The Kid: A Novel (33 page)

The gun noise traveled far, and Gottfried Gauss hurried out of his bunkhouse to see James W. Bell stagger outside, fall face-forward into the yard, and there find finality.

Upstairs, the Kid went into Sheriff Garrett’s office and got the Whitney shotgun that Olinger often left behind on the oak desk when he went out for dinner. The Kid then hurried into his cell, but with his shackles on it was like he was in a sack race. He fell down to his knees and crouched below the sash as he heard Olinger run out of Wortley’s and call to someone on Main Street, “Was that a gunshot?”

“Can’t think what else it could be,” Bonifacio Baca said.

The Kid cocked both hammers and raised up to rest Olinger’s ten-gauge on the windowsill, finding the deputy marshal below him unlatching the fence’s gate to the courthouse yard.

“Hello, Bob,” the Kid said.

Olinger glanced upward at the worrisome voice and in that half second must have recognized what was next. The Kid then fired both Whitney barrels with their thirty-six heavy shot into the deputy’s head and chest. Ameredith R. B. Olinger was dead before he hit the ground, his face torn to pieces.

The Kid rammed his shoulder into the frail closet door to the armory, and it gave way. Choosing twin holstered pistols, a Winchester rifle, and a box of bullets, he clanked out to the hallway again and looked through the north window to Main Street. Half of Lincoln seemed to be there, but no one was venturing to do more than murmur.

Looking down the courthouse staircase, he saw Gauss hesitantly ascending. “I won’t hurt you, Gottfried. Just get me that prospector’s pickax, won’t ya?”

Whether it was in friendship or fear, Gauss obliged and went out.

The Kid sat down to load his stolen weapons, and when he finished Gauss was tossing up the pickax. Widening his legs on the stair step, the Kid slammed down the little pickax over and over again until the chain that connected the ankle irons was chewed apart.

Like the Kid himself was a gun that could go off, Gauss was holding still. And then he was given the instruction to go to Judge Ira Leonard’s stable and saddle a horse.

The Kid walked out onto the balcony with his guns. Most of Lincoln’s wary citizenry was scattered in front of the Wortley Hotel but exercising restraint in halting Billy. Whether friends or foes of the Kid, no one manifested a disposition to molest him.

He yelled, “I fulfilled Bob Olinger’s ambition and sent him to Hell! I liked Jim Bell and did not want to kill him, but it was a case of have to! I haven’t considered myself bad heretofore, but I guess I’ll have to let people know hereafter what it
is
to be a bad man! And now I just want to ride out of town without interference!”

“We ain’t gonna stop ya, Billy!” Sam Wortley called back.

The Kid collected his worldly goods and headed downstairs.

Ira Leonard’s horses were elsewhere, but Gauss managed to thieve and saddle a skittish pony belonging to a clerk of the probate court, and he tugged that to the front hitching rail. The Kid got on the frantic, dancing animal after a few failed tries and told Gauss to tell the clerk he’d be sure to send his cayuse back to him. And then the Kid peaceably rode west on Main Street toward Fort Stanton, softly singing the Spanish waltz tune “
La Golondrina
,” about a flying swallow, worn-out and tossed by the wind, looking so lost and with nowhere to hide.

- 20 -

THE MANHUNT

S
am Corbet, a former clerk at the Tunstall store, sent an anonymous letter to Silver City’s
New Southwest and Grant County Herald
frankly and dispassionately detailing the facts of the jailbreak, and that account was repeated even in New York and London.

The editor of the
Daily New Mexican
seemed exhilarated by the escape, for though he lamented that the swashbuckling outlaw was again on the loose, “one can not help but admire the Kid’s coolness and steadiness of nerve.” The jailbreak was, the editor commented, “as bold a deed as those versed in the annals of crime can recall. It so far surpasses anything of which the Kid has been guilty until now that his past offenses lose much heinousness in comparison with it, and it effectually settles the question whether the Kid is a cowardly cut-throat or a thoroughly reckless and fearless man.”

Another paper reported that the happenings in New Mexico were so sensational that Ned Buntline, the highest-paid writer in America, the author of over four hundred dime novels, “is on the way to our territory to interview various men about the outlaw and thus secure material for blood and thunder literature.”

With hard riding Garrett made the forty miles from White Oaks to Lincoln right after he got the telegram with news of the tragedy. He held a kind of vigil in the dark shed where Olinger’s and Bell’s bodies were laid out, the red blood on their shirts now dried and stiff and maroon, Olinger’s face so mutilated it could have been mistaken for a heaped plate of food.

Gottfried Gauss walked in and told him, “The undertaker is here to undertake them.”

And Garrett admitted, “I feel responsible. I knew the desperate character of the man, that he was daring and unscrupulous, and that he would sacrifice the lives of a hundred men if they stood between him and liberty. And now I realize how inadequate my precautions were.”

Walking out into the fading light of evening, he found a journalist who was waiting there and who questioned the sheriff concerning people’s worries about the Kid being on the loose. The sheriff’s mood darkened even more as he caustically responded, “Don’t matter what the public feels about it. I’ll follow the Kid to the end of time, and there will be a fierce reckoning. There will be a whirlwind he will reap while desperately begging for my forgiveness.”

*  *  *

A quarter mile out of Lincoln after the jailbreak on the night of April 28, the Kid turned north to cross the rushing Rio Bonito and headed to the foothills of the Capitán Mountains. In Salazar Canyon, he found the
jacal
of José Cordova, who chiseled off the rivets to his ankle shackles, and near Las Tablas in the wee hours, the Kid woke up Yginio Salazar, who was now eighteen and still idolized his cousin.

Rattling with adrenaline, the Kid told Salazar about his jail escape and his killings, and Yginio took it all in with the solace of approval, telling the Kid that Olinger, for sure, needed killing and with Bell he was given no option. It was kill or be killed in a war that seemed to be never-ending. “Your Spanish friends love you and we’ll all hide you,” Yginio said. “But wouldn’t Old Mexico be safest?”

“There’s no job for me there. I need to get some loot first,” said the Kid.

Exactly as he’d promised he’d do, the Kid slapped the hindquarters of the Indian pony he’d stolen, and it trotted back to its owner in Lincoln. Then he stole a prized roan stallion and headed south past Agua Azul, weaving through shady forests of ponderosa pine and spruce to overnight at the farm of a John Tunstall ally. There he traded for a fresh horse and headed farther south to the Rio Peñasco, riding in melancholy over the sunny Los Feliz rangelands where he used to cowboy in order to get to the neighboring ranch and
choza
of Harry’s friend John Meadows. The Kid told his tales of woe, and then Meadows, too, urged him to continue down to Old Mexico for a fresh start. Ciudad Juárez was on the Rio Grande a little over one hundred miles southwest, and in the opposite direction was Fort Sumner, half again as far. The Kid failed to mention Paulita as he said his old friends there were enough of a draw that he felt the fort ought to be his destination, telling Meadows that he’d just hole up with shepherd pals for the summer or until he’d earned enough cash to head south.

John Meadows scolded the twenty-one-year-old that Pat Garrett had relatives in Sumner. The sheriff would hear he was there and find him and kill him, or the Kid would have to kill Garrett.

But the Kid would not be dissuaded, and rode northeast through sun-bleached grasses as high as his horse’s hocks, zephyrs dipping and lifting great swaths of fresh wild barley that seemed to rise and roll like the swells of a storm green ocean he’d never see.

*  *  *

On May 3, 1881, Lew Wallace again published the government’s offer of a five-hundred-dollar reward for William H. Bonney. Announced via the newspapers, it did not mention “dead or alive,” but those conditions were presumed.

The Kid understood that, yet he still went northeast 150 miles to the locale of his familiars, walking the final 20 miles from Conejo Springs because his stolen bay stallion got spooked one night and galloped away. He was footsore, parched, and exhausted when he got to Fort Sumner and the Indian hospital on May 7. “I feel like I been rode hard and put away wet,” he said, and Manuela Herrera, whose new baby boy was sleeping, prepared the Kid a bath.

Watching him lather his hair with soap as she poured in more hot water, the young widow asked in Spanish how long it had been since he’d been with a woman, and he admitted that with jail and being on the run it was too long ago to remember. She said she’d been without for six months, since before Charlie died, and as she toweled him off she saw his interest and they quietly took comfort in each other’s bodies.

His hands were still desiring her afterward, but she was nettled with concern as she asked in Spanish, “Why are you here?”

He answered in Spanish, “Here’s where my friends are.”

“Celsa? Paulita?”

“And you. And others.”

“I’m not jealous. We can share. But don’t you see you’ll be found out? Even getting here you were noticed. Many love you and will keep the secret. Some won’t.”

He laid his cheek against the scented crook of her neck as his free hand idly floated over her seascape of rise and fall. “I have no roots anywhere else. I have no ‘at home’ but here. And I feel doomed. Like I’m riding to Hell on a fast horse. I’m not afraid of dying, but I don’t want to die alone. I don’t want some no one finding me finished off and asking a sheriff, ‘Who’s that?’ ”

The baby woke and cooed to himself, but then hunger changed his mind and he cried until his mother got to him.

The Kid found fresh clothes for himself in the trunk he’d left behind, and after a skillet of fajitas, there was nothing for him to do on a Saturday night but steal a fine horse hitched in front of Beaver Smith’s saloon and ride it fifteen miles along the Rio Pecos to a Mexican shepherd’s camp.

The horse’s owner hammered a barracks door to wake up Deputy Sheriff Barney Mason, and he promised the rancher he’d launch an investigation. Because of the Kid’s fame, he was no problem to track, just a “
Donde está el Chivato
?” was enough to get children to give Mason a heading, and he and a friend, an oddly unarmed cattleman, got to the shepherd’s camp near Buffalo Arroyo that Sunday evening.

The man hunters were still a quarter mile off when the Kid spied them on the open range of sideoats grama grass, and, embittered by Mason’s abandonment of their former friendship, he enlisted four Mexican friends to back him up with rifles as the agents of justice ever more gradually rode in.

Some years later, Paulita Maxwell recalled that whenever Billy rode into Fort Sumner, the fearful Deputy Mason would find a reason to ride out, and he lost courage again when from a hundred yards he saw the Kid rise up and shoulder his Winchester. The deputy felt it unlikely he could be hit from that distance, but he wasn’t in fact
certain
, so he wheeled his horse fully around and raced off. And he would soon hurriedly collect his wife and child, head to Roswell, and have no other part in this drama.

But the cattleman found the wherewithal to hold up his hands as he ambled his own horse forward, and he was surprised at the Kid’s affability as the cattleman told him how much the owner wanted his stolen horse back. It was a gift from his late wife.

With a smile the Kid said, “I’m real upset that I inconvenienced anyone, but you see I’m without transportation otherwise. When circumstances are better with me, I’ll either return his horse or give him good money for it.”

And with relief the cattleman said, “Well, my business here is done,” and he cantered off.

The Kid did return the widower’s horse the next noon, doffing his hat to the man in a much-obliged gesture, and then he stole another.

*  *  *

Although the Kid was still on the loose, on May 13, Governor Lew Wallace signed a pro forma warrant of execution as if the hanging were going to happen in Lincoln that day as planned. And then he returned to packing for his long journey east on a Pullman sleeper to Indiana in order to finally join his wife, Susan, and then go onward to the Port of New York and, a few weeks later, to his ministry to the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire. He served four years there, but with Grover Cleveland, a Democrat, taking the presidential oath of office in 1885, Lew Wallace retired from diplomacy and politics in general to focus on his writing, publishing a biography of Benjamin Harrison, the novel
The Prince of India
, and the narrative poem
The Wooing of Malkatoon
. Surpassing even Harriet Beecher Stowe in book sales, he became a hugely wealthy man, and at age seventy-seven he died of gastritis while in the midst of writing a two-volume autobiography in which Billy the Kid was hardly mentioned.

*  *  *

On May 19, the
Las Vegas Gazette
either found out or inferred, “Billy keeps well-posted on matters in the outside world as he is well thought of by many of the Mexicans who take him all the newspapers they can get hold of. He is not far from Fort Sumner and has not left that neighborhood since he rode over from Lincoln after making his break.”

Like the town of Lincoln after its civil war, Fort Sumner and its outlying
placitas
were losing hundreds of residents because of the wildness and continuing violence, and that left as its majority Mexicans who were generally sympathetic to the Kid, as well as some hard and dangerous characters who shrugged at the Kid’s outlawry, and no more than a dozen Anglos who followed all the potboiled accounts of his wickedness and were terrified of him.