The Kid Page 4

  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

  Hiding 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.

  “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 u
nder 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.”