I, Tom Horn Read online

  I, Tom Horn

  Will Henry

  To Clark Kinnaird

  I, TOM HORN

  A Bantam Book

  PRINTING HISTORY

  J. B. Lippincott edition published January 1973

  Bantam edition / December 1975

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 1975 by Will Henry.

  This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, by

  mimeograph or any other means, without permission.

  For information address: Bantam Books, Inc.

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  Is there a warrior left who remembers me? A

  woman remaining who will weep to know that Talking

  Boy will bring his horse no more outside the

  jacal of her father? A single child, a sister, an old

  man to light one dark face with the candle of its

  smile thinking back to him the soldiers called Tom

  Horn?

  Yo no sé, amigos. Montad en vuestros caballos.

  Ride on, ride on.

  Tom Horn

  in Cheyenne Jail

  The Beginning

  footnote to a fat tin box

  found in a courthouse fire

  In the summer just past, Allard Kroeger, the Los Angeles attorney, backpacking through his native Wyoming, became lost and sought direction at a remote ridgetop cabin. Midway in his ascent of a ridge, he was met by a gaunt and growling dog. Not having prepared a brief for this contingency, Kroeger rested his case in some alarm. The dog, however, gave way upon nearer approach and, when it turned to trot whiningly back up toward the cabin, the city man understood there was trouble in this lonely place, and he went forward quickly.

  Inside the log shack, dirt-floored, sod-roofed, smelling rankly of its hundred years of human denning, he found an inhabitant as ancient as the outpost itself. The old fellow was plainly hard upon his time, the fear of that fact no less within him for his great age. He was pathetically thankful to know he would not be alone.

  Kroeger quieted him, prepared a meal from some beef scraps, suet, and cornmeal, all that was available. As he fed the old man, the latter insisted his visitor understand it was his own beef they were eating. Kroeger appreciated the concern.

  "I was born in this county, old-timer," he said. "I remember those times when it mattered to know whose beef you were eating. I’m Allie Kroeger."

  "The hell!" the old man cried, the faded eyes alive with brief memory. "I knowed your paw and grandpa both. They was cattlemen, sure." He labored for breath. "I'm Charley Starrett," he said. "The one that testified for Tom Horn. I’m ninety-three years old. I was twenty-three then."

  He fell back. There was a disquiet in the smoky air. An unease in the wolfish dog whimpering by the fire. The other visitor was coming. "Mr. Starrett," Allard Kroeger said, "is there anything you would like done; do you have a will?"

  The question reached the old man. He struggled up, a sudden urgency within him. "No," he said. "But I hold another man’s testament that sore burdens my soul. God sent you here, lawyer, to do His justice. You wasn’t lost."

  "Old-timer, we never know. What is it you want?"

  "Yonder. The flat tin box on the mantelpiece."

  Kroeger brought the old box to the bedside, curious at its unexpected weight.

  "There’s a man’s life in there," the old man said. "Dug out’n the ashes of a courthouse fire."

  The attorney’s eyes narrowed. "Tom Horn’s life, Mr. Starrett?" he asked softly.

  The old man moved his head in assent. "You’re cattle people and law-trained, too," he whispered. "I deed you the trust of it." Then, barely audible. "That’s Tom Horn’s handwrote last testament."

  Allard Kroeger, born of that lonely land, felt the violence of the shadowed past reach out and draw him in. He opened the old box, took from it the heavy document wrapped in oilskin. "Are you saying you know Tom Horn wrote this?" he asked.

  The old man said that he was. Somewhere, he had kept a penny postal from Horn dated 1901 that would prove it. It was the exact same writing as the papers in the flat tin box.

  Moreover, he would recognize Horn’s hand anywhere. "He writ it," he said. "God’s witness."

  Kroeger drew breath. Could this be? Was he holding the legend’s last holograph in his hands?

  He angled the unopened packet toward the coal-oil lamp. Peering, he made out a date, December 6, 1903, and a place, City of Cheyenne, County of Laramie, State of Wyoming. Then, in starkly bolder script of the same hand, leaping at him through the yellowed oilskin, there it was:

  FOR TOM HORN

  AGAINST THE PEOPLE OF WYOMING

  That Justice May Be Done Before God

  In the stillness broken only by the pine chunks settling on the fire, Allard Kroeger read on:

  To brave men everywhere who, seeking justice uncringing to the cries of the beast people for popular vengeance, will bring this history before the courts of posterity where the law will not be the sicklied servant of the mob that it is here, and where an innocent man may finally know honored peace, to come before his God "not guilty" in the Last Great Judgment.

  *Received in trust by an atty of record for the defense who dares not enter his name in witness.

  Kroeger heard a small sound, put aside the ancient manuscript. "Old man, Mr. Starrett," he said anxiously, "you all right?"

  There was no answer but the low crying of the dog. "Damn," said Allard Kroeger softly, and he pulled the frayed horse blanket over the shrunken small man who had been, seventy years before, the last, best friend of Tom Horn.

  Next morning the attorney took the wolfish dog and the tin box with him on the long hike out to the pavement. At the county seat, he reported the death of Charley Starrett, arranged lifetime care for the old dog. The flat tin box with its presumptive last testament of Tom Horn he bore back to California, determined to publish the contents. One problem of substance intervened.

  An "official" Horn autobiography already existed (Life of Tom Horn, Government Scout and Interpreter, by himself, Louthan Book Company, Denver, 1904). To now publish a second true-life story, also allegedly by Horn’s own hand, could be awkward.

  Yet Kroeger was of the frontier by blood himself. He loved the larger-than-life badmen heroes of the western past. And shadowy Tom Horn above them all.

  There had to be a way.

  Now wait. How was it Horn had ended his story in the Louthan book?

  I then came to Wyoming (1894) and went to work for the Swan Land & Cattle Company, since which time everybody else has been more familiar with my life and business than I have been myself.

  And I think that since my coming here the yellow journal reporters are better equipped to write my history than am I, myself I

  Respectfully,

  TOM HORN

  That was it of course! Horn had deliberately stopped short of the terrible Wyoming years in the Louthan volume. Deeply hurt by the indifference and hostility shown him by press and public alike, he had refused to tell the rest of his story at that time. But the Starrett papers told another story. He had changed his mind. They were the rest of Tom Horn’s life!

  So it was decided, and so it was done.

  What follows is the recreated autobiography of Tom Horn taken from the text in the flat tin box. It is not history, surely. It is only a fab
le, a Green River folklore stirred to that larger life named legend. Except for one thing.

  There is still that old, flat, black enameled box of tin. And in it, smelling of must and age and the burned faint stench of gun smoke, that strange dark story that begins, I, TOM HORN. . . .

  Book One

  Out There

  "I, TOM HORN, do solemnly swear—"

  That's the way the lawyers would start it off, and so shall I. It will let those who are against me understand it is a man's testimony given here, and not the hassayampa trash seen in the yellow journals. As for the friends of Tom Horn who may read this, they will not need any oath to tell them who wrote it; they will know. And they will know it is the truth, the entire of it, and nothing tacked on, nor taken back.

  I could have told the same thing at the trial, with my hand on the good book, and would have, but they didn't want to hear it. They just wouldn't let it be my way. If Jesus himself had of come down and swore for me, they'd have got it struck from the record and bought him a free ticket out of town on the next train.

  But that's all washed down the river now. It can't be roped and towed back upstream again. Yet a man has to try. He has to set it right if he can. He has to say how the times were that ended him in Cheyenne Jail. What the laws were and what they wasn't. How justice failed. The way witnesses lied under vow. How judges turned deaf and juries went blind. And oh how different the rules read when twisted to convict the innocent. It has to be remembered, always, what happened to the law "out there." It was not the same.

  Out there, a man took the law to be as good as his own word. Which he ever gave straight-out, with no tangles in the mane or tail of it. He neither whined nor tucked his croup when lies and libels rode him down. Nor did he burn over his brands once he put them onto the hide of his testimony. Whatever he done, or said he done, he stuck by it. He depended on the law to do the same.

  But sometimes a man wouldn't get his entire herd to railhead the first drive. Sometimes there was trail going on past where he believed he had all his cattle safe-loaded on the stock cars. He doesn't see it at the time. It's afterwards that it comes to him. Like when the drive crew's been paid off and the dust of their ponies has settled into the prairie twilight south toward Texas. That's when a man would look the other way, north, to Wyoming, and his eyes would slit down and he would say to himself, out-loud soft, "Damn."

  For what he saw up there, God help him, was the rest of his life's track, and it made him shiver hard in the gloom.

  He knew then that he must tell the truth about that last dark part of the trail. The part his grand, good friend John C. Coble had not wanted to put into the book Coble had in mind they would write as a "vindication" of all that had gone wrong in Wyoming.

  The first bright part of the trail. Coble had insisted, that was the true part. Tell it straight-out and fair, as you know it to be, he had advised. Your happy boyhood in Scotland County, Missouri. Working as a rawboned lad, not yet fifteen, out in Kansas on the Atchison, Topeka & the Santa Fe. Helping to lay the rails clean and shining-pure, from Kansas City to the Pacific's fartherest shore. How you became a famous stagecoach driver in New Mexico at just past fifteen years of age. How you rose, not yet quite eighteen, to be second only to legendary Al Sieber in the famed Apache Scout Corps of the United States Cavalry, in Arizona Territory. The way you captured the evil Geronimo single-handed—almost. The way you were made blood brother to the savage Apache. Why they honored you with the name of Talking Boy, because you spoke their tongue as no other white man had ever been able to do. The resolute and fearless manner in which, commended by the Pinkerton Detective Agency to the vast Swan Land & Cattle Company, you cleaned out the rustlers from all of southern Wyoming in but two seasons of lone-hand daring, 1894 and 1895. And thusly on and on.

  Why! Coble had said, there was no end to the admirableness of such a life.

  "Tell all those fine and upright things," John Coble had finished, "and you will go free. The people will know the law has the wrong man charged for the terrible Willie Nickell killing."

  Well, maybe this would work for Mr. Coble; a man couldn't tie hard and fast to it for himself, though. It sounded wrong somewhere. It had an off ring to it. Like a horseshoe on a fouled anvil. Coble's story would run only up to the edge of the real hell that Tom Horn rode into in Wyoming. It would rear up short and shy off, where the dark part began.

  A man had to know that—if he was me, Tom Horn, the one they were going to hang that coming sunrise, at Cheyenne Jail.

  I never doubted John C. Coble and don't doubt him now. He was the best friend and whitest pal a man could find in this hard life.

  But that was last year.

  The trees have turned again since then. Mr. Coble sticks with me but doesn't come so much anymore. The other men I worked for, and saved their stock and ranges from the nesters, have all gone away from me. Sheriff Ed Smalley, a truer friend than most who said they were, tells me it is all over for me.

  "It's ended, Tom," he says. "God knows, and you know, Tom, that I am sorry."

  Well, it is not over yet for Tom Horn.

  I have been where the bear turned back before. I have been run by the wolf and made him whimper. I have felt the bullet whisper at my ear and the arrow brush my eye. The knife has sought twixt my ribs, the lance struck my belly, the ax gone in me to the bone, and it doesn't matter. A man knows when his time is on him, and mine isn't yet.

  My friends will get me out.

  The word has come to me that they will, and they are true pals and I believe them. All is ready, they say, and the hangman's trap will never spring for me in Cheyenne Jail. The plan can't fail. The men who are doing the job know their game and won't blink to the light nor jump sideways of the trail. They will break me out of here, that is certain this time. No more mistakes.

  Before they come and take me free, I must leave this truth where it will be found. The story is all told, all written down, waiting only to be passed to the one who will get it from me tonight when he comes for the last time. No one could have told this story but me. I rode that trail in Wyoming alone. What happened at Iron Mountain, and beyond, wasn't kin at all to the days in Arizona or New Mexico. Or even to the Denver times.

  From the first day into the Wyoming country, It was Tom Horn against the pack; and the pack run mean and hot and relaying on me all the while, quartering me down.

  There was no Al Sieber to show a man the way in Wyoming. In Wyoming, there was nothing but me and my horse and my rye bread and raw bacon and rat cheese, and that smokeless powder .30-30 Winchester model '94, riding to the far-off call of the old loafer wolf going home, with me, from his kill in the murk of early dawn.

  Not John Coble, not Marshal Joe LeFors, not Deputy Snow nor Sheriff Smalley nor Prosecutor Stoll nor any man alive knew where Tom Horn went or what Tom Horn did. Only the ones found looking empty-eyed at next morning's sun, with the round, smooth trademark rock wedged under the flyblown head, could say if they had seen Tom Horn; and they never said.

  This is my other story, then.

  My enemies will deny it, my friends will hear it too late. But no man follows that nightshade trail over the last river but that he says his hasta la vistas straight.

  One way or the other, this night will see it done.

  Right up to first snow-fly it looked to all that I would get off clean as a drawed shoat. They said Tom Horn would not do thirty days in Cheyenne Jail, nor ever come to trial. Nor, if he did, would ever get convicted. The shameful charge against me would surely be dismissed for simple lack of decent proof.

  But now that first year has rolled away. The trees have gone bare and the old grass clumped-up to wait for winter. It is November, getting late-on, and good Sheriff Smalley would not lie to me, or any man.

  By God! what was that?

  Out yonder in the alley back of jail? Down there in the early winter dusk where I can see it from the bars of my cells lone window. The form of a man on foot skulking along. No, two,
three forms. Drifting along past the trash barrels where the note had said they would drift if the break was still on.

  There! O, Christ Jesus be praised.

  The lead man is waving as though to warm his arms. Three times he gives me the signal, shucking the cuffs of his sheepskin coat, then blowing into his cupped hands. Jesus, Jesus, it is on.

  Get away from the cell window. Quick, move back. A boot has scraped in the corridor. Somebody comes.

  But God Amighty let them come.

  In only hours I would be away. On this very last night, in the shadow of the scaffold being put up for me by the daft architect James Julian, the boys would gather and, swift as the strike of a Chiricahua knife, cut me out. There in the blackest pool of night they would have Old Pacer waiting under saddle, rifle in scabbard, bread and bacon and cheese tied on the horn. Up I would go aboard him and we would be gone, Old Pacer and me, like two bullbat shadows on the underbelly of the moon.

  South! south! to Arizona and the territory. Why, within the hour of getting loose, the grand old gelding and me would be near into Lost Range, beckoning down there on the Colorado line where I could see its hump-ribs sticking up through the snow like old dry buffalo bones. An hour? Wagh! Me and Pacer would be shut of Cheyenne by sight in thirty minutes.

  When the storm growling around outside the past few hours had rolled on and the sun come again to glisten on Granite Gap, Lone Tree River road, and the Buck Eye cutoff, long down into Colorado, Wyoming would see Tom Horn no more, nor ever know his trail again.