The Kid: A Novel (21 page)

Dear Sir I have heard that You will give one thousand dollars for my person, which as I can understand means alive as a Witness against those that murdered Mr. Chapman. If it is required that I would appear at Court, I have indictments against me for things that happened in the late Lincoln County War and am afraid to give up because my Enemies would Kill me. If it is in your power to annul those indictments I hope you will do so, so as to give me a chance to explain myself. I have no Wish to fight any more, indeed I have not raised an arm since your November proclamation. Concerning my character, I refer You to any of the Citizens of Lincoln, for the majority of them are my Friends and have been helping me all they could. I am also called Kid Antrim, but Antrim is my stepfather’s name. Waiting for an answer, I remain your obedient servant.

The governor invited him to Santa Fe, and a gussied-up Kid got there at night on March 17, 1879, St. Patrick’s Day. An Irish festival in the plaza carried the noise of the kettles, pans, and horns of a shivaree as the Kid walked up to a one-story, 350-foot-wide, porticoed Spanish palace of whitewashed adobe that was constructed in the 1600s. He knocked many times on a rough door of sawn wood, and it was finally opened by an annoyed official in a frock suit, who flinched at seeing the Kid’s Winchester rifle and holstered six-shooter.

“You must be Kid Bonney.”

“Yes sir.”

“You’re late.”

“Had to ride forever to get here.”

“Hand over your weapons.” With some hesitation, the Kid did as instructed, and as the official carried them away he told the Kid, “The governor is still dining. Wait for him in his office.” He nodded his head. “End of the hallway.”

The floor of the hallway was earthen but softened by an ill-matched variety of English, Persian, and Navajo rugs. A faint stream of dirt was trickling through a cleft in the ceiling, and fronds of water stain slurred the walls. In the governor’s office, four hurricane lamps were lit, and a grand, ambassadorial desk was heaped with books such as
Antiquities of the Jews
by Flavius Josephus,
The Lands of the Saracen
by Bayard Taylor,
Innocents Abroad
by Mark Twain, and a King James Version of the Holy Bible that was bookmarked with many torn scraps of paper. Tacked to a wall was a map called
Terra Sancta sive Palestina
, whatever that was. Billy saw a cardboard stationery box that was labeled
Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ
, and a quill pen and jar of India ink were next to a half-filled page of handwriting. The Kid stooped over it to read: “Let the reader try to fancy it; let him first look down upon the arena, and see it glistening in its frame of dull-gray granite walls; let him then, in this perfect field, see the chariots, light of wheel, very graceful, and as ornate as paint and burnishing can make them.”

Heel-thumping boot steps caused the Kid to scurry from behind the desk and stand beside a yellow tapestried armchair. The patrician governor hurried in, wearing a dark broadcloth suit and worrying his mouth with a toothpick as he glanced at Billy and said, “Sit,” then paused as he sternly added, “And take off your hat in a governor’s presence.”

The Kid complied.

Lewis Wallace was the son of a former governor of Indiana and had left Wabash College to practice law with his father. Elected to the state senate, he was later appointed to the office of Indiana’s adjutant general, then joined in the Civil War, where he became the youngest general in the Union Army at the age of thirty-four and was a judge in the trial of the eight coconspirators in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Because lawyering bored him, he wrote a novel about the Aztecs and twice ran for Congress as a Republican, losing both elections, but in 1876 he was on the commission to re-count the presidential vote in Louisiana and Florida, and he reversed the tally in favor of Rutherford B. Hayes, who, as president, rewarded him with the governorship of the New Mexico Territory in 1878. Lew Wallace was now fifty-one, a hawkish, fierce-eyed man with long, graying hair aslant on his skull, a full beard that seemed almost a bib for his chest, and a wide mustache that concealed his mouth and forced him now to comb reminders of his dinner from it.

To be ingratiating, as was his habit, the Kid said, “I lived in Indianapolis for a while. We got Indiana in common.”

Lew Wallace seemed unimpressed. “You’re younger than I imagined,” he said.

“Yet, I’m a full-grown man.”

“Aged what?”

“Nineteen.”

Wallace looked around his office with dismay. “And are you seeing for the first time our filthy, falling-down
palace
?”

“Heck, every house I ever lived in could fit inside this.”

“Oh yes, I have cavernous chambers, but there are vermin in the kitchen and holes in the roof. A few rooms have cedar rafters that are so overweighted with mud that they sag with the curvature of a pirate’s cutlass. Inviting my dear wife to join me here would be the acme of indecency.”

The Kid had no idea what to say, and he found himself fidgeting.

Wallace asked, “Have you heard politics called the art of the possible?”

“Nope,” the Kid answered, then worried that was rude so he added, “Your Excellency.”

“Well, here it’s the art of the
impossible
. All calculations based on my earlier military and political experiences absolutely
fail
in New Mexico with so many officeholders on the take from those seeking commercial advantage.” The governor squeezed a pair of rimless pince-nez on his nose and lifted his box of manuscript to get W. H. Bonney’s letter from underneath it. “And so I welcome problems I feel I can handle, and one is outlawry in Lincoln County. I shall push those Black Knights without rest.”

With “Black Knights” Wallace was alluding to an Arthurian romance from the Middle Ages, so the reference went over Billy’s head. “Like I say, I’m just hoping for a clean slate and citizenhood. Your note to me gave promise of absolute protection.”

“Yes, and I shall be true to that promise.” Rereading the Kid’s letter, Lew Wallace asked, “You mention indictments. What kind?”

“Territorial for the killing of Sheriff William Brady, but I was just one of a half dozen shooters. And he deserved to die. The federal one was for the killing of Andrew Roberts on the Mescalero reservation, which I definitely did not do.” The Kid forgot to mention his killing of Windy Cahill in self-defense, but Arizona seemed to have forgotten that, too.

“You would end up testifying against yourself in all likelihood.”

“And that means?”

“Histories and narratives that would include your own activities. But that’s neither here nor there, for I am prepared to offer you clemency in return for your full, accurate, and truthful testimony before a grand jury.”

“Clemency?”

“Leniency, forbearance. You’ll go scot-free with my own official pardon for all your prior misdeeds.”

The Kid said he liked the sound of that but confessed the fear that those criminals he named would have him killed.

Wallace told him he’d order a sham arrest and lock him in handcuffs, then jail him with instructions of protective custody. The government would also be arresting those involved in the homicide of Huston Ingraham Chapman. And now, if the terms were agreeable to him, he could begin naming names.

“We ought to have all this in writing,” Billy said.

The Kid failed to understand the governor’s sneer as he said, “Not until I have your testimony.”

Which he guessed was a reasonable hitch to the bargain. The Kid offered the names of those who had joined in the parley on February 18, and then with hesitation he asked, “You
are
staying put as governor, right?”

Lew Wallace seemed defeated and sorrowful as he rocked back in his chair. “Oh, there will soon arrive the time when I have become fed up with this place. Then another governor will be in this hovel of a
palacio
and he’ll do just as I did, have the same ideas, undertake the same vain attempts, and with the same heartiness of effort he’ll soon cool in his zeal, then finally say, ‘All right, let her drift.’ ”

The Kid was thinking the governor could have depressed the devil, but he stood and smiled as he said in good night, “Well, sir, I guess it’s time to pee on the fire and call home the hound dogs.”

The governor winced at the vulgarity and shooed the petty criminal off, saying, “I have to get back to my novel.”

*  *  *

Acting on further information, the governor sent a sixty-man cavalry detachment to Jimmy Dolan’s Carrizozo ranch and overwhelmed William Campbell, Jacob B. Mathews, and Jesse Evans, who were arrested and taken to the Fort Stanton stockade. But Jesse Evans and Billy Campbell convinced an infantry recruit from Texas to help them slink out of their loose imprisonment. Evans seemed to have the Kid’s knack for getting out of jails. Billy Campbell “skedaddled for Texas,” as Evans put it, and was never heard from again.

Worried that the escapees would be seeking vengeance, the Kid and Tom Folliard volunteered to be handcuffed by Sheriff George Kimbrell and were escorted to a friendly confinement in Juan Patrón’s store, where they played Mexican monte with the sheriff and other visitors and the Kid won big as the “house bank.” Writing of their jailing to the secretary of the interior, Wallace sarcastically noted, “A precious specimen named ‘the Kid’ whom the Sheriff is holding in the Plaza, as it is called, is an object of tender regard. Singing and music can be heard in the night as minstrels of the village actually serenade the fellow in his prison.”

Lew Wallace was so intrigued by the judicial intelligence of Susan McSween’s current lawyer that he chose Ira E. Leonard, a former judge in Missouri, to ensure fulfillment of the governor’s interests in the forthcoming spring term of the district court. But Wallace may also have foreseen that his efforts would fail, for he disassociated himself from the process.

Judge Warren Bristol and District Attorney William Logan Rynerson got to Fort Stanton for the grand jury proceedings on Sunday, April 13, and immediately confirmed the habeas corpus petitions—writs against illegal imprisonment—that were submitted on behalf of fifteen men associated with robberies and murder in the Lincoln County War. The fifteen were released from the fort’s stockade after go-and-sin-no-more instructions from Judge Bristol.

The grand jury was constituted with friends of Alexander McSween and handed down some two hundred indictments: against Lieutenant Colonel Dudley and ex-Sheriff Dad Peppin for arson; against Billy Campbell, Jimmy Dolan, and their accessory Jesse Evans for the homicide of Huston Chapman; a hundred against people already dead; and one against Tom Folliard for horse theft.

Tom Folliard and J. B. Mathews were interrogated about their activities and, according to a prior agreement, were then given immunity from further prosecution under the governor’s proclamation of amnesty.

But when the Kid offered his full, accurate, and truthful testimony about the night of Huston Chapman’s murder and waited for District Attorney Rynerson to do just as he’d done for Tom and J.B., instead the scowling and freakishly tall and Rasputin-like Rynerson objected, “We find in the law no precedence for the governor’s presumption of the right to offer a homicidal felon a promise of clemency. The state therefore requests a continuance of prosecution.”

Judge Bristol granted it.

Sidney Wilson then took up the defense of Jimmy Dolan, urging a change of venue to Doña Ana County, for the partisan feelings in Lincoln County made a fair trial of his client impossible. Judge Bristol agreed. The Kid’s hearing for the murder of Sheriff Brady was shifted there as well.

*  *  *

Soon after the gavel fell on the grand jury proceedings, Fort Stanton also hosted the military court of inquiry that was meant to establish if Lieutenant Colonel Dudley should be court-martialed for the arson of the McSween residence, abetting in Alex’s murder, looting the Tunstall mercantile store, and “procuring base and wicked men to make false and slanderous charges against Mrs. McSween in order to ruin her reputation.”

The first to testify on the witness stand was His Excellency Governor Lew Wallace, who was humiliated by Henry Waldo, a partner in the firm of Catron & Elkins. The vast majority of Waldo’s objections were sustained, and he forced the governor to admit that he’d gotten there from the East months after the incidents in question, his only acquaintance with affairs in Lincoln County being through the hearsay of intermediaries. The presiding judge was condescending in excusing the governor from further attendance at the inquiry.

Susan McSween did even worse, failing to recall things, seeming disinterested and confused, and confessing that she’d not fully read Ira Leonard’s affidavit concerning the arson of her home and the murder of her husband. She was soon to marry George Barber in Lincoln and was addled by wedding details.

Then “William Bonney, called the Kid, also Antrim,” took the stand and answered Waldo’s questions, in general regarding “Where were you on the nineteenth of July last, and what, if anything, did you see of the movements and actions of the troops that day?” After two tiring days of telling and retelling what happened during the Big Killing, Billy was told, “You may retire.”

Lieutenant Colonel Nathan A. M. Dudley then enjoyed the affirmations and encomiums of a host of Alexander A. McSween’s enemies, including Jimmy Dolan, Dad Peppin, post surgeon Daniel Appel, J. B. Mathews, and Sheriff’s Deputy Bob Olinger.

Ira Leonard sent a pessimistic report to the governor, calling Dudley “impetuous, vindictive, overbearing, self-conceited, and meddlesome” and noting, “I am thoroughly and completely disgusted with their proceedings.”

The Kid registered his own disgust on June 17, 1879, by wringing the iron cuffs off his hands and dangling the irons to his hospitable jailers in the Juan Patrón store, saying, “Boys, I’m tired of this,” and then just walking out the door and heading toward Fort Sumner on his stabled horse.

*  *  *

Foxes have dens and birds have nests, but the Kid had nowhere to lay his head. Either he slept in rooms above the saloons in Puerto de Luna and Anton Chico or he overnighted with Doc Scurlock in Fort Sumner or Charlie Bowdre in his new wrangler’s job at the Thomas J. Yerby ranch, or he sang for his dinner in the huts of the ever-welcoming Mexican sheepherders. José Trujillo said of him, “
A todo el mundo le gusta El Chivato. Su mirada penetra hasta el corazón
.” Everybody likes the Kid. His face goes straight to the heart.