by Ron Hansen
* * *
Around five o’clock and still ten miles from Lincoln, Widenmann rode back to Tunstall and said, “Vee haf seen a flock of wild turkeys. Would you like a goot dinner?”
“Capital idea,” Harry said. And he told Rob to go off on the hunt, he’d mind the horses.
The Kid was two hundred yards behind, riding drag with John Middleton, who was claiming there was a twelve-hundred-dollar reward for his hide in Texas. And Billy said, “Well, if you die, and I hope you never do, I’ll try to collect it.”
“At least I’d be good for somethin,” the horse thief said.
Off to the Kid’s right and far ahead, Brewer and Widenmann were in a kind of steeplechase over sagebrush and rills and runnels, hollering and laughing as they fired their pistols at wild turkeys that hopped aside or ran in a zigzagging way or flew in an ungainly flapping of wings that seemed to be without practice. And then the Kid heard galloping and spun in his saddle to see nine riders racing like floodwater over a hillcrest, firearms in their hands and lifting and holding on him. He saw spurts of smoke from the guns before he heard the gun reports, and then there was a sizzle as one bullet flew past his head.
Widenmann and Brewer were still lost in their childish joy in the canyon, hurrahing and circling as the wild turkeys succeeded in evading their horse-jolted and horse-waggled aims in the scrub oak and chaparral. The Kid spurred his gray to warn them and looked over his shoulder to see that a trio of pursuers were in a sprint right behind him, though their mounts seemed to be hard-used and tiring, a pinto whose owner was Jimmy Dolan being one of them. The Kid cried out to his friends and frantically waved both arms. Brewer noticed and frowned at the ruckus, then wheeled his horse around and fired his gun before ducking behind his horse’s head when a fresh volley answered him. Widenmann hurried for a hillside that was jagged with tombstones of rock, and Brewer and the Kid did, too, jumping down from their steeds and hiding, then raising to shoot at the villains who’d grandly called themselves a posse.
The Kid called to Brewer, “Is that Buck Morton?”
Brewer shouted over the gun noise, “And Jesse Evans, I think.”
The Kid said to himself, “We used to be friends.”
John Middleton had seen that John Tunstall was far enough ahead to not recognize what was going on, so he sprinted his horse forward with half the posse in flagging pursuit and now getting out of pistol range, their horses were so done in. Middleton sang out, “Mr. Tunstall! Hey! Look here!”
Tunstall turned in his saddle. “What, John?”
“For God’s sake, follow me!”
Tunstall seemed not to get why his hired hands were fleeing. “What, John?” he called again. And then he appeared to recognize Jesse Evans running hard at him, guns no longer firing, and since they’d joked and shared a flask of whiskey when Jesse was in the Lincoln jail, Tunstall must have thought Evans was delivering a helpful message, for instead of galloping away he swerved Colonel around and loped toward the three men, a free hand raised up in hello or do-not-be-afraid.
The trio halted and instructed each other as Tunstall trotted forward with a friendly smile for Evans and some familiar faces, including the frowning one of Tom Hill.
His heart racing, the Kid stood up from the cold protection of a doghouse of stone, seeing the separated gang of Jimmy Dolan, George Hindman, and others skirt their horses around and away from Harry’s cowering ranch hands and head toward a trio some hundred yards off that seemed to be formally waiting for the genial Englishman. His horse Colonel nearly touched the nose of the horse of Buck Morton as greetings seemed to be exchanged. There followed a stillness, as if a secret judicial deliberation was going on, as if they were waiting for a verdict. And then the Kid watched in horror as Morton just calmly lifted his pistol and shot Harry in his chest. The force of it slammed him into a fall from his horse, and he was as quiet on the earth as a heap of coats.
Wanting to answer but realizing their guns would just spit up dirt at that range, Widenmann, Brewer, and the Kid could do nothing but hate as Tom Hill jumped down and, because his own gun was shelled out, took the Colt Peacemaker from the Englishman’s holster and, for officious assurance, executed John H. Tunstall with a shot through his head.
Jimmy Dolan seemed to say something and Tom Hill turned to listen. Then he looked at Tunstall’s solemn, unseeing bay horse, and Hill shot it in the head, too. Colonel fell on his front knees and then on his flank, fully dead. And in an insult they found hilarious, Evans and Hill laid Tunstall’s body out and tucked his saddle blanket around him as if he were sleeping, his head bleeding onto the pillow of his folded overcoat. Likewise, Jimmy Dolan had the hoot of squashing Tunstall’s felt fedora under the head of his favorite horse. And then the nine rode off.
John Middleton yelled out, “Boys, they have killed Harry!”
And I just watched, Billy thought.
– PART TWO –
THE REGULATORS
(FEBRUARY 1878–JULY 1879)
- 9 -
“WORKING UP A GOOD HATE”
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 so
ldiers 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.