The Kid

Jimmy Dolan seemed to say something and Tom Hill turned to listen. Then he looked at Tunstall’s solemn, unseeing bay horse, and Hill shot it in the head, too. Colonel fell on his front knees and then on his flank, fully dead. And in an insult they found hilarious, Evans and Hill laid Tunstall’s body out and tucked his saddle blanket around him as if he were sleeping, his head bleeding onto the pillow of his folded overcoat. Likewise, Jimmy Dolan had the hoot of squashing Tunstall’s felt fedora under the head of his favorite horse. And then the nine rode off.

John Middleton yelled out, “Boys, they have killed Harry!”

And I just watched, Billy thought.

– PART TWO –

THE REGULATORS

(FEBRUARY 1878–JULY 1879)

- 9 -

“WORKING UP A GOOD HATE”

Sheriff William Brady wisely stayed on his dear-bought eighty-acre farm four miles east of Lincoln for all of February 18, playing with a few of his eight children when they were freed from the schoolroom run by Susan Gates. In the cold of twilight he wandered through his fruitless orchard and ghostly dry vineyard in his old blue Army officer’s overcoat. Watching the sun flare red as blood against the scraps of cirrus cloud in the west, he wondered if the deed had been done. And then he went inside for dinner.

On Tuesday morning the ex-major rode his Arabian sorrel horse into Lincoln and heard that forty outraged villagers had congregated in Alexander McSween’s house on the yesternight, offering Tunstall’s hired men and the McSweens their sympathy over the loss of their friend and demanding some kind of judicial retribution. Worried about a reprisal, Sheriff Brady used his old connections at Fort Stanton to get a detachment of soldiers to ride into Lincoln with the object of preserving the peace.

John H. Tunstall’s corpse was hauled the ten miles to the village in an oxcart and was examined in a postmortem by the post surgeon, Major Daniel Appel, who was assisted by Dr. Taylor Ealy, a Presbyterian medical missionary who’d just arrived in Lincoln at Alexander McSween’s invitation. They found that one bullet fractured the right clavicle and tore through the victim’s artery, which would have caused him to bleed to death within minutes; but there was another bullet that exploded just above the orbit of the left eye, fracturing the skull at entrance and exit.

In his diary that night, Taylor Ealy noted, “This is truly a frontier town—warlike. Soldiers and citizens armed. Great danger of being shot.”

At a coroner’s inquest into the death of John Henry Tunstall, employees and eyewitnesses Robert Widenmann, Richard Brewer, John Middleton, and William H. Bonney testified to the facts as they knew them with the result of a verdict of homicide against the so-called deputies Jesse Evans, William Morton, Frank Baker, Thomas Hill, George Hindman, and James J. Dolan. Recognizing that the sheriff would do nothing affecting his own posse, on Wednesday Lincoln’s justice of the peace issued warrants that were to be delivered to the indicted by the village constable, Atanacio Martínez, and his newly sworn deputies, Fred Waite and Kid Bonney.

With Winchester rifles crooked in their left arms, the trio took their warrants to the House and found idling with whiskeyed coffee inside the store William Brady, Lawrence G. Murphy, and Jimmy Dolan—Irish who’d gotten out of their country during the Great Potato Famine but still felt the pangs of not-enoughness.

“We don’t serve youse kind,” Dolan warned.

And Waite said, “The fact is we’re not interested in buyin what you’re sellin.”

“Aw, sure look it,” Major Murphy said. It was an Irish expression that could mean anything. Seeing the wrath in the faces of Waite and the Kid, Murphy drunkenly fell his way toward the storeroom door and hurriedly spoke inside, and immediately there was commotion as a lieutenant and six gloomy so

ldiers with weaponry joined the Irishmen. “Ready” was the lieutenant’s warning command, and the soldiers let their index fingers find the triggers.

Constable Martínez was cowed by the intimation of force, but Waite said, “We have warrants for the arrest of you, Jimmy, and for other members of the posse that the so-called sheriff here sent out to execute John Tunstall.”

Little Jimmy Dolan glowered. “It was self-defense.”

“The inquest said otherwise.”

Sheriff Brady stood up. “Let me look at those warrants.”

Lincoln’s constable handed them over, and Brady scoured them one at a time, his lips moving as he read. And then he smirked and tore the papers in half. “All these names belong to a legally constituted posse of the finest citizens procurable.”

Seeing the Kid inching up his Winchester, the Army lieutenant yelled, “Aim!” and six carbines were suddenly shouldered and leveled on the constable and his two deputies.

Martínez shrank down a little, but Waite just flatly stared at the guns as if indifferent to their shenanigans.

Sheriff Brady asked if the Kid’s was a Winchester ’73, heard nothing, and with a drill sergeant’s experience of handling tyros he loomed over Billy and demanded, “Hand me that rifle, you son of a bitch.” And when the Kid didn’t do that at once, Brady wrenched it away and admired the Winchester’s blued-steel breechblock and oiled walnut stock before socking the Kid’s jaw with its butt plate.

The Kid yelled, “Ow!” and held his jaw. He could taste blood, and his face was blotched red with fury over the injury and with the shame of a helplessness he hadn’t felt since adolescence.

The sheriff confiscated the rifle Harry had given the Kid for his birthday and announced to Waite and Martínez, “It’s you three that are under arrest!”

Jimmy laughed and said, “Oh, ain’t it grand!”

“Tis indeed,” L. G. Murphy said. “Good on ye, Bill. And good riddance, laddies.”