That summer a smart-aleck journalist asserted that hundreds were in pursuit of the Kid and dearly hoping not to find him. But word got to Sheriff George Kimbrell that Billy was hiding out in a shack alongside the Rio Bonito just six miles from Lincoln, and because his deputies were in his office and heard the rumor as well, the sheriff felt obliged to go after the Kid.
There was some dillydallying and a host of invented tasks that he said first needed tending to, so the sheriff and his posse didn’t get to the pinewood shack until sundown. They saw no sign of movement from afar, just a wisp of smoke from the chimney. But a forward scout did find a fettered horse near the river. Looked like a hard keeper of an animal indulging in green foliage and watching the timid scout with unblinking disrespect.
Sheriff Kimbrell thought someone ought to crawl up to the only window and have a look-see, but he got no volunteers.
“You could do it,” a deputy told him.
But a fluttery reluctance befell the sheriff and he confessed, “Nah, it’s not just that I like the Kid, it’s that I also like living.”
Kimbrell changed his strategy to cautious waiting throughout the night in a semicircle sixty yards distant. Soon enough the Kid would open the door and their guns would catch him in a crossfire.
Hunger was overtaking them and skeeters whined at the ears of the posse. They kept slapping themselves in the head and grousing.
Inside the shack, the Kid cooked frijoles in a saucepan, then roasted green coffee beans in the same pan and stirred in water with a fork until he got the coffee to a boil. He let the grounds settle, then filled his tin cup. Hearing an unfamiliar sound, he sidled to a knothole in a plank and peered out into the pitch-black. Humps of infrequent motion lay on the earth and whispering heaps leaned against fir trees.
Wasn’t but one way out for a normal person, but the Kid crouched under the window to get to the fireplace, where he doused the wood embers with his coffee and quietly shoveled them, still hissing, into a bucket. Wrapping his firearms, hat, and necessaries into a woolen poncho and tying it to his left ankle with twine, he stooped inside the fireplace and squeezed up inside the hot chimney just as he’d done at age fourteen in the Silver City jail. Alternately reaching up his arms and kicking his feet as in an Australian crawl, the hot bricks scalding and soot-blackening him, he did manage to get out and onto the shingled roof, squatting to haul up the jutting burdens in the poncho and assemble himself in full armory as he looked down at a semicircle of men in front who were either sleeping or swatting at insects. And then there was nothing left to do but jump and jar his legs with the hard hit to the ground and to roll in loam, where he halted on all fours, his finely tuned ears seeking the sounds of notice or stirring. But he heard nothing but an older man mumbling in dream, “Oh dear, oh dear.” The Kid stood up and walked toward his horse like just another deputy selecting a night pee in the river, and he left in an easterly direction.
Sheriff Kimbrell and his posse plodded into Lincoln the next morning, slumping with hangdog looks and scratching their itches. Inquiries were made about what had happened, but the sheriff only stated, “I don’t want to talk about it.”
Confidence in him was forever lost, and some of the wealthier cattlemen in Lincoln County began seeking a finer and more stalwart candidate for the sheriff’s office when next election time came.
* * *
Early in July 1879, James Joseph Dolan was examined in a habeas corpus hearing concerning the homicide in the first degree of Huston Ingraham Chapman. Although he’d initially testified that he wasn’t there when the murder occurred, then that he was there but without a gun, he now claimed in his own defense that he’d seen nothing because he was so drunk and he did fire a shot but at the ground to call off his friends from their hazing of the lawyer. The contradictions and inconsistencies in Jimmy’s sworn testimony would have gotten him locked up for perjury anywhere else, but Judge Warren Bristol’s affection for him was such that he decided to release Jimmy on $3,000 bail until the next term of court in Socorro.
Upon his leaving the courtroom, a journalist asked him, “Will you be found guilty in Socorro, do you think?”
“Hardly dat.”
“So you’ll be getting off scot-free?”
Jimmy smirked. “Luck o’ the Irish, boyo.”
On Sunday, July 13, in a Roman Catholic ceremony held in a friend’s parlor, Jimmy married Caroline Franzis “Lina” Fritz, the German-American niece of Jimmy’s former business partner and commanding officer at Fort Stanton, the late Emil Fritz. Lina was eighteen and exceptionally pretty, so Jimmy, who was twelve years older, had been forced to overcome many other paramours in his wooing, and he never did earn the approval of Lina’s father, who failed to attend the wedding. There was a formal reception afterward, at which Jimmy was reminded that the civil insurrection in Lincoln had commenced exactly one year earlier. “Water under the bridge,” Jimmy said. And then the small group waved goodbye as the newlyweds left for a luxurious two-month honeymoon in Texas.
Jimmy could afford it, for he had invested in gold and silver mines in the Jicarilla Mountains northeast of White Oaks and culled enough of a fortune to get into the mercantile business again, the Jas. J. Dolan General Store finding location in John H. Tunstall’s building in Lincoln because Thomas Catron held the mortgage on the House. Jimmy even acquired the Englishman’s choza and ranch on the Rio Feliz, later constructing a solid, handsome home there and joining District Attorney William Rynerson in establishing the Feliz Land & Cattle Company on Harry’s former rangeland. Jimmy would be elected Lincoln county treasurer twice, and then, despite his arrogance and contentiousness, he would become a New Mexico state senator.
But Jimmy’s family life was filled with tragedy. His first child, a son, was two years old when he died; a daughter died at age five; and his wife, Lina, was just twenty-five when she died after giving birth to another girl. Jimmy soon married his children’s nanny, a fretful, unsmiling woman who screamed back at his screaming until she cowered beneath his slaps and Wellington boots. His drunkenness became as regular, reeling, and demented as that of his idol L. G. Murphy, and James Dolan finally died of delirium tremens in 1898, aged fifty. Which was just as well, since he didn’t have to deal with the indignity of realizing that his name would have been lost to history were it not for his association with that scoundrel Billy the Kid.
* * *
To keep lawmen and cavalry patrols akilter, the indicted Kid rotated among the gambling haunts of Las Vegas, Anton Chico, Puerto de Luna, and Fort Sumner, staying just a few days at each before skedaddling off, and since Manuela Herrera was now residing with Charlie Bowdre on Thomas J. Yerby’s ranch twenty miles north of the old fort, the Kid’s trunk of finer clothes was stored in the old adobe quartermaster’s store with Celsa Gutiérrez.
She’d become the Kid’s querida, his mistress, and her generally intoxicated husband, Saval, vaguely acknowledged the arrangement before riding to White Oaks to prospect for currency metals, telling the Kid in a glum so-long, “Billito. Cuida bien de ella.” Billy. Take good care of her.
But Billito lost too much at cards and he was running out of cash, so in October of 1879, the Kid, Folliard, Bowdre, and Scurlock sought to fortify their scant wages by heading to Uncle John Chisum’s rangeland some fifty miles south of Fort Sumner. The cattle there were now officially owned by the St. Louis firm of Hunter, Evans & Company, and the executives had given up the Jinglebob way of branding, in which a hot iron burned a long rail along the cow’s flank and an ear was notched so that a large lobe of it dangled like jewelry. The Hunter, Evans brand was far easier to change, enticing the former Regulators led by the Kid to steal a herd of 118 cattle and drive them north to Yerby’s ranch, rebrand them, and sell the lot to Colorado beef buyers for about $800.
The Kid divvied up the loot four ways, and then thirty-year-old Josiah Gordon Scurlock stunned the gang by saying his nineteen-year-old wife, Antonia, was pregnant with their first child and he was collecting these earnings, quitting outlawry altogether, and heading off to Texas. His missing front teeth put a whistle in the statement.
“We sure are dwindling,” Charlie said. “Won’t be but three of us Ironclads left.”
Tom said in frustration, “Doc, I’m so mad at ya I’m gonna find an insane asylum and have ya committed.”
But the Kid said, “Okay with me if you go, Doc. Could be wisdom is prevailing.”
“Well, I just reckon the noose is tightening for us all,” Doc said. “We retire now or be retired later.”
Doc took his past-due wages from Pete Maxwell in the form of fifty pounds of flour, and then he indeed took Antonia Herrera Scurlock in a buckboard to Potter County, Texas, where he first hired on as a mailman, then shifted to other towns where he became a much-loved schoolteacher, a histrionic reciter of poetry, and a doctor of last resort. Doc and Antonia eventually had ten children, and he died in Eastland, halfway between Abilene and Dallas, in 1929, three years after The Saga of Billy the Kid became a bestseller and made his former gang internationally famous. But Doc remained so penitently silent on the topic of his history that only an innuendo about it in one obituary alerted his neighbors to his gaudy and reckless past.
* * *
Whenever in Fort Sumner, the Kid earned his income with card dealing, favoring Beaver Smith’s saloon for the intimacy of the room and the heat of the coal-burning World & Sterling stove. The floor was tiled, there was a chandelier over the gaming table, and the ornate mahogany bar was hung with four white towels for the wet its customers carried in or slopped in their sottishness. Because of its whores, Bob Hargrove’s much larger saloon on the north side of the fort seemed to collect a gunslinger crowd.
With no takers for monte one fall afternoon, the Kid ordered a pint of sarsaparilla at the bar and then recognized the skinny and stoic bartender as the man a near-foot taller than Billy who’d been in livery at Pete Maxwell’s Christmas dinner. “You’re the one Los Hispanos nicknamed Juan Largo!” the Kid said.
“Well, yes. I’ll concede that I’m tall.” His speech had the slow cadence and syrupy accent of the Deep South.
“We met at the Maxwell house.”
The bartender seemed embarrassed—probably because of his butlering getup then. “That was just for the extra money,” he said.
The Kid offered his hand, and the bartender stopped drying a shot glass to shake it.
“William H. Bonney. Kid, my pals call me.”
Even in later photographs the future sheriff seemed to have an alien and unsettling habit of widening his eyes as if in shock or as if he were dredging his faulty memory for further information. Whenever captured in a group portrait, he was the lone man who did not fit in. And now his stare seemed to loiter over the Kid’s face until his dark thoughts finally became “I heard stories about you, Mr. Bonney. Some of them true most likely.”
“Hardly any. And your name?”
“Pat Garrett.”
* * *
Patrick Floyd Jarvis Garrett was born on June 5, 1850, in Chambers County, Alabama, and grew up on an eighteen-hundred-acre Louisiana plantation in Claiborne Parish. Even as a high-strung little boy he imitated the foreman by dragging a bullwhip through the cotton fields while yelling and glaring at the slaves. Although he became expert at hunting, fishing, and horseback riding—really, anything done outdoors—Garrett received little formal schooling, and he followed his father in having no truck with organized religion.
He was fifteen when the Confederacy lost the War of Rebellion and Yankees seized much of the estate. His father drank himself to death within three years, and financial hardship so poisoned family life that at nineteen Garrett left home, condemning his sisters to sudden marriages and his brothers Alfred and Hillary to hardscrabble farming. Garrett was hired as a cattle gunman to fend off rustlers from the huge LS Ranch in West Texas and, after a squabble over a card game, was indicted for “intent to murder” a freed slave in Bowie County. But he managed to shake the sheriff’s deputies who were tailing him and they lost interest in the chase.
Rumor later had it that Garrett had married in Sweetwater, Texas, and fathered a child, forsaking both the mother and the baby girl when he walked outside, as he’d told his wife, to smoke his pipe. And then with some partners he became a buffalo hunter in the flat grasslands of northwest Texas on what was called the Staked Plains, slaughtering from fifty to one hundred placid animals per day and collecting twenty-five cents for each three-dollar hide.
Essentially he and a hundred others like him were shooting themselves out of their livelihoods, and soon, with scarce animals to skin, the hunters went sullen and pouty. An Irish kid named Joe Briscoe was one of the skinners and was vexed that he couldn’t get the stink of blood and intestines out of his clothes. Watching Briscoe squat by a brook and dunk his shirts in its ice water, Garrett said, “I reckon you have to be as ignorant as an Irishman to think you can wash your camisoles in that mud.” The Briscoe kid took it hurtfully and there were oaths and haranguing until he peevishly swung at Garrett with an ax. Without anticipating the certain outcome, Garrett fired his Winchester and killed the kid, watching him topple into the campfire and just lie there feeding the flames until Garrett yanked the body out. After a full day of repentance and self-loathing, Garrett finally turned himself in to officials at Fort Griffin, suicidally wishing to be hanged. But without even an investigation, the officials decided his sounded like an act of self-defense, and so he was off the hook.
Soon he quit his unprofitable hunting job, and, fed up with the emptiness of the Panhandle, he wandered west, drunkenly frittering away his savings with gambling and whoring until he finally found himself, penniless, outside Fort Sumner. Seeing cattle being moved upstream alongside the salty Rio Pecos, he rode his horse up to an overseer in a buckboard and told him he dearly needed work.
Pete Maxwell looked over a dour, wide-mustached, rail-thin man in his late twenties, six and a half feet tall and half of that seeming to be his stovepipe legs. He later recalled that Garrett’s nag was so swaybacked his boots nearly dragged on the ground. Maxwell asked, “What can you do for me, Lengthy?”
“Ride anything with a hide and rope better than any cowpoke you got.”
Maxwell had faith in the solemn man’s integrity and told him to hop aboard.
Garrett’s extreme height and Southern formality were fascinating to the far shorter Mexican folks at Fort Sumner, and though he failed in his miserable tries at Spanish, there was a good deal of envy among the señoritas when it was Juanita Gutiérrez who became his wife in 1877. She was pregnant at the time and just a few weeks later died of a miscarriage.
His grief became rage, and when he heard that Comanches had stolen a herd of twenty-seven horses from a Roswell ranch, Garrett crazily took it personally and organized a vigilante group to go after the horse thieves. Relentless in his pursuit and not seeming to need food, water, or rest, he outstripped his pluckless companions, who one by one peeled off for home until it was just Garrett alone heading over a hill at sundown. Six days passed with no word of him, and then he achingly rode into Roswell with half the stolen horses and hefting a gunnysack that he finally spilled out onto the wooden porch of the general store. Ash Upson, who would become his closest friend and ghostwriter, collected the murderous proof that was six pairs of worn moccasins, a few of them still spotted with blood.
Hearing the tale from Upson, John Chisum went up to Fort Sumner to interview Garrett about running for sheriff when George Kimbrell’s term was up, and then he sent a letter rife with misspellings “To his Exelency Gov Lue Wallis.” Uncle John advised the governor on where to station men to “prevent Robers from coming in off the plains on to the Pecos and give protection to this place and the Citizens below.” And he noted that “Pat Garrett who resides hear would be a very suitable man to take charge of the squad East of this place if authorized to do so.”
Although he stayed on even terms with Pete Maxwell, Garrett sought indoor work with the hard winter coming on, and he found a job in Beaver Smith’s saloon. When off his saloonkeeper duties, Garrett persistently lost at five-card draw with the Kid, who generally only played hands that seemed likely to win while Garrett would play even a deuce-seven off-suit, hopefulness his reigning emotion.
Elderly Beaver Smith called them Big Casino and Little Casino. They weren’t close friends, they just knew each other, and that was enough for Pat Garrett to fill the silence one rainy afternoon in November by confessing that he intended to marry Apolonaria in January.
“Apolonaria Gutiérrez? Your wife’s sister? Celsa’s sister-in-law?”
“You drafting a family tree?”
“I’m just happy for you and hope I’ll be invited to the wedding.”
Garrett tilted forward with a hollowed, nothing-thereness in his eyes, eyes as dead as the buttons on a doll. “I heard all about you and Celsa,” he said. “Don’t make you a relative.”
* * *
On November 23, 1879, the Kid celebrated his twentieth birthday by doing the idle things he generally did, but a sidewalk photographer showed up in front of Beaver Smith’s saloon with his camera, props, tented booth, and boy assistant, and the Kid decided to indulge himself with a ferrotype portrait that was then called a carte de visite. The cost was twenty-five cents.
With a full measure of snootiness, the photographer considered Billy’s rather slovenly, not-put-together look and asked, “Are you wearing that?”
“You have nothing more formal?”
“All the ordinaries dress up for picture making. I want to be different.”
The Kid’s hat that Sunday was a dark fedora, cocked to the right, with a crown that seemed crushed by a whack. A yellow bandanna was loosely knotted at his neck, and under that was a childish blue sailor shirt with an anchor design and a tan unbuttoned vest with lapels overlaid by an overlarge, acorn brown cardigan with a hem that hung as low as his thighs. His trousers were navy blue and tucked inside dirty midcalf cavalry boots constructed with leather so thin the boots rumpled at the ankles. In accordance with the manly style then, Billy posed with his Winchester rifle in his pale left hand, his bulky cartridge belt and Colt revolver slung to the right. His gambler’s ring on his left little finger sparked in the sunlight.
Billy said with nervousness, “Some Indians think getting captured by a camera steals your soul.”
The photographer was mixing chemicals. “Well, there might be something to that. Look at celebrated, much-pictured people. Such odd behaviors!”
The Anthony four-tube camera was already positioned, so as the photographer painted a collodion emulsion on a lacquered rectangle of thin iron, his assistant guided Billy to his mark, adjusting the U of a vertical brace behind his neck to hold his head stable for the six-second exposure. And then it was done. The wet plate ended up with four fractionally different halftone images, each flipped so that Billy’s right hand seemed his left.
The practiced assistant used tin snips to perfectly divide the plate into four separate picture cards, and the Kid carried one to fifteen-year-old Paulita as a gift.
She sank onto her plush white bed to examine his portrait, and she seemed at a loss for words.
“You don’t like it.”
“I’m just disappointed that you can’t tell the color of your eyes. They’re such a lovely powder blue. And your hair needs cutting, and it looks dark, not your honey blond. Plus your ears stick out like bat wings.”
She kindly did not note what he could see now, that he seemed girlish, with wide hips and narrow shoulders and those ever-unmanly hands. And his squirrely front teeth looked even bigger, like he could eat fruit through a picket fence.
“Oh, please don’t misunderstand, Billy. I’m really grateful for this and I’ll cherish it forever, but it doesn’t do you justice.”
“You’re saying I look like a slack-jawed oaf.”
“So you see it, too? You’re a handsome man! You’re the kind of cavalier who makes wives fall out of love with their husbands.”
The Kid wondered if she knew about Celsa.
“So this is your birthday?” she asked.
“Yep.”
“How old?”
“Twenty.”
She was chagrined. She scanned her very feminine bedroom and concluded, “But I have nothing to give you.”
“A kiss?”
She smiled and softly complied.
“Don’t quit,” the Kid said. “Kiss me till I’m drunk with you.”
She did.
* * *
On January 10, 1880, faithful Tom Folliard visited from wherever, and since he’d been alone for weeks he was in the mood for a rollick and soon grew tired of the smallness and innkeeper calm at Beaver Smith’s, harassing the Kid to find him some action and sporting ladies in Bob Hargrove’s saloon.
Walking across the parade grounds in front of the Maxwell house and in a hunker from the sleeting cold, the Kid was called to by Jim Chisum, Uncle John’s younger brother, who’d been in conversation with Pete Maxwell on the front porch. Pete offered a friendly wave and went back inside the former officers’ quarters as Jim and one of his hands, a Jack Finan, hurried through the gate of the picket fence to interrogate them.
Jim told the Kid and Tom that he’d been retrieving stolen cattle in Canyon Cueva near the village of Juan de Dios. Would the Kid know anything about that? The Kid said he didn’t. Jim and Jack squinnied their eyes at him.
“I’ll grant you I have rustled from time to time, but not in this particular instance.”
Jack Finan said, “Pete says you prolly did.”
“Pete says a lot of things, and he lies like a no-legged dog.”
Tom was hugging himself as he asked, “How long we gonna stand out here? I’m frozen!”
The Kid asked, “Would you galoots like to join us in Hargrove’s? Just to let bygones be bygones? I’m buying.”
Jim Chisum dithered a little, but Jack Finan scoured the Kid with his glower. The Kid chose to take note of Jack’s gun, an ivory-handled Colt single-action Army revolver that shone like new chrome. “You got a handsome hog leg in that scabbard.”
“Cost me plenty,” Jack said, his face hinting at a readiness to smile.
“Could I heft it?”
Jack was tentative as he handed it to him. The Kid felt its weight, tested its balance, spun it on his trigger finger, and looked down the barrel at the front sight as he aimed at a sheet of newspaper flying on the wind.
“Go ahead and try it,” Jack said.
The Kid shot, and the sheet of newspaper swatted. “Wow!” he said, just to be charming. He fired again with his left hand, and the first bullet hole got larger. His third shot from hip-high was elsewhere on the page. “Enviable piece,” the Kid said. And because they were heading into a public place, he half-turned the cylinder so that the hammer was on the first spent shell and couldn’t misfire. Jack took the pistol back with satisfied pride.
Even in midafternoon, there was the noise of someone cranking organ music from a hurdy-gurdy, the hee-haws of drunken laughter at the long bar, and four flirting daughters of joy in frilly, full-length white dresses inveigling fallen men. Red-haired Tom went to one who was no prettier than the others and confided a few sentences. She tugged him by the hand into the stalls in back.
The Kid bought pints of Anheuser-Busch for Chisum and Finan and got a porcelain cup of coffee for himself. And then he heard a drunk yell, “Are you Bunny? I’s here alookin for Kid Bunny!”
The Kid leaned toward the mixologist. “You know who that is?”
“Says he’s Joe Grant. Says they call him Texas Red.”
“Stewed?”
“Half a quart of our rotgut so far.”
The Kid waved his hand and called, “Kid Bonney, over here!”
Jim Chisum whispered, “You need help, just say so.”
Widening his winter coat to give freedom to his six-shooter, the Kid said, “I’ll deal with it.”
Joe Grant was zigzagging over to him, skidding off the backs of drinkers and swinging his forearm at the vexation or bumping chairs into screeching changes of position. His hand gripped the bar to hold himself upright. He was fat and hatless, and the fringe of auburn beard at his jaw so matched the fringe on his skull that the Kid thought his chapped, round face would look pretty much the same upside-down.
“So, you Bunny?”
“William H. Bonney.”
“We gots a score to shettle.”
“Why don’t I buy you a shot or two of fire starter and you can tell me all about it?”
“Had enough for now.” Weaving and seeming about to fall, Joe Grant’s unfocused glances around himself fell on Jack Finan’s fancy .45. “Lemme see that gun.”
The Kid nodded permission, and Jack handed it over.
Grant admired it for a second, then asked, “Wa was I sayin?”
“Shettling something,” the Kid said.
“Here. Here,” Grant said to Finan. “My gun while I’m lookin.” Exchanging weapons, he shoved his own pistol into Jack’s holster, then he lewdly licked the shining barrel and ivory handle of the Colt with his own pitiful impression of rapier wit. “She so perty!”
“So,” the Kid patiently said. “What’s your plan?”
His face hardened. “Ah’m gonna kill you afore you do.”
A reverent, churchlike silence took over as hard-bitten cowhands and gunmen in the saloon edged away from the forecast confrontation, not wanting to get anything on them.
The Kid chose to be pacifying. “Oh, wha’d’ya want to kill anybody for, Joe? Give Jack his pistol and let’s solve the world’s problems with whiskey.”
Joe Grant was shaking his head from side to side. “Nope, mind’s made up.” But then he tilted a little as he uncertainly focused on Jim Chisum. “You Uncle John? Hafta kill Chisum firs.”
His halitosis could frazzle houseplants.
Jim’s and Jack’s hands were easing down to their holsters as the Kid lifted his hand in the halt sign. “Hold on, Joe. You got the wrong sow by the ear. This is Jim Chisum, Uncle John’s brother. And he done nothing to you.”
“Well, I gots this shiny gun and she’s all go!”
“Shall I show you to the door? Walk with me outside.” The Kid strolled from Joe Grant’s fuddled menace toward the saloon doors, the ever-so-quiet crowd dividing for him as he heard Jim Chisum call out, “Kid!” and then heard the click as the hammer cocked and snapped onto an empty chamber. The Kid hesitated and heard another snap as in frustration Joe Grant tried to kill him again. And then the Kid ducked and twisted around in a crouch and in sudden rage and viciousness fired his own Colt three times, bang, bang, bang, each shot hitting Joe Grant in the chin in a gruesome destruction that was the size of a fist. Grant was dead so quick there was no chance for reaction or even for pain. He fell against the foot rail of the bar, and his body sagged gradually to the floor, blood eddying from him.
The Kid considered his victim and said, “Sorry, Joe, but I’ve been there too often.” Recalling Windy Cahill and Arizona, he looked around through the acrid gray haze of gun smoke. The saloon customers were still holding their ears from the noise and cautiously inching away, like this was finally the frightening Kid they’d heard so much about. “You saw what happened, right? It was self-defense.”
“He was spoilin for it!” a far-off man yelled out.
Another man agreed, “You had yourself no option in the matter.”
Jack Finan bent down to extract his ivory-handled .45 from the corpse’s surprisingly firm grip.
“We’ll clean all this up,” the bartender said. “But you better go, Kid.”
Tom Folliard had heard the shots and was running into the main room, his face full of horror as he buttoned up his trousers. “What’d I miss?”
With the jazzy exhilaration he always felt when he found himself still alive, the Kid told him, “Oh nothing. It was a game of two and I got there first.”
* * *
Because Celsa wanted his company and because Saval was still prospecting northeast of White Oaks, hunting for fortunes that would never be found, she invited the Kid to Pat F. Garrett’s Wednesday marriage to her cousin Apolonaria in the white, twin-spired San Jose Catholic Church in Anton Chico. Garrett was nearing thirty, his wife was twenty-two. Joining them in the double wedding ceremony was a Virginian named Barney Mason, who still worked for Pete Maxwell, and Barney’s seventeen-year-old bride, Juanita Madril.
Apolonaria’s father, José, owned a successful freighting company, and he hosted a fiesta afterward in the Abercrombie general store, founded by a Scottish father and son who’d frequently been hospitable to the Kid. And though Garrett wouldn’t himself dance, he howled encouragement and fervently applauded the hilarity of friends making, he thought, fools of themselves. Celsa fed the Kid some wedding cake and got up to see if the quartet would play “Turkey in the Straw.” The Kid found the tune irresistible, and he was encircled and cheered as he sang, dancing an Irish jig his mother had taught him. And Celsa noticed that Garrett’s face was now solemn, for the Kid of course was famously indicted and Celsa knew that Patrick F. Garrett was considering a run for Sheriff of Lincoln County.