The Kid: A Novel (6 page)

“Well, I guess you’ll get nothing at all, then,” Evans said.

Ire and menace smoldered in the faces of the Evans gang as Brewer regarded them, and he judged it healthier to leave without his stock.

The Kid later walked out of the house interior with just socks on and peeling an apple as he viewed a horseman riding off. “Who was that?”

Soon and very soon he was going to meet the man.

*  *  *

In mid-October Billy left the Boys at the south fork of the Tularosa River, and they headed down to Hugh Beckwith’s ranch, where a half mile off from the adobe farmhouse the Boys overnighted in an abandoned dirt and straw hut that the Mexicans call a
choza
.

The news of the sheltering outlaws was taken to Dick Brewer by a Beckwith girl who was plainly smitten with the bachelor Adonis, and he thence went to Sheriff William Brady in Lincoln and urged him to get a vigilance committee together. The sheriff’s reluctance shocked him, but Brady finally relented and even made Brewer foreman of a hastily assembled grand jury. And then Brewer and his force of legalized authorities galloped south after the banditti with the sheriff riding trail.

Sheriff Bill Brady was an Irishman from County Cavan, born in 1829, the son of a potato farmer. When he was twenty-one he enlisted for a five-year hitch with the US Army and left a sergeant, then reenlisted for another five before joining a New Mexico volunteer infantry, achieving the rank of major and adjutant to the commanding officer before he was mustered out and married a Mexican widow with whom he would have nine children. With no job but as an entered apprentice with the Masonic Grand Lodge, he went to his old Army pal and fellow Mason Lawrence Gustave Murphy and was given employment at his we-got-everything store that was being called just the House, and then Murphy connived to have him elected sheriff. Which meant the sheriff was also in cahoots with the Boys, who did L. G. Murphy’s bidding.

It was a tangled web.

Semicircling the
choza
and the Boys just before sunup, the Brewer-Brady posse waited for the stirrings of life and finally saw Jesse Evans cracking his neck as he walked out of the hut, full tilt with dual holstered pistols and the chest of his flannel shirt x-ed with two cartridge belts.

The citizens had the decency to let him relieve himself and shake as steam rose up from the blue grama grass, then the foreman stood from his hiding and yelled, “Hands up, Jesse!”

Hot-blooded as he was, Jesse answered with both six-shooters, firing three shots that were just enough imperfect that Brewer heard the sizzle as the bullets zipped by his head. The posse did not stay reticent but retorted with similarly inaccurate shots as Evans crouched back under the Mexican blanket hanging in the hut’s doorway. A hand would reach a gun out through the one window and go off and be withdrawn, then a rifle would angle out and only manage to crack a branch off a hackberry tree, or the door blanket would be touched aside by a nickel barrel and there’d be a
bang!
then a
zing
as a rock jumped in the air. And the posse themselves would reply with shots at the
choza,
exploding fists of dried mud from the walls and whapping the blanket into a toss. The wild riot of the gunfire was all so random, unaimed, and without consequence that each side seemed to grow tired of the melee and there was silence for a minute.

Sheriff Brady was lying in weeds, his gun silent, but he got up on his elbows to yell out, “Evans! You and your boys surrender in the immediate and you won’t be lynched!”

Brewer was astonished by the lenience and gave the sheriff a look that he ignored.

They could hear the outlaws deliberating. The scarcity of food and water seemed an issue of importance. And then a hand lifted the door blanket aside a little and shook a handkerchief that was once white.

The sheriff called, “Okay. Walk on out slow with your hands on your heads.”

Out came Evans and three other owl hoots. William H. Bonney was not among them. Their guns were collected and their hands tied behind them once they were saddled, and the citizens took the reins of their horses to trot them to Hugh Beckwith’s hacienda for coffee and a feed since it would be a long ride to the new Lincoln County jail.

Which jail was just a dark, deep dungeon dug out of the earth and walled with hewn timber. There were no windows, just a cellar door and ceiling covered with a half foot of dirt and over that an adobe hut for the jailers to get out of the weather. Entrance to and exit from the cells was available only by a ladder that the jailers lifted out once the Boys were hunkered down there. And there was a threat of flooding with any thunderstorm. But soon the shackled four were playing cards like this was a sunny picnic and happily calling up to the six posted guards for a quart of Oh-be-joyful.

The intent was to have them on trial when the next court was convened, in December, but they would not stay kept for even a month.

*  *  *

About the time the gang was locked up in Lincoln, a horseless Kid staggered into the village of Seven Rivers and found his way to a flat-roofed adobe grocery store founded by Heiskell Jones.

He was close to fainting when he asked the bib-bearded, Amish-looking owner, “You have any job of work for me to handle?”

Jones glanced up at a dirty, ill-off, scrawny boy, his face peach-fuzzed and mesquite-scratched, his sagging and scuffed Wellington boots seeming to ache him, but a gun bulging under his wool coat and a Winchester rifle at parade rest. “How old are you, son?”

“Eighteen in November.”

Heiskell looked outside. “Where’s your ride?”

“Apaches stole it from me in the Guadalupe Mountains.”

“And you walked all this ways?”

“Afraid so.”

“Well, I don’t have nothin to pay you.” The Kid caved some, and Heiskell closely considered him. “You hungry?”

*  *  *

Heiskell’s wife, Barbara, was called Ma’am Jones by all and sundry because of her gentle, maternal, nursing nature. She worried over the Kid that afternoon and evening, first seating him in a big fireside chair, feeding him salted steak and eggs and a tin cup of warm goat’s milk, then yanking off his boots to find his poor feet were sockless and bleeding.

“You walked a long ways,” Ma’am said.

“Yes I did.”

“I’ll heat you a bath so you can get the stink off. Hang your clothes on the chair for the laundry.”

Watching Ma’am walk to the kitchen, he said, “You remind me a lot of my mother.”

She turned and smiled. “You mean she’s delightful, lovely, and very nearly perfect?”

“Yes, Ma’am. She
was
.”

“Oh,” she said. “I’m so sorry for your loss.”

He said, “They say I’ll get used to it.” And he found himself adding, “I hope not.”

Kid Bonney, as he was calling himself, stayed with the Jones family for three weeks, handling chores around the house, sleeping in a feather bed with some of the nine Jones boys, hunting deer and wild turkey for their dinners, and generally being so jolly, helpful, and courteous that the family later would not permit any nastiness spoken about him.

The Kid was closest to Johnny, who was his age and just as interested in gunslinging. They’d rustle heifers and swap them for cartridges, then invent games of skill at marksmanship that the Kid generally won. There was a trigonometry he’d learnt that let him forget about holding steady and aiming, instead freeing his mind to find intersections wherever his gun and the target were and then fire on instinct. He could even hold his rifle on his hip, watch Johnny toss a penny, and flip the coin with a gunshot. Johnny gushed to his brothers, “Kid’s not just good; he’s a wizard.”

The Kid and Johnny hunted mountain lions with the cousins George and Franklin Coe, hardworking ranchers in their twenties, with stock farms on the Rio Hondo near La Junta and farther upstream at Dowlin’s Mill. Franklin later remembered the Kid as “very handy in camp, a good cook and good-natured and jolly.” He said Billy spent all his free time cleaning his guns and that he “could take two six-shooters, loaded and cocked, one in each hand and twirl one in one direction and the other in the other direction at the same time. And I’ve seen him ride his horse on a run and kill snow birds, four out of five shots.”

*  *  *

Word got to John Kinney that the Kid was lodging with the Jones family, and because he needed his fearlessness and flair with guns, the gang leader sent about twenty of his hirelings over with a saddled horse and ordered Kid Bonney to rejoin the Boys. And that was it. Worried that he’d overstayed his welcome, the Kid gave Ma’am a kiss goodbye, told Johnny he’d stay in touch, and rode off with a gang hieing northward to the Rio Bonito and the fenced village of Lincoln, the county seat.

With more than twenty million acres of real estate, Lincoln County was one-fourth of New Mexico, as large as the state of Maine and two-thirds the size of England, but there were five times as many cattle as people and the village of Lincoln was just a jumble of sixty structures alongside a dirt main street that was forty yards wide. The Boys rode down it in the wee nighttime hour of three. It was November 17 and sleeting.

At the village’s west end, where the Fort Stanton Road became Main Street, and just across from the Wortley Hotel, there was a big, two-story mercantile establishment with signage as L. G. Murphy & Co. Eastward there were houses and saloons no bigger than parlors and the still-under-construction J. H. Tunstall merchandise business, and beyond that was the Torreón, a three-story rock tower formerly used to ford off Apache Indian attacks. And east of that was the jail where Jesse and his amigos were holed up in the pit.

Half of the Boys stayed on horses facing every direction while the other half, including the Kid, hitched theirs to a rail and walked right into an unlocked jail shack. The jailer was snoring in a Victorian smoker’s chair until the Kid shocked him by pressing a cold gun barrel to the jailer’s forehead, warning, “Try me and you’ll have a sleep you won’t wake up from.”

He was trying out a hoodlum persona.

The jailer looked up at the Kid and then to the others. “This job ain’t nothin but puny wages for me,” he said. “You fellers go on and do what you have to do.”

Crew members with gunnysacks that were heavy with rocks smashed the cellar door again and again until the boards splintered and gave way. Village residents must have wakened from the noise but wisely pretended to be deaf to it.

“Well, it’s about damn time,” Evans called up.

A man the Kid didn’t yet know slid the ladder down. “Mr. Kinney wanted y’all to stew for a bit for givin up so easy that time there at Beckwith’s.”

“We was powerful thirsty is all” was a jailed man’s excuse.

Jesse Evans was first up and free from encumbrance because of his fierce use of a garden file ever since dinner, but he was followed by three still in shackles that were soon chiseled off. The Kid stuffed a handkerchief into the jailer’s mouth and tied it in with a bandanna as another character roped the jailer’s hands and feet to the chair legs.

And then they vamoosed.

- 6 -

THE HIRELING

W
ho knows why, but the Kid took ownership of Tunstall’s favorite dapple-gray buggy team and was found out and locked up in the same hoosegow he’d released Evans and his misfits from. But no one came for
him
, which contaminated his trust in their camaraderie. When he soon grew tired of his fetid dungeon, he asked a jailer to send for the offended party, and the Englishman, whose J. H. Tunstall & Co. wareroom was now open and vying with L. G. Murphy & Co., walked over to what Tunstall would spell as the “gaol.”

Even in the November cold, the Kid was enjoying his hour of outdoor exercise, a jailer watching for any funny business with a rifle slack in the crook of one arm. When he saw the victim of his horse thievery approaching, the Kid adopted a forlorn expression.

The Englishman was an inch under six feet tall, slender, twenty-four, and seemed genteel in his cashmere overcoat and swank suit of Harris tweed. His jawline was fringed with a quarter-inch scruff of whiskers, his mustache was hardly there at all, and wings of longish brown hair fanned out from under a slouch hat of ivory wool. Elegance and good grooming met in him. He wore no gun. “So you are the rascal who
purloined
my horses,” John Henry Tunstall said in a lilting, patrician accent.

The Kid swerved his estimation of him off toward a Rio Bonito that was swollen with rainwater and loudly brawling eastward to the Pecos. “Embarrassed to say so,” he said, “but I’m the culprit all right.”

“I’m afraid my nose is a bit out of joint,” the Englishman said. “All this stealing has cost me like the mischief, and scoundrels like you have chaffed me to the fullest extent of my patience. I have a mind to scold you in terms too true to be palatable.”

Owing to his having had an English schoolmistress in Silver City, the Kid felt he understood, and he foresaw how politicking could help. “I deserve whatever you hand out in regard to admonishment,” he said. “I done wrong and judge myself kindly in need of correction.”

Surprise and happy ignorance gave the Englishman a flush. “What an extraordinary admission from a rustler! I never heard the like from Jesse Evans and his serviles.”

The Kid hung his head some. “Well, I’m different from that ilk.”

Still rheumatic, headachy, and faint from drinking alkali water on his new ranch on the Rio Feliz, Tunstall took a seat on the board sidewalk and gloved off the space beside him. “Please sit and we’ll parley.”

With a glance, Kid Bonney begged permission of the jailer and he nodded. The Kid sat.

“You’re different from the rest how?” Tunstall asked.

“I feel like I was never given the scope to do other than. I’m an orphan since fourteen and I been making my own hard way with few means available to me. And there’s so much thieving in the territories it just came to seem natural as a way to make do.”

“And you fell in with bad company?”

“Afraid so, sir. And each mistake kept on breeding others.”