The Kid

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.