Antrim scowled. “Lot of people do that.”
“But they locked me in jail for it.”
With outrage, his stepfather said, “Ainunt fair at all!”
Henry agreed. “Exactly my thinking. So I escaped.”
Billy Antrim leaned over the jury box formed by his crossed forearms and told his stepson, “Don’t try to lie to a liar, liar! I believe the jail part. What about the clothes?”
“Stolen,” Henry confessed.
“Stolen!” Antrim fell back in his chair as though flummoxed. “Suspected as much from your scoundrel airs. Even knew it from your childhood. You was wrong, wrong, wrong from the very inception.” He got another shot glass of whiskey.
“Had enough?” the Kid finally asked.
Antrim finished it and said, “I’ll stop when I’m just beyond plenty.”
“I was here to forgive and forget how you ran out on your wife.”
His stepfather sneered. “Well, you can go to Hell with your forgiveness, Henry. Don’t want it and haven’t earned it.”
“I’m tired,” the Kid said. “Been a long day.”
Antrim hung his head as though himself seeking rest. “I have a judgment to render, which is if a thief is the sort of boy you’ve become, you got to get out. I got a hard-won reputation here.”
Henry thought he was kidding and laughed.
“You heard me! Get!”
The Kid stood up and saw Billy Antrim was incapable of standing. “I’ll just clear out my things,” he said.
Wearily, Antrim waved him off.
Upstairs, the Kid rooted around until he found two dollars and change and a loaded Colt 1849 Pocket revolver, and just for spite he stole some fresh clothes. Then he rumbled downstairs and out of the Two Galoots Saloon with nary an adíos for his stepfather. They’d never see each other again.
In 1922 at the age of eighty, William Henry Harrison Antrim would die in Adelaida, California, in the home of his niece. At his funeral service he was remembered as a pious and highly regarded gentleman.
- 3 -
STOLEN HORSES
Hardly ever did hold a job for any length of time. There was some cowboying for the Kid at the Sierra Bonita Rancho, located in the Sonoran Desert east of Tucson and six miles southwest of Camp Grant. Hitched a ride to it on a freight wagon. The foreman liked the fifteen-year-old who called himself Kid Antrim, but he was the skinniest pickaninny he’d
ever laid eyes on, and when he saw what a misfit the Kid was alongside his hardy and violent Mexican vaqueros, he shifted him to helping the chuck wagon cook. The job was snidely called the Little Mary and after a host of insults to his manliness, the Kid let himself be let go.
The Kid had taught himself to cook in the final months of Catherine’s life, when she couldn’t do for herself, so in April 1876 he hired on in the kitchen of the four-roomed Hotel de Luna, just down the road from the Army post named for Ulysses S. Grant.
Wasn’t long before he left the Hotel de Luna’s oven heat for a summer job as a hay reaper that paid just as poorly but at least was outdoors, and he liked looking beyond the yellowing hayfields to the far and wide flatlands of pinkish scrabble greened here and there with creosote bush, buckhorn cholla, prickly pear, and desert tea. Off in the distance were orange foothills as jagged as dragon tails but blued in their heights by the shade of foaming anvil clouds that looked tall as forever. And he found himself thinking, I’m happy in Arizona. I could stay here.
And then he fell under the unfortunate influence of a Scottish former 6th Cavalry trumpeter named John Mackie, who rented the sleeping room next to him in the Hotel de Luna. Mackie was twenty-seven and had enlisted during the Civil War when he was just fourteen, but he’d never lost his Fife dialect and was still so hard to understand that some folks just shook their heads when he talked. The Kid, however, could decipher it, and John found him clever and amusing company on his sprees.
The Kid had felt fatherless since his vague early memories of New York City, and he forever found himself generating fierce loyalties for confident older men who paid him the least bit of attention. And that, for now, was a Scotsman whose current stint was horse thievery.
Strolling at eventide from the Hotel de Luna and heading down the lone street to the saloons, Mackie introduced the Kid to his nightly pursuits as if they were not only just but proper. “Sorry, laddie,” the Scotsman said, “but them loons what’s dinna tie up their mounts good, nae watch o’er em, are a-beggin for me to reive em. It’s the Code ay the West.”
“Seems to me the Code of the West means you have the right to hold your ground. The right to defend yourself.”
“Tis indeed! And also if ye hae a strong want for what belongs to wheelthy others, it’s in yer rights to make free with it.”