The Kid

The Kid shied from answering that and inquired as to why he was being so closely questioned.

“I have a need,” Tunstall said. He was blind in his dullish, hazel-brown right eye, but his left was sympathetic and he sat snug enough that the Kid could smell a breath pepperminted with the Altoids that he ordered from Callard & Bowser in England. “It can be dull, venal work. You may feel like a hireling at times. But I daresay the tedium may be punctuated by sudden moments of danger. John Chisum pays his cattle protectors four dollars a day, or so it’s rumored, but I can afford just one dollar per diem, plus room and board. Would you settle for that?”

“I got nothing but these old clothes and some high ambitions. Seems like wealth to me.”

“Your name’s Billy?”

“Yep. William H. Bonney, sir.”

“How old are you?”

“Eighteen this November twenty-third.”

“Are you Protestant?”

“Probably.”

“Yes, but are your origins in the north of Ireland? Are your forefathers Anglicized and of the Orange Order?”

Because it seemed to matter so to him, the Kid nodded.

“Excuse me if I i

nquire again: In a pinch you’d be handy with a pistol?”

“Have had multiple trials and I passed em all.”

“And have you a firm purpose of amendment?”

“Absolutely.”

Smiling as he clapped a hand on the Kid’s knee, Tunstall said, “Well, William H. Bonney, you’re hired. Let us rise and go about changing your prospects.”

* * *

The horse-stealing charges against the Kid were withdrawn by John Henry Tunstall through his lawyer, Alexander A. McSween, and Tunstall linked his arm inside the Kid’s as he strolled him into the new J. H. Tunstall & Co. General Merchandise store, which was wide as eleven spaced porch posts and smelled of fresh pinewood flooring and the cedar fire in a hissing cast-iron stove. Employees were emptying boxes or working the till and coffee grinder, and the floor was crammed with crates and barrels and shelves overstocked with just-arrived groceries, dry goods, hardware, tools, guns, and even an apothecary of patent medicines and elixirs. Tunstall claimed with a grand gesture that his store offered more luxuries and necessities than did the so-called House kitty-corner from them, and he said he hoped to undercut that scoundrel Murphy until he captured even his Army contracts for groceries and meat. And he would be adding a bank, too, with the cattle baron John Chisum as its president and financial source. With some grandiosity he said, “I intend to get half of every dollar that is made in Lincoln County by anyone. And I will deal with those who oppose me. I do not suffer fools gladly.”

Then, as gifts for the Kid’s forthcoming birthday, the owner went about happily equipping charming Billy with batwing chaps, a holster and six-shooter, a Winchester rifle, .44-40 cartridges, whatever food he fancied, and, “not stinting anything,” outfitted him with the rigging of a Colorado saddle with doghouse stirrups and took the Kid to the corral behind the store and let him select a fine white Army horse that Tunstall said he’d purchased for twenty-five dollars from the post trader at Fort Stanton. “And I would not take seventy-five for her now.”

The Kid was overwhelmed with glee. Wanted to stop grinning but couldn’t. He told Tunstall, “Went through a dozen Christmases with no gifts at all, and you just made up for all a child’s wanting in one afternoon.”

Tunstall bowed humbly to the Kid as he acknowledged, “Gratitude is the sign of a noble soul.”

* * *

The Kid then rode beside Tunstall’s buggy and the dapple-gray team he’d stolen earlier as they traveled south thirty miles to the JHT Ranch of 3,840 acres in the Rio Feliz valley, and while they traveled John Henry Tunstall revealed himself.

Hinting at inherited wealth, he said he grew up in the fashionable London borough of Hampstead, where his father, “the Governor,” was “a financial success in the merchandise and shipping business.” Tunstall had three sisters, whom he adored, and he’d attended the Royal Polytechnic Institution with the intention of becoming an accountant in his father’s multiple firms. Since his father was also a John, all his friends and associates called him Harry, “And you may, too.” He said he was fluent in French and adequate in German and was pleased to hear that Billy spoke Spanish “to help us find common ground with the locals.” After graduation from the Polytechnic, Tunstall took a gentleman’s grand tour of Europe, then boarded the Cunard liner Calabria for America and finally arrived by railway in Victoria, British Columbia. There he worked for three years in his father’s mercantile firm of Turner, Beeton & Tunstall, but he left for California with the goal of investing some of his father’s fortune in sheep and a fleece- and wool-making business. Hearing in Santa Barbara of the practically free, semiarid land in the New Mexico Territory, he instead went east and found himself in Santa Fe in 1876. There in Herlow’s Hotel he met a Scottish Canadian, “a very shrewd fellow and a lawyer by profession, Alexander A. McSween,” who persuaded the Englishman to go into stock raising in Lincoln. Tunstall hired as his foreman the “wonderful physical and moral specimen” of Richard M. Brewer, and because Tunstall was a foreigner, McSween and Brewer had to file the papers for him to acquire the Rio Feliz ranch on which he hoped to graze ten thousand cattle. “With overhead and losses you can’t accumulate real wealth with less.” Working for him as well were Robert Adolph Widenmann, who grew up over a hardware store in Ann Arbor, Michigan, but attended an excellent high school in Stuttgart, Germany; and Frederick Tecumseh Waite, a handsome half Chickasaw Indian who’d graduated from Mound City Commercial College in St. Louis. “So you’ll be fraternizing with educated men.”

“I like learning things, sir,” said Kid Bonney. And he amended that: “Harry.”

Tunstall admired him for a moment. “I could see that. The flames of intelligence gleam in your eyes.”

* * *

The Kid was imagining an English manse or at least a handsome Mexican hacienda, but John Henry Tunstall’s home in the high desert foothills east of the Sacramento Mountains was just a fourteen-by-fourteen hovel of a cabin constructed with adobe blocks and piñon logs. But Tunstall was delighted at seeing his property again and, as if they were objects of beauty, called Billy’s attention to a heavy anvil and sledgehammer outside in the weather and a spade and a scoop shovel atilt against a lone mesquite. “I have tools!” he exclaimed. “I have forsaken the fancy drawing rooms and am downstairs, dining with staff!”

Hearing his voice, an English bulldog happily ran over a hill to his owner and wiggled and shrimped around in delight as Harry knelt to greet his Punch with high-pitched baby talk. Worry about the Englishman’s sanity caused the Kid to examine the manic zeal in his face.