Ever in motion, the Kid recruited into his gang his cousin Yginio Salazar and his pal Pascal Chaves, Garrett’s friend Barney Mason, and Billie Wilson, a headlong eighteen-year-old petty thief originally from Ohio with whom the Kid was often confused by the authorities. Wilson had owned a livery stable in the burgeoning tent city of White Oaks, which, since its founding in 1879, was filling up with optimistic miners. But Billie Wilson sold out his faltering business in exchange for a sack full of counterfeit hundred-dollar bills that looked pretty darn good to him. Also in White Oaks, at West & Dedrick Livery & Sales, the Kid recruited the worshipful Dedrick brothers and even thrilled them with the gift of one of his ferrotype portraits. Handed down for generations, it is still the only certifiable photograph of William H. Bonney, age twenty.
Calling themselves the Rustlers, the night-riding gallants reportedly stole forty-eight Indian ponies from the idly guarded Mescalero Apache reservation and roamed up and down the Rio Pecos in the hostile cold of February selling them off to horse traders who could not resist a bargain. In March, it was claimed that the gang went after the livestock of Uncle John’s kid brothers, Jim and Pitzer Chisum, riding off with ten steers, ten bullocks, and two pregnant cows. Charlie Bowdre joined them for an eastward foray into Los Portales in May, stealing fifty-four cattle from a Canadian River ranchers’ association, steering them cross-country all the way to White Oaks and selling them for ten dollars a head in a deal that the Dedrick brothers had arranged. They thieved from a cattleman at Agua Azul, from a cattleman named Ellis near Stinking Springs, and even supposedly stole seven thoroughbreds from Uncle John Chisum, daring him to try to retrieve them.
But much of that accounting was Ash Upson’s and written insincerely in 1882, when he thought exaggeration, outrage, and garish lies would help Pat Garrett’s book sales. And Upson could have claimed in 1880 that the Kid was the source of any crime perpetrated in Lincoln County, from burglary to hijacking a train, and a lot of the Anglo citizens would have believed it. The Kid was not yet twenty-one, he still didn’t need to shave, and even wary people on meeting him remembered his cordial smile and fun-loving nature. Yet he was increasingly considered a fiend with a lust for blood by those seeking commerce and prosperity for New Mexico, for whom he seemed the impediment, the hitch in the get-along, the enemy of progress. And the Kid was not yet aware that there was a faction that desperately needed to have him done away with.
* * *
Heading up the hunt for a new sheriff was Joseph C. Lea, a former Confederate Army officer who’d fought alongside Cole Younger. Lea would later be called the father of Roswell, but in 1880 he was just the owner of its few buildings and a homestead ranch. Hearing praise of Pat Garrett from an excited Uncle John, Lea invited the saloonkeeper to stay in his own Roswell home just long enough to establish residence in Lincoln County. And John Chisum joined them on the homestead one evening for dinner, skirting political topics until Mrs. Lea took the dinner plates and cutlery away and the three men lit Chisum’s gifts of La Flor de Sanchez y Haya cigars.
“I guess it’s up to me to broach the subject first,” Chisum said. “We want to get your mind right on what our intentions are for our new sheriff.”
Garrett grayed the air in front to him with smoke before he asked, “Which are?”
“Well, we frankly need you to kill the Kid dead.”
Captain Lea used the rim of a saucer to carve the ash from his cigar and took a more lawyerly, brick-by-brick approach. “Uncle John and I have ambitions for Roswell and in fact for all of New Mexico. We foresee a time when most every major town will have a railway depot, a schoolhouse, even a doctor’s office. We want land that is platted and fenced. We want roads instead of cattle trails. We want factories and merchants and all the niceties of civilization.”
“What we got is wildness and anarchy,” Chisum said. “We got Kid Bonney on the loose taking whatever he pleases, whenever it suits him. Carefree, headlong, guns in every hand.”
Lea said, “The Kid’s days are numbered, and I imagine he knows that. We think of him and the frontier he inhabits as doomed, for—”
Interrupting Lea, Chisum spoke around the cigar in his mouth as he said, “Your job will be to uproot the Kid and his lackeys like chokeweeds in the garden patch!”
Pat Garrett rocked back on his dining room chair and quietly considered his fine cigar. With his Southern formality he said, “Elect me sheriff and I’ll be a cold and impersonal legal machine. Without sentiment or malice or resentment, I’ll carry out the law to the last letter.”
“Exactly what we hoped to hear,” said J. C. Lea.
* * *
At the Democratic Party’s nominating convention, Garrett was vaunted as a strict disciplinarian of impeccable morals who would persevere in an endless manhunt for the Kid and his ilk. Joseph Lea shouted in his convention speech, “Whosoever has encountered Pat Garrett will have noted how coolness, courage, and determination are written on his face! He alone shall bring law and order to the Territory and spell doom to the villains wreaking havoc on our lands!”
Running against him was Sheriff George Kimbrell, a former government scout and justice of the peace and an easygoing Republican who was thought to be too friendly to Billy and too timid in his prosecution of criminals. Even though both he and Garrett had Mexican wives, Kimbrell was far more liked by a native community that despised the wealthy associates of the Santa Fe Ring because of the thefts of their lands.
Louisiana-born George Curry would become governor of New Mexico in 1907, but in 1880 he was just nineteen and working for the firm of Dowlin & DeLaney, when the Kid, whom he didn’t know from Adam, rode onto the ranch and was invited to join Curry for dinner. In his twentieth-century autobiography, Curry recalled, “He asked me how I thought the election for sheriff would go in Las Tablas, our voting precinct. I told him our votes would be for Pat Garrett. He asked, bluntly, why I thought Garrett would win, and I replied just as bluntly that Garrett was a brave man who would arrest Billy the Kid or any other outlaw for whom a warrant was outstanding.”
The Kid told him, “You’re a good cook and a good fellow, George, but if you think Pat Garrett is going to carry this precinct for sheriff, you are a darn poor politician.”
The Kid was right about Las Tablas; Garrett got only one vote out of forty. But in Lincoln County’s final tally of its 499 votes for sheriff, Pat F. Garrett of Roswell got 320 and was elected.
Paulita Maxwell later recalled, “Nothing ever gave Fort Sumner such a shock of surprise as Garrett’s selection by the cattle interests to be sheriff. He was just a saloonkeeper, with no experience as a detective and no reputation as a gunfighter.”
The election was on November 2, 1880, and Sheriff Kimbrell would have normally stayed in office until January 1, but with cattlemen providing him a financial incentive, Kimbrell appointed Garrett as his deputy and pretty much vacationed for the next two months.
A journalist interviewing the new deputy sheriff inquired if he thought he could quell New Mexico’s outlawry, and Garrett told him, “Yes, I can. Because outlaws all have one thing in common: sooner or later they find themselves wanting to get caught.”
* * *
Governor Lew Wallace’s novel Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ was published in New York by Harper & Brothers on November 12, and he was in the East, neglecting his government duties and also ignoring the telegraphed entreaties of Billy’s lawyer, Judge Ira Leonard, who vowed the Kid would cease his illegal activities if he was just given the clemency that the governor had promised.
Soon everything began turning sour.
About the time that Lew Wallace was getting the first accolades for his bestselling novel, the Kid and his gang were riding into Puerto de Luna, forty miles northwest of Fort Sumner. Arctic cold flooded over the West that November, and they all wore woolen scarves over their heads and ears and hunched under the wind with bandannas over their noses, snarling at the agonies of weather. Wanting food and heat, they hitched their horses and with their spurs jangling walked into the restaurant and general store of Alexander Grzelachowski (Gur-zel-a-hóf-ski). He was a jovial, overweight, fifty-six-year-old former Catholic priest from Gracina, Poland, who’d been invited to New Mexico by the archbishop of Santa Fe, Jean-Baptiste l’Amy. But after some years as pastor of a church in Las Vegas, “my laziness ate all my wits,” as Grzelachowski put it, and he left the priesthood. Billy now thought of Padre Polaco’s place as his lair in Puerto de Luna, and he felt like flaunting his friendship with an educated European to his gang. With him were Tom Folliard, Charlie Bowdre, and Billie Wilson. Of late Wilson and the Dedricks were getting away with passing Wilson’s counterfeit currency, buying the finest new guns that way and so outraging the stung businessmen Jimmy Dolan and Joseph LaRue that they wrote letters of complaint to officials in the United States Treasury, who thereafter named Wilson, the Dedricks, and, of course, William H. Bonney as “persons of interest.”
Wedged into the gang just that morning was twenty-six-year-old Dave Rudabaugh, originally from Illinois. Called Dirty Dave because of his aversion to soap and water, he was an offensive, ruthless, dark-bearded lout filling up the doorway in his slouch hat and rank goat-hair coat. Doc Holliday had gambled with him in Dodge City and was quoted as saying, “Dave Rudabaugh is an ignorant scoundrel! I disapprove of his very existence. I considered ending it myself on several occasions but self-control got the better of me.” Wyatt Earp wore out three horses hunting for him following his robbery of a Santa Fe Railroad construction camp, and after Rudabaugh’s failed train holdup in Kansas, Bat Masterson finally arrested him. But he was offered immunity if he squealed on his three partners in crime, and he did, avoiding a five-year sentence in Leavenworth prison. Ending up in Las Vegas, Rudabaugh hired on as a policeman just to seem an unlikely stagecoach robber, which he was, but after a friend was arrested for murder, Rudabaugh tried to jailbreak him, succeeding only in killing a much-loved deputy, Antonio Lino Valdez. So Dirty Dave was on the lam, found Billie Wilson in White Oaks, and Wilson in turn convinced the Kid they needed a fifth Rustler. Currying the Kid’s favor, Rudabaugh had said, “Real sorry Alex McSween was taken from us. When he was just getting into lawyering, he was a schoolteacher at the Miles farm in Eureka. Taught my little sister Ida. Nice man, she said.”
“Small world.”
Entering the Grzelachowski establishment, the five were greeted by a genial owner, who flung his arms wide and fondly grinned as he said, “Halo, Boleslaw! Jak się masz?” Hello, William! How are you?
“Świetnie,” the Kid said. Just fine. “Wanted to introduce you to my pals.”
Hands were shaken and names exchanged, and Padre Polaco asked the Kid, “Would you like to take something on the teeth? I have a kettle of borscht on the stove. Red beetroot, onion, garlic, very hearty.” Without waiting for a reply, he went to his kitchen cabinet and pulled down six Navajo bowls before calling out, “And some sweet Tokaji Aszú wine for the chilliness? I have.”
And Charlie called out, “You still a horse trader?”
Padre Polaco asked, “You need?”
Tom explained, “On the scout so much, we’re the ruination of animals.”
“I have horses.”
The Kid was warming himself in front of the fireplace and saw Billie Wilson dawdling near a display case. The Kid called to him, “You find a naked lady under that glass?”
“I’m shopping. The padre’s got some nice things.”
The Kid walked over and gazed at the jewelry as he stood beside Wilson. He retrieved a golden crucifix on a golden necklace and held it up to his gang. “Charlie, Tom. Would Paulita like this?”
“Hell if I know,” Tom said, and Charlie just shrugged.
The ex-priest asked, “Is she Catholic?”
“Well, she’s French and Spanish.”
“Then maybe.”
The Kid fitted the necklace inside its green velvet pocket and paid Grzelachowski the full price. The owner served the borscht, red wine, and hunks of stale bread to be soaked in the soup. Wrinkling his nose at Rudabaugh’s devastating odor, he told him, “I could find you in a room with no light.”
Rudabaugh thought it over for a few seconds and then concluded, “You sayin I stink?”
The Kid said, “He’s saying you have a strong personality.”
“Well, I guess that’s accurate.”
Charlie interrupted to praise the borscht, saying, “This here is in the nick of time. My belly’s been thinking my throat’s been cut.”
The former pastor asked while laying down cutlery, “And how are you and Manuela faring?”
“She’s with child. See, we got this here picture took.” Charlie was wearing a gray, caped Civil War sergeant’s coat that was called a surtout and he found in its inside pocket a ferrotype of himself sitting in his finest dancing clothes and, in the fashion of the time, displaying his six-gun and Winchester ’73, looking again like a gloomy Edgar Allan Poe as his unsmiling common-law wife stood next to him, one hand formally on his left shoulder and the other gently riding the balloon of her belly.
“Very laughly,” Grzelachowski said. “I am exceeding happiness for you.”
Tom craned his neck to see and said she didn’t look all that pregnant.
“Old picture. She’s as big as a wish now.”
“Is nine months the usual?” Tom asked.
“Oui, mon enfant,” said Padre Polaco as he sat across from the Kid. They ate in silence until he finally got out, “You have a birthday soon?”
“November twenty-third.”
“That’s today!”
“Then I have reached my majority.”
“Aged twenty-one,” Tom needlessly said.
Padre Polaco regarded Tom with pity, then returned to the Kid. “So, no clemency yet?”
“I got Judge Ira Leonard working on it. But the governor’s in New York and avoiding me. I’m heading to White Oaks from here to hash out some legalities with Ira.”
Wagging his finger but smiling, the ex-priest said, “You are afflicted with the general problem of disregarding the distinction between meum and tuum.”
The Kid frowned.
“Latin for ‘mine’ and ‘yours.’ Old seminary joke.” The padre lifted up and looked over the Kid’s head to Billie Wilson as he yelled, “Ho there! I’ll hang dogs on you if you steal from me!”
The Kid hated the fatherly whine in his own voice as he turned and asked Wilson, “Oh, wha’ja do?”
Padre Polaco rose from the rough-hewn table and rushed the petty thief.
“Nothin,” Wilson explained to the Kid. “I was just holdin it in my pocket. Seein if it fit. I got money.”
Padre Polaco forced his hand inside Wilson’s overcoat pocket and retrieved a Waltham watch in a gold case. “Shame on you!” he scolded.
Anticipating an uproar, Charlie said, “We better eat up, Tom.” They both began hurriedly spooning borscht and slurping down wine.
The Kid said, “You were gonna pay him for it, weren’t you? You just had more shopping to do?”
Wide-eyed with innocence, Wilson told the ex-priest, “Yes! My family’s festive and I have Christmas things to get!”
Padre Polaco examined the price tag. “Thirty-eight dollars. You have it?”
“Here,” Wilson said and found a folded hundred-dollar bill in his trousers.
The Kid sighed. “Don’t take it, Padre. It’s worthless.”
Grzelachowski squinted at the note in the lamplight and felt the texture of the paper before holding it over the hurricane lamp and letting the counterfeit bill brown and blacken and flame into ash.
“Hey!” Wilson said, but it was late and halfhearted.
“Enjoyed the dinner,” Tom said, getting up.
Rudabaugh was heading outside, but his odor would linger for days.
The Kid saw that no one else was volunteering to pay for their dinner, so with exasperation he said, “Here, let me get this,” and generously laid down five authentic two-dollar bills with Thomas Jefferson in the left oval and a vignette of the United States Capitol in the center.
“Dziękuję,” the owner told the Kid. Thank you.
“I’m really sorry about the fuss.”
“Yes, yes.” Padre Polaco smiled. “But all my customers bring me happiness. Some by coming, some by leaving.” And then he said like the gravest of teachers, “But I have a warning for you about your friends. ‘He that lieth down with dogs shall rise up with fleas.’ ”
Exiting, Billie Wilson yelled, “This is a fine way to treat your dinner guests!”
Padre Polaco yelled back a Polish get-lost expression that in English would be “Oh, go stuff yourself with hay!”
* * *
Tying a woolen scarf over his skull and ears again and fixing his sugarloaf sombrero over it, the Kid adjusted his fine sable coat and got up on his latest horse. And then he heard hooting from the night of Grzelachowski’s corral as Wilson, Rudabaugh, and a what-the-hell Folliard urged four stallions, four geldings, four mares, and four fillies through the yanked-open gate using spurs to various hindquarters. Charlie Bowdre was overseeing the theft and sheepishly twisted in his saddle. “Won’t listen to me, them.”
The Kid yelled, “What are you doing? Alex is a friend of mine.”
“We thought we was your friends,” Rudabaugh said. “And he disrespected us.” His hand was on his six-gun, and the Kid could tell he was wanting to use it. The Kid felt so tired of all this quarreling and menace that he made the mistake of giving in, just riding gloomily toward White Oaks as planned, his skin feeling the itch of fleas.
And that continued as he just watched Billie Wilson sell Padre Polaco’s horses to West & Dedrick Livery & Sales and divvy the cash among the thieves. Then Wilson, Folliard, and Rudabaugh felt a hankering for the saloons and sporting ladies of White Oaks, while the father-to-be and the Kid just gambled.
With the dealer shuffling his cards, the Kid asked, “You feel worn-out, Charlie? Not just tonight, but lately?”
“Well, yeah. A-course. We got so much to-ing and fro-ing I don’t know whether to scratch my watch or wind my nuts.”
The Kid collected his cards and immediately folded. “I’m frazzled, too. We ought’ve quit the territory when Waite and the Coes did.”
Bowdre finished his jigger of whiskey and said, “That locomotive done left the depot.”
And then Rudabaugh, Wilson, and Folliard shambled in with a burden of stolen overcoats, woolen blankets, and cardboard boxes of tinned food. Tom Folliard grinned as he said, “Look what we got!”
Wiping his coined winnings into his left hand, the Kid stood. “Where?”
“Will Hudgens’s store.”
The Kid hissed, “But he’s from Lincoln. Will Hudgens knows you and me, Tom.”
“So?” Rudabaugh said.
Charlie Bowdre looked at the many rubberneckers in the saloon and whispered, “We best get outta here.”
* * *
The five hustled out, the Kid forgetting his yellow gloves, got on their horses with their ill-gotten gains, and galloped off to the Greathouse & Kuch ranch and trading post. All that hard, freezing ride the Kid was thinking, You have lost control.
Will Hudgens was not just a storekeeper, he was a deputy sheriff in White Oaks. Happening upon the wreckage of his mercantile operation, he shouted a hue and cry for a lynching and collected a posse of fourteen men to chase down the thieves overnight by following their horses’ hoofprints in the deepening snow. It was not yet five in the morning when they got to the Greathouse & Kuch roadhouse, so the fourteen reclined on horse blankets in the snow, hating the zero cold as they cradled Winchesters and waited for the sun to rise.
Whiskey Jim Greathouse got his nickname from his moonlighting job of illegally selling liquor to Indians. He employed a short-order cook from Berlin, whose first job that morning was to harness a Clydesdale horse team in the stables. His boots were crunching in the snow and he was hiding his face from the wind with the lifted collar of his buffalo coat when he was tackled and pinned deep into a drift by a few of the White Oaks men.
“Who ya got in that house?” Deputy Jimmy Carlyle asked.
The Kid was first up and heating water for coffee in a fireplace pan when a cook who was floury with snow hurried inside and held out a folded sheet of paper. “Der ist a posse,” he said. “Here a message.”
Charlie Bowdre and Tom Folliard wandered over as the Kid read aloud, “ ‘We have you surrounded and there’s no escape. We demand you surrender. Deputy Sheriff William H. Hudgens.’ ”
With the cuff of his overlarge sweater, the Kid wiped a garden of frost from a four-pane window and looked out at rifles bristling in the flare of first light. “We been here before, Tom.”
Ever slow on the uptake, Tom Folliard asked, “You mean Alex McSween’s house?”
The Kid nodded. “And lived to tell the tale.”
Whiskey Jim Greathouse went outside with his cook, feeling it safer to hang with the White Oaks contingent, and to stir up aggravation he told Hudgens, “Kid Bonney says you’ll only take him as a corpse.”
“We don’t just want the Kid. We want Dave Rudabaugh and Billie Wilson, too.”
Whiskey Jim shrugged. “Well, if you want them, go and take them.”
Because he was famous in White Oaks, Billie Wilson was the first who was asked to surrender. He declined for the time being but asked to talk to Jimmy Carlyle, a young farrier who’d shoed horses for him in his livery stable and was, like Wilson, originally from Trumbull County, Ohio. Whiskey Jim offered himself as a hostage to guarantee the deputy’s safety, and Carlyle handed off his rifle and holstered pistol and held his hands in yellow gloves high as he waded forward through knee-high snow to the ranch house.
Young Billie Wilson welcomed him inside with a tin cup that he sloshed full of whiskey. “To take the chill off,” he said.
Carlyle drank it all down and held the tin cup out for another ration.
The Kid asked, “You wearing my gloves?”
“I just found them somewheres.”
“And I just forgot em. Hand em over.”
Carlyle complied.
“You been out all night?” the Kid asked.
“Yep.”
“Your men feelin cranky?”
“Well, darn cold and hungry.”
The Kid looked to the cook. “Let’s get this officer of the law some breakfast.”
“Anybody else?” the cook asked.
Hands went up.
Rudabaugh walked into the front room, and Carlyle winced at the overpowering stink of him. “Shall I kill him?” Rudabaugh asked, like he’d just offered the man a fine seat at the table.
“I’ll have to see your papers,” the Kid told Carlyle. “Your warrants for our arrests.”
“How was we s’posed to get papers and chase y’all at the same time?”
Rudabaugh slugged him in the mouth. “Don’t sass him.”
Carlyle felt his teeth with his tongue, found an incisor floating in blood, and spit it onto the floor. Ever untidy, Rudabaugh didn’t seem to mind. Bowdre was watching and told Carlyle, “It’ll feel better when it quits hurtin.”
“Here’s our conditions,” the Kid said. “Your posse rides off to White Oaks and we go elsewhere.”
“We’d just be giving up!”
“Exactly.”
“We got thirteen guns fixed on this ranch house and you’re actin like you got the upper hand!”
“Don’t you go getting my dander up,” Rudabaugh said and held his gun to Carlyle’s head. “Seems to me we do have the upper hand, far as you’re concerned.”
Carlyle glumly finished a fresh dose of whiskey, and Rudabaugh holstered his Colt.
The cook served steak and eggs, and Bowdre, Wilson, and Folliard hunkered over their dishware as they chatted about the coldest they’d ever been. Rudabaugh finished one rib eye and tore into another. The Kid cautioned, “Easy on the chow there, Dave. You’re swelling up like a tick on a bloodhound.”
“I like to be full up,” he said and jawed the meat with a wide-open mouth.
The Kid looked out at loitering men fogging the air with each irritated breath and trying to stamp feeling into their feet. A few aimed at his face in the window. They seemed close to storming the house. “Your pals are getting restless,” he said.
Rudabaugh told Carlyle, “We’ll kill em all. You know we will.”
“You’re outnumbered.”
“Don’t matter. We’re professional killers. They ain’t.”
“I haf chores to do?” the German cook said. “I haf to go outside now?”
The Kid waved him out.
Soon, though, the cook was back again with a note from Deputy Sheriff Hudgens stating that if Carlyle was not free in five minutes, the posse would execute their hostage, Greathouse.
Rudabaugh grinned at Carlyle. “Where do you want my bullet? Ear? Eye? Lotsa choices.”
Wanting to get as far away as possible from Dirty Dave, Carlyle rose from the breakfast table and tilted with intoxication as he sought the Kid. “Would you,” he began, and just then a loose and impatient shot was fired from outside. In his drunkenness, James Bermuda Carlyle seemed to think it was from inside, from Rudabaugh, and in a sudden panic he dashed for freedom, crashing through the window glass and wrecking the sash before getting shot by his White Oaks friends, bang bang bang! He fell into the snow, crawled just a few yards trailing ribbons and scarves of blood, and then gave himself up to death.
“You idiots!” Hudgens shouted. “That wasn’t Kid Bonney! It was Jimmy!”
Still the firing went on for a while, with sixty or seventy bullets pocking the adobe and making that vwimp sound as they zipped into the house and at the Kid’s command “Don’t shoot!” missed the gang that was not yet bothering to fire back. In the chaos and confusion outside, Whiskey Jim Greathouse just stepped backward from the frustrated posse and got on a horse that his partner Fred Kuch trotted forward. They both galloped off without getting shot at.
* * *
Who knows how it went? The Kid claimed the White Oaks shooters were dispirited over having killed Carlyle and slunk off in their despondency. But so much was unexplained. Greathouse and Kuch rode back a full day afterward and found Jimmy Carlyle still dead there on his back, frozen stiff, with snowflakes collecting in his gaping mouth and eye sockets. Their way station had been torched and was nothing but hissing rafters, charred adobe, and defeated furniture. There were no signs of blood anywhere except around Carlyle; no sign at all of the Rustlers. Hoofprints seemed headed west to White Oaks and east toward Fort Sumner.
* * *
In Roswell, J. C. Lea got word of the Kid and his gang’s depredations in and around White Oaks and on November 27 sent a descriptive letter to Deputy Sheriff Pat Garrett, who’d already collected a posse comitatus that included his gambling buddy Barney Mason, a half dozen neighbors from his four-section homestead outside Roswell, and the Lincoln deputies James W. Bell and Robert Olinger. Riding up the Rio Pecos, they achieved Fort Sumner and found out Tom Folliard and Charlie Bowdre had been seen in the vicinity of Las Cañaditas, twenty miles to the northeast, on rangeland that belonged to the cattleman Thomas J. Yerby. Garrett held a warrant for Charles Bowdre for the homicide of Andrew Roberts at Blazer’s Mill, so after a hasty breakfast in Beaver Smith’s saloon, the posse of nine men grudgingly took off across a prairie deep with snow, favoring the vales and ravines to stay hidden from the criminals, with Garrett frequently forging up steep hills on his own to scan with field glasses a periwinkle blue horizon.
Eight miles from the Yerby ranch house, the deputy sheriff spied a red-haired horseman a half mile off who could have been Tom Folliard rocking in his saddle on a splendid filly thoroughbred, heading east. The geography was familiar enough to Garrett that he wisely elected to take a shortcut through a gorge that was hard going with its yucca, sagebrush, and tricky shale, but he soon got the posse within three hundred yards of the horseman they sought.
Tom glanced south and saw a sudden gang of nine riders hurtling toward him with guns in their hands. But their mustangs were scuffling through hillocks of snowdrift and seemed overused after a far journey, while his was a racehorse that vaulted forward at the first jab of his spurs, all four hooves flying with thrilling speed as he crouched like a jockey over her withers and crest and fired six rapid shots behind him. They could not overcome gravity and gashed up spits of snow far ahead of the challenging posse.
Even having the advantage of an angle toward the Yerby ranch house, Garrett could see the gap between himself and Folliard widening as the possemen’s own horses heaved for air and gradually gave out. He yanked his Winchester out of its saddle scabbard and halted his progress to fire three useless rifle shots at the fleeing thief, then slow-walked to Yerby’s before the government horses could keel over dead.
Tom Folliard had raced up to the Yerby barn and called, “Charlie, you in there?”
Wearing a blacksmith’s apron, the wrangler hunched outside, shading his eyes from the sun.
“Sheriff’s men are after us.” Which got his attention. Folliard freed his left boot from the stirrup, and Bowdre inserted his own and swung up behind the saddle cantle and hugged Folliard as the filly racehorse exploded forward again, Bowdre waving back to a concerned Manuela on the bunkhouse porch as she watched her husband vamoose.
After a quarter mile, Folliard veered the horse toward a deep coulee, and a jouncing Bowdre called, “Where the hell you goin?”
“To get outta sight,” Folliard called back.
And Bowdre yelled, “But there’s a creek!”
Exactly then the racehorse crashed through the snow and ice in the coulee to four feet of ice water below, and Bowdre fell off the filly as she floundered in fear, thoroughly drenching her riders. “This is just awful!” Folliard yelled, but the horse finally found a purchase and scrabbled up onto an earthen bank and shook herself like a dog.
Bowdre wetly crouched in the snow, holding himself and shivering. He said, “I’ve seen fun times before and this ain’t it.”
When his posse got to the hitching post in front of an adobe bunkhouse, Garrett found no sign of Folliard, Bowdre, or even Yerby. Garrett furtively sidled inside the bunkhouse, his pistol impatient beside his cheek, and found weeping on cots a pregnant Manuela and Mrs. Herrera, her mother. His Spanish was too poor to fully understand their gibberish and finger wagging, so he went out again. He told Deputy Kip McKinney, “They are hailing our advent with terror-born lamentations.”
Reconnoitering Yerby’s property, Garrett’s posse found four horses they decided were stolen and a pair of mules that the deputy sheriff took as his own because he pretended they could have been those purloined by Mose Dedrick from a Wells Fargo stagecoach depot on the Rio Grande and perhaps later sold to the Kid for his fanciful ranch in Los Portales. Which is where they went next, fifty miles southeast of Fort Sumner, hoping to take possession of the sixty cattle rustled from John Newcomb at Agua Azul. The Kid’s hideout near Los Portales was just twenty miles from the Texas border. The Kid having neglected their feeding, a bony yearling and a calf were hungrily tearing dead leaves from whatever manzanita branches were above the snow. But there was at least a fluent freshwater spring that flowed under ice next to a fifteen-foot-high quarry of feldspar, gypsum, and mica that looked like a layer cake dropped from a height on the flatlands, its only welcome being the dark mouth of a cave. The Kid had bragged about his homestead as if it were a magnificent castle, but that was him dreaming again. Garrett scrabbled up to the entrance to find nothing but a damp emptiness, a rolled-up mattress, a pile of foul blankets, and some rusty tin utensils. With no food there other than a shaker of salt and sack of flour infested with weevils, the posse slaughtered the skinny yearling and filled up on steaks and rump roasts before wintering that night in the cave and heading back to Fort Sumner in the morning.
And that afternoon a postman walked into Beaver Smith’s saloon to deliver a letter to Pat F. Garrett from Charlie Bowdre, saying he was anxious to parley with the deputy sheriff and wondered if he could make bail should he ever give himself up. With dickering in mind, Charlie offered to meet him one-on-one the next afternoon in the military cemetery.
* * *
Looking everywhere around him, Bowdre kept his afternoon appointment and found the deputy sheriff smoking a cheroot in a long gray Civil War overcoat just like his own, Garrett’s right thigh resting on a low, whitewashed cemetery wall, his left boot on the ground. He gently lifted his handgun from his side holster and laid it a foot from him on the wall. The outlaw likewise rested his cavalry pistol on the headstone of a private killed in the Indian Wars. Bowdre had a misbegotten, hangdog look.
“You feeling ill, Charlie?”
“Well, I was better, but I got over it.”
“You just need your rest.”
“You, too, I spect. Hear tell you been runnin ragged.”
Garrett flicked ash from his cheroot with a fingernail and with a formality he thought of as Southern gallantry, he said, “I have been told by higher-ups that you’ll be needing to forswear your evil life and forsake your disreputable associates. After that, every effort will be made by good citizens such as Joseph Lea in Roswell to procure your release on bail and give you the opportunity to redeem yourself.” Hiding his disgust, he thought, Garrett blandly focused on the criminal before him, and Bowdre saw the irrational nullity in his eyes, each as nickel gray as a gun barrel.
Seeking to appease, Bowdre said, “I’d do it if nothing broke or came untwisted, but more’n likely it would. You ain’t the onliest lawman after us.”
“You’d be safe in jail for a piece and probably get out in time to see your child born. But right now you have to give me something to go on.”
“Like?”
“Cease all commerce with the Kid and his gang.”
“Cain’t hardly not feed em if they’s to wander to Yerby’s. But I won’t harbor em more’n needs be.”
Garrett stood from the wall and slapped snow from his overcoat. He took a final drag from his cheroot, dropped it, and squashed it out with his boot. “The upshot is this, Charlie. If you don’t quit them and surrender, you’ll be pretty sure to get captured or killed. We are in resolute pursuit of the gang and will sleep on the trail until we take you all in, dead or alive.”
Charlie Bowdre couldn’t help but smirk as he said, “Mr. Garrett, you may be hangin your basket a little higher than you can reach.”
And then they parted ways.