I, Tom Horn Read online

And so was my mother.

  This was Sunday morning, now, because it had been Saturday night that father had gone to the wagon camp, and I ought to have gone right home from burying Shed and got my feet washed, and everything, to go to church. Rather, I cut around the barnlot and kept going.

  At the Griggs place they were up earlier than us. It wasn't the same church they went to. So I darn near missed Sam. But he was hanging back in the line of his folks going out to the wagon from the house, and I was able to give him our special crow squawk signal from out back of the corn-rick. He walked on behind the wagon and when it pulled out there wasn't anything to see but the softwater rainbarrels up against the kitchen wall. But directly old Sam slud out from twixt the barrels, whistled up Sandy, and away we went. "There ain't nuthin," Sam advised, hearing my sad report, "to take your mind off a good dog dying-up on you like going right back out on a coon hunt with another dog that's even better. Come on, Sandy. Cut fer coon!"

  I was going to back water right there but, after all, Sam had called Shed a good dog, which was the best he had ever said of him, alive or departed. So I went along.

  Well, that was the quickest coon hunt ever.

  We hadn't more than struck the creekbrush and got into some good bottomland timber when Sandy commences to yell and we saw fresh sign and all three of us lit out to end up at the foot of a big slippery ellum growing orphan in a stand of beech and black walnut.

  "Tree! Tree!' " Sam hollered at his dog, which the damn fool was yammering and fussing up the trunk of the wrong tree and not the ellum which he'd run the trackline to himself. Dumb? That dog was pathetic. I thought of Old Shed and near commenced weeping, but didn't.

  I couldn't see a thing up that big ellum but Sam was certain he could. "He's a old buster!" he cried. "Big as a bearcub. Cripes, he's really suthin! Cain't you spy him out on that old under-rot limb yonder?"

  I confessed my eyeballs weren't up to his, and I guessed he'd have to climb the ellum and knock his grand champion he-coon out of it, account he knew where he was. Sam wasn't a site too much quicker in his head than his dog was, and up the ellum he skinned, old Sandy finally coming over to bell at the right tree when he saw Sam clambering up it. He was still there squalling and slobbering when there came a split and cracking from up in the tree. Down out of the foliage, thrashing and crashing, came the old under-rot limb. It had broke off under Sam's weight crawling out on it, and if that was the he-coon we were after yet clinging to it, he was surely the granddaddy raccoon ever. Sam's dog Sandy thought so too.

  With one screech he dove onto the poor critter.

  This was his chance. Old Shed was gone and this was Sandy's time. He made a grand show of it. He was no more feared of that giant coon than of a fieldmouse in the shelled corn bin. He like to tore the poor thing limb from brisket. He must of bit it in the butt, the head, the spleen, the gizzard and the gullet, for you never heard such coon-yelling in your life.

  Only trouble was, it wasn't the coon yelling. It was Sam Griggs. The old he-coon was still up the ellum laughing.

  Sam had fallen down on the limb and Sandy had like to chewed him apart from every last stitch of his Sunday clothes, fores I could get the damnfool loose of his own master. Even then, when I'd pried him off and turnt him loose, he went in again for the finish.

  By this time, Sam had found his footing and he fetched the idiot hound a couple of thumps with his new brogans that caved in three ribs and sobered up old Sandy long enough for me to pin him down again.

  After that, is when I lost Sam Griggs.

  I looked at my one other friend and saw that he was bit in one ear, shoulder, arm, both hands, and his belly.

  The seat of his trousers was down around his brogan-tops and his galluses was wropped around his gullet and, well, I ought to have said something else than I did,

  But brains always work better later on.

  "Sam," I said. "Too bad. But I reckon my dog Shed would have had more sense than to jump on me if I'd been tomfool enough to fall down on him out n a coon tree."

  The fight lasted about three minutes. It was the longest one we ever had. I spent all of it on the ground but Sam wouldn't let up on me this time until he had had his "full satisfy." When him and his dumb yellow hounddog finally went off limping wounded soldier-wise through the beech and walnut grove, nobody had to tell me Tom Horn had managed it again. There wasn't anybody left to me in Scotland County of kith, kin, dog, or other friend. Excepting maybe for my sister Nancy, which was a girl and didn't count.

  But I had a head like a millstone.

  Round and hard and full of grit and flat on top.

  I had one more whipping to go.

  My Father

  Lying in my loft bed up under the south gable that last night, I listened to the west wind drive in the sweet, soft rain from away out there where the wagon trains were going. Lordy! but that rain smelt exciting wild. I could taste the farness in it where little drops would seep and run under the sheathing boards and I could reach a finger and bring them to my tongue.

  Buffalo grass! Wild horse manure! Cowboy saddle sweat! Longhorn dust! Tepee smoke! Grizzly sign! Gunpowder and rifle grease! Sagebrush in perfumery!

  Lord God but I could imagine it all brought a thousand and more prairie miles just for me to whiff and feel from far out there. Out there where the feathered redskins rode. And the gaunt horse soldiers chased them down. And where the flash and clap of their guns was what I truly heard in the thundersplits and lightning rivens that rattled the warped shingles of that old Missouri farmhouse on the Keokuk road.

  It was then I knew that I was going.

  That I had to go.

  And that all that remained was to tell mother and father of it in the morning.

  It is said that only the just sleep sound. To that, add the simple of mind. I slept that night like a winter calf in a warm barn. I was counting coup on Cheyenne, Sioux, Pawnee, and Arapaho without fear or favor. I took more redskin hair and rescued more outnumbered pony soldiers that one night than the regular cavalry did in the ten years since the war. I could have won the whole West by myself except that, as always, daybreak came in the dark on the Horn farm.

  With a start I came awake. The night was gone and the west rain with it, and down below in the kitchen of my mother I could hear the bear's growl of my fathers early morning voice wanting to know where the hell at was young Tom. "Ain't he been told he's to finish in the south forty today? By God, you send him direct out to me, woman. I'll be in the barn hitching the mule."

  I could hear mother moving to the loft stairs.

  A little shiver trembled me.

  My feet thumped the floor, my heart thumping right along with them. I knew something neither one of my folks knew. This was their final day of me. I had made up my mind during the night. Tom Horn was heading west.

  My father was waiting for me. He had the mule hooked to the single-row cultivator just like it hadn't rained at all. And he was mean-eyeing me. I could smell the brimstone stink of trouble in that storm-cleared air and went careful as a cat the rest of the way toward him.

  "Morning," I said, drawing up.

  He only nodded and stood there looking me over, and I knew what he was up to. After a downpour such as we'd had in the night, it was daft of anybody to go into the corn with a cultivator; he was box-trapping me.

  "Your mother tell you about the south forty?" he began.

  "Yes," I said. "You ain't finished it yet."

  He eyed me, then sort of let his glance wander on beyond where we were standing. In the stillness, the mule blew some wind, then spraddled and commenced to stale.

  I watched father's eyes. The mule splattered on.

  My father was called the hardest man to whip in northeast Missouri. Hr would have things his way, or you would have to break his head open to halt him. Top of that, he was fevered of religion. His was the Lord's job. Everybody else worked for the devil. Specially his son Tom.

  My father figured you had to beat th
at out of a boy.

  Don't know why that was so, but it was.

  Austin or Martin or Charley, my brothers, or Nancy, Hanna, Maude, or Alice, the four sisters, they, all of them, seemed better than me. Did better in school and never had trouble with anybody important. It never did come clear to me why I was the practice post, where not one of them ever took the hidings I did. But one thing I knew and had decided on last night; I had run out of hide: I wasn't taking no more whippings.

  Somehow, father knew it; his eyes quit wandering.

  He didn't say anything to me. I just looked at him.

  We both knew where we were at then.

  I could see his hands working on the singletrace harness leather he held in them.

  "Mule's hitched," he said.

  I nodded, still saying nothing.

  Father shook his head. "Had you worked that field when I asked, boy, you would still have your dog."

  He crouched a little, settling his grip on the trace.

  "You got something to tell me?" he asked, saying it slow-quiet, maybe almost like he wanted I should have.

  "I got something to tell you," I said. "It's good-bye."

  It throwed him.

  He turnt black in the face with insult blood, but he didn't know quite how to handle what I'd said. After a minute, he got aholdt of himself.

  "Last chance, boy." He handed the lines of the mule toward me. I didn't reach to take them. "School's commencing," he went on, "corn's to be got in and shelled. Pigs to butcher and pickle down. It ain't no time to be left shorthanded, nor to talk of leaving."

  "Ain't no time to be running a cultivator in a muddy field neither," I said, wagging my head stubborn as a bay steer. "Not unless you're aiming to do it. I ain't, that's for certain sure. Good-bye, father."

  It was mean-eye time again. Both ways. With him watching me and me watching his hands and that heavy leather singletrace. He dropped the mule's lines but held onto the trace, and I could see him settle himself.

  "That all you got to say to me, boy—good-bye?"

  "Yes sir, father," I answered, letting it come out from fourteen years of holding it back. "Good-bye, and go to hell."

  I was still watching that trace, but he got me with it anyway. He was faster than a blue racer snake. It missed my face but cut the shirt right off my shoulder.

  Then I grabbed the free end of it before he could recoil to hit me again, and the trace was torn loose from his grip and I had it in my own hands and, by God, I hit him with it like to take his head off his body.

  It knocked him into the barn siding, but not down off his feet. He held up a minute bracing against the sun-blister of the boards. His face was strange when he finally turned it to look at me. It was like he didn't know me. Like I was somebody else's boy Tom. Of a sudden I knew that I had already left home.

  I pitched the singletrace to one side.

  "All right, father," I said. "Just help yourself; this is your last time at me."

  He didn't say a word, just came for me.

  I looked up through the haze of sweat and blood in my eyes. The world was spinning around and I was sick to my gut, and the face of my father was leaning down through the wavy lines and cloudy streaks that hung heavy all about. Whirl as it would, there was one thing my blurred brains understood about that barn lot turning like it was. Father had beat me within a breath of killing me, and I might die yet.

  "Now, if you are set on leaving home," his mouth opened above me to say, "go on and do it. Just remember that the last time the old man whipped you, he gave you a good one." The face misted away, then hove back down upon me for one brief time more. "Ask your mother for a lunch to take with you. You will be back by night if you start this morning, and if you take something with you, you won't miss your noon dinner"

  This time, when the face dimmed away, it didn't come again, nor did the ghosty voice of my father.

  Stories would get spread about that fight.

  Some would hold that father took me up out of the mud and lay me gentle in on the fresh hay of the dry barn. Or that mother came, with sister Nancy, and got me up into the haywagon standing half full in the lean-to shed, so they could hide me there till father left. The straight of it was that nobody picked me out of the mud. It came on to storm again, and I was still laying there too weak to move and I almost drowned from pooling water. But a cold wind came back of the rain and it freshed me enough so that I could crawl. Which I did, as far as the barn door and then through it to hide myself back of the downfall pile from the loft.

  I laid there the day and night through.

  It wasn't till next morning, and father gone into Memphis to trade for a Justin Morgan mare, that mother and all the girls came out to the barn, or dasted to. They got me onto an old storm-shelter half door, toting me that way into the house. I passed out from the jolting, I was that sick, and don't know how they got me up to the gable room by the loft stairs.

  They never had any doctor for me, but they prayed hard.

  I lay up there under the shingles for ten days. I couldn't even stand up for six of the ten. When I could walk, I didn't tell anybody but waited for that night. Under its cover, I stole out of the house. I took a lunch with me out of the kitchen and just kept going. My way led up Stump Hill and to old Shed's grave, where I said my only good-bye—to that old dog of mine. After that, I straightened out and hit for Memphis.

  There, next morning, I sold my rifle to Mr. Jessup at the Memphis Mercantile, and it fetched me eleven dollars. It was all the money I had to get me out west, but I was on my way. That was the grand thing. I don't believe my feet touched solid ground for at least the first mile.

  Maybe I didn't know where the West was, exactly.

  Which I didn't.

  But I surely knew how to start on the way to it. You just took the Keokuk road over to the county seat, hung to the south, and hit out for Kansas City. Sure it was near onto seventy-five miles to get there, but Tom Horn would make it. He had to.

  Kansas City was where the West commenced.

  Kansas City

  One thing has got to be set right about me and Kansas City. That's what year it was I got there. There's been argument over it. I said, and remain saying, 1874. And I was either fourteen, or "about fourteen," depending on how a person looks at it.

  My older brother Charley, the level-headed one, always said that was precisely the trouble—the way I looked at how old I was. "You keep track like a damn horse," he would say, discouraged. "You don't count birthdays, you count years. Way you see it, you're born in 1860, November, why that's one year gone when 1860 goes. You're one year old come January 1, 1861. So, come 1874, you're fourteen that year. No matter you really ain't, until November. I got to tell you, Tom; you ain't real quick."

  Well, Charley always saw things complicated.

  I still say fourteen, and 1874, for Kansas City.

  Leastways that's the way it's going to be with such dates for me; perhaps a body should bear it in mind.

  Like maybe you would say I was thirteen years and eight months when I got into it with my father. I would say I was about fourteen. I sure wasn't about thirteen, was I? Shucks no. It was August of 1874 that I left the farm, and August of 1874 that I hove into view of Kansas City on my way to the West. But I will copy a final date here for them that holds such matters serious, just the way mother wrote it into the family Bible, along with the other seven she bore: "Tom Horn, Jr. b. November 21st, I860."

  Past that, take your own trail. I was either thirteen or fourteen or fifteen, and I will graciously give everybody his pick of which. Of all the lies told of Tom Horn in his hard life, to miss my age a year or so would be the kindest way possible to go wrong.

  One thing for certain sure, though: I was a big one for any of those ages; big and likewise looking much older than most that was even sixteen, seventeen.

  And I did have a useful store of farmer-boy wisdom as to sharpers, grifters, roughs, highwaymen, and all of the wandering kind, bad and g
ood, which store I got from my years of hanging along the Keokuk road talking with the emigrants, horse soldiers, freed black men, foreigners, freighters, drovers, all the hundred breeds of folk heading for the new country, from the old parts.

  So I got to Kansas City in one piece and with all of the eleven dollars I set out from home with.

  I did have one squeak with the money, getting there.

  It was in Clay County, where I took a wrong turn at Kearney late in the day. Come dark, I was way deep into hill country and somewhat fearful of what to do. But by and by I saw a fire off through the timber and smellt the aroma of roast meat. The pangs of my empty belly cramped me so fierce I set off nearly on a blind run for that fires light. It was some damn-fool stunt. When I blundered in out of the timber and groping up to where the camp was, a couple of burly men jumped me from the back, fierce as bear dogs. They jammed pistols into my smallribs near up to the cylinders and snarled out, "Hoist 'em!"

  I shrunk up like a cold leech on a hot stone and gulped, "Y-y-yes s-s-sir," sounding more like four years old than fourteen.

  The two of them backed off of me like they had grabbed skunk. "Why Christ Jesus, Ding," the huge one of them said to their leader, over by the fire. "This here pilgrim ain't even legal size to keep. Ought we to throw him back, you reckon?"

  Ding came over to where we were at. He was of medium heft, brown spade beard, and had bad eyes. He blinked all the time, and fast. But he wasn't in any way nervous. Just those watery, flick-winking eyes.

  "Where you from, boy?"

  "Memphis, mister."

  "You're off the line for Tennessee."

  "It's Memphis, in Missouri. Scotland County, sir, up toward Ioway."

  The blinking man said he knew where it was, that there wasn't a decent bank within fifty miles of it, nor a railroad line anywhere short of six other counties, and that anybody born in Memphis, Missouri, ought to be shot, or at least have the courtesy to apologize for it. At which the four or five others of them had a good guffaw and the big fellow told me to pull up a stump and "dig in." This I did, taking a rare-big chunk of the roast. As the one with the bad eyes kept standing there looking at me, I said kind of awkwardlike, "Thanks, mister. My name is Tom Horn." At this, all the bearded hardcases about the fire grinned and chucked one another with elbows and the leader blinked and cocked his head at me and said in a high, tight-word voice, "One name's as good as the next; mine's Jesse James."