Everybody will tell you that Jane Bowen was just the sweetest thing. Well, yes she was. She was pretty too, there’s no denying that, and had attracted the boys from the time she started blooming at about twelve. Her hair was the absolute envy of all the girls—it was long and soft and bright light brown. And if she was as vain about it as some believed, well, you couldn’t really fault her too much for feeling that way.
She was a quiet girl, but not really what you’d call shy—not when it came to saying directly what was on her mind if somebody happened to ask her. And when she did speak up, she hardly ever said anything that didn’t have a point, and she most always got right to it. Directness of that sort can put people off, since most folks like to stroll around in a conversation for a bit before getting to the point—if there even is one. Jane just wasn’t one for small talk, which was a big reason some saw her as stuck on herself. I’m not saying I thought so, I’m just saying there were some who did.
I did tend to agree with them who said she probably read more than was good for her. She read more books than anybody I ever knew. Books were hard to come by in the Sandies in those days, but her daddy, who was given to spoiling her, made it a point to bring her back a book or two from San Antone every time he went there on business. One time at school I heard this boy ask her what the book in her hand was about, and she said poetry, and the fella looked around at the rest of us with a smarty-pants grin and said, “You mean like ‘Roses are red, violets are blue’?” Jane nodded and smiled sweetly, then turned away and said—just loud enough for some of us to hear—“Even a jackass is smarter than you,” like she was finishing the poem.
It’s no wonder so many of the boys were skittish of her. They’d be attracted by her prettiness—she never did lack for dance partners at parties—but then her learning and direct way of talking would buffalo them so bad they’d be afraid to open their mouths for fear of sounding like ignorant fools to her, and so they’d shy away. It was that way with her and one boy after another until she met Cousin Wesley.
Wesley might of done some reckless things in his life, I won’t deny that, but nobody would ever call him an ignorant fool unless they’re a true one theirself. The fact is, as we quick came to find out, Wesley was an educated man—a lot more than most you’d ever meet. He’d read more than a few books himself, and he could speak just like his daddy the Reverend whenever he took the notion. I imagine that when he and Jane met at that barn dance they must of felt like two people from the same strange little country meeting in a place where nobody else could speak their true language.
I was right there when Gipson introduced them, and you should’ve seen the way their eyes lit up on each other in the first two minutes. I hadn’t never believed in love at first sight till that moment. He kissed her hand like he’d done to ours, but even though her cheeks got rosy she kept cool as you please, like she’d had her hand kissed every day of her life. Mary Ann looked at me and rolled her eyes. She wanted Wesley to meet a sweet girl as much as Minerva and I did, but she’d never been as easily abiding of Jane Bowen’s airs as we were.
“May I have the honor of this dance, Miss Jane?” Wesley said to her, and she said, “It would be my pleasure, Mr. Hardin.”
So off they went on the dance floor—and they didn’t sit down or separate from each other for more than a minute the whole rest of the evening. They danced like they’d been born to be partners. They square-danced and two-stepped and reeled—they danced every dance that Fiddler Thomason called. It was while they were Texas waltzing that they looked the most beautiful together—whirling round and round to the music of the fiddles and Elmer Quayle’s five-string and Toby Franks’s mouth harp. The barn was warm and close with all those people churning up such a dancing sweat, but him and Jane moved just as light and easy as a pair of birds, his open coat swirling and the skirt of her dress flaring full and sassy as they spun around the floor. I don’t believe I was ever so jealous of somebody and so happy for them at the same time.
I happened to pass close by to where they were sitting and sipping punch during a short rest the band took to wet their whistles. He was talking earnest and she was looking at him like he hung the moon. I heard him tell her she had eyes “like the fairest stars in God’s wide heaven.”
I’ve never forgot that. “The fairest stars in God’s wide heaven!” Declare, if any man ever said such a thing to me … well, never you mind.
The next morning Wesley told Manning he’d been thinking it over and had decided not to go to Mexico after all but would join up on the Kansas drive with him. Nobody was a bit surprised by his sudden decision—nobody who saw the way him and Jane had wrapped their eyes around each other the night before. We had a barn dance every Saturday evening for the next few weeks till the herds were ready for the trail, and Wesley and Jane would dance all night like they were in a world of their own, spinning and spinning to the music, just swimming in each other’s arms.
When Manning told him that Wes wanted to join the drive to Kansas, Columbus Carol was so pleased he nearly popped his buttons. He didn’t waste any time signing Wes on. He even made him boss of one of the two herds—the small one of twelve hundred head. Me and my brother Jim were in his crew. Manning was ramrodding the bigger herd, about twenty-five hundred head, and Gip and Joe were working with him.
Only me and a hand named Billy Roy Dixon were younger than Wes, who was still well shy of being eighteen. You might think there’d be some hard feeling among the older hands about working for one so young and who didn’t have any experience on the trail—and who would get paid one hundred fifty dollars a month when the regular hands like us were getting thirty and found. But if you thought that, you’d be wrong. The fact is, they were proud as banty roosters to have a man of Wes’s reputation for a ramrod, his young years be damned. “Wes Hardin, by God!” Big Ben Kelly said when he heard the news. “I’d like to see somebody just try and give this outfit trouble.” That’s how Columbus Carol felt about it. “That boy’s reputation,” he told Manning, “is gonna save me enough cows to cover his wages twenty times over.”
Manning told him that if the reputation didn’t do the job, Wes himself surely would. The day before him and Wes had got into a shooting contest in the draw behind Daddy’s house and Wes had outshot him every which way. That’s saying something, because Manning was one of the best pistol hands you’d ever hope to see, and I’m talking about a time when that part of Texas had more pistoleros than a hound’s got fleas. The Sandies was crawling with Taylors and Sutton Regulators, and there wasn’t a man among them who wasn’t handy with a gun. But good as Manning was, he wasn’t no match for Wes. The whole family watched the contest, Jane Bowen too. She about broke her hands by clapping so hard every time Wes showed off with some extra-tricky shot. He’d look over and wink at her, and she’d smile and blush pretty as a sunrise.
Word got around fast to the other outfits that Wes had signed on with us, and trail bosses and cowhands from the camps scattered all around us came over to make his acquaintance. A few of them, like Fred Duderstadt, became his friends for life. What they were all hoping, of course, was that he’d keep rustler and Indian trouble off their cattle while he was keeping it off our own. Wes himself was looking to make all the friends he could. Even though Columbus and Manning had said he didn’t have to fret about the State Police while he was on the trail, he figured it wouldn’t hurt to have plenty of friends in front and back of him, both, as we made our way to Kansas.