Tunstall interpreted his concern. “Don’t be distressed, Billy. It shan’t always be such a humble abode. I fully expect betimes a stately house with rooms upon rooms and pretty maidens to do our bidding.”
* * *
White-bearded Gottfried Gauss, an ex-clergyman from Württemberg, Germany, and for thirteen years an Army hospital steward, worked as the ranchers’ chuck wagon cook and that night served them grilled pork chops with a green chilli glaze as Harry talked passionately about the fortunes to be made. Without a table or chairs, they sat on the cold earthen floor, and Harry hunched over his food as he confided, “John Chisum was given a contract to supply eleven hundred steers for the soldiers at Fort Stanton. The Army agreed to pay him thirty-five dollars a head for the full-grown livestock, but Chisum only paid eighteen dollars a head in Trickham, Texas! The cattle drive took two weeks so there were considerable expenses, but the scalawag still netted over eighteen thousand dollars!”
“A lot of money,” the Kid said.
Tunstall agreed and took that as encouragement to say more, going on and on about his wild ambitions until it was twelve, his “witching hour.”
The Kid slept in the hovel only one night and then was relieved to be sent farther north to the winter-dead grasslands fed by the Rio Ruidoso. There the jigger boss, or second in command, was Charlie Bowdre, a twenty-nine-year-old from Mississippi who’d gone flat broke on a cheese factory in Arizona before finding work with L. G. Murphy’s House as a gunman with Jesse Evans and the Boys. But in 1876 Bowdre had taken the teenage Manuela Herrera as his wifely servant and become domesticated, signing on to fork a saddle for the gentleman from London instead of being, as he put it, “ever on the skeedaddle and in a state of frantic.”
The Kid recalled a lithograph of the author Edgar Allan Poe that he’d seen in Wichita. Charlie Bowdre, he thought, took a likeness to Poe with his sad, dour, seen-too-much eyes and his trying to balance his ever-gaining baldness with a walrus mustache and a wealth of dark brown hair behind his ears.
When the Kid rode up and introduced himself, Bowdre scowled, and in the snail’s pace of Southern speech he asked, “William H. Bonney. Is that a consumed name?”
“Consumed?”
“Was you born with it or just take it on by your ownself?”
“Sort of.”
Bowdre nodded. “Well, your secret’s safe with me.” His flat-topped hat was rakishly cocked rightward on his head
like the straw boater of a city boulevardier, but he otherwise looked like a far older man who’d been in the hot or cold outdoors for too long. He spurred his gray ahead to swerve a maverick far from an arroyo, and the Kid trotted his white horse to catch up.
Bowdre asked him, “You ever buckaroo aforehand?”
“In Arizona.”
“Which ranch?”
“The Sierra Bonita.”
Bowdre took his measure. “With the vaqueros? You look too littlish for that.”
“Well, mostly I helped around the chuck wagon.”
Bowdre smiled. “Oh, you was the hoodlum!”
“They called it by another name.”
“Was it the Little Mary?”
The Kid said nothing.
And Bowdre said, “Mr. Tunstall, he don’t tolerate disrespect amongst our ownen.”
The Kid was sent eastward as a flank rider, his sole job to bunch the cattle in their move-along and scare them with shrill whistles if they strayed wider. Though Bowdre was a hundred yards off, his voice carried, and the Kid could hear him sing, “It rained all night the day I left, the weather it was dry. The sun so hot I froze to death. Susanna, don’t you cry.”
At sundown Widenmann and three other hands in the nighthawk shift rode up to assume the overseeing, and with no more work for the weekend, Bowdre said Friday was his night to howl, and asked if the Kid had a place “to lay your wary head.” Billy hadn’t thought far enough into the future for that, a common problem with him, so Bowdre invited him to join him and his wife in his flat-roofed, two-room adobe house on the Rio Ruidoso. He’d purchased it from Lincoln’s L. G. Murphy for fifteen hundred dollars, but with just three years to pay off the mortgage, foreclosure was inevitable, so Charlie and the woman he called his wife were just camping there and expecting to head for the horizon soon like most vagrant cowboys. Bowdre called it “searching for the elephant.”
Manuela Herrera was a glamorous, exotic, high-spirited girl the Kid’s age who seemed ill-suited to be heavily bundled up and frying tortillas in a skillet over a crackling fire in their front yard. The Kid hopped down from his horse and introduced himself in the formal Spanish way, kissing the sides of her cheeks as he said, “Buenas tardes. Me llamo Guillermo Bonney.” Good evening. I call myself William Bonney.
She blushed as she said, “Con mucho gusto, Señor Bonney.” With much pleasure, Mr. Bonney.
“El gusto es mío.” The pleasure is mine. The Kid felt sure she’d batted those gorgeous brown eyes.
Charlie Bowdre was watching them with jealousy. “You speak Mexican excelente, Kid. I’m unpressed.”