by Ron Hansen
Still, Buck Morton fought for Sallie’s notice against John Middleton and Billy Bonney. Sweet glances and winking, tee-heeing, and tickling only soured the meal for the married men Scurlock and Bowdre, and Doc chose to darken the mood by reciting to the accused, “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may, old time is still a-flying; and this same flower that smiles today tomorrow will be dying.”
“Heck, that could be a poem,” Middleton said.
And Scurlock said, “Is.”
The Kid sneered at their captives and drew a finger from ear to ear in a cut-throat warning.
Buck Morton could not hide his horror over Scurlock’s threat and the Kid’s gesture, and after hurrying his dinner he requested stationery to write a letter to his cousin, an attorney in Richmond, Virginia, lying about his innocence and noting: “Constable Brewer himself said he was sorry we gave up as he had not wished to take us alive. I presently am not at all afraid of their killing me, but if they should do so I wish that the matter should be investigated and the parties dealt with according to law. If you do not hear from me in four days after receipt of this I would like you to make inquiries about the affair.”
Sallie stamped the envelope, and Brewer promised they’d stop at the post office in Roswell on their way to Lincoln. Then the Kid heard knocking at the front door, opened it, and was grieved to see William McCloskey there. He was a scoundrel when drinking and a wheedler when not, and he’d fashioned a shoddy career of hiring on at Jinglebob roundups and branding times and otherwise handling janitorial work for the likes of Jimmy Dolan. “Saw the lights from the trail,” McCloskey said. “Sallie here?”
“Yes.”
“Wondered if the Chisums would let me stable Old Paint and rest my weary bones.”
With dismay Sallie allowed it, and soon McCloskey was hunkering in the dining room with Brewer and hot coffee, flattering him and trafficking in gossip as he sought to join the Regulators, whom he’d heard were getting handsomely paid.
Sallie allowed the murderers to stay under guard in her frilly pink bedroom that night, chosen by Brewer because it lacked windows. And when she saw the Regulators had laid out their bedrolls on the floor of the dining room and parlor, Sallie said she was too excited by the company to sleep, seeming to hope that Brewer would invite her on a moonlight stroll. Instead it was the Kid who escorted Sallie outside into the darkness, where she said with fresh wonderment, “There are so many thousands and thousands of stars here. Ever so much more than in Texas. They’re like a spill of sugar.”
“Supposed to snow,” Billy said, and then chided himself, Weather, when she was being romantic.
Uncle John Chisum grazed upward of eighty thousand cattle on rangeland that extended north one hundred miles, but only fifty or so were close enough to see beyond the fences, all watching Sallie with their sad and beautiful faces as she showed Billy the starry W of the constellation Cassiopeia.
Words were lost for the Kid. He tried to fetch a joke now and then but was so tardy in doing so that she just looked at him quizzically with no idea of his references. She stood still, hugging her overcoat, and just stared silently into the night, as though waiting for a train. She wants me to kiss her, he thought, but he hesitated and failed to touch her and finally Sallie said, “Brrr. That cold old wind cuts right through you, doesn’t it?”
“The hawk is talking,” he said.
She squinched her face at the boy oddity beside her.
“Old expression,” he said. “Because a hawk’s beak is sharp. Like a cold wind.” Each further explanation made him feel stupider.
She considered him for a while and then she quoted, “ ‘We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.’ ”
“So you’re going to bed now?”
“That’s what I was implying, yes.”
Billy just watched Sallie walk back to the house alone, thinking, Could’ve said you love her, Kid.
* * *
An hour before sunup he tramped through fresh-fallen snow with his tack and petted the left side of a fourteen-hand roan called Tabasco that Alex McSween had loaned to him. He swatted the black saddle pad to free it a little of reddish hair and flew it up over the horse’s withers, then hooked the stirrups over the horn and flipped up the cinch before hefting the saddle onto the horse’s back.
Dick Brewer was drinking coffee from a tin cup as he humped his own tack to his stallion. “Up and at em early, Kid.”
“I figure I’ll sleep when I’m dead.” He inserted and inserted again the leather latigo through the D ring at the end of the cinch and then necktied it.
Brewer put his tin cup on a fence post, and steam twisted from it. Catching up with his saddling, he said, “McCloskey tells me Jimmy Dolan already heard we caught Buck and Frank. Some pards of theirs saw the chase. Jimmy’ll have lookouts posted east of Lincoln, so I figure we’ll go north and around the Capitán Mountains and ride in from the west at night.”
Sallie called from the front porch, “Richard? Shall I refresh your coffee?”
“I’m fine!”
“I’d like some,” the Kid called back, but she was heading inside again. In his frustration he yanked Tabasco’s flank billet too taut, then apologized to the horse as he loosened it.
Brewer stared over his saddle at the Kid. “McCloskey also heard Mr. Chisum is going to pay each Regulator five dollars a day.”
A stolen calf fetched five dollars then. Rooms rented for that by the month. “Seem likely?”
“Well, this isn’t a job, it’s an obligation.”
The Regulators were genial as they ate breakfast in the dining room, but the criminals seemed to be fasting. Frank Baker theatrically presented Sallie with a fine gold Waltham pocket watch, a horsehair bridle he’d plaited himself, and a farewell letter to be mailed to his sweetheart. William Scott Morton spoke only to insist that he wanted a fair trial.
Soon the Regulators and the accused, with their hands tied in front of them, were riding through the main gate. Wondering if Sallie was watching from the front porch, the Kid turned in his creaking saddle, and she was. He waved his sombrero in a haymaker goodbye, and she smiled and waved back.
Some time later William McCloskey asked him, “Why are you grinning?”
The Kid ignored him, jabbed Tabasco with his boot heels, and trotted forward to ride point ahead of his friends.
Roswell was just four miles north of the Chisum ranch. An Omaha gambler had invested in the arid emptiness by constructing a two-story hotel and an identical general store, giving the village the first name of his father. The next-to-nothing population would not increase much until a few years later when a farmer found an underground aquifer and water ceased being scarce.
Ash Upson was the government postmaster inside the general store, and he would have remembered Billy from his rooming with the Antrims in Silver City, so the Kid stayed outside and incognito, but he gazed though the front window glass as his friends happily purchased things with the income they now expected from John Chisum.
At the till, Morton confided to Upson, “I have a bad feeling, Ash. I’m afraid they’re gonna lynch me.”
“Well,” said Upson. “That would be unfortunate.”
McCloskey was a friend of theirs and swore, “Any harm comes to you two, it means they must’ve kilt me first.”
Charlie Bowdre brought outside for himself and Billy dill pickles still dripping from the barrel, and after Buck Morton’s letter to Richmond, Virginia, had been registered and mailed, Dick Brewer pushed him out of the general store.
McCloskey asked their boss, “Is there time for me to visit the hotel whore?”
Brewer looked at him like he was something the cat dragged in, and they all saddled up.
Could be that some skulking Apaches saw them; but otherwise no one spied the party until a Mexican shepherd with a flock of merinos viewed them from a hillside as they turned in to Agua Negra Canyon.
Night began to lower its curtain with the
party strung out for two hundred yards fore to aft, the Kid and Brewer riding drag far behind the straggled Bowdre, Middleton, and Scurlock and overlooking the central three of McCloskey, Morton, and Baker. The trio were old gambling buddies yacking about electric dice and marked decks of cards you could buy for two dollars when Morton suddenly jerked McCloskey’s six-shooter from its scabbard with his tied hands. And when McCloskey shied from the outreached barrel, Morton shot him under his jaw and upward. Alive one second, dead the next, McCloskey fell from his horse like furniture off a wagon.
Both the former captives then thundered off, ducking low and heading for a fort of high rocks, with Morton holding the only gun and crazily firing at the men who gave chase. The Kid counted five more shots, so the gun was used up as the still-tired horses of Sheriff Brady’s possemen wore out and the avenging hunters caught up. And then it was nothing more than an execution as the Kid finally got his way and with John Middleton thoroughly killed the fleeing Frank Baker with five shots in the back as the other Regulators finished William S. Morton with nine.
It was a collective thing, but only Kid Bonney got accused of the murders.
* * *
Dick Brewer rode alone into Lincoln that night, slow-walking his exhausted horse toward the House, where the upstairs veranda was filled with loud, jolly suited men in rocking chairs and overcoats, tipping back square glasses of whiskey and smoking green cigars. Sheriff Brady was one, and his deputy George Hindman; Lawrence Gustave Murphy, of course; then a few citified strangers and, lo and behold, Governor Samuel Beach Axtell.
Axtell was an Ohio attorney who’d failed at gold mining on the American River in California but succeeded in being elected a congressman in San Francisco. A Democrat then, he changed his affiliation to curry the favor of the Republican president, Ulysses S. Grant, and was given the post of Governor of the New Mexico Territory in 1875. Axtell was secretly in the thrall of Thomas Catron’s Santa Fe Ring, and a federal agent would later claim he was more inept, corrupt, fraudulent, and scheming than any governor in the history of the United States. In fact, Interior Secretary Carl Schurz would soon investigate his administration and within months would have him dismissed from his office.
Sheriff Brady stood and called out, “Where’s your crew, Dick?”
“Oh, here and there.”
“And how about your prisoners?”
“We lost em.”
The sheriff looked to his deputy, saying, “Go tell Jimmy,” and George Hindman hurried in his halting way toward the east side of town. His left thigh had lost a good deal of muscle to the teeth of the mauling black bear, so he was forced to sling his leg forward like a wooden pedestal.
L. G. Murphy called, “Wait on, Dick!” Smiling hugely and resting a hand on the governor’s shoulder, he yelled, “And who would our guest of honor be? The governor, do ye think?”
Dick Brewer just tipped his hat to Axtell and rode on, and the drunken Murphy yelled again, “He’s intervening in our current situation!”
Axtell asked him, “Who is he?”
Murphy said, “Fella used to tend for me. I hold the mortgage on his ranch.”
Axtell shouted loudly, just as he must have done earlier in a village assembly. “I seek only to assist Lincoln’s finer citizens in upholding our laws and keeping the peace!”
But Brewer’s back was shut to him by then. And by the time the Regulator got to Juan Patrón’s tavern, he could see Jimmy Dolan and a slew of rifled men grumpily slouching down Main Street, having been denied their ambush.
Juan Batista Wilson, the justice of the peace, was just where he frequently was, standing at the east end of an ornate bar freighted in from Albuquerque, a jar of tequila in his hands. Seeing Brewer, he filled a shot glass for him from the jar and tilted and weaved in his drunkenness as Brewer reported on the capture of Morton and Baker. At the end of the recital of the events, Wilson told him the governor had just issued a proclamation that booted the justice from his office, voided all the legal writs and processes issued by him, and specified that District Attorney Rynerson and Sheriff Brady and his deputies were the only officers empowered to enforce civil law.
“Meaning what?”
Ex-Justice Wilson offered him an ironic smile. “Means you ain’t a constable now and never wast. Had you self no deputies never. Warrants? They’s worthless. Axtell even called em ‘disreputable.’ And how I figure it is you and your Regulators are outlaws. Oh, and also, guilty of murder.”
* * *
With their freedom in jeopardy, Alexander McSween and Dick Brewer fled Lincoln that night to hide out at Chisum’s ranch, where Susan McSween was to rejoin her husband after a few weeks shopping in St. Louis. At the South Springs ranch, Alex and Dick would hear that another two of Tunstall’s assailants were done for, Tom Hill having shot and failed to kill a Cherokee sheep drover who fired back with an old Henry rifle that finished him. Jesse Evans was Hill’s accomplice and was shot as he took flight, the Henry’s bullet shattering his left elbow and yanking him in a fall off his horse. Evans was soon arrested and taken to the post hospital at Fort Stanton for surgery, and then was locked in the post stockade to await his trial.
Of the Regulators, Doc Scurlock and Charlie Bowdre went to their women and scratch-ankle ranch on the Ruidoso while John Middleton and Billy Bonney sequestered in San Patricio, a village a few miles south of Lincoln on the Rio Hondo. The Kid was a first-rate card counter, so he made a nifty income by placing bets at faro only when the dealer got toward the end of the deck, when predicting the fall of cards got easier. Seeing the Kid was winning far too often, but not intuiting why, the saloonkeeper finally denied Billy access to the games, and he and Middleton just loitered on the sidewalks, target-practiced in the hills, and used up the nights of March courting pretty novias at the Mexican dances that were called bailes.
The Kid was particularly fond of a girl of fifteen named Carlota, and she seemed shyly responsive, flickering a smile at his jokes and courtesies. His gallantry was overseen by a judicious aunt who was the dueña, which can mean overseer, and Tía Hortensia seemed to hope for the match, praising Billito in Spanish for his fluency in their language, his Old World manners, and his gentlemanly respect for the old, the viejos, while Carlota talked of his flashing blue eyes, his sweetness, his smartness, his frequent smile.
On the night of March 31, Hortensia stood far behind her niece under the awning of a mercantile store, looking away when the Kid kissed Carlota. A hard rain was falling and the streets were flooding and the cool, clean air smelled like Armour’s laundry soap. Carlota held the Kid’s kiss for as long as he wanted, wrapping her shawled arms around his neck as his chest crushed against the cushion of her still-small breasts. She let her mouth be insistent, nibbling, and smearing, a vagabond in its wandering over his face with lips softer than the petal of a rose.
The Kid withdrew a little and asked Carlota, “Qué estás haciendo?” What are you doing?
She smiled. “Te estoy enseñando a besar.” Teaching you to kiss.
“Oh. Muchas gracias.” They resumed, and the Kid’s hands were traveling toward Carlota’s sweet rump when he felt a soft tap on his shoulder and fearfully turned to find not the dueña but San Patricio’s constable José Chávez y Chávez and John Middleton with a giggling Mexican girl playfully twisting his black handlebar mustache.
José had lost his grandfather’s farm to the Santa Fe Ring and sought to join the Regulators to extract some justice. So he told the Kid in Spanish that he’d heard Judge Warren Bristol and the semiannual meeting of the district court were due in Lincoln on April 1, and Sheriff Brady intended to arrest Alexander McSween yet again on his announced return to Lincoln from the Chisum hacienda, urge the grand jury’s prosecution of the Regulators for the homicides of Baker and Morton, and convince Judge Bristol and the jury that the sheriff’s posse was legally constituted and acted in self-defense in the February killing of John Henry Tunstall.
Middleton waited for the rattle of Spanish to
end in order to make his own contribution. “And then I’ll wager he’s gonna hunt us each down and kill us dead, just to get rid of the contrary evidence.”
The Kid was fuming as he added to the list of outrages, “The sheriff stole my Winchester rifle.”
* * *
Sheriff Brady took his breakfast of steak and eggs at the Wortley Hotel on April 1 and slogged across a sloppy street to the House, the Kid’s Winchester slung over his forearm. Rain had turned to sleet in the cold of morning, but with the sun it would just be more of the wet.
The frail and ailing old lion Lawrence G. Murphy was alone and leaning over his elbows behind the bar, his thoughts flying and his first quart of Double Anchor rye whiskey being caressed by his hands. The sheriff barging in made him bolt upright in surprise. “Jaysis, ye put the heart crossway in me, Bill!”
“Sorry. Was there mail?” The House was also the post office.
“Oy, yes! And from hisself, Judge Bristol.” L.G. staggered a little as he got an official letter from a warren of mail slots and handed it to the sheriff.
Brady slit it open just to see that it was the signed warrant for Alexander McSween, then shoved it in his overcoat pocket.
“You’ll have a dram with me, Major Brady?”
“Oh, don’t be troubling yourself.”
“Ah, go way outta that, of course ye will.” L.G. poured an inch of the rye into a square tumbler and slid it to him. “Cheers,” he said as he lifted and finished his own glass, adding, “I always drink with my gun hand, to show my friendly intentions.”
The sheriff’s deputy George Hindman limped in with another mustached deputy, Jacob B. Mathews, who was also the House’s bartender, the clerk at semiannual meetings of the circuit court, and a participant in the thirty-man posse that had hunted down John Henry Tunstall.
“Where’s Jimmy?” Hindman asked.