Prewet’s filling station, handcuffed them and pushed them into the station office while he made a phone call. One of them whipped a .38 revolver from a shoulder holster and put four slugs in Vail. That was his mistake. Bleeding but upright, Vail turned from the phone, pulling his Colt from its hip holster; he pumped six shots at the manacled prisoners. Deliberately, he reloaded and pumped six more. When the smoke cleared away, both men were dead . . .
Turner’s newsstand sold its usual hundred-copy shipment in two hours. Another 150 went fast. George Turner ordered 128 more.
2
Johnny Barnhart bought his copy of Time at the University of Texas Co-op. He took it with him around the campus, showing it to everyone he knew, students and professors. Then he took it to the Kappa Alpha house and read it aloud to his fraternity brothers. Johnny had been listening to jokes about his hometown (“Is it between A-ville and C-ville?”) since his freshman year in Austin. Now Time magazine had answered any remaining questions about Beeville’s centrality to the universe. Pleased to have the attention of the house, he told stories of his personal relationship with the now-famous lawman: “I used to sit with him in his living room. There were picture frames all over the walls, but no pictures. They were all marksmanship awards. He won every pistol-shooting competition in Texas.”
Johnny had been performing for audiences since he won a junior declamation competition when he was eleven years old. Recently, he had been the head cheerleader for the Texas Longhorns. It pleased him to have become the Kappa Alpha’s resident authority on the Old West. The truth was that he had been in that living room because he had taken Vail Ennis’s niece, Carvis Uzzell, to a few dances. Carvis lived with the Ennis family in the sheriff’s quarters at the jail. She was the best dancer in the Beeville high school. Everyone wanted to dance with Carvis. And the truth was that boys who grew up in Beeville in the 1940s got their experience of the Old West in the same way other American boys did: the B Westerns that showed in the Rex and Rio theaters. The few high school boys who owned boots and Western hats had a reason to wear them—work. Their families still ran cattle on the old ranchlands. Country was a nickname for a kid whose family still labored in ag. The boys in the FFA pretty much stuck together. Few joined Johnny Barnhart and Carvis Uzzell and the popular crowd at the Friday-night dances on Tyler Street. The high school sock hops played the big swing bands—Glenn Miller, Tommy Dorsey, Harry James—with singers like Bing Crosby and Jo Stafford and Frank Sinatra. Western dances at the American Legion Hall used local bands (Lawrence Goynes and the Boys) and drew the same crowd that drove out to Olmos to dance polkas played by other local bands (Julius Jardina and the Boys). Hip kids went to these dances because they were old-timey and made them feel even more sophisticated than they already felt they were. And the truth was that Johnny Barnhart was the opposite of the image of the rangy, rugged Texan in Western movies. Johnny was five four. He wore horn-rimmed glasses. Saddle shoes. He was shorter than Mickey Rooney. In a time when teenagers danced cheek-to-cheek, he didn’t reach a single one. All the popular coeds were big girls (Carvis, Martha Iris Gill, Minnie Krause—so many of them), tall and beautiful. His middle initial was N so his nickname became Nehi.
Growing up in Beeville was no different from growing up in some small town in Indiana or Pennsylvania. Johnny mowed lawns for twenty-five cents. He jerked sodas at Schulz’s pharmacy and gained fame for his root beer float. On election nights, he carried trays of Cokes and coffee to the men watching the big blackboard in front of the newspaper office. He knew the newspaper men, the ministers, the store managers, the farmers and ranchers who came to town on Saturday; he knew them all. He especially knew the lawyers, who remembered the short, black-haired boy who watched courtroom trials like other kids watched football games.
Johnny was Beeville’s favorite son: the senior class president, class favorite, star of the school plays, declamation champion. When he left for the University of Texas, his teachers followed his college career, holding him up as a model for younger students. “Miss Goen told us she was going to read the class a letter from a former student, and it was the way a letter should be written,” said Sylvia Rudeloff, recalling her freshman Spanish class. “She said it was from Johnny Barnhart. We were so impressed. She never read a letter from anyone else.”
In Austin, he found much to write home about. He wrote about Dr. Gilbert McAllister’s course in cultural anthropology, about being ushered into that a dark hallway with the display cases of primitive heads (Neanderthals, Cro-Magnons, Australopithecus) staring back at him beyond the glass, waiting with dozens of other freshmen—and those heads—for what seemed an hour before being led into a lecture hall. Dr. McAllister’s opening remarks impressed him deeply: “I see this classroom as a port. I look at you and see a number of small craft who have sailed into this port and are moored in the harbor. My objective is to cut all these craft loose from those moorings, to set them asail. If at some point they come back to the mooring, that’s fine. But many will keep on sailing.”
Johnny was thrilled to be at the University of Texas. Students on their way to class routinely passed both J. Frank Dobie and Clarence Ayres, the school’s most famous faculty members. Both were instantly recognizable. Ayres was tall, almost gangly, with legs too long for the rest of his body. He walked at a lope. Dobie meandered; he was stocky, with thick fingers. He favored an open-collared shirt and a wistful walk. Ayres wore glasses with thin rims, a white shirt, and narrow tie. His hair was dark, short, and carefully combed. Ayres would not be out of place at a small-town Rotary Club luncheon. Dobie would. They were roughly the same age (Dobie was born in 1888, Ayres in 1891), but Dobie, with his leathery outdoors look, looked much older.
Dobie was a Texas celebrity. He had published ten books, including Coronado’s Children and A Vaquero of the Brush Country, by the time Johnny Barnhart got to Austin. He had a radio program, Longhorn Luke and His Cowboys, and wrote a newspaper column about Texas politics. His “Life and Literature of the Southwest” was the most popular course on campus.
Ayres was an atheist from Massachusetts, and he saw fit to announce this to his Bible-schooled Texas students at the start of each school year. He had taught at Reed College and the University of Chicago, where with Thorstein Veblen he originated the concept of institutional economics, assimilating the social sciences and anthropology. Ayres introduced himself to each timid class of Plan II freshmen with a question:
“What does everyone want?”
Which he answered himself: “More.”
“Why do economies grow, and why are they repressed?”
Lifting his right hand: “Economies grow through technology and free markets.”
Lowering the left: “They are repressed . . . by religion and bureaucracy.”
For a small-town kid, the overt clash of ideas was stunning. And exciting.
Johnny had come to college to learn more about history, geography, the world. But he expected this knowledge to be defined, orderly, packaged. He didn’t expect challenges. He didn’t expect ideas.
Students were protective of Dobie and Ayres. Both were often in trouble with the school hierarchy. By the time Johnny got to Austin, the Texas regents had tried twice to get Ayres fired. (Not because he was an atheist, but because he supported New Deal economics.) Dobie was just ornery. He argued in public that business and journalism (“the unctuous elaboration of the obvious”) were unworthy of major study, should not be considered disciplines, and should be dealt with in seminars. Of his Education Department colleagues he said: “I have never encountered one possessed of a first-class mind . . . Many are dull well-meaners, cunning climbers, exponents of the paltry, and, worst of all, quellers of eager searching intelligence—especially of intelligence lodged in teachers not willing to knuckle.”
On the most thrilling day of his sophomore year, Johnny had joined the protest against the firing of the University’s president, Homer
