by Ron Hansen
“And you’ve been with whores?”
“But not lately.”
“So you have no real experience in pleasuring a lady.” She lay back and said, “I’ll teach you.”
They reveled until she’d attained a chaos of sufficiency. Catching her breath and with her eyes still shut, she heard him snap open a tin, and then he knelt over Sallie and seemed to be holding and steering himself.
“And now what are you doing?” she asked.
“Silently entering,” he said.
* * *
The Cattle King of the Pecos returned from some legal wrangling in the east around noon. The Kid had already shifted his belongings to the bunkhouse and soon was sitting bootless, hatless, and gunless with Doc Scurlock and Charlie Bowdre in the hallway outside the office of the Jinglebob Land & Livestock Company. Sallie brought them lemonades during their hot wait and flushed when the Kid declared with fervor, “Really enjoyed our night, Miss Chisum.”
Scurlock slyly asked him, “Oh, and why is that?”
She was going to fabricate a lie but decided instead to hurry from them when John Simpson Chisum, whom all and sundry called Uncle, walked out of his office and fixed a tired gaze on the three Regulators. Because his father was an Englishman, he’d found common ground in his partnership with John Tunstall and the Scotch-Canadian McSween despite having grown up in Texas. And now he looked on their former employees as mere unfortunate remnants. Uncle John had just celebrated his fifty-fourth birthday in St. Louis, but he seemed far older, with a cane he leaned on, a goiter in his throat, overlarge ears, and a waxed mustache with ends curled up like the horns of an Angus bull.
“You fellows here for a job of work?” Doc and Charlie allowed that’s what they were hoping for, and Chisum said, “Well I’m not hiring. The cattle you see here are just for my repasts. Rounded up the rest and sent them to Texas. Sold em to the Hunter and Evans company.”
“Begging your pardon,” Doc said, “but who is hiring?”
“You could head up to Fort Sumner and try Pete Maxwell. He runs through cowpokes about as soon as I do a can of Folgers coffee.” Uncle John penciled a note for them to give to the cattleman up north, and, like hirelings, they made a slinking, grinning, bowing exit. The Kid was embarrassed for them. Uncle John scowled at the Kid. “What about you, Billy?”
“You see those horses in the bunkhouse corral?”
“Hadn’t noticed.” Chisum went to his office window and looked out. “Stolen?”
“Yes sir. We got them from Jimmy Dolan.”
Chisum turned. “I have troubles enough, son. You’ll have to get them out of here.”
“And do what with them?”
“Sell em in Texas. There’s an itty-bitty town on the Canadian River. Tascosa. Cattle drives head right through it, and their horses are always ending up scoured or lame.”
The cattle baron sat down in a creaking office chair as if their meeting was ended. The Kid hesitated before saying, “You owe me five hundred dollars.”
Uncle John was writing in a ledger and did not look up. “How’s that?”
“Bill McCloskey said you’d agreed to pay us five dollars per day for hunting down Harry’s killers. And I read in some newspaper that you’d hired gunfighters like me at five hundred dollars a head.”
Chisum tried to kill the Kid with his stare. “You were misinformed,” he evenly said.
With a childish stridence he regretted, the Kid argued, “We put in the time. We risked our lives. We ought to get paid for it.”
Uncle John tilted to slide out a side drawer of his ambassadorial desk, saying, “You make a lot of sense, Billy. Let me get out my petty cash.” And then he lifted from the drawer his Colt .45 and cocked it. “You’ll need to be leaving now, Kid.”
“But we’re only asking for what’s right.”
“Tell you what. You can steal my cattle when you’re hungry.”
“You’re just giving us permission because you know we’ll do it anyway.”
Chisum smirked. “You’re bright, Billy. Nothing gets past you.”
* * *
And so it was that just John Middleton, the fawning Tom Folliard, and the Kid headed to the Texas Panhandle with the stolen herd while the Coes forsook horse thievery for a fresh start at farming in Colorado; Frederick Tecumseh Waite rejoined his roots in the Indian Territories, became a tax collector, served in the Chickasaw legislature, and never again fired a gun in anger; and Josiah Gordon Scurlock and Charlie Bowdre tucked their cohabiting sisters, furniture, and belongings into cells in the Indian hospital at the Fort Sumner that the Army had abandoned.
The Kid never again saw Sallie Chisum. She dutifully listed in her red journal Willy’s mailed gifts of “a beaded Indian tobacco pouch” and “2 candi hearts,” but then she seemed to fancy other men more and in 1880 married another Willy, a German immigrant who hired on as a bookkeeper for the Jinglebob company. When Uncle John died in 1884 from gruesome surgery on his jaw, Sallie shared in an inheritance of $500,000. She sent her sons overseas for schooling in Germany and became estranged from them. She divorced Willy in 1895 and married the man who gave his name to Stegman, New Mexico, becoming the town’s first postmistress. She divorced that husband, too, and then remained alone as she ran a successful cattle company and died rich, aged seventy-six, in 1934.
* * *
In the few shabbily made adobes in Tascosa and the fifty or so campaign tents, some of them brothels, the Kid sold the stolen horses to cattlemen hawing their longhorns to Abilene for the railroads and eastern markets. Then he just hung around for some weeks, gambling on games of monte played on Army blankets, happily flinging señoritas at the Mexican bailes, even pitching with both left hand and right at a game of baseball “nines” before he was ejected for loudly doubting the umpire’s impartiality.
An Irish fan dancer originally from Baton Rouge—called Frenchie because of her fluency in the language—became one of the Kid’s familiars in Tascosa. Wild and dazzling, she made a fortune as an adventuress in the sideline of prostitution, and she later remembered Billy as “the best-natured kid and had the most pleasant smile I most ever saw in a young man.”
Another friend there was a handsome, happy mail carrier five years older than the Kid whose name was Henry Franklin Hoyt. A former student at the University of Minnesota and the Rush Medical College in Chicago, but not yet an MD, he’d adventured west and found his way to Uncle John Chisum’s ranch in 1877. Like the Kid, he was urged by Chisum to go to Tascosa for the opportunities, and he’d intended to become a general-practice physician for the injured and ill until he found there wasn’t adequate funding from all the pass-throughs. Although they met in the Howard & McMasters General Store and Saloon, Henry and Billy shared a dislike of intoxicants; both were festive, carefree, inquisitive, and rambunctious; and the Kid’s late-night conversations with Hoyt felt like an education in science he’d lost out on. When Henry Hoyt decided to wander farther northwest to the green meadows of Las Vegas, New Mexico—the Wool Capital and boomtown that was the western railhead of the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe—the Kid gifted him with Sheriff Brady’s sorrel racehorse with the brand of BB, even inventing a bill of sale signed by William H. Bonney so Hoyt’s good reputation would not be sullied. In fair exchange, Hoyt gave the Kid a little gold lady’s watch he’d won at five-card poker and the Kid saved it as a Christmas gift for some damsel yet unmet.
In A Frontier Doctor, written forty-two years later, Henry Hoyt remembered: “Billy Bonney was eighteen years old, a handsome youth with a smooth face, wavy hair, an athletic and symmetrical figure, and clear blue eyes that could look one through and through. Unless angry, he always seemed to have a pleasant expression with a ready smile. His head was well-shaped, his features regular, his nose aquiline, his most noticeable characteristic being a slight protrusion of his two front upper teeth. He spoke Spanish like a native and although only a beardless boy was nevertheless a natural leader of men.”
Just before lea
ving, Hoyt offered some final advice to the Kid, telling him that while he was still free and fairly solvent he should run off to Mexico or South America and forget about the outlawry, for the Kid was smart, self-assured, easy to like, and efficient; he’d be a success at whatever he chose to do.
Hoyt was not the first nor last to suggest a getaway, but the Kid hung on to the familiar.
Soon after Henry Hoyt left, so did John Middleton, who petted his handlebar mustache as he complained, “Everything is already stoled out of the country.” He took a job again with the Hunter, Evans & Company firm and its cattle drive north, earning three hundred dollars that he used to finance a grocery store in Sun City, Kansas, and failing in the business. His marriage to a fifteen-year-old girl also failed, and he was cowboying again when he died of smallpox in 1882.
* * *
Word got to the Kid in November 1878 that Thomas B. Catron of the Santa Fe Ring, who was finally under criminal investigation, had formally resigned as United States Attorney for New Mexico; that Lawrence G. Murphy had died in October—his ranch in Carrizozo would much later be purchased by the actress Mae West—and that Rob Widenmann had journeyed from London to Las Vegas, New Mexico, with a gift of one hundred pounds sterling (about five hundred American dollars) from John Partridge Tunstall to Susan McSween. She wrote Harry’s father, “I am truely grateful as I was so very much in kneed,” but then requested five hundred dollars more. She’d also hired a Las Vegas civil engineer and choleric lawyer named Huston Ingraham Chapman to sue Lieutenant Colonel Nathan A. M. Dudley for arson and “the murder of my dear husband.”
President Rutherford B. Hayes had named Lewis Wallace, the fifty-one-year-old Indiana lawyer and former Union Army general, to become the reforming successor to hapless Governor Axtell in New Mexico, and soon after getting to Santa Fe, His Excellency announced “that the disorders lately prevalent in Lincoln County have been happily brought to an end.” He noted that now those
peaceably disposed may go to and from the County without hindrance or molestation.
And that the people of Lincoln County may be helped more speedily to the management of their civil affairs, and to induce them to lay aside forever the divisions and feuds which, by national notoriety, have been so prejudicial to their locality, the undersigned, by virtue of the authority in him vested, further proclaims a general pardon for misdemeanors and offenses committed against the laws of the Territory in connection with the aforesaid disorders, between the first day of February, 1878, and the date of this proclamation.
The governor also pardoned officers of the United States Army stationed in Lincoln County, affronting Colonel Dudley, who construed the pardon as a slander against “the gallant officers of my command for offenses we know not of, and of which we feel ourselves guiltless.”
The governor denied a pardon for any person “under indictment for crimes and misdemeanors, nor shall this operate the release of any party undergoing pains and penalties” for his wrongdoing.
The Kid read the statement over and over again, yet he so fully believed in his innocence that he seems not to have recognized that he was one of those unpardonable criminals, for he was under indictment for murder. And because he did not see it, he thought it was a favorable time to return to the New Mexico he thought of as his home. The Mesilla News foresaw that result, noting that “peace was dawning in Lincoln County when Governor Wallace extended a pardon to absent thieves, cutthroats, and murderers and virtually invited them to come back and make a fresh start in their occupations.”
- 13 -
THE PARLEY
Lucien Bonaparte Maxwell left Illinois at seventeen to become a fur trapper in Nebraska, headed farther west as a scout alongside Kit Carson, and providentially married Ana Maria de la Luz Beaubien, whose heritage was of the French and Spanish aristocracy. With an inheritance from his father-in-law of 1,714,765 acres of rangeland in the New Mexico Territory and southern Colorado, Lucien developed a cattle operation that rivaled John Chisum’s; founded three merchandise stores, a major gristmill, the Azteca Mine, and the First National Bank of Santa Fe; and in Cimarron constructed a glorious hacienda full of European wines, silver dishware, a redundancy of servants, and so many houseguests that there were two dining rooms. And then, as if he foresaw he would die of kidney failure four years later, in 1871 he sold off properties, gave up his rangeland to an English syndicate for $1,350,000—less than a dollar an acre—and moved his wife and six children two hundred miles south along the Goodnight-Loving cattle trail to Fort Sumner.
A forty-square-mile government Indian reservation on the Rio Pecos had been constructed there for 8,500 Navajo and 500 Mescalero Apache prisoners. Washington politicians hoped for civilizing instruction in farming and Christianity, but the project was a tragedy, offering only malnourishment, poisonous water, and, at an elevation of four thousand feet, overexposure to the fierce cold of winter. In frustration and defeat, the federal government finally released the Indians a few years after the Civil War, and the Army that had overseen and serviced the reservation abandoned the neighboring Fort Sumner, selling its many buildings to Lucien Maxwell for just five thousand dollars. Maxwell forsook his grand hacienda in Cimarron and converted the officers’ quarters into a handsome twenty-room, two-story adobe house for his wife, Doña Luz; his only son, Pedro; and his five daughters, Emilia, Maria, Sofia, Paulita, and Odila. Twenty Mexican families followed him to the fort, establishing apartments in buildings such as the company barracks, the stables, the quartermaster store, the commissary, and the Indian hospital.
And that’s where the Kid, now age nineteen, sought out Scurlock and Bowdre in December 1878, trotting his horse southwest from the Staked Plains of Texas along the Portales–Stinking Springs Road and entering the fort near the parade grounds where Pete Maxwell’s sheep were gardening the wintry grama grass. The Kid saw Beaver Smith’s saloon to his right and the great barn of a dance hall to his left, then rode the wide avenue between the Maxwell house and the former enlisted men’s barracks to an orchard at the north end and Bob Hargrove’s saloon. A hundred yards east were the old Indian corrals and then the former Indian hospital, where Doc Scurlock, Charlie Bowdre, and the sisters Herrera were housed.
Doc and Charlie had been hired as wranglers on Pete Maxwell’s horse-overrun ranch and told Billy they’d found Fort Sumner congenial, with good hunting on the treeless plains, a peach orchard on the property, weekly frolics and dances, and fame among the Mexicans for the Regulators’ stance against the House and the Santa Fe Ring in the Lincoln County War.
The Kid was mystified. “But we lost.”
“We won their hearts and minds,” said Doc.
“So we’re fixin to settle right chere,” Charlie said. “With the outlyings we got near three hunderd peoples so our women got company now, and speakin for Manuela, she’s sore put out with me forever wanderin hither and john.”
The Herrera sisters nodded their agreement.
The Kid smiled and said, “Wow, if times get any better you’ll have to hire me to help you enjoy em.”
“Well, we’re tired of falling on stony ground,” said Doc.
With a tad too much interest, Manuela inquired, “And what are jour plan?”
“It is my firm intention to put the dastardly gunplay behind me.”
Doc frowned and asked, “You get that out of some damn dime novel?”
The Kid winked. “Whip Penn and the Scoundrels of Whiskey Flats.”
* * *
With no job or responsibilities, the Kid frittered away his time practicing his shooting, knocking a tin can into a twirl down the road, trimming the skeletal branches off trees, inventing situations and reeling around to slap leather and nail the evildoer, or galloping a horse and tilting off until he could snatch his rifle from the ground.
And he gambled at faro at Beaver Smith’s or Bob Hargrove’s saloon, generally favoring placing his bets on the lacquered face cards on the green felt and mentally counting and recalling what had al
ready been dealt from the shoe so he could predict what would next fall. Like all gamblers, he said he won more than he lost, but in his case it was true.
His first Saturday in Fort Sumner there was a baile, a dance, with Doc and Charlie adding a fiddle and guitar to the trumpets and violins of a six-piece band. It wasn’t only songs from Old Mexico like “El Tecolotito” but a mix of tunes such as “Rose of Killarney” and “I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen.” Doc invited the Kid onstage to sing the 7th Infantry’s regimental march, “The Girl I Left Behind Me,” and the Kid grinned widely with the lyrics as he sang,
Such lonely thoughts my heart
Do fill since parting with my Sallie.
I seek for one as fair and gay
But find none to remind me.
How sweet the hours I passed away
With the girl I left behind me.
Women were so scarce that Pete Maxwell’s hundred cowhands and sheepherders took numbers and waited to be yelled for, were forced to dance with the oldest ladies first, and then again stirred in the hall with that form of despair that is patience.
The high stepping included a four-couple square dance called a cuadrilla, a side-by-side waltz called a varsoviana that was accompanied by the song “Put Your Little Foot Right There,” and the excitement and shrieks of the schottische, a slow polka in Europe but faster in America, with wild pivots and twirls.
With an attractive señora named Celsa Gutiérrez, the Kid flirted with a jarabe tapatío, otherwise known as a hat dance, while her liquor-addled husband dully watched from an old Victorian office chair. Then she yanked the Kid over to happily introduce him to Saval, who seemed interested only in swallowing more mescal.
Celsa was very pretty, with a pouting, pillowy mouth, copper-colored eyes, and hair more brunette than black. She told the Kid in Spanish that she and Saval had found housing in the old quartermaster store. Would he like to sleep there? They had room. The Kid said he’d give it prayerful consideration. She asked his age and confessed she was three years older. She said her maiden name was also Gutiérrez, that she and Saval were cousins. Even though her husband was within earshot, she confessed she was not in love with Saval, the marriage had been arranged, and she’d fought the family over it until she’d finally just grown tired of Saval’s ridiculous begging. Hearing that, her husband gave the Kid that woebegone, baleful look that no one wants to see, and the Kid excused himself to sit again with Manuela and Charlie, who was slumped in a chair with a fifth of Old Grand-Dad, his fiddle biding its time on his knee.