I, Tom Horn Read online

  Well, good luck to them, too, as old Staked Plains says; may the Great Bull Buffalo bless them likewise as he has others of our good friends along the way.

  Santa Fe for real?

  I will never forget the sight and feel and smell of it that Christmas Eve of 1874 that I came into it from out of the north on the high driver's box of a four-mule hitch freight wagon, just ahead of a New Mexico snowstorm. I was just but fourteen years old. I was six foot tall in my body and muscled up like a snake from a man's ways and work. But I was yet a far ride from being growed in my mind, or turned hard of imagination. That legend town beyond the Sangre de Cristo Mountains was like my whole life being taken back and me born over again into a different world. It was all one big blaze of yellow lamplight and soft candleshine and wonderful smells of piñon and jumper smoke and the beautiful haunt of the guitar music and Mexican laughing and singing and, ah! it was wonderful coming down into old Santa Fe that snowy winter's night so long ago.

  And I was never the same again, after it.

  Pajarita Morena

  Christmas Eve in Santa Fe was one too many for Tom Horn, Jr.

  When we had got the freight wagons parked and been paid out by Mr. Blades, friend Wolf-Eye says to me, "Come on, younker. I am well acquainted here and will introduce you to the right people. Bring your money."

  Well I had always been a swift grower. By this time I was chewing my own tobacco and spitting it pretty far, too.

  "Lead out!" I answered, full and clear; and me and Staked Plains Bronson woke up next morning, which was Christmas, in the local juzgado, sick as two poisoned coyotes and not a peso left betwixt us.

  "What ever will we do now?" I asked him, depend-fully.

  He peered hard at me. "Who are you?" he said.

  The town marshal turned out to be a white man, but we were hauled up in front of a Mexican judge for sentencing. Up to then, I had always figured New Mexico was U.S. of A. territory. And I sort of liked Mexicans. They struck me as happy-go-lazy folks who would rather sing and dance than sweat for hire. They loved horses and cattle and living out on the range, and, well, hell, I got along so great with them on my way to getting roostered Christmas Eve that I remember telling them I was a Missouri Mexican. But that judge set all that back about a year; in fact, exactly one year: "to be served in the Santa Fe Jail, in lieu of fifty dollars fine and five hundred dollars legal fees."

  Old man Bronson, due to his age and busted-down condition, plus having a Mexican wife and eleven half-breed kids over in Taos—which he surely never mentioned to Tom Horn nor freighter Blades—was turned loose with a fine which he paid by putting his Sharps rifle into soak down at the La Fonda Loan Office. I later learned that the old devil had been in and out of the Santa Fe hoosegow so many times they'd lost count. It worked out to be about every time he came back to town. And since each time he did that he got his Mexican old woman big-bellied again, the folks down there figured it would be eleven years that Staked Plains had been hocking his rifle in Santa Fe. Give or take one year, or one kid.

  In any case, this time he must have decided to stay over in Taos, for I never saw him again in Santa Fe.

  As for me, the marshal's deputy, likewise a white fellow, hauled me back to the jail and locked me up in solitary, "so's you won't contaminate the local prisoners." Which, naturally, were all Mexicans that had been my dear new friends just before the big fandango wherein I and Staked Plains had challenged "every brownskin son of a bitch in the house." Strong drink had done me in in three hours, where three months on the Santa Fe Trail had left me fit as a catgut fiddle. There was a lesson there which I was determined to learn. If I ever got out and was give the fair chance, that is. Which right then it surely didn't appear that I would be.

  "Horn," the deputy said, clanging the big old bronze key in the celldoor lock. "Iffen you want anything, you had best learn to speak greaser. Me and the marshal are bound by tonight's stage over to Prescott, in the Arizona Territory, to pick up a prisoner. We'll be a week away. But don't you worry now, hear? Even if the Mex jail help don't savvy a word of English, you won't be starved nor harmed. These here chollos are a generous and butter-hearted sort. They'll treat you fine, unless you try something."

  "I suppose should I try something, I'll get shot," I snapped, turning smart-ass with him.

  "No," the deputy answered, politelike. "Knifed."

  Which naturally ended that.

  Praise be, that deputy was right; the Mexes were good people. Hadn't they been, I might yet be in that old adobe-mud and Spanish-iron birdcage down in Santa Fe.

  Not that I then, or ever, learned to love a knife, or came to admire knife fighters. To me, a man that uses a knife on another fellow human being is the lowest scum of the frontier. Knives are for cutting up meat. Damn a man that will use one otherwise. That's Mexican, white man, heathen Chinee, or red-ass Indian. It ain't right.

  But I don't change my story on good Mexicans.

  Pajarita Morena was her name. The pajarita part meant "the little bird," and she was just that. Tiny, soft, quick, beautiful, easy-hurt, wild to fly. Ah, Pajarita! Eyes luminous as a doe fawn. Voice trilling sweet as any songbird throat, yet low and husky, too, in a way to make a man's nape-hair rise up. Lord God, but she was a wickedbodied little thing. And didn't even know it!

  I didn't realize it right off, either, those first few days she brought me in my noon dinner at the jail. It was her job, she murmured, with those slanty-hot eyes cast down. Paying her what she needed to support her agey grandmother, the only kin she had in the world. The men in the jail near always respected her, prisoner and keeper alike, for they knew her want. She hoped the tall new Anglo prisoner from far Missouri would be as kind. It was very much in the heart of Pajarita Morena to have that hope come true. She had never seen a vaquero like the young Missouriano. So lean, so brown, so very brave. It was a thing of sorrow to contemplate his future. One year is as a lifetime to the young. Ay de mí! Were there but something that she, Pajarita Morena, might do. But, alas. Qué tragedia. There was nothing.

  Now I heard this talk one day and the next. And was polite and grateful to her for it. But it didn't really sink in. Here I was not yet fifteen years old and in jail for a year in a foreign place. I didn't have a friend nor a penny of money nor any actual way to know I might not rot for a hundred years in that mud-wall Mexican juzgado.

  I for sure as hell wasn't dreaming along about then of getting under the shimmy of Pajarita Morena.

  But, come the first weekend after Christmas, things were changing swift and rough.

  It was Saturday night, New Year's Eye.

  The Mexican girl was plenty late with my supper and the winter darkness was full down when she finally showed.

  "It is for a reason, hombre," she told me in that soft low voice. "I have here more than your food to eat. Mira!" She pulled aside the cover-cloth of the shallow Indian basket she brought the meals in. There on my supper plate was the big bronze key. "Be sure it is the one, caballero" she nodded. "I know them all. It will fit the lock."

  She stared at me the shakiest moment of my life; I felt it to the toes of my both feet and back up again.

  "I will be waiting for you," she said. "You will find me in numero tres, the third doorway from the cantina where they took you and the old one. Hurry there, but stay to the dark places of the streets. Do not go by way of La Fonda."

  "But the doorway," I protested. "I might count wrong!"

  "There is a light over it," she smiled. "You will know it. Cuidado now, I must go."

  "But the other prisoners, yonder," I said. "They will raise a ruckus when they see me getting free."

  "No," she said. "They have all been freed for the New Year. It is our tradition, tall one."

  "Sure," I said, foolish with bitterness. "You mean they was all Mexes but for me!"

  She came very close up to me. I could feel the female of her, though she was yet a foot away from me. "Hombre," she whispered, "Pajarita brings you the same message o
f peace and love. The same gift of freedom. Take it!"

  I started to bumble and stumble that love and peace was dandy things but you didn't buy freedom without you took it. And I had no gun and the guard was armed, maybe more than one guard. Also, I had no money to pay for el morbito, "the bite," the bribe, that I had heard was paid in Mexican jails. So how was I to win free, after all?

  Again she moved into me to where the fragrance of her swirled about me to upset the senses. Her eyes shone wild. Of a sudden, I aged. It came to me with a jolt, like being thrown on hard ground by a mean horse. This "little bird" was full-feathered out. It seemed to me that I was plenty old to do anything, and the first thing I wanted to do was to get my hand under whatever it was Mexican girls wore for shimmies. But she backed away quick.

  "I have given the jailer a bottle of wine. It is heavy with a drug my old grandmother knows of. In ten minutes he will not know a footstep from a shadow's whisper. Count those minutes when I am gone. Then call to him that you have finished your food. When he does not reply, you will know he cannot. Hasta la vista."

  She was gone before I might worry her more.

  Out in the office of the jail, I heard her low and throaty laugh. And the Mex jailer growling back in Spanish. It plainly was something off-color that he said. There was more laughing and whispers and gruntings and soft cries of, "don't, don't !" all of it in Mexican but clear to me as mountain air. Afterwards there came a quiet spell. Then a thud as of something heavy falling to the whitewashed mud floor, and more silence, this time fit to pain the eardrums.

  Directly, I tried a yell. Nobody hollered back at me. My breath came hard. Pajarita Morena had played it true to her word. Where the hell was that key?

  The key made no sound in the lock, the celldoor swung as though fresh-greased, the empty cells watched me past their bars like ghost holes in the adobe wall. Christ, maybe I would make it yet. Maybe that little old smoldereyed Mex meant it all. It was enough to make a stone shake. I eased open the outer door, trembling hard.

  The jailer was floor-flopped, wine bottle in one hand, a rose-green garter in the other. I rolled him over with my boot. And was glad his pants weren't open-buttoned. I surely didn't want to owe that little sungrinner girl everything. I was in deep enough with her, just for the wine and the key. Not even counting the peace and love.

  But the freedom, ah!

  I took the jailer's pistol and stuck it in my pants-band. There was a short old .44 rimfire Henry rifle in the corner of the room back of the desk. I took that, along with my pockets full of ammunition for both guns. The Mex had a hideout knife, and I took that too. Next, I drug his body in behind the desk. As a last act, I pitched an old horse blanket over him, as it was freezing cold outside and the stove in the office smoked out.

  After that, I just slipped to the street door, cracked it three inches, slid on out into the snowy dark. I was at the cantina in twenty shadow-clinging minutes, and the only living things saw me were two cats. I circled four or five dogs that never dreamt a six-foot Missouri boy had soft-walked square around them, not eight feet off, and gone on by with not a woof nor a whimper from them.

  Giving the cantina a good big downwind detour, I drifted over the dirt wagon ruts of the street and started to counting doorwells on the far side. But I broke off the count at two. I didn't need three. For Pajarita had said it straight again. There was the little light over numero tres, and all the others dark, up and down Calle Cantina. "Damn," I said to the wind and the lonesome coldness of the night. "Ain't that suthin', now."

  And went on, shadow-quick, into the archway recess of numero tres, square under the little red light.

  The Hero

  Pajarita got up from the bed. I watched her go and wash herself and come back. The shine of our one candle in the room made her body look unreal, it was that slim and beautiful, yet full where it should be full. She laid back down with me, and I loved her again and we rested a quiet spell, still holding on. She was wondrous to me.

  But it grew so still, by and by, that she said to me, "Hombre, listen." And I did and heard the loud ticking of the old Spanish granddad clock over near the washbasin stand. "You hear it, Tomas?"

  "Yes. Qué hora es?"

  "Eleven," she said. "There is only one hour now."

  She meant that the stage for Arizona pulled out at midnight. We had been talking of how I was to get away when I got there from the jail. She had told me a Mexican story. Some of it in English, which she spoke real good. A lot of it in Spanish, which I did not speak so great, but was getting the hang of it.

  The idea of her little fahula was that, according to her sainted grandfather, Dios perpetuate his soul, the wise fox did not run from the dogs but with them. Señor Zorro would double around and trot behind the pack, making the pursuit endless. Or, better yet, would leap into the moving haycart or carreta of passing firewood and so remove himself from the countryside preceded by the pack as honor guard or, que tall even as dueño primero, as principal chaperone. The dogs never caught the fox because they never thought to look for him behind them, or in their very company.

  Ending the example, Pajarita had smiled and said, "Do you understand that story, Tomasito?"

  "No," I'd said. "You'd best lead it past me one more time. At a halter walk."

  It was her turn to frown, but it didn't stop her.

  "Tonight, Saldano, at the jail, told me Marshal Beck and Deputy Simms will come in on the eastbound stage with the prisoner from Prescott. Saldano had that word by telégrafo from Bernalillo early this day. The stage will come before the other one departs. An hour perhaps."

  I'd jumped a foot at that.

  And should have, for it was past ten o'clock—we had been loving and hugging around and the time had seeped away like campsmoke—when she first told me. Somehow, though I'd wanted to cut and run, right then, she had made it seem "foxier" to wait and "take the midnight stage," a thing no lawman, at least no white lawman, would ever look for an escaped prisoner to attempt.

  It had seemed fair enough then, for she made it so by shrugging off her things, one by one, and letting me have what we'd been tussling and giggling over for those flown-by hours of the night. But now, God knew, with eleven o'clock striking and me as loved out as a stray dog, things were tightening like wet rawhide drying over fire.

  That little whorehouse room in Santa Fe was like to be the last stop Tom Horn ever made.

  The damned marshal and his wiseacre deputy might even now be swinging down off the Prescott stage. At this exact minute, they could be herding their manacled prisoner into the old adobe jail and finding that blockhead Saldano sprawled back of the desk. I had to figure it could be that way. And, right now, those white lawmen might be fanning out to cut off the great Missouri fistfighter and fandango-wrecker. The idea of that year in the Santa Fe Jail made me wilder than a mustang.

  Of a sudden, the soft-yielding body of Pajarita Morena was no más importa. The low voice, the sweet scents of her, the hard, high breasts and appled buttocks, all of it was as if it wasn't there and never had been.

  Tom Horn was being run for the first time in his life, and he didn't like the feel of it.

  Pajarita had come up to me as I dressed in the smoky darkness of the candle's lowering flame. She was yet naked as the day God sent her seed into her mother, and she touched me with the little brown-pink fingers and said animal things to me, moaning soft and wanting me again; it was way, way late in the night for that.

  "Mujer," I said, "basta!"

  I was reaching for the Henry rifle and the jailer's pistol, stomping into my boots. She shrunk back with a hurt cry, and I took her shoulders in my two hands.

  "It ain't you," I said, "and it ain't me. It's only the way things are. I ain't going back to that jail."

  I give her a hug and a kiss, and she was crying like a little girl and holding onto me, and I had to break hardaway from her. I could still hear her sobbing in the door-well behind me as I went out into the winter night and sliding along
the adobe walls of Calle Cantina, in old Santa Fe, outwardbound for the sagebrush west of town, where the stage road turned south for Bernalillo.

  And where, inside the hour, along would come the Prescott run of the Overland Stage Company, six-horse hitched and rolling hightail, long gone from Santa Fe.

  There was a three-quarter moon and ragged scud of fairly low clouds, with gusty, dry winds blowing cross-quartering. I dogtrotted about an hour along the stage road. Passed only some Mex wood carts going into town and one man on muleback which looked white but I wasn't sure. None of them saw me. If I had learned one thing on Wyaconda Creek, it was to make myself scarce in just about any landscape. Especially by dark.

  I always felt at home in the dark.

  So I found the place I wanted, and no trouble. It was a top-out of a little rise that dropped off sharper on the far side. That is, going south toward Bernalillo. Here, the teams would have to move out at a brisk gait to keep the coach off their hind hocks. The coach would be swaying and running "light," and nobody in her, or atop her, would "feel" me go aboard of her from the back. When the teams steadied out and commenced to pull again down off the slope, they wouldn't know the 180-pound difference they had picked up cresting the rise.

  It worked just that smooth way, too.

  To a point it did anyway.

  Which point was down on the flat beyond my rise, with me safe atop the baggage boot and with a fine handholdt on the straps of same, riding free and fancy as a dude.

  I had seen this place from up above whiles I was waiting for the stage to get out from Santa Fe. I'd thought then, the way the outcrop of base rock rose in a jumble thirty foot high both sides of the road, what a hell of choice lay it made for a stickup by road agents. But it was 1874 and my imagination was getting the best of my good sense. What kind of a haul could robbers expect from that old Concord rattling through the night toward Bernalillo? Shucks, there wasn't anybody aboard it but some women I could hear talking inside, and a whiskey drummer I could smell! Them, and then the crew on the box. One man. An old bastard. The driver. No guard, nobody riding shotgun. Imagination, nothing more. Just hang on and watch for traffic that might spot you on the boot.