Sheriff William Brady wisely stayed on his dear-bought eighty-acre farm four miles east of Lincoln for all of February 18, playing with a few of his eight children when they were freed from the schoolroom run by Susan Gates. In the cold of twilight he wandered through his fruitless orchard and ghostly dry vineyard in his old blue Army officer’s overcoat. Watching the sun flare red as blood against the scraps of cirrus cloud in the west, he wondered if the deed had been done. And then he went inside for dinner.
On Tuesday morning the ex-major rode his Arabian sorrel horse into Lincoln and heard that forty outraged villagers had congregated in Alexander McSween’s house on the yesternight, offering Tunstall’s hired men and the McSweens their sympathy over the loss of their friend and demanding some kind of judicial retribution. Worried about a reprisal, Sheriff Brady used his old connections at Fort Stanton to get a detachment of soldiers to ride into Lincoln with the object of preserving the peace.
John H. Tunstall’s corpse was hauled the ten miles to the village in an oxcart and was examined in a postmortem by the post surgeon, Major Daniel Appel, who was assisted by Dr. Taylor Ealy, a Presbyterian medical missionary who’d just arrived in Lincoln at Alexander McSween’s invitation. They found that one bullet fractured the right clavicle and tore through the victim’s artery, which would have caused him to bleed to death within minutes; but there was another bullet that exploded just above the orbit of the left eye, fracturing the skull at entrance and exit.
In his diary that night, Taylor Ealy noted, “This is truly a frontier town—warlike. Soldiers and citizens armed. Great danger of being shot.”
At a coroner’s inquest into the death of John Henry Tunstall, employees and eyewitnesses Robert Widenmann, Richard Brewer, John Middleton, and William H. Bonney testified to the facts as they knew them with the result of a verdict of homicide against the so-called deputies Jesse Evans, William Morton, Frank Baker, Thomas Hill, George Hindman, and James J. Dolan. Recognizing that the sheriff would do nothing affecting his own posse, on Wednesday Lincoln’s justice of the peace issued warrants that were to be delivered to the indicted by the village constable, Atanacio Martínez, and his newly sworn deputies, Fred Waite and Kid Bonney.
With Winchester rifles crooked in their left arms, the trio took their warrants to the House and found idling with whiskeyed coffee inside the store William Brady, Lawrence G. Murphy, and Jimmy Dolan—Irish who’d gotten out of their country during the Great Potato Famine but still felt the pangs of not-enoughness.
“We don’t serve youse kind,” Dolan warned.
And Waite said, “The fact is we’re not interested in buyin what you’re sellin.”
“Aw, sure look it,” Major Murphy said. It was an Irish expression that could mean anything. Seeing the wrath in the faces of Waite and the Kid, Murphy drunkenly fell his way toward the storeroom door and hurriedly spoke inside, and immediately there was commotion as a lieutenant and six gloomy soldiers with weaponry joined the Irishmen. “Ready” was the lieutenant’s warning command, and the soldiers let their index fingers find the triggers.
Constable Martínez was cowed by the intimation of force, but Waite said, “We have warrants for the arrest of you, Jimmy, and for other members of the posse that the so-called sheriff here sent out to execute John Tunstall.”
Little Jimmy Dolan glowered. “It was self-defense.”
“The inquest said otherwise.”
Sheriff Brady stood up. “Let me look at those warrants.”
Lincoln’s constable handed them over, and Brady scoured them one at a time, his lips moving as he read. And then he smirked and tore the papers in half. “All these names belong to a legally constituted posse of the finest citizens procurable.”
Seeing the Kid inching up his Winchester, the Army lieutenant yelled, “Aim!” and six carbines were suddenly shouldered and leveled on the constable and his two deputies.
Martínez shrank down a little, but Waite just flatly stared at the guns as if indifferent to their shenanigans.
Sheriff Brady asked if the Kid’s was a Winchester ’73, heard nothing, and with a drill sergeant’s experience of handling tyros he loomed over Billy and demanded, “Hand me that rifle, you son of a bitch.” And when the Kid didn’t do that at once, Brady wrenched it away and admired the Winchester’s blued-steel breechblock and oiled walnut stock before socking the Kid’s jaw with its butt plate.
The Kid yelled, “Ow!” and held his jaw. He could taste blood, and his face was blotched red with fury over the injury and with the shame of a helplessness he hadn’t felt since adolescence.
The sheriff confiscated the rifle Harry had given the Kid for his birthday and announced to Waite and Martínez, “It’s you three that are under arrest!”
Jimmy laughed and said, “Oh, ain’t it grand!”
“Tis indeed,” L. G. Murphy said. “Good on ye, Bill. And good riddance, laddies.”
Waite seemed unsurprised, but Martínez protested, “Pero por qué?”
The sheriff answered, “Well, for disturbing the peace. And impersonating an officer of the law. And things I haven’t thought of yet.”
Eventually the lieutenant got the three arrestees in a tight formation with his Fort Stanton detachment around them, humiliatingly marching them to the jail like they were oafish new recruits.
Atanacio Martínez was let out of la cárcel before nightfall, but Waite and the Kid were held in the cold, fetid underground dungeon, and they were still there when the funeral for John Henry “Harry” Tunstall took place on Friday and he was buried in the horse corral behind his looted store.
The Kid said, “You and me, we could take over Harry’s ranch and run his cattle for him.”
Waite said, “You’re no rancher, Kid. Hell, you don’t even garden.”
“So what am I s’posed to do?”
“Well, you’re an able gunman.”
Mrs. Susan McSween’s foot-pumped reed organ had been carried into the corral, and the Kid could faintly hear the village congregation singing the hymns “Jesu, Lover of My Soul” and “My Faith Looks Up to Thee.”
Handsome Fred Waite leaned against an earthen wall with his flat-brimmed hat tilted far back on his head. His black mustache was wide as a comb. Hearing the hymns, he stared across the darkened room to where the Kid was listening, too, as he squatted down, his arms hugging his knees.
Waite asked, “You know about the lawyers Thomas Catron and Stephen Elkins? Of the Santa Fe Ring?”
“A smidge.”
“They were friends and classmates at the University of Missouri. But Smooth Steve served with the Union Army and Tomcat with the Confederacy. Enemies. Yet they’re partners in their Santa Fe law firm now, letting bygones be bygones. Water under the bridge. And that’s how it’s gonna be with us. Civil war, with friends and neighbors against friends and neighbors. Afterwards it may be different, but for now it’s unto death that we’re parted. Lincoln County is a house divided.”
The Kid was rocking back and forth on his boots, saying nothing.
Waite asked, “What’s hamstering in your head, Kid?”
“Working up a good hate.”
Within thirty hours Waite and the Kid were released from jail, in a rage over the injustices of the legal system, the factious stance of the Army, and the refusal of Sheriff Brady to go after murderers still very plainly at large.
Seeing their side of things, Lincoln’s justice of the peace made twenty-eight-year-old Dick Brewer, whose record was clean, an official constable, and all of John H. Tunstall’s former employees joined him as deputies when he formed a vigilante group he called the Regulators. Their stated purpose was to restore law and order in the enormous county, but each Regulator had his own fealty and resentments, his own scheme to make a dollar, his own childhood education in the uses of violence, and a wild craving for vengeance.
The Kid went to the grocery and tavern of Juan Patrón in Lincoln and took pleasure in telling the tequila drinkers there in Spanish that he was Brewer’s deputy now and finally on the right side of the law and he intended to stay there. Could maybe run for sheriff next election.
* * *
The first arrests of the Regulators came on March 6, when Brewer, Middleton, Bowdre, Scurlock, and Kid Bonney found Frank Baker and William “Buck” Morton watering their horses on the far side of the Rio Peñasco. Baker was raised in an educated and cultured family in Syracuse, New York, but took a wrong turning, joined the Boys, and found sick pleasure in several homicides even before he signed on with Sheriff Brady’s posse to hunt down John Tunstall. Twenty-one-year-old Buck Morton grew up on a tobacco plantation in Virginia, clerked in a hotel in Denver, slit the throat of his gold-mining partner in Arizona, and was a sixty-dollar-a-month foreman on Jimmy Dolan’s cattle ranch on Black River when he joined the sheriff’s posse and shot Tunstall in cold blood. They both still rode with the Boys at times and were hightailing it to Texas when their means of locomotion got thirsty.
Wide-eyed at seeing the Regulators, the culprits fired at the five from a crouch, and in a wild panic hopped on their horses and spurred them southward. The Regulators crashed their own horses across a pretty fly-fishing river and gave chase through open but jagged country, the pursued in a hot gallop and twisting in their jolting saddles to shoot backward, hitting nothing but earth and sky, then having to frantically reload on the run. The Regulators sent a fusillade of gunfire at them, too, but the leaps and lunges of their horses also jostled their aims into ever-miss. Yet their five animals were fresher and Morton’s and Baker’s were hard-used and playing out, heaving for air and lathering up and stumbling with weakness until one just halted in a head-shaking statement of I shall go no farther and then the other horse joined him in sharing their exhaustion.
There was nothing for the murderers to do but jump down and hide in some tall, crackling tules in cold marsh water. Reeds nodded whenever they shifted position and guns could find their sloshing noise even when they couldn’t be seen.
“Fish in a farrow,” Bowdre said.
The Kid corrected him: “Barrel.”
Constable Brewer shouted, “We could set fire to these weeds and burn you out! So surrender and we won’t harm you!”
The Regulators could hear the hissing of whispered discussion and then, “Okay, we give up. Don’t shoot.”
One fell in the high reeds, making a commotion, and his partner criticized him, and then both sodden men showed themselves with their hands held high overhead but seeming skeptical about their futures.
Brewer said, “We’d rather have shot you both and had it done with, but as it is I guess you’re under arrest.”
Wet Buck Morton said, “We never did anything wrong. It was all justifiable.”
And the Kid told Brewer, “Let’s kill em now.”
“We can’t. We caught em.”
The Kid protested, “We take them back to Sheriff Brady or Judge Bristol, and they’ll just set them loose.”
Brewer ignored him and got off his horse to take their guns and tie their hands behind their backs. And then the seven of them rode to John Chisum’s fine hacienda on his South Spring River ranch, headquarters of the Jinglebob Land & Livestock Company.
Cottonwood trees shaded a quarter-mile avenue from the main road to the residence. Eight hundred acres of alfalfa provided forage for Chisum’s cattle. Orchards of apple, pear, peach, and plum trees had been imported from Arkansas. The hacienda was hedged with roses he got in Texas, and even the bobwhite quail and scarlet tanagers were foreign birds hauled all the way from Tennessee. In a region of rolling grasslands and a far-off emptiness, the Kid thought of the South Spring River ranch as a gorgeous, watered oasis, and he was so full of need and aspiration that he told Doc Scurlock, “I’ll own this someday.”
Doc flatly said, “Sure you will, Kid.”
Sallie Chisum, the old man’s niece, walked onto the front veranda in a high-collared teal dress to greet them. She said she was alone there with the Mexican cook and a Navajo servant and it was nice to have men around. She was a half year older than Billy and pretty and blond and welcoming enough that she at once made any men she encountered lovesick and overeager. Even the prisoners Baker and Morton, whom she’d note in her diary were “nice looking chaps with unmistakable marks of culture,” forgot the jail they were headed for and gave her a spark, as was said then. Billy Bonney she thought of as an affable, funny, and very occasional friend but nothing more, so he was vying for Sallie while the sole object of her own flirtatious attentions, the strong, august, and dashing Dick Brewer—she alone called him Richard—avoided the contest for Sallie but still seemed to be winning it.
She relished having the crowded surround of seven sentimental, admiring men at the candlelit dinner table, Baker and Morton joining the Regulators for porterhouse steaks and roasted red potatoes but without utensils and with their gun hands tied to the stiles of their chairs so that they were forced to gnash the meat off the bone like dogs.
Still, Buck Morton fought for Sallie’s notice against John Middleton and Billy Bonney. Sweet glances and winking, tee-heeing, and tickling only soured the meal for the married men Scurlock and Bowdre, and Doc chose to darken the mood by reciting to the accused, “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may, old time is still a-flying; and this same flower that smiles today tomorrow will be dying.”
“Heck, that could be a poem,” Middleton said.
And Scurlock said, “Is.”
The Kid sneered at their captives and drew a finger from ear to ear in a cut-throat warning.
Buck Morton could not hide his horror over Scurlock’s threat and the Kid’s gesture, and after hurrying his dinner he requested stationery to write a letter to his cousin, an attorney in Richmond, Virginia, lying about his innocence and noting: “Constable Brewer himself said he was sorry we gave up as he had not wished to take us alive. I presently am not at all afraid of their killing me, but if they should do so I wish that the matter should be investigated and the parties dealt with according to law. If you do not hear from me in four days after receipt of this I would like you to make inquiries about the affair.”
Sallie stamped the envelope, and Brewer promised they’d stop at the post office in Roswell on their way to Lincoln. Then the Kid heard knocking at the front door, opened it, and was grieved to see William McCloskey there. He was a scoundrel when drinking and a wheedler when not, and he’d fashioned a shoddy career of hiring on at Jinglebob roundups and branding times and otherwise handling janitorial work for the likes of Jimmy Dolan. “Saw the lights from the trail,” McCloskey said. “Sallie here?”
“Yes.”
“Wondered if the Chisums would let me stable Old Paint and rest my weary bones.”
With dismay Sallie allowed it, and soon McCloskey was hunkering in the dining room with Brewer and hot coffee, flattering him and trafficking in gossip as he sought to join the Regulators, whom he’d heard were getting handsomely paid.
Sallie allowed the murderers to stay under guard in her frilly pink bedroom that night, chosen by Brewer because it lacked windows. And when she saw the Regulators had laid out their bedrolls on the floor of the dining room and parlor, Sallie said she was too excited by the company to sleep, seeming to hope that Brewer would invite her on a moonlight stroll. Instead it was the Kid who escorted Sallie outside into the darkness, where she said with fresh wonderment, “There are so many thousands and thousands of stars here. Ever so much more than in Texas. They’re like a spill of sugar.”
“Supposed to snow,” Billy said, and then chided himself, Weather, when she was being romantic.
Uncle John Chisum grazed upward of eighty thousand cattle on rangeland that extended north one hundred miles, but only fifty or so were close enough to see beyond the fences, all watching Sallie with their sad and beautiful faces as she showed Billy the starry W of the constellation Cassiopeia.
Words were lost for the Kid. He tried to fetch a joke now and then but was so tardy in doing so that she just looked at him quizzically with no idea of his references. She stood still, hugging her overcoat, and just stared silently into the night, as though waiting for a train. She wants me to kiss her, he thought, but he hesitated and failed to touch her and finally Sallie said, “Brrr. That cold old wind cuts right through you, doesn’t it?”
“The hawk is talking,” he said.
She squinched her face at the boy oddity beside her.
“Old expression,” he said. “Because a hawk’s beak is sharp. Like a cold wind.” Each further explanation made him feel stupider.
She considered him for a while and then she quoted, “ ‘We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.’ ”
“So you’re going to bed now?”
“That’s what I was implying, yes.”
Billy just watched Sallie walk back to the house alone, thinking, Could’ve said you love her, Kid.
* * *
An hour before sunup he tramped through fresh-fallen snow with his tack and petted the left side of a fourteen-hand roan called Tabasco that Alex McSween had loaned to him. He swatted the black saddle pad to free it a little of reddish hair and flew it up over the horse’s withers, then hooked the stirrups over the horn and flipped up the cinch before hefting the saddle onto the horse’s back.
Dick Brewer was drinking coffee from a tin cup as he humped his own tack to his stallion. “Up and at em early, Kid.”
“I figure I’ll sleep when I’m dead.” He inserted and inserted again the leather latigo through the D ring at the end of the cinch and then necktied it.
Brewer put his tin cup on a fence post, and steam twisted from it. Catching up with his saddling, he said, “McCloskey tells me Jimmy Dolan already heard we caught Buck and Frank. Some pards of theirs saw the chase. Jimmy’ll have lookouts posted east of Lincoln, so I figure we’ll go north and around the Capitán Mountains and ride in from the west at night.”
Sallie called from the front porch, “Richard? Shall I refresh your coffee?”
“I’m fine!”
“I’d like some,” the Kid called back, but she was heading inside again. In his frustration he yanked Tabasco’s flank billet too taut, then apologized to the horse as he loosened it.
Brewer stared over his saddle at the Kid. “McCloskey also heard Mr. Chisum is going to pay each Regulator five dollars a day.”
A stolen calf fetched five dollars then. Rooms rented for that by the month. “Seem likely?”
“Well, this isn’t a job, it’s an obligation.”
The Regulators were genial as they ate breakfast in the dining room, but the criminals seemed to be fasting. Frank Baker theatrically presented Sallie with a fine gold Waltham pocket watch, a horsehair bridle he’d plaited himself, and a farewell letter to be mailed to his sweetheart. William Scott Morton spoke only to insist that he wanted a fair trial.
Soon the Regulators and the accused, with their hands tied in front of them, were riding through the main gate. Wondering if Sallie was watching from the front porch, the Kid turned in his creaking saddle, and she was. He waved his sombrero in a haymaker goodbye, and she smiled and waved back.
Some time later William McCloskey asked him, “Why are you grinning?”
The Kid ignored him, jabbed Tabasco with his boot heels, and trotted forward to ride point ahead of his friends.
Roswell was just four miles north of the Chisum ranch. An Omaha gambler had invested in the arid emptiness by constructing a two-story hotel and an identical general store, giving the village the first name of his father. The next-to-nothing population would not increase much until a few years later when a farmer found an underground aquifer and water ceased being scarce.
Ash Upson was the government postmaster inside the general store, and he would have remembered Billy from his rooming with the Antrims in Silver City, so the Kid stayed outside and incognito, but he gazed though the front window glass as his friends happily purchased things with the income they now expected from John Chisum.
At the till, Morton confided to Upson, “I have a bad feeling, Ash. I’m afraid they’re gonna lynch me.”
“Well,” said Upson. “That would be unfortunate.”
McCloskey was a friend of theirs and swore, “Any harm comes to you two, it means they must’ve kilt me first.”
Charlie Bowdre brought outside for himself and Billy dill pickles still dripping from the barrel, and after Buck Morton’s letter to Richmond, Virginia, had been registered and mailed, Dick Brewer pushed him out of the general store.
McCloskey asked their boss, “Is there time for me to visit the hotel whore?”
Brewer looked at him like he was something the cat dragged in, and they all saddled up.
Could be that some skulking Apaches saw them; but otherwise no one spied the party until a Mexican shepherd with a flock of merinos viewed them from a hillside as they turned in to Agua Negra Canyon.
Night began to lower its curtain with the party strung out for two hundred yards fore to aft, the Kid and Brewer riding drag far behind the straggled Bowdre, Middleton, and Scurlock and overlooking the central three of McCloskey, Morton, and Baker. The trio were old gambling buddies yacking about electric dice and marked decks of cards you could buy for two dollars when Morton suddenly jerked McCloskey’s six-shooter from its scabbard with his tied hands. And when McCloskey shied from the outreached barrel, Morton shot him under his jaw and upward. Alive one second, dead the next, McCloskey fell from his horse like furniture off a wagon.
Both the former captives then thundered off, ducking low and heading for a fort of high rocks, with Morton holding the only gun and crazily firing at the men who gave chase. The Kid counted five more shots, so the gun was used up as the still-tired horses of Sheriff Brady’s possemen wore out and the avenging hunters caught up. And then it was nothing more than an execution as the Kid finally got his way and with John Middleton thoroughly killed the fleeing Frank Baker with five shots in the back as the other Regulators finished William S. Morton with nine.
It was a collective thing, but only Kid Bonney got accused of the murders.
* * *
Dick Brewer rode alone into Lincoln that night, slow-walking his exhausted horse toward the House, where the upstairs veranda was filled with loud, jolly suited men in rocking chairs and overcoats, tipping back square glasses of whiskey and smoking green cigars. Sheriff Brady was one, and his deputy George Hindman; Lawrence Gustave Murphy, of course; then a few citified strangers and, lo and behold, Governor Samuel Beach Axtell.
Axtell was an Ohio attorney who’d failed at gold mining on the American River in California but succeeded in being elected a congressman in San Francisco. A Democrat then, he changed his affiliation to curry the favor of the Republican president, Ulysses S. Grant, and was given the post of Governor of the New Mexico Territory in 1875. Axtell was secretly in the thrall of Thomas Catron’s Santa Fe Ring, and a federal agent would later claim he was more inept, corrupt, fraudulent, and scheming than any governor in the history of the United States. In fact, Interior Secretary Carl Schurz would soon investigate his administration and within months would have him dismissed from his office.
Sheriff Brady stood and called out, “Where’s your crew, Dick?”
“Oh, here and there.”
“And how about your prisoners?”
“We lost em.”
The sheriff looked to his deputy, saying, “Go tell Jimmy,” and George Hindman hurried in his halting way toward the east side of town. His left thigh had lost a good deal of muscle to the teeth of the mauling black bear, so he was forced to sling his leg forward like a wooden pedestal.
L. G. Murphy called, “Wait on, Dick!” Smiling hugely and resting a hand on the governor’s shoulder, he yelled, “And who would our guest of honor be? The governor, do ye think?”
Dick Brewer just tipped his hat to Axtell and rode on, and the drunken Murphy yelled again, “He’s intervening in our current situation!”
Axtell asked him, “Who is he?”
Murphy said, “Fella used to tend for me. I hold the mortgage on his ranch.”
Axtell shouted loudly, just as he must have done earlier in a village assembly. “I seek only to assist Lincoln’s finer citizens in upholding our laws and keeping the peace!”
But Brewer’s back was shut to him by then. And by the time the Regulator got to Juan Patrón’s tavern, he could see Jimmy Dolan and a slew of rifled men grumpily slouching down Main Street, having been denied their ambush.
Juan Batista Wilson, the justice of the peace, was just where he frequently was, standing at the east end of an ornate bar freighted in from Albuquerque, a jar of tequila in his hands. Seeing Brewer, he filled a shot glass for him from the jar and tilted and weaved in his drunkenness as Brewer reported on the capture of Morton and Baker. At the end of the recital of the events, Wilson told him the governor had just issued a proclamation that booted the justice from his office, voided all the legal writs and processes issued by him, and specified that District Attorney Rynerson and Sheriff Brady and his deputies were the only officers empowered to enforce civil law.
“Meaning what?”
Ex-Justice Wilson offered him an ironic smile. “Means you ain’t a constable now and never wast. Had you self no deputies never. Warrants? They’s worthless. Axtell even called em ‘disreputable.’ And how I figure it is you and your Regulators are outlaws. Oh, and also, guilty of murder.”
* * *
With their freedom in jeopardy, Alexander McSween and Dick Brewer fled Lincoln that night to hide out at Chisum’s ranch, where Susan McSween was to rejoin her husband after a few weeks shopping in St. Louis. At the South Springs ranch, Alex and Dick would hear that another two of Tunstall’s assailants were done for, Tom Hill having shot and failed to kill a Cherokee sheep drover who fired back with an old Henry rifle that finished him. Jesse Evans was Hill’s accomplice and was shot as he took flight, the Henry’s bullet shattering his left elbow and yanking him in a fall off his horse. Evans was soon arrested and taken to the post hospital at Fort Stanton for surgery, and then was locked in the post stockade to await his trial.
Of the Regulators, Doc Scurlock and Charlie Bowdre went to their women and scratch-ankle ranch on the Ruidoso while John Middleton and Billy Bonney sequestered in San Patricio, a village a few miles south of Lincoln on the Rio Hondo. The Kid was a first-rate card counter, so he made a nifty income by placing bets at faro only when the dealer got toward the end of the deck, when predicting the fall of cards got easier. Seeing the Kid was winning far too often, but not intuiting why, the saloonkeeper finally denied Billy access to the games, and he and Middleton just loitered on the sidewalks, target-practiced in the hills, and used up the nights of March courting pretty novias at the Mexican dances that were called bailes.
The Kid was particularly fond of a girl of fifteen named Carlota, and she seemed shyly responsive, flickering a smile at his jokes and courtesies. His gallantry was overseen by a judicious aunt who was the dueña, which can mean overseer, and Tía Hortensia seemed to hope for the match, praising Billito in Spanish for his fluency in their language, his Old World manners, and his gentlemanly respect for the old, the viejos, while Carlota talked of his flashing blue eyes, his sweetness, his smartness, his frequent smile.
On the night of March 31, Hortensia stood far behind her niece under the awning of a mercantile store, looking away when the Kid kissed Carlota. A hard rain was falling and the streets were flooding and the cool, clean air smelled like Armour’s laundry soap. Carlota held the Kid’s kiss for as long as he wanted, wrapping her shawled arms around his neck as his chest crushed against the cushion of her still-small breasts. She let her mouth be insistent, nibbling, and smearing, a vagabond in its wandering over his face with lips softer than the petal of a rose.
The Kid withdrew a little and asked Carlota, “Qué estás haciendo?” What are you doing?
She smiled. “Te estoy enseñando a besar.” Teaching you to kiss.
“Oh. Muchas gracias.” They resumed, and the Kid’s hands were traveling toward Carlota’s sweet rump when he felt a soft tap on his shoulder and fearfully turned to find not the dueña but San Patricio’s constable José Chávez y Chávez and John Middleton with a giggling Mexican girl playfully twisting his black handlebar mustache.
José had lost his grandfather’s farm to the Santa Fe Ring and sought to join the Regulators to extract some justice. So he told the Kid in Spanish that he’d heard Judge Warren Bristol and the semiannual meeting of the district court were due in Lincoln on April 1, and Sheriff Brady intended to arrest Alexander McSween yet again on his announced return to Lincoln from the Chisum hacienda, urge the grand jury’s prosecution of the Regulators for the homicides of Baker and Morton, and convince Judge Bristol and the jury that the sheriff’s posse was legally constituted and acted in self-defense in the February killing of John Henry Tunstall.
Middleton waited for the rattle of Spanish to end in order to make his own contribution. “And then I’ll wager he’s gonna hunt us each down and kill us dead, just to get rid of the contrary evidence.”
The Kid was fuming as he added to the list of outrages, “The sheriff stole my Winchester rifle.”
* * *
Sheriff Brady took his breakfast of steak and eggs at the Wortley Hotel on April 1 and slogged across a sloppy street to the House, the Kid’s Winchester slung over his forearm. Rain had turned to sleet in the cold of morning, but with the sun it would just be more of the wet.
The frail and ailing old lion Lawrence G. Murphy was alone and leaning over his elbows behind the bar, his thoughts flying and his first quart of Double Anchor rye whiskey being caressed by his hands. The sheriff barging in made him bolt upright in surprise. “Jaysis, ye put the heart crossway in me, Bill!”
“Sorry. Was there mail?” The House was also the post office.
“Oy, yes! And from hisself, Judge Bristol.” L.G. staggered a little as he got an official letter from a warren of mail slots and handed it to the sheriff.
Brady slit it open just to see that it was the signed warrant for Alexander McSween, then shoved it in his overcoat pocket.
“You’ll have a dram with me, Major Brady?”
“Oh, don’t be troubling yourself.”
“Ah, go way outta that, of course ye will.” L.G. poured an inch of the rye into a square tumbler and slid it to him. “Cheers,” he said as he lifted and finished his own glass, adding, “I always drink with my gun hand, to show my friendly intentions.”
The sheriff’s deputy George Hindman limped in with another mustached deputy, Jacob B. Mathews, who was also the House’s bartender, the clerk at semiannual meetings of the circuit court, and a participant in the thirty-man posse that had hunted down John Henry Tunstall.
“Where’s Jimmy?” Hindman asked.
“Out in the beyont,” Murphy said. “Havin a whale of a time.”
The sheriff swallowed what was left of his whiskey and carefully set the tumbler down. He asked his deputies, “Are we ready for the routine?”
They seemed to be.
He told Murphy, “We have a prisoner to release from jail, and then we’ll camp out on McSween’s porch. We’re told he’s heading in from Roswell.”
“Hope it’s any use,” L.G. said and refilled his tumbler with whiskey.
J. B. Mathews later remembered that it was about half nine of the morning.
Sheriff Brady’s men went ahead of him, for he was slow and overweight and far older than his forty-eight years because of the too-muchness of drink.
Ike Stockton’s wife, Ellen, was stamping mud from her shoes in front of the McSween house, and the sheriff chatted with her as he caught his breath. “It’s a quare cold morning, isn’t it?”
“Tis. But will you still be planting on your farm yet?” she asked. “Ike is.”
“Would otherwise with the earth so loose, but my walking plow got banjaxed.”
“Ike might could fix it for ya,” she said.
“I have tools meself,” he said and tipped his hat before heading onto the wooden porch of the Tunstall store, stooping and peering through its windows to see the pretty schoolteacher reading to children from a book.
Hindman called back, “Shall we wait for you, Bill?”
Sheriff Brady stepped off the porch, yelling, “I’ll be right there!” Then for some reason he glanced down the alley beside the store to a high gate of upright planks hiding a view into Tunstall’s corral. And suddenly the gate swung open and a gang of men stood up and raised their rifles or pistols and fired. Shots hit his gut and wrist and spun him into a fall on the street. Sitting there in a daze, he said, “Oh Lord,” and as if recognizing he was late for the train, he struggled to get up, only to be hit with another volley of gunfire, which hammered his left side and back and tore off a chunk of his skull.
Deputy Jacob Mathews ran into Lola Sisneros’s house, and Deputy George Hindman was floundering for the Torreón when he was shot in the back just below his gun belt and fell face forward into the puddled street. Rolling over, he held his innards inside the exit wound and gasped with pain. Soon he was calling for water.
Dick Brewer wasn’t among them, but William H. Bonney, John Middleton, Fred Waite, Rob Widenmann, and José Chávez y Chávez were seen walking to the street and standing over the very dead sheriff.
The Kid resisted kicking him but said, “Ooh, that feels good!”
“Don’t it?” said Middleton.
Billy hid the jitter of excitement in his hands and grinned with achievement. “We got even!” José took the credit for killing the Irishman, and the Kid said, “We all did,” as he retrieved his confiscated Winchester.
Seeing their slackened wariness, Deputy Mathews fired on them from the Sisneros house, his bullet whapping through Rob Widenmann’s trouser leg and scorching his skin before squarely ripping into the Kid’s left thigh. Even as he fell, the Kid fired back at Mathews, splintering a doorjamb and sending him into hiding. Then Fred Waite helped Billy up, and he hobbled back to their horses in the corral as the others retreated with them, their guns blazing at nothing much, a stray bullet skewering Juan Batista Wilson’s buttocks as he hoed his onion patch on a hillside.
John Middleton frowned at the Kid’s leg and said, “You’re bleedin.”
The Kid gave him a no-kidding look.
The lull was a minute old. Soon other guns would be gotten and there would be a fray in which they were outnumbered. Some Regulators got on their horses as Fred Waite deliberated. “You can’t ride like that,” he finally told the Kid.
And so Waite and Middleton carried the Kid into the eastern backroom of the Tunstall store, where Harry’s bachelor quarters had been. Taylor Ealy, the doctor of medicine whom Alex McSween had hired as a pastor of a still-unbuilt church, was now housed there with his wife, two small children, and Susan Gates, the teenage schoolteacher Dr. Ealy had recruited from Pennsylvania. The Ealy parents were elsewhere, and Susan Gates had been reading aloud Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland to the children until she heard the guns. Now she rushed to the Kid, for she’d developed a crush on the good-looking, good-natured rogue.
Waite got a hammer, said, “They’ll be scouring for him,” and efficiently clawed up two wide floorboards.
Hugging his Winchester, the Kid groaned with hurt as he squeezed between the floor joists but offered a false and uneasy smile of goodbye to the schoolteacher, whose hands went to her cheeks in horror as Waite hammered the floorboards over him like the lid of a coffin.
And then Waite and the three other Regulators were galloping out to the east and toward San Patricio, John Middleton halting near the eastern courthouse, the Convento, to fire back at the crowds running to rescue Sheriff Brady and the dying deputy. They scattered.
Deputy Mathews watched the four exit the town and noticed Kid Bonney wasn’t with them. Rushing to the Tunstall corral with a few men, he confirmed that the Kid’s horse was still hitched there.
In the tight, stifling darkness, the Kid heard the back door crash open as J. B. Mathews shouted, “Where is he?”
“Where’s who?” Susan Gates said. The quiet children must have been scared and clinging to her skirt.
Deputy Mathews ignored the schoolmarm, and the Kid heard a lot of boots overhead as the searchers undertook conjectures and interrogatories. He held his breath until in frustration and bewilderment they finally exited and there was silence. Then he heard the children being hustled to the front of the store to join their mother. Susan Gates seemed to be crouching close to him as she said, “Dr. Ealy is here now. He’ll get you out.”
The floorboards were lifted up again, and the Kid inhaled like he’d been underwater that whole time.
“Let me look at that leg,” Ealy said, and the Kid sat on a yellow Empire couch to have his trousers unbuttoned and yanked down to his knees. Susan Gates shyly looked away. “Kerosene,” the doctor said, and the schoolteacher carried over a crockery jug of it. The doctor dunked his handkerchief into the coal oil and told the Kid, “I have to hurt you.”
Billy nodded.
Dr. Ealy used a pencil to poke the wet handkerchief into the wound of the quadriceps muscle until a quarter inch of the blood-soaked cloth exited the other side. The Kid seized the couch cushions with the agony of it, which only increased when the doctor tugged the handkerchief completely through the injury.
The Kid sighed in the aftermath and said to the ashen Susan Gates, “That was excruciating. I don’t recommend it.”
“We have to worry about infection,” Ealy told him. “The hole won’t kill you, but sepsis will.” With a sewing needle and thread, he stitched the wound shut at entrance and exit, and the bleeding was stanched.
The Kid asked Susan Gates, “Was I wincing?” and she nodded. His left leg wrapped in a yard of gauze bandage, the Kid hoisted up his trousers and stood. “I have to go,” he said and limped outside.
He took a moment to stand over John H. Tunstall’s grave near the granary and pray a rest-in-peace and say aloud like an oath, “We’re gonna get the rest of em, too.” He managed to get onto his horse by boarding it on the right side, and he was the final Regulator to get away. He thought this would be his last visit to Lincoln, and so at the eastern extreme of town he forced himself to painfully stand on his saddle like this was a Wild West show, and he offered those lingerers who knew him a theatrical bow and a roundhouse wave of his sombrero to say goodbye forever.
But Lincoln would see him again.