The Sons of Grady Rourke
Page 26
“Where’s Doc Blazer?”
“Gone to Santa Fe. Too hot for him lately.” Billy smiled.
“Yes.”
“You can bed down here, if you want. It’s just me.”
“Where you going, Billy?”
“Sheriff Peppin still wants my hide. Thought I’d hide out in Silver City for a piece. My ma is buried down there. She died of the consumption when I were just fifteen.”
“It’s hard, ain’t it, Billy?” Sean’s face sagged in the moonlight.
“Sometimes.” Billy smiled easily. “And sometimes, it ain’t.”
Sean nodded.
“What about you, Sean? Where you headed?”
“California.”
“Ain’t been there. Maybe one day.”
“Look me up.” Sean stepped onto the porch. He inhaled the delicious smelling coffee through the broken window.
“You can tell folks out there you know’d me when.”
“I’n do that, Billy.”
William Bonney’s clean-shaven, boyish face became serious.
“When you do, I’m thinking of changing my name.”
“Oh?”
“Yes, sir. I’m going to call myself Kid.”
“Kid Bonney?” Sean tried not to smile as he walked inside. His spurs made music on the wooden floor.
“No. Billy the Kid.”
Introduction and Acknowledgments
An historical novel should be slightly less than a post-graduate dissertation and must be slightly more than a pack of lies. Nearly all of the principal players in this story are real, historical figures from the 1878 anarchy in New Mexico now known as the Lincoln County War. Actual names are used for such persons. The author assumes responsibility for offense taken by their living heirs and descendants. Of the primary characters in this story, only Grady Rourke and his sons, and Cyrus, Melissa, and Bonita are fictional.
The author acknowledges his debt and abiding gratitude to the scholars of the Lincoln County War whose texts are the sources for the historical accuracy of this story:
Maurice G. Fulton, History of the Lincoln County War, University of Arizona Press, Tucson, 1968 (Robert N. Mullin, editor). Susan McSween’s frontispiece quotation is from page 270.
Joel Jacobsen, Such Men as Billy the Kid: The Lincoln County War Reconsidered, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 1994. John Tunstall’s frontispiece quotation is from page 20.
Donald R. Lavash, Sheriff William Brady: Tragic Hero of the Lincoln County War, Sunstone Press, Santa Fe, 1986.
John P. Wilson, Merchants, Guns and Money: The Story of Lincoln County and Its Wars, Museum of New Mexico Press, Santa Fe, 1987.