Lay Down My Sword and Shield

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Almost ninety years ago during the Sutton-Taylor feud, John Wesley Hardin drilled a half-dozen.44 pistol balls into one of the wood columns on my front porch. My grandfather, Old Hack, lived in the house then, and he used to describe how Wes Hardin had ridden drunk all night from San Antonio when he had heard that Hack had promised to lock him in jail if he ever came back into DeWitt County again. The sun had just risen, and it was raining slightly when Hardin rode into the yard, his black suit streaked with mud, horse sweat, and whiskey; he had a shotgun tied across his saddle horn with a strip of leather and his navy Colt was already cocked in his hand.

“You, Hack! Get out here. And don’t bring none of your Lincoln niggers with you or I’ll kill them, too.”

(My grandfather was sheriff and justice of the peace, and the Reconstruction government had forced him to take on two Negro federal soldiers as deputies. Of the forty-two men that Hardin eventually killed, many were Negroes, whom he hated as much as he did carpetbaggers and law officers.)

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