The Kid

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.”

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.