The Kid: A Novel (26 page)

Ever slow on the uptake, Tom Folliard asked, “You mean Alex McSween’s house?”

The Kid nodded. “And lived to tell the tale.”

Whiskey Jim Greathouse went outside with his cook, feeling it safer to hang with the White Oaks contingent, and to stir up aggravation he told Hudgens, “Kid Bonney says you’ll only take him as a corpse.”

“We don’t just want the Kid. We want Dave Rudabaugh and Billie Wilson, too.”

Whiskey Jim shrugged. “Well, if you want them, go and take them.”

Because he was famous in White Oaks, Billie Wilson was the first who was asked to surrender. He declined for the time being but asked to talk to Jimmy Carlyle, a young farrier who’d shoed horses for him in his livery stable and was, like Wilson, originally from Trumbull County, Ohio. Whiskey Jim offered himself as a hostage to guarantee the deputy’s safety, and Carlyle handed off his rifle and holstered pistol and held his hands in yellow gloves high as he waded forward through knee-high snow to the ranch house.

Young Billie Wilson welcomed him inside with a tin cup that he sloshed full of whiskey. “To take the chill off,” he said.

Carlyle drank it all down and held the tin cup out for another ration.

The Kid asked, “You wearing my gloves?”

“I just found them somewheres.”

“And I just forgot em. Hand em over.”

Carlyle complied.

“You been out all night?” the Kid asked.

“Yep.”

“Your men feelin cranky?”

“Well, darn cold and hungry.”

The Kid looked to the cook. “Let’s get this officer of the law some breakfast.”

“Anybody else?” the cook asked.

Hands went up.

Rudabaugh walked into the front room, and Carlyle winced at the overpowering stink of him. “Shall I kill him?” Rudabaugh asked, like he’d just offered the man a fine seat at the table.

“I’ll have to see your papers,” the Kid told Carlyle. “Your warrants for our arrests.”

“How was we s’posed to get papers and chase y’all at the same time?”

Rudabaugh slugged him in the mouth. “Don’t sass him.”

Carlyle felt his teeth with his tongue, found an incisor floating in blood, and spit it onto the floor. Ever untidy, Rudabaugh didn’t seem to mind. Bowdre was watching and told Carlyle, “It’ll feel better when it quits hurtin.”

“Here’s our conditions,” the Kid said. “Your posse rides off to White Oaks and we go elsewhere.”

“We’d just be giving up!”

“Exactly.”

“We got thirteen guns fixed on this ranch house and you’re actin like you got the upper hand!”

“Don’t you go getting my dander up,” Rudabaugh said and held his gun to Carlyle’s head. “Seems to me we
do
have the upper hand, far as you’re concerned.”

Carlyle glumly finished a fresh dose of whiskey, and Rudabaugh holstered his Colt.

The cook served steak and eggs, and Bowdre, Wilson, and Folliard hunkered over their dishware as they chatted about the coldest they’d ever been. Rudabaugh finished one rib eye and tore into another. The Kid cautioned, “Easy on the chow there, Dave. You’re swelling up like a tick on a bloodhound.”

“I like to be full up,” he said and jawed the meat with a wide-open mouth.

The Kid looked out at loitering men fogging the air with each irritated breath and trying to stamp feeling into their feet. A few aimed at his face in the window. They seemed close to storming the house. “Your pals are getting restless,” he said.

Rudabaugh told Carlyle, “We’ll kill em all. You
know
we will.”

“You’re outnumbered.”

“Don’t matter. We’re professional killers. They ain’t.”

“I haf chores to do?” the German cook said. “I haf to go outside now?”

The Kid waved him out.

Soon, though, the cook was back again with a note from Deputy Sheriff Hudgens stating that if Carlyle was not free in five minutes, the posse would execute their hostage, Greathouse.

Rudabaugh grinned at Carlyle. “Where do you want my bullet? Ear? Eye? Lotsa choices.”

Wanting to get as far away as possible from Dirty Dave, Carlyle rose from the breakfast table and tilted with intoxication as he sought the Kid. “Would you,” he began, and just then a loose and impatient shot was fired from outside. In his drunkenness, James Bermuda Carlyle seemed to think it was from inside, from Rudabaugh, and in a sudden panic he dashed for freedom, crashing through the window glass and wrecking the sash before getting shot by his White Oaks friends,
bang bang bang
! He fell into the snow, crawled just a few yards trailing ribbons and scarves of blood, and then gave himself up to death.

“You idiots!” Hudgens shouted. “That wasn’t Kid Bonney! It was Jimmy!”

Still the firing went on for a while, with sixty or seventy bullets pocking the adobe and making that
vwimp
sound as they zipped into the house and at the Kid’s command “Don’t shoot!” missed the gang that was not yet bothering to fire back. In the chaos and confusion outside, Whiskey Jim Greathouse just stepped backward from the frustrated posse and got on a horse that his partner Fred Kuch trotted forward. They both galloped off without getting shot at.

*  *  *

Who knows how it went? The Kid claimed the White Oaks shooters were dispirited over having killed Carlyle and slunk off in their despondency. But so much was unexplained. Greathouse and Kuch rode back a full day afterward and found Jimmy Carlyle still dead there on his back, frozen stiff, with snowflakes collecting in his gaping mouth and eye sockets. Their way station had been torched and was nothing but hissing rafters, charred adobe, and defeated furniture. There were no signs of blood anywhere except around Carlyle; no sign at all of the Rustlers. Hoofprints seemed headed west to White Oaks and east toward Fort Sumner.

*  *  *

In Roswell, J. C. Lea got word of the Kid and his gang’s depredations in and around White Oaks and on November 27 sent a descriptive letter to Deputy Sheriff Pat Garrett, who’d already collected a posse comitatus that included his gambling buddy Barney Mason, a half dozen neighbors from his four-section homestead outside Roswell, and the Lincoln deputies James W. Bell and Robert Olinger. Riding up the Rio Pecos, they achieved Fort Sumner and found out Tom Folliard and Charlie Bowdre had been seen in the vicinity of Las Cañaditas, twenty miles to the northeast, on rangeland that belonged to the cattleman Thomas J. Yerby. Garrett held a warrant for Charles Bowdre for the homicide of Andrew Roberts at Blazer’s Mill, so after a hasty breakfast in Beaver Smith’s saloon, the posse of nine men grudgingly took off across a prairie deep with snow, favoring the vales and ravines to stay hidden from the criminals, with Garrett frequently forging up steep hills on his own to scan with field glasses a periwinkle blue horizon.

Eight miles from the Yerby ranch house, the deputy sheriff spied a red-haired horseman a half mile off who could have been Tom Folliard rocking in his saddle on a splendid filly thoroughbred, heading east. The geography was familiar enough to Garrett that he wisely elected to take a shortcut through a gorge that was hard going with its yucca, sagebrush, and tricky shale, but he soon got the posse within three hundred yards of the horseman they sought.

Tom glanced south and saw a sudden gang of nine riders hurtling toward him with guns in their hands. But their mustangs were scuffling through hillocks of snowdrift and seemed overused after a far journey, while his was a racehorse that vaulted forward at the first jab of his spurs, all four hooves flying with thrilling speed as he crouched like a jockey over her withers and crest and fired six rapid shots behind him. They could not overcome gravity and gashed up spits of snow far ahead of the challenging posse.

Even having the advantage of an angle toward the Yerby ranch house, Garrett could see the gap between himself and Folliard widening as the possemen’s own horses heaved for air and gradually gave out. He yanked his Winchester out of its saddle scabbard and halted his progress to fire three useless rifle shots at the fleeing thief, then slow-walked to Yerby’s before the government horses could keel over dead.

Tom Folliard had raced up to the Yerby barn and called, “Charlie, you in there?”

Wearing a blacksmith’s apron, the wrangler hunched outside, shading his eyes from the sun.

“Sheriff’s men are after us.” Which got his attention. Folliard freed his left boot from the stirrup, and Bowdre inserted his own and swung up behind the saddle cantle and hugged Folliard as the filly racehorse exploded forward again, Bowdre waving back to a concerned Manuela on the bunkhouse porch as she watched her husband vamoose.

After a quarter mile, Folliard veered the horse toward a deep coulee, and a jouncing Bowdre called, “Where the hell you goin?”

“To get outta sight,” Folliard called back.

And Bowdre yelled, “But there’s a creek!”

Exactly then the racehorse crashed through the snow and ice in the coulee to four feet of ice water below, and Bowdre fell off the filly as she floundered in fear, thoroughly drenching her riders. “This is just awful!” Folliard yelled, but the horse finally found a purchase and scrabbled up onto an earthen bank and shook herself like a dog.

Bowdre wetly crouched in the snow, holding himself and shivering. He said, “I’ve seen fun times before and this ain’t it.”

When his posse got to the hitching post in front of an adobe bunkhouse, Garrett found no sign of Folliard, Bowdre, or even Yerby. Garrett furtively sidled inside the bunkhouse, his pistol impatient beside his cheek, and found weeping on cots a pregnant Manuela and Mrs. Herrera, her mother. His Spanish was too poor to fully understand their gibberish and finger wagging, so he went out again. He told Deputy Kip McKinney, “They are hailing our advent with terror-born lamentations.”

Reconnoitering Yerby’s property, Garrett’s posse found four horses they decided were stolen and a pair of mules that the deputy sheriff took as his own because he pretended they could have been those purloined by Mose Dedrick from a Wells Fargo stagecoach depot on the Rio Grande and perhaps later sold to the Kid for his fanciful ranch in Los Portales. Which is where they went next, fifty miles southeast of Fort Sumner, hoping to take possession of the sixty cattle rustled from John Newcomb at Agua Azul. The Kid’s hideout near Los Portales was just twenty miles from the Texas border. The Kid having neglected their feeding, a bony yearling and a calf were hungrily tearing dead leaves from whatever manzanita branches were above the snow. But there was at least a fluent freshwater spring that flowed under ice next to a fifteen-foot-high quarry of feldspar, gypsum, and mica that looked like a layer cake dropped from a height on the flatlands, its only welcome being the dark mouth of a cave. The Kid had bragged about his homestead as if it were a magnificent castle, but that was him dreaming again. Garrett scrabbled up to the entrance to find nothing but a damp emptiness, a rolled-up mattress, a pile of foul blankets, and some rusty tin utensils. With no food there other than a shaker of salt and sack of flour infested with weevils, the posse slaughtered the skinny yearling and filled up on steaks and rump roasts before wintering that night in the cave and heading back to Fort Sumner in the morning.

And that afternoon a postman walked into Beaver Smith’s saloon to deliver a letter to Pat F. Garrett from Charlie Bowdre, saying he was anxious to parley with the deputy sheriff and wondered if he could make bail should he ever give himself up. With dickering in mind, Charlie offered to meet him one-on-one the next afternoon in the military cemetery.

*  *  *

Looking everywhere around him, Bowdre kept his afternoon appointment and found the deputy sheriff smoking a cheroot in a long gray Civil War overcoat just like his own, Garrett’s right thigh resting on a low, whitewashed cemetery wall, his left boot on the ground. He gently lifted his handgun from his side holster and laid it a foot from him on the wall. The outlaw likewise rested his cavalry pistol on the headstone of a private killed in the Indian Wars. Bowdre had a misbegotten, hangdog look.

“You feeling ill, Charlie?”

“Well, I was better, but I got over it.”

“You just need your rest.”

“You, too, I spect. Hear tell you been runnin ragged.”

Garrett flicked ash from his cheroot with a fingernail and with a formality he thought of as Southern gallantry, he said, “I have been told by higher-ups that you’ll be needing to forswear your evil life and forsake your disreputable associates. After that, every effort will be made by good citizens such as Joseph Lea in Roswell to procure your release on bail and give you the opportunity to redeem yourself.” Hiding his disgust, he thought, Garrett blandly focused on the criminal before him, and Bowdre saw the irrational nullity in his eyes, each as nickel gray as a gun barrel.

Seeking to appease, Bowdre said, “I’d do it if nothing broke or came untwisted, but more’n likely it would. You ain’t the onliest lawman after us.”

“You’d be safe in jail for a piece and probably get out in time to see your child born. But right now you have to give me something to go on.”

“Like?”

“Cease all commerce with the Kid and his gang.”

“Cain’t hardly not feed em if they’s to wander to Yerby’s. But I won’t harbor em more’n needs be.”

Garrett stood from the wall and slapped snow from his overcoat. He took a final drag from his cheroot, dropped it, and squashed it out with his boot. “The upshot is this, Charlie. If you don’t quit them and surrender, you’ll be pretty sure to get captured or killed. We are in resolute pursuit of the gang and will sleep on the trail until we take you all in, dead or alive.”

Charlie Bowdre couldn’t help but smirk as he said, “Mr. Garrett, you may be hangin your basket a little higher than you can reach.”

And then they parted ways.

- 17 -

THE OFF-SCOURING OF SOCIETY

O
n December 3, 1880, J. W. Koogler—a close friend of the late Huston Chapman—wrote an editorial in the
Las Vegas Gazette
stirring up a campaign against the Kid, Charlie Bowdre, Dave Rudabaugh, and “others of equally unsavory reputation,” claiming they were “hard characters, the off-scouring of society, fugitives from justice, and desperadoes by profession.”