Chapter Three

“My name is Anthony Conner, but people call me Tony. I grew up in Silver City, New Mexico with Billy, or Henry as we knew him. More’n two years after Henry busted out of the Silver City Jail, he rode into my brother’s ranch … my brother’s name is Richard Knight … same mother … older. Do you want to hear about me, or what I know about Billy the Kid?

“As I was saying, Henry rode into the ranch a few years after he escaped up the chimney of … The ranch? Our ranch is located in the Little Burro Mountains forty miles southwest of Silver City. Now are you going to keep interrupting me or let me tell my story?”12

The dream continues …

Again, my bodiless soul hovers above the campfire. Below, the strange manchild stands before my sleeping figure, lying there so still and vulnerable. As his darkened figure shadows over my old body, the relief of being released from such a weighty anchor is somewhat diminished by a sudden sympathy for the lifeless hulk below and an inexplicable desire to return to its painful yet defining restraints.

The campfire flames flicker behind his sinister silhouette framed by a large sombrero. The front of his poncho, pulled over his left shoulder, reveals his rifle, barrel low. From above, the sombrero hides his features, but then, as if on cue, my perspective changes. I’m lying on the ground. I feel my body again: my soul nestled in warm flesh, skin itchy beneath a rough wool blanket, face flushed by the flickering fire, and both eyes staring up into the barrel of a Winchester carbine.

“He told my brother what he’d done. Remained about two weeks, but fearing the officers from Arizona might show up any time, he left and never returned.”13

I feel numb. I’m awake yet immobile as if my body still sleeps. I strain to move, but an invisible rope seems to tighten the more I struggle until it becomes difficult to breathe. I stop struggling and slowly regain my breath.

“Henry was kind of quiet when we was schoolboys, but he took a liking to our teacher, Miss Richards. Henry used to help her around the schoolhouse … oh, chores and stuff. We used to tease him that he was the teacher’s pet. Henry didn’t like that. After his mama died, he came over to live with us. He worked in my brother’s butcher shop in town and I know for a fact that he never stole anything. We left Henry there alone all the time and never noticed anything missing. We couldn’t say that about others that had worked there.

“He never swore or acted bad like other kids. When a few of us boys got together and started a minstrel troupe, Billy was head man in the show. Got a standing ovation over at Morrill’s Opera House.”14

Looking up to the silhouette before me, I try to distinguish his features more distinctly. The face beneath the hat is boyish, an obvious stranger to the blade. Dirty blond hair frames bright blue eyes. The most outstanding feature, however, is a pair of bucked teeth, slightly crooked. Otherwise, his eyes betray more charm than gruff as if at any moment he’d break out into a smile that would make one proud to call him a friend.

“A real good singer and dancer, Henry was, but he was smart too. Henry got to be a reader. He would scarce have the dishes washed until he’d be off somewhere reading a book … Dime novels and such, the Police Gazette. Oh yeah, there was this series about a team of lawmen, vigilantes, who rode the West in search of bad men. What did they call themselves? I remember, ‘The Regulators.’ Henry loved reading about The Regulators. He wanted to start a gang and call it that, but nobody wanted to join a gang of do-gooders. We all wanted to be badmen.”15

But with the rifle slung low, he isn’t smiling now…

“When Sarah told him he could pick any horse … Sarah Ann Knight, my brother’s wife … any horse he wanted out of the corral, he picked the scrubbiest of the lot. Before he left, he told me he was thinking about drifting over to Lincoln County and joining the war. When my brother Richie asked him what side he was going to join, Henry said he did not know.”16