The darn fool boy never should have been on his Pa’s bay that morning, nor wearing his slicker, even though misty rain dripped from a slate sky. I told LeFors it was the best shot I ever made and the dirtiest trick I ever done. But that wasn’t the way of it. Not at all.
I sat my own bay in the rocks above the roughhewn homestead, saw the boy’s peach-fuzz face although he kept it dipped low so the rain flowed off his hat to puddle at his feet instead of down his neck. It was clear the work I had to do wouldn’t get done this day, and so I’d reined around and leaned into a ground-eating trot headed north.
Didn’t take long for word to get around about the killing. It would have spread quickly no matter who lay in the dirt. But this tale burst forth like a wildfire because Willie had been the one found faceup, stone-cold by the gate. Most everybody at Iron Mountain knew immediately the bullet that got the boy had been intended for his Pa. Kels was burly and mean, had a sharp temper, and fast hands with a knife or his fists. His Irish wife handled their pack of kids as effortlessly as he landed an uppercut to the chin of a rival. I never paid much mind to the younger children, but that Katie, now she had caught my attention months before, and since I’m a truthful man, I’ll tell you she was an eyeful and the reason I liked to hunker down in the rocks and brush above their cabin.
She’d come out in the morning carrying a milk pail, making her way to the four-stall barn. Sometimes I’d creep close enough that I could hear the squirt of warm milk against the tin pail, hear her hum to the old cow and talk to the cats. Certain days, Mondays I’m sure because I pay attention to such details, she’d roll up the sleeves of her blue dress—she only seemed to have one dress—and do the wash. The brown ringlets she’d piled up on her head would look ever so tidy when she started, but after scrubbing shirts and wool pants, socks and undergarments, they’d start tumbling and flying like spiderwebs, sticking to the back of her damp neck, lying across her honey-colored cheek. After scrubbing and scouring, rinsing and wringing, she’d put the wet garments in a heavy wicker basket, then haul it over to a rope line strung between two trees that shaded the west side of the house. One by one, she shook out the dripping clothes, draped them over the line, forcing wooden pins in place to hold them in the wind that always seemed to flow through the canyon.
Katie’s sister, Ida, and her mother seldom helped with the washing, never with the milking. But I saw them gathering the eggs, butchering chickens, working in the garden, wrangling the youngsters. And staying out of Kels’s way. He had built a solid house of stout logs, showing some real craftsmanship by notching the corners into a double dove. And he’d added the barn, some corrals, a privy far enough from the house to be private, and, more important, downwind. There was a root cellar and a shed where I’d heard him and Willie pounding iron and seen the black smoke pour out when the forge got hot.
I knew right off when I saw the place they were at Iron Mountain to stay and to be truthful again, that was fine with me, especially if Katie might somehow come into my personal picture.
Course I was quite a bit older than she and I’d been around some. Had scouted with and packed mules for General Crook down Arizona way, helped rout old Geronimo out of the hills and sent him off to the swamps in Florida. I darned well knew how to tie a good knot, and it always irritated me to see Kels take a load in to Cheyenne City. He’d pitch a butchered hog or some sacks of potatoes into his wagon not caring whether they stacked neatly or not. Then he’d bark at Willie to cover it with some osnaburg before pitching ropes over the top and tying them down in a set of knots that weren’t no better than what I tied when I was barely six.
The first chance I had to see Miss Katie up real close was at Iron Mountain School. It was near Christmas and as always happened, the townsfolk at Iron Mountain gathered for a pageant put on by the children. In fact, that was the first time I saw Glendolene Kimmell too. She’d moved up to Iron Mountain in the fall and began instructing the children in reading and writing and arithmetic. She had pinned her black hair back into a neat bun at the base of her neck, and that pulled her face tight over her high cheekbones and accented her dark, almond-shaped eyes, making her look exotic. She intrigued me right off because I could tell she was no homesteader’s daughter. She wore a dress that stretched tightly across her bodice and drew in at the waist. Now I suppose a man shouldn’t notice things like that, but let me tell you, she wore it in such a way that it was obvious she wanted a man to notice things like that.
After putting the students through their drills, she had us push back the desks, Otto got out his fiddle, and the fun began as we all danced until dawn. When I think back on it, I realize that was the only time I ever saw the Nickells and the Millers in the same room, hell, the first time I saw them in the same town, where they was getting along and not fighting. Course now that I think on it, I realize that’s because at Christmas Kels was raising kids and pigs, cattle and horses.
Iron Mountain life started going haywire in the spring. Kels trailed some of his horses to Cheyenne City and came home with range maggots. He was just too belligerent, and I’d have to say ignorant, to realize that bringing sheep into cattle country was going to cost him more than the value of some horses.
Jim Miller struck the first blow, killing several of the sheep when they strayed onto his range. Kels hammered back, taking down more than a mile of fence between the two places. Then the Miller and Nickell boys got into it, throwing insults and taunts in the schoolroom, and following with their fists during lunch break. Miss Glendolene Kimmell had more than attracted my attention at the Christmas event, and so I rode over by the school pretty regular to check on her, make sure the boys weren’t causing too many problems, occasionally stealing a kiss when we thought nobody was looking, especially Katie. For I sure didn’t want her to think I had any regular gal.
I wasn’t the only man around those parts visiting the schoolteacher. More than once I’d meet someone else leaving the schoolroom as I arrived, making me wonder how she kept her beaus apart. Even though I wasn’t interested in any long term alliance with Miss Kimmell, I do think I led her affections. Most of the others were cowboys who’d never been far from Iron Mountain. Having been to other places in the West, I could talk geography with her. I could tell her about the big saguaro of Arizona Territory and the rocky crags of Colorado. I could talk with her about the Apaches and scouting for a military expedition.
As I turned my horse away from Iron Mountain one spring day, I knew I’d have some more geography to discuss before long. I’d been asked by my employers to ride down to Brown’s Park and deal with a couple fellas who’d been throwing long loops and using a running iron.
In my line of work, you can’t move too quickly, or too carefully, so I was away from Iron Mountain several weeks. It took me that long to locate Matt Rash and Isom Dart, monitor their cow work, finally get a bead, and take care of the problem. This was a particularly difficult situation because Rash and Dart were seldom alone. They worked the cattle with other riders and had people in and out of their two-room log cabin like they were hosting a party. I’d never risk taking a shot if someone might see or hear me do so and that delayed my work, but of course, I’m a patient man so eventually my preparation met opportunity and I caught them alone. Not wanting to draw attention to myself, but knowing my employers would not pay me if I did not mark the end of the job, I carefully placed a rock beneath each of their heads as they stared with lifeless eyes at a cloud-filled sky. Then I rode north along the Little Snake and spent some time at the Dixon Club where the whiskey was smooth and the girls pretty. I did a little day work to establish myself as a fitting hand should I ever need to return to this country for a job before crossing the Sierra Madre and the Laramie Range on my return to Iron Mountain.
I considered this little community to be my home now and I certainly didn’t want to do anything that would hinder my ability to move freely hereabouts. I spent the early summer riding for the Two Bar and my good friend John Coble who had backed me in more than one tight spot and paid the best wages to boot. I’d always been good with a rope and had an easy way with cattle so I helped with branding, watched Jimmy Danks try to tame a black outlaw horse he had started calling Steamboat, and rode by the Nickell homestead on occasion for a glimpse of Miss Katie. You see, I was just biding my time. I knew in another year or so, she’d be of marrying age, and I intended to be the one to set her up in her own home.
I hadn’t thought of that for many years, a home; a place where a man and a woman broke bread, and broke night silence. But the more I watched Miss Katie, well, the more I was ready to settle in to a permanent situation at Iron Mountain. But a man has to ease the pressure sometimes, so I found myself more than once over at the schoolhouse where Glendolene Kimmell was always eager to share my embrace.
The tension at Iron Mountain that started with schoolboy fisticuffs had escalated while I was away in Brown’s Park and then working on the Two Bar. By the Fourth of July, Jim, Victor, and Gus Miller were taking potshots at Kels and his sheep, warning him to get the maggots out of the country or else they would drive the blatting animals over a cliff and Kels with them. He didn’t back down, not one inch, so the anger just continued to fester.
Like I said earlier, it was raining the morning of July 18. I’d seen Willie saddling his father’s horse just after dawn, and then I kicked my own bay into a trot, his hoofbeats muffled by the drizzle. A couple hours later, the sun was driving water dogs from the timber as I lay in the rocks watching for my quarry. He moved into position and I squeezed the trigger of my thirty-thirty, hearing the ricocheting echo from a rifle fired several miles away before I felt the explosion from my own weapon. Satisfied that my shot had hit the heart, I eased up from the rocks, whistled for my horse, went to my target to finish the job.
Sometimes it’s hard to know what’s real and what’s story. Now it is real that I headed down to Denver where I had a few drinks. I shared some stories there about the killing of fourteen-year-old Willie Nickell. When the boys didn’t believe me, I trumped the cards, “Boys, it was the best shot that I ever made and the dirtiest trick I ever done.” They was so impressed by my stories of chasing Geronimo, I figured one more wouldn’t do no harm.
But U.S. Marshal Joe LeFors heard about my stories, found me at Harry Hynds’ Saloon in Cheyenne City a few days later, and joined me for a few drinks. Soon we were upstairs in the marshal’s office, a small room with a tall grimy window that allowed light in just barely. He had me sit in a chair facing the back wall of the room, angling it away from him even though he said he needed to be sure he could hear my answers clearly, and then he grilled me over and over about how I killed Willie. I just kept on a-telling him the same story about it being my best shot and dirtiest trick.
What I didn’t realize is that he was taking his best shot and playing his dirtiest trick. Before I knew it, I’d been pinched for the crime because he had Deputy Les Snow and Charles Ohnhaus in the room beside his office. Their door had been rigged so they could hear and see me, though I did not know it at the time. While LeFors and I talked, Ohnhaus scratched my words onto a pad, and before I knew it, I was locked up in the city jail and told to prepare a defense.
By then I knew that there’d been further bloodshed on Iron Mountain. Kels took a bullet in the leg, another in the arm, but got help and lived. Already he was planning to leave the country, go over to the Grand Encampment, and claim new land there. He’d take Katie with him, I knew. And even if he didn’t, I recognized that my chances with her had fluttered into the wind along with my stories of killing her younger brother.
I spent my days behind the iron bars braiding horsehair into a rope and planning an escape with “Driftwood” Jim McCloud. I had some accomplices on the outside—I won’t name them even now after all these years—and McCloud could pick a lock slicker than a cat could slide down a greased pole. We forced our way out of our cell, tied up the jailer, grabbed a couple of thirty-thirty Winchesters, and raced out the west door of the cell block, just as deputy Snow realized there was a break. The crack of Snow’s rifle quickly alerted the sheriff and the town so McCloud and I barely made it to the horses that had been left in the livery for our use by friends of mine, when we heard the mob and split. I raced into the alley and ran headlong into a posse on bicycles and an irate circus man who fired his revolver twice before cracking me over the head with it. Imagine that, I’d made my living on a horse and now here I was captured by men on two-wheelers.
At my trial two people stepped up that could have gotten me out of my predicament. Two Bar cowboy Otto Plaga had seen me the morning Willie died. At the time I was miles north of the Nickell homestead and had a freshly killed deer draped over the back of my horse. Fiddle-playing Otto told the judge all that, saying it was impossible for me to have fired the fatal shot at Willie because I could not have made such a ride between the two places in the time that had been known to elapse from when Willie left the homestead on his Pa’s horse to when he was found facedown in the mud at the gate. I watched Otto’s sincerity, knew he was telling the truth, as he always did, stood up, and shouted across the courtroom, “Of course I could make such a ride, I’m Tom Horn after all. Plaga is wrong about the time and wrong about my location.” That was one nail in my coffin. And I put it there.
Glendolene Kimmell also came to my aid, or tried to. She wrote letters to the governor, she pleaded with the prosecutor, she took the stand, and would have said I was with her at the time Willie was killed, but looked into my eyes before such a perjury and instead admitted we weren’t together, but she just knew I did not kill Willie. I might have stood up then and shouted to the courtroom, “Well, if not me, then who?” But chivalry kept me in my chair, my mouth closed.
You see, she and I are the only two people who know about the killing of Willie Nickell. I realized as I sat in that musty courtroom that if I told what I knew, I would not gain my freedom, but instead would be forever burdened with it. And with Miss Katie now almost certainly out of my life, I realized there would be no happy home for me, that my breed was a relic. Truthfully, I just didn’t care any more.
My fate was inevitable. The rock under Willie’s head was the final straw that pitched the jury to guilty. I didn’t place it there, but I put it there by telling the wrong person how I marked my jobs so my employers could pay me. It didn’t much matter to me. Katie was gone with her family to the copper boomtown at Grand Encampment. Glendolene left Iron Mountain, moved to California. The Millers stuck around for years, finally starved out. I swung from a new rope in Cheyenne City as C.B. and Frank Irwin sang “Life’s a Railway to Heaven” and they took my bones to Boulder.
But I came home to Iron Mountain. Been here ever since. It was the best home I ever had, the place I was happiest. Now I keep an eye on the site where Willie died, occasionally roam through the rotting structure that was the Iron Mountain School and the crumbling remnants of the Nickell and Miller homesteads.
I saw the law dogs come that day a century after Willie died. They intended to solve the murder once and for all. They had heat-sensing sonar, Geiger counters, crime tape, cameras. They pulled out the transcript of my trial, forensic microscopes, and some beers. It was going to be hard, hot work solving this Wyoming crime. For days they poked and prodded in the rocks, along the road, around the gate, theorizing and speculating, accepting and rejecting details.
This is the way they set it up. Willie, riding his Pa’s horse and wearing his Pa’s slicker and hat, left the house to go find a hired hand who was with the sheep a couple miles from the homestead. He rode up to the gate, dismounted, started to open the gate, and from a distance of two hundred yards, I shot him with my thirty-thirty, firing three rounds, two of which struck him. Then I walked to the body, placed a rock under his head, got on my horse, and left the scene. Later I went to Denver, bragged about the killing, did the same in Cheyenne, had a fair trial, and was hanged for a deed I did commit. Or so they said. They never took into account that it only ever took me one bullet to get my man.
Having solved the case once again, these lawmen built a big fire, threw some potatoes, carrots, cabbage, sausage, and water into a milk can they had on the fire, and started cooking as they drank more beer, slapped each other on the back, and congratulated themselves for their crime-solving abilities.
And then the reporter arrived. She drove up in a rusty gray pickup, climbed out, and pulled on a ball cap. Wearing scuffed brown boots, faded Wranglers, and a chambray shirt, she took out her notebook, stuffed in into her hip pocket, poked a pen above her ear, and took a firm grip on a blue bag that she slung over her right shoulder. Walking purposefully she approached the law dogs, their fire and their cooler, but she looked at the land. Her brown eyes moved intently over the ridgeline to the east, swung across the road toward the west, took in the fence and the gate.
“You find anything interesting?” she asked the lead investigator.
“You bet. Some thirty-thirty casings over in those rocks,” he pointed toward the west. “Measurements coincide with the trial transcript. It’s clear Willie rode up, got off his horse, and Horn shot him. Fired three bullets. Two struck the boy who made it sixty-five feet toward home before collapsing.”
The reporter didn’t respond, walked to the gate, looked around, and headed for the rock outcrop and cedar trees where the law dog said I’d been. She moved slowly and even before she got to the place, I knew she sensed something they hadn’t. She pulled her camera out of the blue bag, put on a long lens, pointed it toward the rocks. And looked right at me.
The shutter never snapped, so I know she didn’t take the photo. But she saw me all right. And in that instant the story came clear for her as it had for me.
“You’ve got it wrong,” she told the law dog as she pulled a Coke from her bag.
“How so?”
“Well, for one thing, Willie would not have been off his horse to open the gate.”
“Oh?”
“No fourteen-year-old boy who’d been riding horses since he was two would ever dismount to open a gate,” she said. “He’d ride up to the fence, angle his horse against the gate, reach over, and open it. Then, with the gate in one hand, he’d swing the horse through and shut it.”
“Oh, ya?”
“Of course, the shot that killed Willie came before he could shut it,” she added. “Who are your suspects?”
“You know them: Tom Horn and Jim Miller mainly.”
“And it wasn’t either of them.”
“Who then?”
“Obviously the one who tried so valiantly to save Tom Horn, who swore at his trial he had not fired the fatal shot,” the reporter said smugly.
“Don’t tell me you think the schoolteacher did it?”
“Don’t tell me you’ve never heard of passion and jealousy as a motive for murder?”
She turned and strode toward her truck, pausing as she reached the rusty vehicle, “And boys, mind your backs, he’s watching you even now.”
AUTHOR’S NOTE: Most of this story actually occurred on Iron Mountain. All of the names are real, although I have compressed some events to fit my story line. The killing of Willie Nickell is one of those Wyoming legends where the truth is so deeply buried it is difficult to discern, but the answers are there somewhere in the rocks above the crumbling Nickell Homestead. I know. I was there with the law dogs. And I had my camera.