The Kid: A Novel (5 page)

Henry took a second to interpret the meaning, and then he stood up in his fury. “You son of a bitch! Don’t you say nothing about my mother!”

Windy hauled off and hit the Kid so hard in the stomach that he lost all his air in one of those will-I-ever-breathe-again
oof
s and fell to his knees. And that was not all. Windy jabbed his stovepipe boot against the Kid’s left shoulder, forcing him over onto the floor, and then he got up and lifted the Kid like he weighed no more than a gunnysack of sugar and slammed him down hard.

Like a child, Henry yelled, “Quit it!”

“But I’m just beginning to have fun!” the smithy said, and he wrestled the Kid up on his feet only to fiercely throw him down again. And then he squatted on him, his tonnage bucking up and down on Henry’s chest and denying the Kid inhalation. Windy slapped the Kid’s cheek and said, “You doll yourself up like some country jake . . . you waltz in here all brazen.” Windy slapped his other cheek. “Horse thieves oughta be in the hoosegow or strung up with a noose.”

The Kid caught enough breath to say, “Get off me, you sloppy bag of guts!”

Cantina drunks were hooting and urging him on as Cahill found mean enjoyment in smacking the Kid’s hotheaded face left and right, reddening it scarlet.

Henry yelled, “Stop it! You’re hurting me!” like he was ten.

“I
want
to hurt you! That’s why I got you down,” Cahill said. But he seemed unaware that the Kid’s right hand was loose and squirming beneath Windy’s heavy hocks to find his hidden .44.

“You know what? Maybe I’ll bite off your nose so you won’t be so perty.” And Windy was flattening on the Kid, with his head sinking low and his teeth looking hungry for a meal of the Kid’s face, when the gun struggled its way to Windy’s belly and there was a loud
bang!
and the odor of singed shirt.

Windy said no more than “Oh” and fell onto his back, both hands holding his bleeding side. “I’m gut-shot,” he told the cantina.

“Well, he’s a goner then,” a farmer said to no one in particular. “Either he’ll bleed out or venoms will rot his insides.”

Waving gun smoke away, another man said, “Seen it happen. Ugly way to die.”

Windy’s face was squinched up in his agony as Henry scooted out from under him and got up on his shoes. Looking around, he saw no one felt called to do anything about him. “It was self-defense,” he explained. “It’s the Code of the West. He gave me no selection.”

Everybody was staring at him and noticing the still-hot gun in his hand.

The Kid then ran outside into a rain torrent and found a racehorse named Cashaw tied up next to his own, and stole the fleet Cashaw to get his gatherings in the tent of Sorghum Smith’s hay camp. The racehorse was soon run out with the getting there, so the Kid set it free to trot back to its owner, then stole another horse in Sorghum’s corral and headed east through high desert and monsoons, swapping used-up horses for fresh ones all the way to the New Mexico Territory. The practice was called hedge hopping.

Francis P. Cahill died in the extreme pain of internal hemorrhaging and sepsis the next morning, August 18, 1877, being survived by one sister in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and another in San Francisco. An inquest was soon held at the Hotel de Luna, and the six members of the jury ruled, “The shooting was criminal and unjustifiable, and Henry Antrim, alias Kid, is guilty thereof.”

Kid Antrim was already certain he was wanted for murder and changed his Christian names to their originals: William Henry. And for his alias he chose his mother’s maiden name of Bonney. William H. Bonney was a for-the-time-being thing, yet it would hold fast in people’s memories in places he’d never been.

- 5 -

THE BOYS

H
iding out in Apache Tejo, south of Silver City, the Kid affected moccasins, buckskin trousers, a long-sleeved white guayabera shirt, and a floppy sombrero. Even Mexicans at first thought him Mexican until they noticed his
ojos azules
. Rustling stray calves from herds along the Rio Grande became his nightly livelihood, and in the afternoons he practiced for hours on end to become a pistolero, quick-drawing and twirling his Samuel Colt, shooting it from whichever hand until the gun barrel and cylinder were hot enough to burn his skin. Even showed off for his compadres by spurring his stolen horse into a gallop and tipping over from his saddle to fire from underneath the horse’s flank and whang fruit cans into flight. His friends hooted and yelled and whistled their flabbergasted praise.

Word came to the Kid that Richard Knight, the proprietor of the meat market in Silver City, had won the contract for a stagecoach depot on his livestock ranch near the Burro Mountains, about twenty miles southeast of their former hometown. And because of a smallpox epidemic in the city, Josie Antrim had taken employment there as a horse tender.

Wanting to visit his older kinfolk, the fugitive from justice rode over to the depot with two Indian friendlies and, being judged Mexican, was at first scowled at through a dining room window by Mrs. Sara McKnight. She then recognized the Kid and jerked her head left, nosing him to the horse stables. The friendlies walked their horses to the water tank and drank of it themselves.

Josie was currying a Clydesdale in a stall with what’s called a dandy brush when he happened to glance over the animal’s croup and was surprised by his little brother. He let the brush drop to the straw and hurried around the Clydesdale saying, “Oh, oh, oh, Henry!”

The Kid told him, “It’s Billy again.”

Josie embraced him hard and rocked him from side to side. “Billy, is it? Well, I always did have higher hopes for the name.”

“You can let me go now.”

Josie stood back in the sunshine. He wore chaps and a John B. Stetson Boss of the Plains hat like he was from boot heels to topknot a Texas jackeroo. “How’d you know where I was at to find me?”

“The Antrim name’s become famous.”

“We got the report of your Arizona escapade. Even Mrs. McKnight, she guessed the feller had it comin. Things bein as they are, we was all worried sick to death that you’d soon be kickin air from a cottonwood tree.”

“I been hanging fire in Apache Tejo over by the hot springs.”

“Well, that’s sensible. Them Mesicans won’t give nairn to a posse.” Josie seldom smiled because of the ruin of his teeth, but one smile finally drifted in as he said, “I’m so glad to see you!”

“Look at my stallion.”

Josie tilted to value it. “Sakes alive! That’s some proud horseflesh.”

“Stole it from some Italian doctor. Roberto Olmetti. Even came with a doctor kit. You need anything stitched or amputated?”

“Not presently, knock on wood.”

The Clydesdale nickered and swished his tail.

With bravado, the seventeen-year-old said, “And now I have to hit the outlaw trail.”

“Oh, I expect.”

Recalling a scene of sentiment from one of Dawley’s Ten Penny Novels, the Kid said, “I’m going to the far horizon. We may not see each other for a spell.”

Josie shrugged. “I guess this is where Momma would chide us that you reapeth what you sow.”

“Really? She ever really say that?”

“She might would’ve,” Josie said. “Bless her heart.”

“She once did quotation me from some poet. ‘He who fights and runs away may live to fight another day.’ ”

“Words to lock in your head,” Josie said.

The Kid took a lunge into his taller brother for a final hug and kissed his whiskered cheek. “I’ll miss you, you old scalawag!”

“You tryin to make me cry?”

“I’m just offering my fare-thee-well. Say goodbye to the McKnights for me.” And then the Kid got on his fine stallion and trotted off with the friendlies.

His older brother returned to his currying, then halted for a little and dried his eyes with the heels of his hands.

Billy never saw him again.

Joseph McCarty Antrim would be footloose for much of his life, heading to Arizona to join his stepfather—they still didn’t get on—then to Trinidad, Colorado; and Albuquerque, where he found an accord with Sheriff Pat Garrett; back to Silver City, where he halted a lynching; and to Tombstone, where he was a houseman at a faro gambling table and was fined for drunkenly knocking out a hotel porter. When faro and monte fell out of fashion, he took up Omaha hi-lo and five-card stud. He was dealing in a Denver casino when he died friendless and penniless at the age of seventy-six. Without a wife there was no one to claim his body, so it was donated to Colorado Medical School for dissection by doctors-to-be.

*  *  *

Soon Billy’s weaponry skills were found out, and by September of 1877 he was hiring on with a gang of banditti that called themselves the Boys. The gang was organized and run by a former cavalry sergeant and stock thief named John Kinney, who was politically connected and whose ranch and slaughterhouse were on the Rio Grande just north of Mesilla. Rustled cattle were dressed out by his nonconformists and the sides of beef were fenced on the cheap to those who did not ask questions.

The captain of the crew of thirty or so desperadoes was Jesse Evans, whose former hazardous occupation was stealing horses from the Mescalero Apaches for John Chisum, the cattle baron. Evans was an orange-haired and freckled half Cherokee, six years older than the Kid and near his size, and he’d found in himself an inclination to kill for the gaudy thrill of it. Even the more murderous of the Boys were ofttimes standoffish and fearful because of Jesse’s fickleness of temper and freedom with his gun, but the Kid was so happy to be adventuring in league with other daredevils that he rode in tandem with Evans and even jested with and about him in a humor that Evans for some reason tolerated. Such as, when Evans tried to sing, the Kid told him, “Jesse, you sure can carry a tune. The sore part is you try to unload it.” And Evans was so pleased by the Kid’s proverb “Don’t let your yearnings get ahead of your earnings” that he rode back to each horseman with him to repeat it as if it was his own invention.

Their far-and-wide acquisitions included whichever livestock they hankered for, mules from the Mescalero reservation, equestrian assets from the L. F. Pass coal mine east of Silver City, a pair of Appaloosas from a ranch near the San Agustin Pass, and some mustangs from Cooke’s Canyon, where “Henry Antrim” was identified from afar by a Silver City resident and his name was published in the
Silver City and Grant County Herald
as being one in “a party of thieves.” Eventually the Boys even tried to rob a stagecoach belonging to the Butterfield Overland Mail, found nothing of worth, and in an uncommon mood Jesse Evans forced the driver to partake of their Cyrus Noble whiskey.

The gang included some Indians and Mexicans, so Old West etiquette was outraged as they barged into taverns and ordered a feast and got roostered up on Old Orchard, and then moseyed out without paying the significant bill, Evans calling over his shoulder, “Chalk it up on our tab.”

A posse of six went after them once, ran into a hornet’s nest of gunfire, and retreated. The Boys exchanged bullets with George Williams at his ranch in Warm Springs but, unaccustomed to a volley of fight-back, left without unnecessary delay. In their bravura, Evans sent a letter written by Billy to the
Mesilla Independent
newspaper stating five resolutions agreed to by the Boys, the final one being “Resolved: That the public is our oyster, and that having the power, we claim the right to appropriate any property we take a fancy to, and that we should exercise the right regardless of consequences.”

*  *  *

The gang had stolen horses and mules owned by the partnership of a lawyer in Lincoln named Alexander A. McSween, an Englishman named John Henry Tunstall, and Tunstall’s foreman, Dick Brewer, whose 680-acre ranch on the Ruidoso River was where the three men pastured their animals. Also missing were over two hundred head of Tunstall’s cattle. Brewer estimated the value of their losses at $1,700.

Richard M. Brewer was a handsome and noble man born in St. Albans, Vermont, in 1850, but raised on farms in Wisconsin, where he became renowned for his strength and, in those littler times, was called a giant. At the age of nineteen, he ran off for the West after a soul-destroying quarrel with his fiancée, during which Matilda Jane told Dick she’d decided to become instead the wife of his cousin. Ever after, in the holiness of his love for Matilda, he fancied himself an unsullied Arthurian knight like Lancelot, hardworking, resolute, courageous, and chaste, and his friendship with John Tunstall originated in their joint determination to remain forever bachelors.

Somehow happening upon the village of Lincoln in 1870, Brewer took a job with the mercantile establishment of L. G. Murphy & Company, which later loaned him, at ten percent annual interest, the $2,600 he needed to purchase the Ruidoso ranch near Glencoe that Lawrence Gustave Murphy claimed he owned but for which he finally was found to have no actual title. Still, Brewer was forced to continue payments to avoid foreclosure, so he was in a cantankerous mood over the West’s general lawlessness even before the cattle and remuda were stolen, and after that subtraction he became relentless in his angry pursuit of the Evans gang, racking out on the scout for them with an intensity that was playing out his horses.

Within the week he found the Boys on a San Agustin ranch that had a handsome porticoed house on the hillside and on the flats a windmill and corrals crowded with his, McSween’s, and Tunstall’s horses. The cattle seemed to have already been sold. With no lack of fortitude, Brewer walked up to the house and encountered Jesse Evans and his minions loitering on the porch. His hugeness may have stunned them, because he wasn’t immediately shot. And then he had the grit to demand the return of his and his partners’ horses.

Still sitting in his rocking chair, Evans smiled. “Well now, I don’t think we can do that after all the trouble we went to to get em.”

It eventuated that Brewer would have nothing of it.

Impressed by his gumption, Evans offered him just his own horses back.

Brewer looked down on the collection and saw John Henry Tunstall’s favorites, a matched pair of dappled, pearl gray ponies that pulled his surreyed buggy. He told Evans he needed the Englishman’s horses, too.