At the same time, his father’s beatings were an attempt to drive the ‘bad’ out of him, a common practice in the 19th century. Yet young Tom’s priorities and instincts were the opposite of his father’s. While the father apparently had a compulsion for hard work, the son was developing another kind of addiction: excitement. From the time he left home at 13, he went where the action was.

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There is also room to suspect that the elder Horn made unfavorable comparisons between the kid and his siblings, and that he played on the fact that young Tom, his namesake, never quite measured up. A hint of low self-esteem surfaced in his actions as an adult.

He was quick to rise to any challenge to his capabilities. In the legal proceedings that followed Willie Nickell’s murder, when questioned whether Willie’s father had warned Horn not to stray off the road through the family’s homestead at Iron Mountain, Horn said: ‘I wouldn’t allow 15 of the worst men in the world to tell me that. I am at liberty to go where I please in the country. I wouldn’t stand for anybody to tell me anything of that kind. If my business took me through that country I would go. He couldn’t tell me that; he wouldn’t tell me half before I would have got him to stop.’

There is also a hint of deep-seated feelings of inadequacy in his propensity to boast and brag, especially (but not only) when he had been drinking heavily. Joe LeFors, the deputy U.S. marshal who extracted Horn’s alleged confession of the Nickell murder, said that when he first met Horn at Frank Meanea’s saddle shop, he found him ‘rather inclined to brag.’ On the weekend of his fatal ‘confession,’ many witnesses testified to his state of inebriation and said that he was talking loudly, telling stories, and speaking of having killed a Mexican lieutenant during his time in the Southwest. In the ‘confession’ taken down in shorthand by court reporter Charlie Ohnhaus, Lefors guided Horn through a string of leading and often confused questions and responses until Horn allegedly said that young Willie Nickell was shot from about 300 yards, and then he boldly remarked, ‘It was the best shot that I ever made and the dirtiest trick I ever done. I thought at one time he would get away.’

Horn’s bent for bragging on an epic scale surfaced in letters he wrote seeking a job as a stock detective who would take on a gang of rustlers — a job that LeFors had dangled as the bait to draw Horn into Cheyenne and extract his confession. ‘I don’t care how big and bad his men are, or how many of them they are,’ Horn wrote. ‘I can handle them. They can scarcely be worse than the Brown’s Hole gang, and I stopped cow stealing there in one summer.’

The only close relationship Horn seems to have had was with the dog, Shedrick, whom he described as ‘the sharer of my joys and sorrows … There never was a better dog!’

In his autobiography, Life of Tom Horn: Government Scout & Interpreter, he wrote of the killing of his dog by two migrant farm boys, who shot ‘Shed’ after an altercation with Horn and the dog. ‘That was the first and only real sorrow of my life,’ Horn said. He carried the big dog (known to be big enough to pull Tom’s father in a cart) back to the farm and buried him. At that point in his life, Horn may have lost all hope that the world was good.

In those words about the death of his dog there is the hint of a developing detachment, a coldness and distance that stayed with him for the rest of his life. Horn never developed close, lasting relationships — only professional friendships. He was not the marrying kind; his alleged romantic involvement with a schoolteacher, Glendolene Myrtle Kimmell, is based more on legend and lore than fact.

Shortly after his dog was killed, Horn challenged his father. The bigger man prevailed, but young Tom told him it would be the last time because he was going to leave home. The beating was a severe one, and Horn lay in the barn all night; it took him a week to recover. When he was well enough to go, he said, he kissed his mother for the last time, looked at Shed’s grave, and headed west.

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