by Ron Hansen
Seeing his calm, John Middleton imitated Alex by writing a jaunty letter to his former employer, saying, “We have taken the town.” After listing the killed and wounded on both sides, he noted, “Everything is fair in war. Seen Jim Reese the other morning walking down the street. Cried because he is on the wrong side but he cain’t get out of it. All of them have taken an oath to stand by each other unto death, so I guess we will kill a lot of them afore they skedaddle.”
The Kid took a ladder up to the roof and crept from the west wing to the east to scan the area, seeing in the north the majestic limestone castle of El Capitán looming over the greenery that moated it, and just beyond McSween’s backyard was the gurgling, crystal-clear Rio Bonito. To the south the sheriff’s men and a hundred soldiers freely walked about with guns at the ready, as if just waiting for an officer’s instruction to overwhelm the Regulators. Hearing a man yell, “Hey, Billy!” he looked to the House and saw his old friend Johnny Jones waving and grinning on the veranda.
The Kid smiled as he called back, “Dang, Johnny! You siding with the devil?”
“Whoever’s got the mostest cash!”
“Well, if you get the chance you’ll make sure to miss me, won’t ya?”
Johnny shrugged. “Reckon I’ll have others to shoot at.”
The Kid laddered back down and went to the sitting room. Alex McSween was standing with his Holy Bible and reading Psalm 86 aloud to Yginio Salazar and Vincente Romero, who were lolling on the floor. “ ‘Bow down thine ear, O LORD, hear me: for I am poor and needy. Preserve my soul; for I am holy: O thou my God, save thy servant that trusteth in thee. Be merciful unto me, O LORD: for I cry unto thee daily. Rejoice the soul of thy servant: for unto thee, O LORD, do I lift up my soul.’ ”
Cued by Alex McSween’s fear and trembling, the Kid stood over the parlor organ to write a farewell letter on the upper-board. He was halfway through when Susan McSween noticed him hunched over his handwriting.
She asked, “Even in such jeopardy, you’re writing a letter?” With the effrontery of the privileged, she looked over his shoulder. “To Miss Sallie Chisum! Well, she is a darling girl.” She lifted the letter and frowned as she read it, even sighing. She tore the letter up as she said, “Oh, Billy, this will not do at all. Here, let me help you.”
On July 20, just the next day, Miss Sallie Chisum received a handwritten letter from the Kid but dictated by Susan McSween:
My darling Sallie,
The indications are very strong that we shall have a battle soon, and I feel impelled to jot down a few lines that may fall under your eyes when I shall be no more. I have no misgivings about the cause in which I am joined. We are dauntless. Yet I fear you do not yet recognize that you have filled my heart with longing and my love for you is deathless. Oh Sallie, the memories of the blissful moments I have spent with you overwhelm me, and I feel most gratified to God and to you that I have enjoyed such cordial regard in your uncle’s home. It is my intent to return to you unharmed but if I do not, please know, my dear Sallie, that I will whisper your name with my last dying breath.
Yours truly,
Billy
* * *
Within the hour on July 19, Deputy Bob Olinger, a lout and bully who’d joined up with the Rio Grande Posse, hunched across Main Street to crowbar the shutters off McSween’s front windows. His accomplice smashed the plate glass and toppled the heaped adobe bricks on the sills. Olinger shouted inside, “I have warrants for you and others in the house. Will you surrender?”
Alexander McSween called, “We have warrants for you!”
Olinger was at a loss and could only inquire, “Where are they?”
The Kid yelled from inside, “Our warrants are in our guns, you cocksucking sons-of-bitches!”
His foul language caused Alex McSween to give him a disapproving glance.
Meanwhile John Kinney and some of his Boys were hauling lumber to the east side of McSween’s house, the only property the Regulators still firmly held. Inside they were hot and stinking and without water. Alex went to the east wing and heard lumber being stacked and Kinney calling for kerosene.
McSween hastily wrote a note in pencil, and his ten-year-old niece, Minnie Shield, walked it to the commanding officer in the folding chair. Lieutenant Colonel Dudley read:
Would you have the kindness to let me know why soldiers surround my house? Before blowing up my property I would like to know the reason.
Nathan Dudley replied that he sought no correspondence with Alexander McSween and, deliberately misreading the lawyer’s syntax, he stated in his note,
If you desire to blow up your own house, the commanding officer does not object.
Kinney’s fire on the east wing of the house wouldn’t catch or was doused, but Andrew J. Boyle, formerly a rowdy British soldier in Scotland and now a Seven Rivers rancher, flung lit dried wood soaked in kerosene into the outdoor kitchen of the west wing. Some firewood was stacked there, and dish towels and aprons, and flames soon crawled over the adobe walls as though ravenous for paint.
The Kid was the first to smell the acrid smoke, and he ran down the hallway with a Shaker broom, intending to swat out the flames, but he found a conflagration. And when he gave extinguishing the fire a go, he was shot at from the stables.
When he got to Alex McSween, he reported what was happening, and Tom Folliard, overhearing, said, “Don’t worry. All is not lost.”
McSween asked in exasperation, “If all is not lost, where the hell is it?”
The fire’s fierce appetite shifted southward to the McSween quarters, and with temperatures nearing a thousand degrees, the hallway wallpaper curled, then blackened, then chafed into flying ash. The adobe bricks burned like charcoal. The houseguests backed up from room to room to avoid the heat and lung-racking smoke, and were soon crowded into the front parlor, their clothing drenched in sweat, handkerchiefs and dish towels held over their noses and mouths to inefficiently filter out the fouled air.
Harvey Morris looked out at forty soldiers and civilians waiting by the front fence and its south gate, and told no one in particular, “We’re in a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t situation.”
Alexander McSween said with despair, “I have no idea what to do,” and fell onto a sofa, his head in his hands as though doomed. “I seem to have mislaid my mind.”
His wife sat on the bench of her parlor organ and seemed to be itemizing all the expensive possessions they’d lose soon. Wood smoke grayly filled the room like a dense fog. Walls were hot as radiators.
Little Jimmy Dolan now tilted forward on his crutches to drunkenly watch indigo clouds of smoke roil up from the house next door to the Wortley Hotel. His room’s plate-glass window so scalded his outreached hand that he withdrew to the hallway to continue his staring.
Erratically choosing action, then inaction, Lieutenant Colonel Dudley was eating dinner from a mess kit and worrying that no women and children were exiting the incinerating house. He’d intended to explain to higher-ups his presence in Lincoln with a previously composed memorandum that he was going there “to protect women and children; and we shall not take sides.” Charred bodies would not do. So he was relieved at nightfall to see five enlisted men hitch a wagon and go into the Tunstall store to get the Ealy belongings and to escort out of town Dr. Taylor and Mrs. Ruth Ealy, their two small children, and the schoolteacher Susan Gates.
Seeing the Ealys getting into an Army wagon and heading for Fort Stanton, Susan McSween ran next door waving a white handkerchief over her head and accosted a captain who was rolling a cigarette while leaning lazily against a post of the mercantile store. “We have three horrified children in that house,” she cried. “I beseech you to give them protection.”
The captain turned to Dudley, and he nodded. Hostilities ceased as Susan McSween, Elizabeth Shield, and the coughing Shield children walked out of the house and got into a navy blue Army ambulance. Once they were gone, a hail of bullets recommenced going every whichway, though act
ual human targets were lacking.
The captain looked at his master sergeant, a veteran of Chickamauga and Marietta as well as the Indian wars. He asked, “What’s your estimate of the gunfire? How many rounds have been shot?”
“Just today?”
“Yes.”
The master sergeant seemed lost in arithmetic, then answered, “About two thousand.”
Watching the dragon of fire grow wings, the captain told his master sergeant, “If the poor devils still in that hellhole get away, they’re entitled to their freedom.”
* * *
In the house, the Kid said, “We can’t just stay here and fry.” With handkerchiefs to their faces, they all turned at the sudden liveliness. “I’m thinking a few of us might could sneak out the kitchen for the east gate. We’ll draw fire and distract the shooters enough that you can get out the river gate and slide down to the Rio Bonito.”
The crack and collapse of an overhead joist fostered their agreement.
Harvey Morris, José Chávez y Chávez, and of course Tom Folliard joined the Kid in hanging out by the east wing’s kitchen. The Kid took the loan of a gun for his left hand to twin with his right and was, as usual, smiling. “Okay, how do we get outta this?” he asked. When they frowned, he said, “Quick, fast, and in a hurry.” And he took the lead in crouching outside into a night illumined by the bonfire of the once stately home before he raced to the east gate.
John Kinney’s men and a few infantry and cavalry soldiers noticed and fired at his party, felling Harvey Morris before he’d gone three yards. But the Kid was shrewd and sudden at whatever he did. Gun sights would find and then lose him. Certain kills ended up cracking pickets and chopping dirt. With his Regulators running past him, the Kid fired with both hands like a trick shot artist, finally holding his aim on the face of his former employer, John Kinney, and in a rare miss shooting off only a wing of his mustache. The Kid then jumped the picket fence and took a hunkered run for the tamarisks alongside the Rio Bonito, followed by those who’d joined him.
They escaped homicide but others did not. Waiting by the north gate on the east side of the backyard were the Seven Rivers ranchers and possemen Robert Beckwith, Ma’am Jones’s son Johnny, and Andy Boyle. Jones and Beckwith hated each other because of a cattle dispute, but they had been ordered by Kinney to position themselves near McSween’s chicken coop. They saw McSween run out of his house with some Mexicans around nine p.m., but with the barrage of gunfire from the sheriff’s men, they hustled back inside.
Andy Boyle later recalled, “Then the fire became promiscuous. And that was the time the big killing was made.”
Robert Beckwith shouted, “I am a deputy sheriff and I have got a warrant for your arrest!”
A half minute passed in a lull as Alex McSween considered his dilemma, and then he called out, “Will you take us as prisoners?”
“I have come for that precise purpose!”
McSween then stated, “I shall surrender!”
Beckwith walked cautiously toward McSween’s voice and found him crouching near the east kitchen against an exterior wall. Alex was without a gun, but when Deputy Beckwith held out a hand to help him stand, McSween so hated the loss of his possessions and his livelihood that he changed his mind, yelling, “I’ll never surrender!”
An infantry soldier mistaught by the Indian wars took that as an invitation, and in friendly fire killed Robert Beckwith with a head shot.
Johnny Jones just considered the soldier with curiosity, like he’d been calculatingly rude, then he looked back at the scene. Hundreds of bullets chattered at Alexander McSween’s crew, with the Canadian stuttering forward in his dying walk, hit four times from waist to neck until a shot located his skull and he fell dead, his three flourishing years in Lincoln ended by gunfire from every whichway. Vincente Romero and Francisco Zamora were next to die, and then the youth Yginio Salazar was hit with gunshots to his shoulder and back.
All was still except for a few far-off gunshots that popped like fiesta firecrackers. John Kinney and his Rio Grande Posse delicately walked into the yard to stand over the bodies and watch for breathing.
Oozing blood and playing possum, Salazar felt his ribs kicked testingly by Andy Boyle and heard Kinney say, “Don’t waste a shot on that greaser, he’s dead as a herring.” Even as scavengers looted the Tunstall store and the victors celebrated with whiskey, Salazar waited.
The officers and men from Fort Stanton joined in the anarchy for a while but, once filled with rations and drink, were ordered into their tents and slept without nightmares of having done nothing to halt the bloodshed, help the wounded, or even bury the many dead, whose bodies stayed overnight where they’d fallen.
An hour before dawn, when only a few infantry guards were not sleeping, Yginio Salazar finally risked his hesitant, bloodletting crawl for help, squirming forward on his belly for more than a mile to reach the home of Miguel Otero. Much later Miguel would recall that Yginio told him in Spanish, “Even in our great danger, the Kid was the coolest man I ever saw.”
* * *
Lieutenant Colonel Dudley took pride in waking before five, and he was fully dressed and inhaling the fresh morning air when he strolled to the incinerated house at sunrise, seeing only embers and ashes and a few kites of smoke. Robert Beckwith had been carried away by other deputies, but Harvey Morris, Alexander McSween, Vincente Romero, and Francisco Zamora were just where they’d fallen eight hours earlier. Some hungry chickens were pecking at their faces. In a gesture he thought of as gallant, the post commander found a patchwork quilt that had been looted from the Tunstall store and slung it over Alexander A. McSween’s corpse, scattering hens, then he headed for a hot coffee.
- 12 -
ADRIFT
Excited, jittery, and still electrified by the threat of death, the Kid snuck back into Lincoln that night and stole cavalry horses for himself and Tom Folliard. Then they splashed north across the Rio Bonito to the foothills where Regulators in hiding whistled to them. They congregated on a mesa, and each squatted with his soft horse’s head next to his own, reins in hand just in case there were soldier pursuers. A few partook of some kitchen rye. His heart still hectic with the could-haves of the murderous night, the Kid even smoked one of Fred Waite’s machine-made cigarettes just to see if it would calm his jangling nerves.
Doc Scurlock read his Elgin pocket watch in the moonlight and announced, “Almost three in the morning. I was about to siwash.”
Tom Folliard asked, “What’s that mean?”
“Sleep. Old Indian term.”
Charlie Bowdre told Billy, “Real sorry we had to absquatulate earlier.”
Tom Folliard began to ask, “What’s ab—”
“Decamp,” Doc Scurlock said. “Hurry off. Leave abruptly.”
“It’s just a word,” said Bowdre and returned to Billy. “We was sore tormented that they had that howitzer square on us so we hightailed it, but we sorta made you boys the escapegoats.”
“Well, at least a few of us got through it.”
Because he thought it needed saying, George Coe added, “And the rest dint.”
Heads hung for a while. And then there was some desultory conversation about their footing from here on out.
Each recognized that the Lincoln County War was essentially over and they were on the losing side. A seemingly petty grocery store rivalry had conjoined some cattlemen’s resentment of John Chisum’s financial success and caused not only civil unrest and a number of murders but the closing of both vying stores that were at the origin of the struggle. And now the Regulators with other options were choosing to head elsewhere: the Mexican farmers to San Patricio and its outlying placitas and the Coe cousins perhaps traipsing north to farm in Colorado. Fred Waite wondered about a return to his father’s prosperity in the Indian Territories; and Doc Scurlock and Charlie Bowdre thought they might could rejoin the sisters waiting for them on the Rio Ruidoso in order to get their gatherings and hire on as wranglers on the Jinglebob.<
br />
It would be remembered as “a war pow-wow.” Franklin Coe noticed the Kid’s silence and asked, “You got plans?”
The Kid stubbed out the Pearl of the Orient cigarette after inhaling again, coughing, and disliking it. “It’s odd,” he said, “but with the gun battle and risks and all, this is the most complete I’ve ever felt. So I guess it’s not all over with me. I’m gonna steal myself a living until I feel revenged.”
* * *
Eighteen years old, rootless, and jobless, Billy Bonney fell into a drifting life of catch as catch can, with horse thievery his main occupation. But first he went to visit Carlota in San Patricio just a few hours later on July 20, finding her heating tortillas in a skillet in the family hacienda with her overweight mother, Sofia, and Aunt Hortensia. Carlota shrieked with astonishment and joy when she saw him at the front door, calling him “Chivato,” the Mexican-Spanish for Kid, and running to hug him as she kissed him over and over again.
“Así da gusto verte,” he said. So good to see you.
She said she’d heard about the killings in Lincoln; she hadn’t heard if he’d been among the dead.
“Estoy vivito,” he said. I’m very alive.
Her mother and aunt welcomed “Bee-ly” into their casa like a prodigal son but were not beyond urging some morning ablutions upon him, for he’d been a few days without benefit of so much as a cat lick. Returning from the yard pump, his tawny hair still wet, he found a feast of huevos rancheros and cinnamon churros. Carlota was as close as a coat sleeve to him as she said, “Mi madre te llama Ojos Brillantes.” My mother calls you Bright Eyes. “Ella piensa que eres muy guapo.” She thinks you’re very handsome.
“Me veo feo,” he said. I’m feeling ugly. “No he dormido.” I haven’t slept.
Sofia heavily fell into a chair at the dinner table just across from the Kid and watched him like his famished eating was merry entertainment. After he’d cleaned his plate she asked, “Ya terminaste?” Are you finished?