said, I told you to get out, you’re under arrest. Vail got his handcuffs and handcuffed the little one and the big one reached him his right arm. I didn’t notice that then until after the shooting. He was left handed. He handcuffed em together and he said to me, Houston, go in there and call Harper Morris. Tell him I’ve got the two men he wanted. Vail follered me in there, right on in there, and them guys follered us in there till they got there to that opening, about four foot over there. He turned around to em and said you boys wait right there, that’s far enough. Just as nice as he could be. I picked up the phone and called Harper Morris and just about the time I was givin the phone to Vail I seen this big one come out with that gun. He told Vail, I said drop that receiver. And drop that gun. And Vail whirled around. And said, wait a minute and pulled his six shooter. But the man emptied his gun in him before Vail came out of his holster with the six shooter. Then Vail levelled on em. Vail emptied his gun in the both of em . . . The big man that done the shootin . . . he turned . . . and acted like he was gonna run outside. The little man caught ahold of the door facing and started coming down and when the big un fell out . . . on his face . . . he pulled the little un out on top of him . . . Vail reloaded his gun. And he shot ’em both again. He turned around to me and said Houston you better get me to a doctor quick. I’m dyin.
Fifty years afterward, people could tell you exactly where they were on the day Sheriff Vail Ennis was shot five times with a Smith & Wesson .38. Wayne Dirks, twelve, was hitching a ride to Tuleta, three miles south, after junior high football practice. He and a friend saw the commotion and jogged down to the Magnolia to see what had happened. “When we got closer we could see all this blood, probably a twenty-by-twenty area. Solid blood. We walked right up to it. The bodies were still there. Someone had covered them up.” The canvas covered everything but an arm with a tattoo—a severed heart, above it the word Deceived, below it the word Laraine. “There was blood everywhere. There must have been a pool of blood twenty feet across. I can see to this day one of the workers at the station taking a hose and trying to wash it away.”
Jack Robinson, later a sheriff himself, was one of the first in Beeville to find out about it. Driving down St. Mary’s Street after work he saw the sheriff’s Hudson Hornet parked in front of the Beeville hospital, the doors open, nobody in it, the police light still flashing. “I just figured Vail had shot somebody again,” he said. Inside the hospital, Cread McCollom Jr. lay on a table in the emergency treatment area, a bandana wrapped around his left hand, waiting for the doctor. He had worked cattle on the ranch at Cadiz that day and ripped a two-inch gash in his thumb. Coal oil and camphor, his grandfather’s usual treatment, hadn’t fixed it. Suddenly the door opened, and there was Vail Ennis, his white shirt soaked in blood. Dr. Edmondson came in and said, “We need that table, Cread. Just lie down on the floor.”
Outside, a small crowd of lawmen and onlookers had formed in the hospital yard. L. D. Hunter and Reese Wade, the sheriff’s hunting partners, were there. Some high school boys came by; they drove to tell others. By nightfall, the yard was crowded. The weather was overcast and raw. The county had seen the first frost of the fall over the weekend, temperatures in the middle thirties, and it had rained almost an inch early Monday. A single streetlight at the corner of St. Mary’s and Jones Streets did little to light the funereal scene, shades huddled against a blackening sky. Inside the hospital, Vail Ennis lay dying at the age of forty-four. No one said it out loud, but they all knew that Vail’s life was meant to end this way. Before today, Sheriff Vail Ennis had killed five men. Now he had killed seven. No other lawman in Texas had killed so many men.
So the gloomy night of November 10, 1947, became the moral high point of Vail’s time as sheriff of Bee County. His death would gray the memory of his own killings. His many enemies would be obliged to show compassion for his widow and small daughter, obliged to join the mourners at his funeral.
Assuming, of course, that he would die.
The American Café that week saw the last gathering of the old-style sheriffs of Texas. They drove in from the neighboring cattle counties to join the vigil. Claude Taylor came from Goliad, Albert Smith from Live Oak, Harper Morris from Karnes. Each was the unquestioned law of his county. Texas, proud of its size, was a small world. Here in the brush country the pioneers had laid out their towns thirty miles apart—the distance a covered wagon could travel in one day. From Beeville it was thirty miles northeast to Goliad, thirty miles north to Kenedy, thirty miles south to Sinton, thirty-two miles southeast to Refugio, and thirty miles west to George West. Distances in frontier Texas were vast but undaunting. A single man on horseback could easily cover fifty miles in daylight.
Standing next to each other, the sheriffs of Karnes and Live Oak counties formed a spectacle. Harper Morris was five feet tall; he wore a size four boot. Albert Smith was a huge, lumbering, rock-hard man. Albert Smith had been sheriff of Live Oak County for two decades. He was almost as feared as Vail. Grifters steered clear of Live Oak just as they steered clear of Bee. And Harper Morris had a legacy that pretty much guaranteed him a lifetime as the law in Karnes County. His father, W. T. “Brack” Morris, was the sheriff shot and killed by the legendary Gregorio Cortez in 1901.
Vail Ennis wasn’t dead yet, but he was close enough for these hard realists to tell the sheriff stories and laugh aloud about them. Most stories were about guns. No one questioned Vail’s skill with a sidearm, but his friends ribbed him about hunting. Around here, bird season—dove and quail—was more important than deer season, and there was much to argue about. Who was the better shot? Who had the better dogs? Vail had bragged about his dogs and bragged about his car, the metallic green Hudson Hornet he said was the heaviest, fastest car in Texas.
At every table, there was expert speculation about what had happened at Pettus. These men knew about guns, knew about the damage guns could do. Was it believable that the sheriff had been shot five times in the belly before he fired back? Who could survive five .38 slugs? Or even .32s? Or even .22s?
The mystery was where the big man got the gun. How had Vail failed to find the big man’s gun when he cuffed him? The gun supposedly was in the man’s boot, but a Smith & Wesson .38 was too big to hide in a boot. No lawman wanted to believe that Vail had searched the big man and missed the gun. Or, worse, that he had neglected to search him at all. The café was full of gun experts, each with a theory:
“It was a .32.”
Another: “Allee says it was a .38. He’s got it.”
Information passed from one table to another. Several men claimed to have been at the hospital when Vail came in. One saw nurses try to put Vail on a stretcher, which he’d refused. “I can walk,” he’d said. There was speculation that Vail had even driven himself from Pettus, but witnesses said one of the station workers had driven, with Vail in the front seat of the Hudson and Houston Pruett, the heavy station attendant, in the back. Pruett had been nicked by a ricochet (either in the back or the butt, depending on the version). Someone said Pruett wanted the stretcher since Vail didn’t. But he was just too heavy.
Such stories would be repeated for decades, with colorful variations: “Vail told the driver that if he didn’t keep the Hudson floorboarded 110 all the way to the hospital, he’d shoot him, too.”
The head table at the American was wherever Captain Alfred Allee chose to sit. The neighboring sheriffs were in Beeville unofficially. But Allee, the famous Texas Ranger, was here to take charge.
Alfred Allee was no stranger to Beeville. During the mid 1930s, he was a regular at the American Café when it was still called the Bluebonnet. That was when Ma Ferguson got elected governor of Texas and fired most of the Rangers. Of all the men in the American, the only one who had known Vail Ennis before he became a lawman was Alfred Allee. Some said he had been in the county since he was sixteen, that he had gone to school in Beeville. No one remembered. No one asked. Most men his age hadn’t finished high school. In Texas a boy had one ambition: to be a man, and most couldn’t wait out high school—there were too many things
