by Ron Hansen
The Kid and Johnny hunted mountain lions with the cousins George and Franklin Coe, hardworking ranchers in their twenties, with stock farms on the Rio Hondo near La Junta and farther upstream at Dowlin’s Mill. Franklin later remembered the Kid as “very handy in camp, a good cook and good-natured and jolly.” He said Billy spent all his free time cleaning his guns and that he “could take two six-shooters, loaded and cocked, one in each hand and twirl one in one direction and the other in the other direction at the same time. And I’ve seen him ride his horse on a run and kill snow birds, four out of five shots.”
* * *
Word got to John Kinney that the Kid was lodging with the Jones family, and because he needed his fearlessness and flair with guns, the gang leader sent about twenty of his hirelings over with a saddled horse and ordered Kid Bonney to rejoin the Boys. And that was it. Worried that he’d overstayed his welcome, the Kid gave Ma’am a kiss goodbye, told Johnny he’d stay in touch, and rode off with a gang hieing northward to the Rio Bonito and the fenced village of Lincoln, the county seat.
With more than twenty million acres of real estate, Lincoln County was one-fourth of New Mexico, as large as the state of Maine and two-thirds the size of England, but there were five times as many cattle as people and the village of Lincoln was just a jumble of sixty structures alongside a dirt main street that was forty yards wide. The Boys rode down it in the wee nighttime hour of three. It was November 17 and sleeting.
At the village’s west end, where the Fort Stanton Road became Main Street, and just across from the Wortley Hotel, there was a big, two-story mercantile establishment with signage as L. G. Murphy & Co. Eastward there were houses and saloons no bigger than parlors and the still-under-construction J. H. Tunstall merchandise business, and beyond that was the Torreón, a three-story rock tower formerly used to ford off Apache Indian attacks. And east of that was the jail where Jesse and his amigos were holed up in the pit.
Half of the Boys stayed on horses facing every direction while the other half, including the Kid, hitched theirs to a rail and walked right into an unlocked jail shack. The jailer was snoring in a Victorian smoker’s chair until the Kid shocked him by pressing a cold gun barrel to the jailer’s forehead, warning, “Try me and you’ll have a sleep you won’t wake up from.”
He was trying out a hoodlum persona.
The jailer looked up at the Kid and then to the others. “This job ain’t nothin but puny wages for me,” he said. “You fellers go on and do what you have to do.”
Crew members with gunnysacks that were heavy with rocks smashed the cellar door again and again until the boards splintered and gave way. Village residents must have wakened from the noise but wisely pretended to be deaf to it.
“Well, it’s about damn time,” Evans called up.
A man the Kid didn’t yet know slid the ladder down. “Mr. Kinney wanted y’all to stew for a bit for givin up so easy that time there at Beckwith’s.”
“We was powerful thirsty is all” was a jailed man’s excuse.
Jesse Evans was first up and free from encumbrance because of his fierce use of a garden file ever since dinner, but he was followed by three still in shackles that were soon chiseled off. The Kid stuffed a handkerchief into the jailer’s mouth and tied it in with a bandanna as another character roped the jailer’s hands and feet to the chair legs.
And then they vamoosed.
- 6 -
THE HIRELING
Who knows why, but the Kid took ownership of Tunstall’s favorite dapple-gray buggy team and was found out and locked up in the same hoosegow he’d released Evans and his misfits from. But no one came for him, which contaminated his trust in their camaraderie. When he soon grew tired of his fetid dungeon, he asked a jailer to send for the offended party, and the Englishman, whose J. H. Tunstall & Co. wareroom was now open and vying with L. G. Murphy & Co., walked over to what Tunstall would spell as the “gaol.”
Even in the November cold, the Kid was enjoying his hour of outdoor exercise, a jailer watching for any funny business with a rifle slack in the crook of one arm. When he saw the victim of his horse thievery approaching, the Kid adopted a forlorn expression.
The Englishman was an inch under six feet tall, slender, twenty-four, and seemed genteel in his cashmere overcoat and swank suit of Harris tweed. His jawline was fringed with a quarter-inch scruff of whiskers, his mustache was hardly there at all, and wings of longish brown hair fanned out from under a slouch hat of ivory wool. Elegance and good grooming met in him. He wore no gun. “So you are the rascal who purloined my horses,” John Henry Tunstall said in a lilting, patrician accent.
The Kid swerved his estimation of him off toward a Rio Bonito that was swollen with rainwater and loudly brawling eastward to the Pecos. “Embarrassed to say so,” he said, “but I’m the culprit all right.”
“I’m afraid my nose is a bit out of joint,” the Englishman said. “All this stealing has cost me like the mischief, and scoundrels like you have chaffed me to the fullest extent of my patience. I have a mind to scold you in terms too true to be palatable.”
Owing to his having had an English schoolmistress in Silver City, the Kid felt he understood, and he foresaw how politicking could help. “I deserve whatever you hand out in regard to admonishment,” he said. “I done wrong and judge myself kindly in need of correction.”
Surprise and happy ignorance gave the Englishman a flush. “What an extraordinary admission from a rustler! I never heard the like from Jesse Evans and his serviles.”
The Kid hung his head some. “Well, I’m different from that ilk.”
Still rheumatic, headachy, and faint from drinking alkali water on his new ranch on the Rio Feliz, Tunstall took a seat on the board sidewalk and gloved off the space beside him. “Please sit and we’ll parley.”
With a glance, Kid Bonney begged permission of the jailer and he nodded. The Kid sat.
“You’re different from the rest how?” Tunstall asked.
“I feel like I was never given the scope to do other than. I’m an orphan since fourteen and I been making my own hard way with few means available to me. And there’s so much thieving in the territories it just came to seem natural as a way to make do.”
“And you fell in with bad company?”
“Afraid so, sir. And each mistake kept on breeding others.”
“Are you a gunslinger?”
Tunstall seemed to be hoping for a yes, so the Kid said, “I’ll admit I have been a shootist on occasion. I’m not a flagrant criminal, though. Each time my hand has been forced.”
Seconds passed. Tunstall seemed to be examining him. “Are you given to strong drink?”
“Whiskey? I haven’t never acquired a taste for it.”
“And if you don’t mind my prying: señoritas?”
The Kid shied from answering that and inquired as to why he was being so closely questioned.
“I have a need,” Tunstall said. He was blind in his dullish, hazel-brown right eye, but his left was sympathetic and he sat snug enough that the Kid could smell a breath pepperminted with the Altoids that he ordered from Callard & Bowser in England. “It can be dull, venal work. You may feel like a hireling at times. But I daresay the tedium may be punctuated by sudden moments of danger. John Chisum pays his cattle protectors four dollars a day, or so it’s rumored, but I can afford just one dollar per diem, plus room and board. Would you settle for that?”
“I got nothing but these old clothes and some high ambitions. Seems like wealth to me.”
“Your name’s Billy?”
“Yep. William H. Bonney, sir.”
“How old are you?”
“Eighteen this November twenty-third.”
“Are you Protestant?”
“Probably.”
“Yes, but are your origins in the north of Ireland? Are your forefathers Anglicized and of the Orange Order?”
Because it seemed to matter so to him, the Kid nodded.
“Excuse me if I i
nquire again: In a pinch you’d be handy with a pistol?”
“Have had multiple trials and I passed em all.”
“And have you a firm purpose of amendment?”
“Absolutely.”
Smiling as he clapped a hand on the Kid’s knee, Tunstall said, “Well, William H. Bonney, you’re hired. Let us rise and go about changing your prospects.”
* * *
The horse-stealing charges against the Kid were withdrawn by John Henry Tunstall through his lawyer, Alexander A. McSween, and Tunstall linked his arm inside the Kid’s as he strolled him into the new J. H. Tunstall & Co. General Merchandise store, which was wide as eleven spaced porch posts and smelled of fresh pinewood flooring and the cedar fire in a hissing cast-iron stove. Employees were emptying boxes or working the till and coffee grinder, and the floor was crammed with crates and barrels and shelves overstocked with just-arrived groceries, dry goods, hardware, tools, guns, and even an apothecary of patent medicines and elixirs. Tunstall claimed with a grand gesture that his store offered more luxuries and necessities than did the so-called House kitty-corner from them, and he said he hoped to undercut that scoundrel Murphy until he captured even his Army contracts for groceries and meat. And he would be adding a bank, too, with the cattle baron John Chisum as its president and financial source. With some grandiosity he said, “I intend to get half of every dollar that is made in Lincoln County by anyone. And I will deal with those who oppose me. I do not suffer fools gladly.”
Then, as gifts for the Kid’s forthcoming birthday, the owner went about happily equipping charming Billy with batwing chaps, a holster and six-shooter, a Winchester rifle, .44-40 cartridges, whatever food he fancied, and, “not stinting anything,” outfitted him with the rigging of a Colorado saddle with doghouse stirrups and took the Kid to the corral behind the store and let him select a fine white Army horse that Tunstall said he’d purchased for twenty-five dollars from the post trader at Fort Stanton. “And I would not take seventy-five for her now.”
The Kid was overwhelmed with glee. Wanted to stop grinning but couldn’t. He told Tunstall, “Went through a dozen Christmases with no gifts at all, and you just made up for all a child’s wanting in one afternoon.”
Tunstall bowed humbly to the Kid as he acknowledged, “Gratitude is the sign of a noble soul.”
* * *
The Kid then rode beside Tunstall’s buggy and the dapple-gray team he’d stolen earlier as they traveled south thirty miles to the JHT Ranch of 3,840 acres in the Rio Feliz valley, and while they traveled John Henry Tunstall revealed himself.
Hinting at inherited wealth, he said he grew up in the fashionable London borough of Hampstead, where his father, “the Governor,” was “a financial success in the merchandise and shipping business.” Tunstall had three sisters, whom he adored, and he’d attended the Royal Polytechnic Institution with the intention of becoming an accountant in his father’s multiple firms. Since his father was also a John, all his friends and associates called him Harry, “And you may, too.” He said he was fluent in French and adequate in German and was pleased to hear that Billy spoke Spanish “to help us find common ground with the locals.” After graduation from the Polytechnic, Tunstall took a gentleman’s grand tour of Europe, then boarded the Cunard liner Calabria for America and finally arrived by railway in Victoria, British Columbia. There he worked for three years in his father’s mercantile firm of Turner, Beeton & Tunstall, but he left for California with the goal of investing some of his father’s fortune in sheep and a fleece- and wool-making business. Hearing in Santa Barbara of the practically free, semiarid land in the New Mexico Territory, he instead went east and found himself in Santa Fe in 1876. There in Herlow’s Hotel he met a Scottish Canadian, “a very shrewd fellow and a lawyer by profession, Alexander A. McSween,” who persuaded the Englishman to go into stock raising in Lincoln. Tunstall hired as his foreman the “wonderful physical and moral specimen” of Richard M. Brewer, and because Tunstall was a foreigner, McSween and Brewer had to file the papers for him to acquire the Rio Feliz ranch on which he hoped to graze ten thousand cattle. “With overhead and losses you can’t accumulate real wealth with less.” Working for him as well were Robert Adolph Widenmann, who grew up over a hardware store in Ann Arbor, Michigan, but attended an excellent high school in Stuttgart, Germany; and Frederick Tecumseh Waite, a handsome half Chickasaw Indian who’d graduated from Mound City Commercial College in St. Louis. “So you’ll be fraternizing with educated men.”
“I like learning things, sir,” said Kid Bonney. And he amended that: “Harry.”
Tunstall admired him for a moment. “I could see that. The flames of intelligence gleam in your eyes.”
* * *
The Kid was imagining an English manse or at least a handsome Mexican hacienda, but John Henry Tunstall’s home in the high desert foothills east of the Sacramento Mountains was just a fourteen-by-fourteen hovel of a cabin constructed with adobe blocks and piñon logs. But Tunstall was delighted at seeing his property again and, as if they were objects of beauty, called Billy’s attention to a heavy anvil and sledgehammer outside in the weather and a spade and a scoop shovel atilt against a lone mesquite. “I have tools!” he exclaimed. “I have forsaken the fancy drawing rooms and am downstairs, dining with staff!”
Hearing his voice, an English bulldog happily ran over a hill to his owner and wiggled and shrimped around in delight as Harry knelt to greet his Punch with high-pitched baby talk. Worry about the Englishman’s sanity caused the Kid to examine the manic zeal in his face.
Tunstall interpreted his concern. “Don’t be distressed, Billy. It shan’t always be such a humble abode. I fully expect betimes a stately house with rooms upon rooms and pretty maidens to do our bidding.”
* * *
White-bearded Gottfried Gauss, an ex-clergyman from Württemberg, Germany, and for thirteen years an Army hospital steward, worked as the ranchers’ chuck wagon cook and that night served them grilled pork chops with a green chilli glaze as Harry talked passionately about the fortunes to be made. Without a table or chairs, they sat on the cold earthen floor, and Harry hunched over his food as he confided, “John Chisum was given a contract to supply eleven hundred steers for the soldiers at Fort Stanton. The Army agreed to pay him thirty-five dollars a head for the full-grown livestock, but Chisum only paid eighteen dollars a head in Trickham, Texas! The cattle drive took two weeks so there were considerable expenses, but the scalawag still netted over eighteen thousand dollars!”
“A lot of money,” the Kid said.
Tunstall agreed and took that as encouragement to say more, going on and on about his wild ambitions until it was twelve, his “witching hour.”
The Kid slept in the hovel only one night and then was relieved to be sent farther north to the winter-dead grasslands fed by the Rio Ruidoso. There the jigger boss, or second in command, was Charlie Bowdre, a twenty-nine-year-old from Mississippi who’d gone flat broke on a cheese factory in Arizona before finding work with L. G. Murphy’s House as a gunman with Jesse Evans and the Boys. But in 1876 Bowdre had taken the teenage Manuela Herrera as his wifely servant and become domesticated, signing on to fork a saddle for the gentleman from London instead of being, as he put it, “ever on the skeedaddle and in a state of frantic.”
The Kid recalled a lithograph of the author Edgar Allan Poe that he’d seen in Wichita. Charlie Bowdre, he thought, took a likeness to Poe with his sad, dour, seen-too-much eyes and his trying to balance his ever-gaining baldness with a walrus mustache and a wealth of dark brown hair behind his ears.
When the Kid rode up and introduced himself, Bowdre scowled, and in the snail’s pace of Southern speech he asked, “William H. Bonney. Is that a consumed name?”
“Consumed?”
“Was you born with it or just take it on by your ownself?”
“Sort of.”
Bowdre nodded. “Well, your secret’s safe with me.” His flat-topped hat was rakishly cocked rightward on his head
like the straw boater of a city boulevardier, but he otherwise looked like a far older man who’d been in the hot or cold outdoors for too long. He spurred his gray ahead to swerve a maverick far from an arroyo, and the Kid trotted his white horse to catch up.
Bowdre asked him, “You ever buckaroo aforehand?”
“In Arizona.”
“Which ranch?”
“The Sierra Bonita.”
Bowdre took his measure. “With the vaqueros? You look too littlish for that.”
“Well, mostly I helped around the chuck wagon.”
Bowdre smiled. “Oh, you was the hoodlum!”
“They called it by another name.”
“Was it the Little Mary?”
The Kid said nothing.
And Bowdre said, “Mr. Tunstall, he don’t tolerate disrespect amongst our ownen.”
The Kid was sent eastward as a flank rider, his sole job to bunch the cattle in their move-along and scare them with shrill whistles if they strayed wider. Though Bowdre was a hundred yards off, his voice carried, and the Kid could hear him sing, “It rained all night the day I left, the weather it was dry. The sun so hot I froze to death. Susanna, don’t you cry.”
At sundown Widenmann and three other hands in the nighthawk shift rode up to assume the overseeing, and with no more work for the weekend, Bowdre said Friday was his night to howl, and asked if the Kid had a place “to lay your wary head.” Billy hadn’t thought far enough into the future for that, a common problem with him, so Bowdre invited him to join him and his wife in his flat-roofed, two-room adobe house on the Rio Ruidoso. He’d purchased it from Lincoln’s L. G. Murphy for fifteen hundred dollars, but with just three years to pay off the mortgage, foreclosure was inevitable, so Charlie and the woman he called his wife were just camping there and expecting to head for the horizon soon like most vagrant cowboys. Bowdre called it “searching for the elephant.”