley. He was born and raised there, and at the time we’re talking about, it was one of the toughest damn towns in Texas. For years after the War it was chock-full of bad actors and hard cases of every sort you could think of.
Oh, we had us a sheriff. He wore a badge and carried a key to the rusty old chicken coop we called a jail. His name was Rollo Somebody and he was real good at the job. Some army patrol would show up with a warrant for one of ours, and Rollo would tell them the fella had just left town two days ago, headed north to the Indian Nations or south to Old Mexico. Whenever some lawman came by with a wanted poster, Rollo would oblige him and tack it up next to the front door of the jail. He’d promise to keep a sharp ear open for any word of the wanted man’s whereabouts. Then as soon as the law left, he’d tear the poster down and take it over to whatever saloon the wanted man was watching from. The hard case would use it for target practice and buy Rollo whiskey till it sloshed out his ears. I don’t believe Rollo ever had to pay for his own whiskey from the day he became sheriff of Evergreen till the sad night a few years later when he fell down drunk in the street one night during a hard rain and drowned in the mud.
The summer Hardin came to town, Bill already had a wide reputation as a pistol fighter, but Hardin’s was just starting to spread. Now I want to make something real clear about Bilclass="underline" he was no bushwhacker. It’s lots who got theirselves a reputation mainly by back-shooting and dry-gulching. I’m not saying Hardin was one of them, but there were stories. You won’t hear any such tales about Bill except from liars and drunks. At the time I’m talking about, Bill had already killed over a dozen men, all of them straight-up. He had the smoothest, quickest pull I’d ever seen and could put six balls in a steady line down a porch post fifty feet away in less time than it takes to tell it. He was the best fanner there ever was. Took the triggers off his Dance revolvers and fanned the hammers to get off his shots.
It’s no trouble to remember the summer of ’70. That sonbitch E. J. Davis had just formed the State Police and we’d heard they had a wanted list with Hardin’s name up near the top with Bill’s. The word on Hardin was that he was hiding out with kin somewhere around Brenham. Bill tried not to show it, but it rubbed him raw to hear talk about what a deadeye Hardin was, or how fast he was said to be on the pull, or how he supposedly killed three bluebellies at one time all by himself up in Navarro County when he wasn’t but fifteen. Bill would usually just stare at whoever was doing the talking until the fool finally caught on and shut up. The way Bill saw it, Hardin hadn’t yet earned the right to be put in the same class with him. We all knew that. So you can imagine the stir when Hardin showed up in town all unexpected one day.
I ought to tell you that in the summertime in Evergreen we used to do our gambling out in the street. Set in the forest like it was, the town had plenty of cool shade outside. We’d put a table or a goods box under a tree and be all set to play. On Saturday, which was race day, there’d be every kind of game set up every few yards on both sides of the street—poker, faro, seven-up, dice, everything. If you wanted a little more privacy for some reason, there were plenty of corn cribs where you could put a box for a table and play in there. They raced the best quarter horses from four counties. There was cockfights and dogfights. On Saturdays the town was thick as fleas with gambling men from all over East Texas.