Chapter Six

The evening before the Patterson stage was due to leave Fort Concho, Brack Cooley had been two things . . . half-drunk and bored. Taken together, they made him irritable, unpredictable, and an almighty dangerous man.

Cowboy Bob Walker should have read the signs and left Cooley the hell alone. He didn’t, and it cost him his life. As a contemporary San Angelo newspaper account would later have it:

A SHOOTING IN THE ALAMO

Gunman Brack Cooley
Again Kills His Man

BOB WALKER LEFT WELTERING
IN HIS OWN BLOOD

Cooley Claims Self-Defense

 

Last night, a little before ten, Bob Walker died with his beard in the sawdust of The Alamo Saloon. He gasped out his last breaths with three bullet wounds in his chest that bartender Luke Arnold later covered with an ace of spades playing card, to the amazement of a large crowd of onlookers. Better for Bob, a cattle drover and well-known face around town, if he’d given Cooley a wide berth. This was Cooley’s second victim in just two days. Ere he braced Walker, he had already gunned down small-time thief and all- round nuisance Frank Pickett for the $200 reward on the man’s head. Cooley is known to the law as a desperate character, one of that new breed of Texas drawfighter they’re all talking about, though THE GAZETTE sees nothing admirable in the species. We consider six-shooter men like Brack Cooley who love the bark of the festive revolver a blight on the landscape and a threat to civilization itself. We hear from Mr. Arnold that Cooley is about to embark for New Orleans and pastures new, and all we can say is, “Good riddance.” The State of Louisiana is more than welcome to him.

The events leading to the shooting scrape began when Cooley refused an invitation from Captain Bentley-Foulkes to join himself and Lieutenants Wood and Allerton for a late supper.

“I’ve got five hundred dollars burning a hole in my pocket,” Cooley said. “I reckon I’ll have a drink or two and see if I can find myself a woman.”

“I’m reliably informed that the Patterson stage is due to leave the fort tomorrow morning,” Bentley-Foulkes said. “It would not do to lose sight of it, don’t you think?”

“I’ll be there when the stage leaves,” Cooley said. “When it comes to agreeing to kill a man, I keep my word.”

“Then see you do, Mr. Cooley,” the Englishman said. “The where and when of the deed, I’ll leave to your discretion.”

“Did you find out who’s up in the seat?” Cooley said. “I’m talking about the guard, not the driver.”

“Yes, I found out, and there’s a complication,” Bentley-Foulkes said.

“I don’t like complications,” Cooley said.

“It seems that a Texas Ranger by the name of Tim Adams has commandeered the stage and is taking a couple of prisoners as far as Austin.”

“I never heard of him, but any ranger is bad news.”

“I’m paying you to handle bad news, Mr. Cooley.”

“Like I asked already, who’s the messenger?”

“A man named Muldoon is the driver.”

“Hell, give me the name of the shotgun guard.”

“His name is Red Ryan.”

“I’ve seen him around. Wears a fancy buckskin shirt and a plug hat? Carries a Greener shotgun and a Colt on his right hip?”

“I can’t answer that question,” Bentley-Foulkes said. “I haven’t seen the man.”

“If it’s the Red Ryan I’m thinking about, he has a reputation of being pretty slick with the iron.”

“He’s a shotgun guard, so I rather fancy that he’d need to be something of a crack shot,” Bentley-Foulkes said.

Cooley nodded. “Ryan’s been in a few shooting scrapes.”

“Goes with his chosen profession,” the Englishman said. Then, a frown gathering on his well-bred, handsome face, he said, “Mr. Cooley, I hope you’re not having second thoughts. Perhaps the job is too much for you?”

The gunmen’s anger flared. “No job is too much for Brack Cooley. I can handle Ryan and the ranger as well, if I have to.”

“Then I’m glad to hear it,” Bentley-Foulkes said. “You’ve set my mind at rest.”

“When do we pull out tomorrow?” Cooley said.

“About thirty minutes after the stage leaves. Be ready.”

“I’m always ready,” Cooley said.

But the Englishman’s words had rankled him, and Brack Cooley was on a slow simmer when he walked into the Alamo Saloon and filled the place with his brooding, menacing presence.

* * *

There were no women available at The Alamo that night, and Cooley sat at a table by himself and steadily drank rye whiskey that did nothing to improve his mood. He was aware that a man kept looking at him, open hostility in his eyes, but already half-drunk and planning to work on the remaining half, the big gunman kept to himself and avoided a stare-down.

But the belligerent man’s eyes never left him, and Cooley, a man who’d been a willing participant in a score of saloon fights, drank his rye and prepared for the inevitable.

The bartender, plump and jolly Luke Arnold, missed nothing in The Alamo and his restless eyes read the crowd like a book. He saw that Bob Walker was on the prod and he decided to act as a herald. On the pretense of offering Cooley a cigar, he whispered, “His name is Bob Walker. Watch your step.”

The gunman smiled. “I see him.”

A moment later he saw Walker within spitting distance.

The drover was a nondescript man of medium height, dressed in a shabby gray ditto suit and collarless shirt. He had a Colt revolver on his hip, the finish badly worn, possibly a pawnshop purchase. A spade-shaped brown beard gave his narrow, unprepossessing face a tad more character, but his dull black eyes showed little intelligence. Walker wore a gambler’s silver signet ring on the little finger of his left hand, an adornment that Cooley dismissed as an affectation.

In all, there was little about Bob Walker to impress, but the man seemed to harbor the belief that he was bulletproof. A fatal mistake.

Cooley’s cold eyes lifted to Walker’s face and he said, “What can I do for you, mister?” At that point, he didn’t want to get into a fight that would further jeopardize his already complicated relationship with Bentley-Foulkes.

“Killing Frank Pickett was a dirty trick,” Walker said, loud, aggressive. He waved a hand. “And I want all present to hear me say it.”

“The fight was of his choosing, not mine,” Cooley said. “He could have given himself up.”

“Damn your eyes, Frank was a friend of mine,” Walker said, pushing it, pushing into mighty dangerous waters where treacherous shoals lurked in the shallows.

“Then you should choose your friends more carefully,” Cooley said. He was calm, amused, at that point still willing to let things slide.

But Walker, who’d never been in a shooting scrape, knew gun reputations were won by putting the crawl on named men like Brack Cooley. He fervently wanted to be recognized as a bad man, to be mentioned in the same breath as draw fighters like John Wesley Hardin and Clay Allison.

The Texas Rangers, no strangers to dangerous men, would later describe Cooley thusly: “The fast draw, the spin, the border shift . . . he did them all with what amounted to magical precision and a cool nerve.”

What Walker didn’t know, or chose to ignore, was that Hardin and Allison would have stepped around Brack Cooley and only gone to the draw when their backs were to the wall and there was no other way out.

Bob Walker had already made a major mistake in bracing Cooley, and now he made another that would have fatal consequences.

Cooley stretched out his foot and pushed a chair from under the table. “Sit down, man, and have a drink and a ceegar,” he said. “Frank Pickett was a fool, and let it end there. I have no quarrel with you.”

Had Walker been sober, he might have seen it as an honor to be invited to drink with such a famous shootist and gladly taken the chair to be seen hobnobbing with the great man. But that night he was drunk, belligerent, and incredibly stupid.

“I won’t drink with you and be damned to ye,” he said. Then, a note of exasperation in his voice, “Git up on your feet and apologize to all present for killing Frank Pickett, the best friend a man ever had.”

“Go to hell,” Cooley said.

Now there was no going back. Walker had called the tune and had to face the consequences.

The drover’s hand dropped for his Colt, and at the same time Cooley rose behind the table like a wraith, his gun flaring. Three shots triggered in the space of a single heartbeat sent three lead bullets slamming into Walker’s chest. The man staggered back, his face registering shock and horror. No . . . this can’t be happening . . . I can’t be dying this way . . .

Bob Walker carried that thought into eternity.

Brack Cooley, his smoking Colt in his hand, looked around the saloon.

“He drew down on me,” Cooley said to the gaping crowd. “You all saw it.”

“I saw it, but I don’t believe it,” bartender Luke Arnold said.

His diamond stickpin glittering in the lamplight, he stepped from behind the bar, picked up a playing card from a table as he passed, and hurried to the dead man. He looked at Walker’s wounds and then placed the card, the Knave of Spades as he later noted, on the chest of the corpse.

“The card covers all three wounds,” Arnold said. “Damn it all, folks, that’s good shooting!”

For a moment, the late-night sporting crowd, now joined by several saloon girls, was stunned. Then one rooster, drunker than the rest, yelled, “Three cheers fer good ol’ Bracky!”

In the West, notorious gunmen were feared, but also admired, and the hearty cheers that went up for Cooley’s prowess with the pistol attested to that fact.

Basking in the limelight, Cooley realized that now was the time for a grandstand play. The crowd expected it, something to later add to the legend when it came to the retelling of the saga of the Gunfight in The Alamo Saloon. The bounty hunter tossed a handful of coins on top of Walker’s body and said, “Bury that decent.”

Again, the crowd cheered. This was theater at its best.

Cooley didn’t disappoint. He grinned, crossed the floor in a chime of spurs, and grabbed one of the saloon girls by the arm. He pushed her toward one of two curtained cribs at the far end of the room, and he and the giggling woman vanished inside.

Luke Arnold, something of a philosopher, nodded and smiled as he stepped back behind the bar and to the excited throng said, “To the victor belong the spoils.”

And the crowd’s huzzahs were even louder than before.