Forty Times a Killer by William W. Johnstone Page B

and a three young’uns at home.”
    Wes hesitated, and I thought for a moment he felt inclined to show the young lawman mercy.
    How foolish I was. How unspeakably stupid.
    The concept of mercy was as alien to John Wesley as sin is to a cloistered monk. He smiled, then shot the crying, sobbing Jones between the eyes. Standing in the red glow of the firelight, gun smoke drifting around him, Wes looked like the devil incarnate.
    At the time I said nothing. Nothing at all.
    He turned to me then, his face like stone, his eyes lost in pools of darkness . . . and he pointed his murderous revolver at my head.
    Sweet Christ save me! I stood transfixed, terrified to move.
    John Wesley smiled. “Did you think I’d shoot you, Little Bit?”
    â€œI don’t know.”
    â€œI don’t know either. Maybe I would. Maybe if you did me wrong I’d gut shoot you.”
    â€œI would never wrong you. I’m your friend.”
    Wes waved the Colt around the clearing. “Was this my fault?”
    Fearing for my life I didn’t hesitate. “No, Wes, not your fault. Smith said he smelled death. He said death walked through our camp.”
    â€œHe was right.”
    â€œWes, quit smiling like that and put the gun away,” I said. “You’re scaring the hell out of me.”
    He did neither.
    â€œI smelled it too, Little Bit. Death walked close to me and it looked like a column of black mist and stank like a rotting thing. I’ve seen it before, you know. Sometimes it watches me and says nothing. It just stares and stares with its cold eyes.”
    Now I was really boogered. I stood there and pissed myself. Warm urine streamed down my legs and trickled onto the toes of my shoes.
    â€œIt wasn’t my fault. They should never have arrested me.” Then, like a man suddenly waking from a trance, Wes grinned and let the Colt drop to his side.
    â€œLittle Bit, how come you just pissed all over yourself?”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN
A Grieving Father
    John Wesley armed himself with a brace of revolvers he took from the dead men, but he decided to leave their horses behind, as they’d attract too much attention to us.
    We stuck to our original plan to stay with his folks in Mount Calm where we’d be safe and welcome and took to the trail at first light.
    I must admit that I rode with a heavy heart, the deaths of the three constables, especially Jones, weighing on me. And consider this—the death of Smith put paid to the lie that Wes would not pull the trigger on a man who’d worn the gray. He knew Smith had been at Champion Hill, heard him say so, yet he blew off his head with a shotgun.
    Need I say more?
    And one more thing . . . I’m often asked how many men Wes had killed after he dispatched the three constables. I’ve heard it suggested that he’d killed one man for every year of his life; like that Billy Bonney kid did later, up New Mexico way.
    Wes was seventeen when he gunned Smith, Davis and Jones, and by then I reckoned he was creepin’ up on Bonney’s twenty-one.
    Some folks will tell you different.
    But, hell, I know better because I was there.
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    Mount Calm lay in the middle of the east Texas hill country. A store, a school, and a handful of whitewashed houses were splattered across flat, sandy ground like spilled milk.
    Wes said there was talk of the railroad laying a spur to the place, but nobody, including his pa, put any stock in that.
    James Gibson Hardin was a tall, slender man, a Methodist minister by profession, who bore, I fancied, a resemblance to the great Jefferson Davis of blessed memory. The Reverend Hardin didn’t exactly welcome his prodigal son with open arms, but neither did he send him away.
    In contrast, Wes’s mother, Mary Elizabeth, an attractive, stiff-backed woman, showered kisses on her son and called him, “My golden boy,” and “My dearest Johnny.”
    After remarking how thin Wes had become,