11

The Bargain

Billy Bonney returned to Lincoln early in December 1878 with a vague notion of squaring himself with the law and going straight. Only ten months earlier he and Fred Waite had almost settled on their own spread on the upper Peñasco, but Tunstall’s murder had intervened. Now that the Regulators had fallen apart, Billy had no close personal attachments beyond Tom O’Folliard. Constantly dodging the law was nerve-wracking, and after the danger and tumult of war a quiet farm of his own may have held momentary appeal. No one else had been punished for the excesses of the Lincoln County War, so why should he be? As he told his friend Sam Corbet, he was tired of fighting, wanted to stand his trial, and did not want to have to run from the Dolan outfit and the civil officers any longer.1

In Billy’s absence from Lincoln, however, the old McSween-Dolan hostilities had not been laid to rest. In November, in fact, they had flared anew with the return of Sue McSween from a two-month stay in Las Vegas. With her came Huston Chapman, an excitable, one-armed lawyer who saw every issue in apocalyptic form. Together, they set out to bring Colonel Dudley to justice for the death of Alexander McSween. This crusade, acting on Dudley’s volcanic temperament, stirred dread of new outbreaks of violence. Chapman in particular bred anxiety. He was “a ‘rule or ruin’ sort of fellow,” said Ben Ellis, “whom nobody liked.”2

Other developments had occurred during Billy’s Texas sojourn that bore on the new tensions. The federal investigator, Frank Warner Angel, had turned in a report damning to the administration of Governor Axtell. To restore order in the territory and credibility to its government, President Rutherford B. Hayes had named a new governor. He was Lew Wallace of Indiana, Civil War general, lawyer, politician, philosopher, musician, artist, sportsman, and rising literary star.

Governor Wallace had taken two steps toward ending the troubles in Lincoln County. Although he wanted the president to proclaim martial law, he had to settle for a proclamation of insurrection. This laid the constitutional groundwork to employ the army in suppressing the “insurrection,” and for the first time since June, Colonel Dudley’s soldiers could act as military posses for the civil authorities. Wallace had followed with a proclamation of his own, declaring an end to the disorders in Lincoln County and extending a “general pardon” to all offenders not already indicted by a grand jury.

Both documents contained flaws. The president’s proclamation, while making policemen out of soldiers, stopped short of martial law and left the courts in civil hands. Witnesses, jurors, and indeed the judge himself remained in terror of both factions and shrank from forceful measures. Why arrest anyone, asked army officers, if the courts would not convict? The governor’s proclamation declared a peace that did not exist, and his amnesty invited the return of dangerous men who had fled the country rather than risk military arrest.

While aggravating the stresses in Lincoln County, Wallace’s proclamation did not lift the cloud from Billy Bonney. The “general pardon” applied only to men who had not been indicted. Billy stood under two indictments—territorial for the murder of Sheriff Brady and federal for the murder of Buckshot Roberts.

For the time being, Billy ran little risk of arrest. Peppin had ceased to function as sheriff months earlier and had been defeated in the November election. The new sheriff, George Kimball, did not immediately qualify to replace Peppin, which left law enforcement incapacitated until early in 1879.

With Chapman keeping up a ceaseless agitation, tempers ran high, and people feared another explosion. Except for Billy and Tom O’Folliard, most of the “iron clads” had left the country, but many who had ridden as Regulators remained. On the other side were Dolan, Billy Mathews, the ubiquitous Jesse Evans, and a newcomer, Billy Campbell. A wandering cowboy, Campbell was a fierce-looking man with a huge brown mustache. His disposition, ill-tempered and thoroughly mean, matched his appearance.

As Billy had told Sam Corbet, he did not want to fight Dolan and the law both, a sentiment given special force by the advent of the steady, competent Kimball as sheriff. Early on February 18, 1879, exactly a year after Tunstall’s death, Billy put out a peace feeler, sending a message to a Dolan adherent at Fort Stanton asking whether the Dolan people proposed war or peace. The reply came back that they would come to Lincoln for a parley.3

That night the two sides faced each other from behind adobe walls on opposite sides of the street. Fifteen or twenty men had gathered, but only about half came as belligerents. Backing Billy were Tom O’Folliard, Joe Bowers, and Yginio Salazar, now recovered from the wounds received in McSween’s backyard on July 19. Dolan headed the opposition, backed by Campbell, Evans, and Mathews.

Hard words from Jesse Evans almost provoked a gunfight. He declared that the Kid could not be dealt with and would have to be killed on the spot. Billy replied that they had met to make peace, and he did not care to begin the negotiations with a fight. As tempers cooled, the men left their barricades and gathered in the street. A few minutes of dickering produced agreement: no one on either side would kill anyone on the other, or testify against him in court, without first withdrawing from the treaty; and anyone who violated the agreement would be executed. Amid general handshaking, they reduced the terms to writing and signed the document.4

With peace declared, the uneasy friends embarked on a boozy celebration. Noisily, and growing drunker with each stop, they staggered from one drinking place to another. About 10:30 P.M., lurching up the dark street in front of the courthouse, they chanced to meet Huston Chapman, unarmed and his face swathed in bandages to ease the pain of a severe toothache. Billy, coolly sober in contrast to the others, watched the scene unfold.

Campbell challenged the lawyer and asked his name.

“My name is Chapman,” was the reply.

“Then you dance,” commanded Campbell, drawing his pistol and shoving it against Chapman’s chest.

He did not propose to dance for a drunken crowd, answered the lawyer, adding, “Am I talking to Mr. Dolan?”

“No,” interjected Jesse Evans, “but you are talking to a damned good friend of his.”

Dolan, standing about ten feet behind Chapman, drew his pistol and drunkenly fired a shot into the street. At the report, Campbell’s trigger finger jerked and the revolver’s muzzle exploded into Chapman’s chest.

“My God, I am killed,” he exclaimed as he slumped to the ground, his clothing ablaze from the powder flash.

Chapman’s killing did not dampen the revelry. Leaving his body burning in the street, the celebrants made for Cullum’s eatery. Over an oyster supper, Dolan and Campbell decided that someone should return to place a pistol in Chapman’s hand so that the killing could be explained as self-defense. Billy, anxious to part with the group, volunteered. Taking Campbell’s pistol, he went outside, found his horse, and rode out of town.5

Aside from getting implicated in still another murder, Billy had good reason to leave town. Sheriff Kimball had spotted him earlier in the day and had gone to Fort Stanton for a military posse to aid in his arrest. Accompanied by a lieutenant and twenty cavalrymen, Kimball returned to Lincoln shortly before midnight. They searched the town without finding Billy, but they did come across Chapman’s corpse, his clothing in ashes and his upper body severely burned. They carried it to the courthouse.6

Whether Chapman’s death was deliberate murder or simply a drunken accident stirred heated debate at the time and has yet to be definitively resolved. Years later one of the bystanders recalled it in terms that ring true for the time and place. When ordered to dance, he said, Chapman refused, “so one of the boys shot him through the heart and he fell over against me, dead. There was really no malice in this shooting. Life was held lightly down there in those days.”7

The killing of Huston Chapman whipped up intense excitement among Lincoln’s residents, who feared that it signaled a fresh burst of violence. They applauded Colonel Dudley’s prompt response to their appeal for protection and drew comfort from the presence of a detail of soldiers that he stationed in Lincoln. With even more relief they greeted the news that the governor himself was finally coming to Lincoln.

Lew Wallace had no sooner taken the oath of office the previous October 1 than he had vowed to go to Lincoln and investigate in person. He had procrastinated ever since. He put forth unconvincing excuses to explain the delay, but the truth probably lay in a literary project in which he had become deeply immersed. It was a sweeping saga of biblical times, and night after night he withdrew to the inner recesses of the governor’s palace to spin the fictional adventures of a hero he had named Ben-Hur. Not until the blazing corpse of Huston Chapman nudged aside Ben-Hur did Lew Wallace make good on his promise.

Once in Lincoln, which he reached on March 5, the governor moved swiftly to reestablish public confidence in the government. As a first step, he got rid of the troublesome Colonel Dudley. Colonel Edward Hatch, military commander in New Mexico, had accompanied Wallace from Santa Fe and now yielded to his insistence that Dudley had become so enmeshed in local factionalism as to destroy his usefulness. On March 8, triggering a predictable cry of outrage, Hatch relieved Dudley of the command of Fort Stanton.8

The new commander, Captain Henry Carroll, proved much more compliant. On March 11, after quizzing Justice Wilson at length, Wallace furnished Carroll with a list of thirty-five names of men who should be arrested and brought into court. Most could go free simply by pleading the governor’s amnesty, but not Bonney, Waite, Bowdre, and other “iron clads” who had already been indicted. “Push the ‘Black Knights’ without rest,” Wallace urged Carroll, who probably puzzled over the governor’s medieval romanticism.9

The governor especially wanted the men involved in the Chapman killing. This had occurred after the amnesty proclamation, and their conviction would go a long way toward reviving public faith in the law and the courts. He had heard that Billy Bonney and Tom O’Folliard were at Las Tablas—“Board Town”—some twenty miles north of Lincoln and that Dolan, Evans, and Campbell were at Lawrence Murphy’s old ranch thirty miles west of Lincoln. At Wallace’s request, Colonel Hatch sent detachments to find the culprits. Las Tablas failed to yield the Kid and O’Folliard, but the troopers returned with Evans, Campbell, and Mathews. Dolan too fell into military hands, and the four were confined at Fort Stanton.10

Meanwhile, Captain Carroll pushed the “Black Knights” without rest. With methodical persistence, he kept his patrols scouring the country and rounding up wanted men. By the end of March he had a dozen in custody, and a week later a newspaper reporter observed that the fort’s lockup had become “a ‘Bastille’ crowded with civil prisoners.”11

Wallace squirmed over a painful dilemma. On the one hand, until citizens acted fearlessly as witnesses and jurors, the courts could not convict. On the other, until the courts convicted, citizens would not act fearlessly. In dread of retribution, witnesses to crimes refused to swear the affidavits that were legally required as a basis for the issue of arrest warrants. “The truth is,” confessed Wallace, “the people here are so intimidated that some days will have to [pass] before they can be screwed up to the point of making the necessary affidavits.” Bowing to the governor’s pleas, Colonel Hatch authorized the troops to make arrests without warrants, and some of the prisoners loudly protested their unlawful detention by the military. Lincoln’s only lawyer was kept busy preparing writs of habeas corpus.12

Secure in their haven near San Patricio, Billy and Tom kept abreast of Wallace’s campaign with an absorption rooted in self-interest. Billy’s quick mind instantly focused on Wallace’s need. On March 13 he sat down to pen the first of several letters that one of his San Patricio friends carried to the harried governor.

“I was present when Mr. Chapman was murdered and know who did it,” Billy wrote. “If it was arranged so that I could appear at court, I could give the desired information, but I have indictments against me for things that happened in the late Lincoln County War, and am afraid to give up because my enemies would kill me.” “If it is in your power to annul those indictments,” Billy suggested, “I hope you will do so, so as to give me a chance to explain.”

Billy then concluded: “I have no wish to fight any more, indeed I have not raised an arm since your proclamation. As to my character I refer you to any of the citizens, for the majority of them are my friends and have been helping me all they could. I am called Kid Antrim, but Antrim is my stepfather’s name.”13

Those may have been hollow words contrived to win the governor’s sympathy. More likely, as confirmed by his avowal to Sam Corbet, they expressed his true feeling at the moment. And a great many citizens would indeed have vouched for his character.

Billy Bonney had embarked on a risky venture. In exchange for lifting the indictments against him, he offered himself as the one thing Wallace needed most: an eyewitness to murder who would testify in court. Billy hated Dolan, Evans, Mathews, and Campbell and would have enjoyed seeing them locked behind bars. In openly testifying against them, however, he placed his life at peril, the more so because he broke the peace accord concluded on the night of Chapman’s murder. That document specified death for any violator. That the other signatories were confined at Fort Stanton afforded some comfort, but not much.

Not above bargaining with a nineteen-year-old outlaw, Wallace responded immediately. “Come to the house of old Squire Wilson,” he wrote on March 15, “at nine (9) o’clock next Monday night alone.” Billy should steal into town from the foothills on the south, Wallace instructed, and knock on the east door of Wilson’s jacal. The governor also touched on the two assurances Billy needed to enter into a bargain: immunity from prosecution and protection from reprisals. “I have authority to exempt you from prosecution if you will testify to what you say you know,” Wallace wrote. “The object of the meeting at Squire Wilson’s is to arrange the matter in a way to make your life safe. To do that the utmost secrecy is to be used. So come alone. Don’t tell anybody—not a living soul—where you are coming or the object. If you could trust Jesse Evans, you can trust me.”

After dark on March 17, the governor and the justice of the peace sat tensely expectant in the candle-lit gloom of Wilson’s little dwelling near the courthouse. At the appointed hour the door vibrated with a firm knock.

“Come in,” said Wallace.

Billy entered warily, a Winchester in his left hand, a pistol in his right. “I was to meet the governor here,” he said. “Is the governor here?”

Wallace rose, extended his hand, and invited the boy in. The three sat at a table, and Wallace explained his plan.14

“Testify before the grand jury and the trial court and convict the murderer of Chapman,” Wallace proposed, “and I will let you go scott-free with a pardon in your pocket for all your own misdeeds.”

“If I were to do what you ask,” replied Billy, “they would kill me.”

No, answered Wallace, he would contrive a fake arrest that would look genuine to the world, then keep Billy in protective confinement. With the bargain sealed, Billy slipped out into the night.

Billy could hardly have received more unsettling tidings than reached him at San Patricio the very next day, March 18. Jesse Evans and Billy Campbell had persuaded their guard to desert and, with his help, had broken out of the Fort Stanton lockup and lost themselves in the mountains. Even in protective custody, the Kid could readily visualize himself shot down by these two before he could relate his story to the grand jury. “Please tell you know who that I do not know what to do, now as those Prisoners have escaped,” he wrote to Squire Wilson on March 20.15

On the same day, however, Billy followed this letter with a long message assuring Wallace that he would keep his part of the bargain. “But be sure to have men come that you can depend on,” he beseeched. “I am not afraid to die like a man fighting but I would not like to be killed like a dog unarmed.”

He then offered detailed counsel on where to look for Evans and Campbell. “It is not my place to advise you,” he concluded, “but I am anxious to have them caught, and perhaps know how men hide from Soldiers, better than you.”

The next day, March 21, Sheriff Kimball and a posse surrounded the house of one of San Patricio’s many Gutierrezes, a mile below town, and arrested Billy Bonney and Tom O’Folliard. Escorted to Lincoln, they were placed under guard in the home of Juan Patrón, next door to the Montaño store where Wallace lodged.

That the Kid had not exaggerated in assuring Wallace that many citizens would vouch for him became clear several days later. In reporting the incident to Secretary of the Interior Carl Schurz, however, the patrician governor betrayed the condescension with which he looked not only on his prisoner but on the entire territory. “A precious specimen nick-named ‘The Kid,’” he wrote, “whom the Sheriff is holding here in the Plaza, as it is called, is an object of tender regard. I heard singing and music the other night; going to the door, I found the minstrels of the village actually serenading the fellow in his prison.”16

Billy not only stood ready to testify in the Chapman case but also proved willing to explain the outlaw scene in general. In a long meeting with Wallace, he poured out explicit details of outlaw trails, hiding places, techniques, and above all personalities ranging all the way from Seven Rivers to Silver City. Once again he had broken the terms of the peace treaty of February 18.17

Billy was soon joined in his “prison” by an old friend. Wallace had formed a militia company, the Lincoln County Rifles, and had sent it out with his list of culprits. Early in April the unit rode over to Fort Sumner to search for Charley Bowdre and Doc Scurlock, both under federal indictment in the Roberts killing. Bowdre got wind of the threat and fled, but Scurlock was seized, brought back to Lincoln, and confined with Billy Bonney.18

Exactly what Wallace promised Billy seems to have been left vague in both their minds. In his letter to Billy, Wallace said that he could exempt him from prosecution, whereas in his memory of the meeting in Squire Wilson’s dwelling he offered a pardon. A pardon could have been granted at any time before or after trial. An exemption demanded more immediate action, before court convened.

An exemption, moreover, did not lie within the governor’s power unless agreed to by the prosecuting attorney. As it turned out, Billy had more to fear from William L. Rynerson than from Evans and Campbell, who prudently disappeared into Texas. A Dolan ally throughout the Lincoln County War, an overt partisan who thought nothing of subverting the law to his private interests, Rynerson could hardly be expected to view the Kid with compassion.

To make matters worse, Wallace did not even remain in Lincoln for the spring term of court but instead returned to Santa Fe and, doubtless, Ben-Hur. A Las Vegas attorney, Ira Leonard, represented Wallace as an aide to Rynerson, who neither needed nor wanted an aide.

Judge Bristol opened the proceedings on April 14. Fear and intimidation stalked witnesses, jurors, and even the judge. Partisans on both sides championed the old Dolan and McSween interests. Judge Bristol, anxious to get out of town, pushed the grand jury hard. He showed “the timidity of a child,” Leonard complained, “and stood in fear of the desperate characters.”19

True to his word, Billy Bonney took the stand to name the slayers of Chapman. So did Tom O’Folliard, who had also witnessed the killing. The testimony identified both Campbell and Dolan as the killers and described the role of Evans, in court legalese, as to “incite, move, procure, aid, counsel, hire and command” them to commit the deed. Based on this testimony, the grand jury indicted Dolan and Campbell for murder and Evans as an accessory. Mathews escaped notice.20

Apparently District Attorney Rynerson had allowed Governor Wallace to believe that, in exchange for turning state’s evidence, the Kid would be released from prosecution in the Brady killing. Rynerson reneged, however, prompting the Mesilla Independent’s comment that “considering the character of the man [Billy] the action was right in the premises.”21

“He is bent on going for the Kid,” Ira Leonard wrote to Wallace of Rynerson’s posture, and “he is bent on pushing him to the wall. He is a Dolan man and is defending him by his conduct all he can.” Far from dropping the prosecution of Billy, the district attorney pressed the case vigorously. On Rynerson’s motion, Judge Bristol granted a change of venue to Doña Ana County, where jurors would be less likely to sympathize with the likable young fellow.22

Despite Rynerson’s obstructionism, the grand jury spewed out indictments—some two hundred falling on fifty men. Dominated by former McSween followers, the jury took note chiefly of the offenses of Dolanites. Even Colonel Dudley, target of Sue McSween’s vendetta, found himself charged with arson in the burning of the McSween house.

Only two people actually came to trial, and they went free. Judge Bristol had already released fifteen of the Stanton prisoners on writs of habeas corpus. Others who had been indicted, such as Evans and Campbell, were nowhere near Lincoln, and those who were in town pleaded the governor’s amnesty and had the charges quashed. A few who chose to fight, such as Dudley, Dolan, and Peppin, obtained changes of venue from Judge Bristol. All ultimately won acquittal or had the charges dropped by friendly prosecutors. Jimmy Dolan, a prime author of the war, slipped easily into a new life of respectability and became one of Lincoln County’s most honored citizens.

Billy Bonney enjoyed no such official favor. By bearing witness against Dolan and his friends, the Kid had planted in Rynerson and even Bristol a fierce resolve to see him hang for the Brady killing. Even the favor of the governor could not offset the implacable hostility of these two pillars of the law.

With Doc Scurlock, Billy “perambulated at leisure” around Lincoln, as the Independent complained. Technically under arrest, the Kid was allowed considerable latitude by a tolerant Sheriff Kimball, who knew the circumstances under which he had been taken into custody. “Kid and Scurlock are expected to walk off at any time,” observed the Mesilla News, “as little restraint is placed on these favorites of the governor.”23

Billy tarried in Lincoln to aid in Sue McSween’s continuing crusade against Colonel Dudley, a cause in which he could participate wholeheartedly. The army had appointed a court of inquiry to look into Dudley’s actions in Lincoln on July 19, 1878, and Sue was busily assembling witnesses who would swear that soldiers bolstered Peppin’s posse in the siege of the McSween house and even helped set the house afire.

The court began taking testimony at Fort Stanton on May 12, 1879. Governor Wallace led off as the first of more than sixty witnesses. Several, including Sue McSween, swore to the active participation of soldiers in the fighting. In testimony given on May 28, Billy Bonney described the breakout from the McSween house and contended that soldiers posted at the southwest corner of the Tunstall store fired at him and the others as they dashed to safety. A parade of witnesses dissented, and Dudley’s counsel, Henry Waldo, persuasively discredited the allegation, as well as the motives of those who had conceived it.24

In particular he tore into Billy. Waldo was a master at sarcasm, and in his summation he wielded it brutally to demolish both the character and the testimony of Billy Bonney.

“Then was brought forward,” he said contemptuously, “William Bonney, alias Antrim,’ alias ‘the Kid,’ a precocious criminal of the worst type, although hardly up to his majority.” Billy was the perpetrator of the “cowardly and atrocious assassinations” of Sheriff Brady and Andrew Roberts, Waldo pointed out, and “there were warrants enough for him on the 19th of July last to have plastered him from his head to his feet, yet he was lugged in to do service as a witness.”

With allowance for hyperbole, that came close to the truth. Just as he signed the affidavit that Rob Widenmann probably composed for the Angel investigation, Billy now told the army judges what Sue McSween wanted them to hear.

As the Dudley Court ground on through June to its conclusion—exoneration of Dudley—Billy Bonney faced another danger. Early in June, Judge Bristol convened the United States District Court in Mesilla. The U.S. marshal for New Mexico, John Sherman, received instructions to produce both the Kid and Scurlock to answer the charge of murdering Buckshot Roberts within a federal jurisdiction. Sherman procrastinated, but finally took steps to have the two “prisoners” escorted to Mesilla.25

Billy Bonney could not have looked with optimism on the prospect of facing Judge Bristol again. He had every reason to feel disillusioned and disgruntled. He had struck a bargain with the governor of the territory, had risked his life to carry out his promise, yet had received nothing in return. The spring session of territorial court had left no doubt in his mind that Rynerson and Bristol intended to convict him of the murder of Sheriff Brady. Now he confronted the more immediate threat of a murder trial in federal court for the Roberts killing. However sincere the governor’s intentions, he had not lived up to his promise. He had not persuaded Rynerson to drop the territorial charges against Billy, and he had made no move to grant a pardon. The law seemed forgiving of everyone except Billy Bonney.

On the night of June 17, 1879, with a sense of betrayal, Billy simply rode out of Lincoln. Doc Scurlock went along, while Sheriff Kimball looked the other way.26

Billy spent the next few weeks in Las Vegas. According to charges later filed in district court there, on July 1 a person known only as “Kid” operated an unlawful monte gaming table. Billy Bonney loved monte and dealt it expertly, but neither the charges nor the arrest warrant ever caught up with the accused. He may have been Billy Bonney or another of the many “Kids” who peopled the frontier West.27

In July 1879 Las Vegas offered an appealing setting for gamblers and every other variety of adventurer, confidence man, and criminal. On Independence Day the first train on the Santa Fe Railroad steamed into the “New Town” where the depot was located. Night and day Las Vegas throbbed with the raucous hilarity that marked the advance of all the transcontinental lines. Billy would have been drawn by the excitement and opportunity.

Other testimony to Billy’s presence in Las Vegas came from his old friend Dr. Henry Hoyt. Now tending bar in one of the railhead community’s many saloons, Hoyt took Sunday dinner in late July at a popular hotel associated with the hot springs six miles northwest of town. Here, to his astonishment, he found himself seated next to Billy Bonney, who in turn introduced him to a companion, a “Mr. Howard.” Later, Billy confided that Mr. Howard was none other than the notorious outlaw Jesse James, traveling incognito.28

By early August Billy was back around Lincoln, provoking Sheriff Kimball into halfhearted efforts to arrest him. On August 9, with an officer and fifteen men from Fort Stanton, Kimball tracked Billy down the Bonito Valley and cornered him in a cabin six miles below Lincoln. Surrounding the cabin in the darkness, they settled down to await daylight. But the resourceful Kid recalled a similarly desperate predicament in his past. As the Fort Stanton commander reported, “he escaped by climbing up a chimney, leaving his arms behind, and escaping under cover of night.” If he learned of the feat, Sheriff Whitehill of Silver City must have enjoyed a chuckle.29

On another occasion, Billy slipped into Lincoln and went to Sue McSween’s house. He had heard that Frank Coe had come down from Colorado to retrieve his hay-cutting machine and was staying there. While Tom O’Folliard held the horses outside, Billy went to the door. Inside, Frank sawed his fiddle while Sue and a sergeant from Fort Stanton danced. Billy entered, confronted the soldier, and asked what he was doing there.

“I guess you ought to know,” the soldier replied.

“Well,” said the Kid, “why don’t you do something?”

“We’re sent out,” the sergeant answered lamely, “but don’t have to do anything.”

To break the tension, Frank began to fiddle again. “Kid went dancing around with his carbine in hand,” Coe remembered. “Had the whole room to dance in, but kept dancing around and over the Sergeant’s feet and Sergeant kept drawing them up under him. I thought there was going to be a kill and stopped playing, and said ‘Come here, Billy, I want to talk with you.’” As they stepped out the front door, a frightened sergeant quickly let himself out the back door and vanished.

“I told Kid that they were looking for him,” Frank remembered. “He said he knew it, but he was tired of dodging and had run from them about long enough.”30

In truth, Billy Bonney had scarcely begun his career of dodging. With both federal and territorial murder charges hanging over him, he had no choice but to continue dodging unless Governor Wallace came to his aid. That seemed increasingly unlikely. Wallace had failed to deflect District Attorney Rynerson’s relentless pursuit at the April term of territorial court and apparently had done nothing to interfere with the effort to bring Billy before the federal court in June. Billy could conclude only that the governor had forsaken him.

As Billy later explained his reasoning, “I went up to Lincoln to stand my trial on the warrant that was out for me, but the territory took a change of venue to Doña Ana, and I knew that I had no show, and so I skinned out.”31