All right then, there we were at the bar in The Bear’s Den—Bill and me and Ben Hinds, Jim Brown, Jody Pinto, and Blacknose Bob—when in comes Sam Ott all worked up and tells us John Wesley Hardin was right that minute playing poker at Weldon Quinn’s table over by the livery. Bill went right on rolling a smoke without a change of expression. He don’t say a word till he gets the smoke rolled and lit and takes a couple of long puffs. Then he asks Sam: “How you know it’s him?”
Well, Sam says, he’d been sitting in on the game at Quinn’s table when Hardin walked up and asked if there was room for one more. Didn’t none of them know it was Hardin, though, till a few minutes later when Sheriff Rollo comes up, weaving drunk, and says to the new man that he liked to know the names of any strangers in his town and would he mind telling his. “John Wesley Hardin,” he said, “and I do admire the lively nature of your town, Sheriff.” He pulled a pint bottle of rye out of his coat pocket and asked the sheriff if he might care for a taste. Rollo gave a big lopsided grin and decided to join the game too. He was so drunk he was holding some of his cards backward. Sam stayed in for a coupla more hands just to be polite, then dropped out and hurried straight on over to the Den to let Bill know about Hardin.
When Sam’s all done talking, Bill looks at him a minute, then says, “How you know it’s him?”
It was a damn good question to repeat, for two reasons—the first being that none of us knew what Hardin looked like, and the second being that anybody could say he was somebody else. Bill knew that better than most, there’d been so many liars claiming to be him. The first time he heard of it, I think he was sort of proud to know his reputation was so fearsome that other men would use it to scare people and have their way with them. But after he heard of somebody else pretending to be him over in Waco, and then somebody else up in Bryan, and in Livingston and a bunch of other towns, it started to grate on him that any son of a bitch who took a mind to it could benefit himself by saying he was Bill Longley. “Look here, Cal,” he once said to me, “it’s took me some doing to earn my reputation, and I don’t much care for these shitheads making such free use of it instead of going out and earning one of their own.” By the time he heard about some hard case who was calling himself Bill Longley over in Walker County, he’d had enough of it. He saddled up and rode on over there and tracked the fella down. Found him in a saloon just a few miles south of Huntsville, talking loud and bulldozing everybody in the place, making Bill Longley seem like some kind of bigmouthed bully. Bill kicked a spittoon across the floor at him to get his attention, then said: “You are too dogshit ugly and too coarse in your ways to even dream of being Bill Longley, you son of a bitch.” The hard case tried to pull, but never cleared his holster before Bill fanned three rounds right through his wishbone. He fell face-first with so much blood pouring out of him he hit with a splash. “Take a good look at my face,” Bill told everybody, “so you won’t be played for such fools by the next fake who says he’s me.” He shot up the bar mirror for good measure, then mounted up and rode home. And still, every now and then, we’d hear of Bill Longley killing somebody in some town Bill had never been to in his life.
Anyhow, that’s why Bill’s question was a good one, and why Sam Ott’s answer wasn’t. All Sam could say was, “Well, hell, Bill, that’s who he told us he was.”
So Bill tells Ben Hinds to go over to Quinn’s and check the fella out, and me and Jody Pinto and Blacknose Bob decided to go along. Ben Hinds was a good one for Bill to send. He was big as a mule and near as strong—and about the same-looking, some of us thought. He’d shot men dead and gouged out eyes and bitten off at least one man’s nose that I knew of. He wasn’t afraid of a thing in this world except for a gypsy-woman fortune-teller named Madam Zodiac who lived a few miles outside of town.
Ben and Jody went down one side of the street and me and Blacknose Bob went down the other, the idea being to come up on Hardin from different angles and spread our positions as much as we could. But by the time we got there, Rollo had passed out and was curled up under a wagon, and Hardin had taken his seat, which put the livery wall at his back and gave him a clear view of the street. I figure he saw us coming before we even knew which one at the table was him.
One of the players quick gave up his chair to Ben, and Ben tossed in his dollar ante and told Quinn to deal him in. Quinn didn’t look glad to see him—or the rest of us, either, as we spread out around the table. Hardin was smiling, but he wasn’t missing a thing, and he took notice of where each of us was standing among the spectators.
On his first hand, Ben opened with a big bet and everybody but Hardin folded. Hardin raised big and Ben raised big right back and Hardin called and took the hand with three tens. Ben wasn’t holding but a pair of treys. He wasn’t wasting time trying to get things to a head. But Hardin suddenly stood up and started sticking his money in his pockets. “Thank you, gents,” he says. “Been a pleasure. Believe I’ll go buck the tiger for a while.”
“Hold on there, hightime,” Ben says. “A man don’t up and walk off winners without giving a feller a chance to win his money back. Sit your ass back down.”
Hardin says, “Well, maybe if you’d of sat in a little sooner, you’d of cleaned me out by now. But we ain’t never going to know because that ain’t what happened.”
Ben thumps his fist on the table and hollers, “Damn you, boy, don’t smart-mouth me!” He shoves back his chair and stands up—and zip-click!—Hardin’s got the Colt in his hand and cocked and pointed square at Ben’s face. Talk about quick. Ben freezes, naturally—and Hardin pulls his left-hand gun and hops back so his back’s against the livery wall and he’s got me and Blacknose Bob covered too. Jody put his hands half up—but Bob looked about to pull, and Hardin said, “Try it, you ugly-nosed bastard, and I’ll kill you quick.” Without looking directly at me he says, “You too, snake-head.” I wore a snakeskin band around my hat in those days, so there was no question who he meant. Hell, I wasn’t even thinking about pulling, not after seeing the way that pistola jumped into his hand. I didn’t get to be as old as I am by being rash in my youth. Bill didn’t make it past age twenty-eight.
“Listen here, damnit,” Hardin says, talking to the whole crowd that’s gathering around, everybody curious but skittish about those Colts in his hands. “I came to make the acquaintance of Bill Longley and pay my respects. I have been told he is a true son of the Confederacy and a sworn enemy of every carpetbagging Yankee sonbitch in Texas. But I was not told the people of this town are so lowdown as to gang up on a friendly stranger.”
Just then the crowd opened up and there was Bill, standing in the street and facing Hardin from twenty feet off in shirtsleeves and no hat on and his hand down loose by his tied-down Dance.
“I’m Longley,” he says, “and I don’t know that I much care to make the acquaintance of somebody who comes looking for me with his hands full of Colts.”
Everybody, including Ben and Jody and Bob, quick got out of their line of fire—and I admit I didn’t tarry in taking cover behind a wagon.