The Kid

Sheriff Brady stood and called out, “Where’s your crew, Dick?”

“Oh, here and there.”

“And how about your prisoners?”

“We lost em.”

The sheriff looked to his deputy, saying, “Go tell Jimmy,” and George Hindman hurried in his halting way toward the east side of town. His left thigh had lost a good deal of muscle to the teeth of the mauling black bear, so he was forced to sling his leg forward like a wooden pedestal.

L. G. Murphy called, “Wait on, Dick!” Smiling hugely and resting a hand on the governor’s shoulder, he yelled, “And who would our guest of honor be? The governor, do ye think?”

Dick Brewer just tipped his hat to Axtell and rode on, and the drunken Murphy yelled again, “He’s intervening in our current situation!”

Axtell asked him, “Who is he?”

Murphy said, “Fella used to tend for me. I hold the mortgage on his ranch.”

Axtell shouted loudly, just as he must have done earlier in a village assembly. “I seek only to assist Lincoln’s finer citizens in upholding our laws and keeping the peace!”

But Brewer’s back was shut to him by then. And by the time the Regulator got to Juan Patrón’s tavern, he could see Jimmy Dolan and a slew of rifled men grumpily slouching down Main Street, having been denied their ambush.

Juan Batista Wilson, the justice of the peace, was just where he frequently was, standing at the east end of an ornate bar freighted in from Albuquerque, a jar of tequila in his hands. Seeing Brewer, he filled a shot glass for him from the jar and tilted and weaved in his drunkenness as Brewer reported on the capture of Morton and Baker. At the end of the recital of the events, Wilson told him the governor had just issued a proclamation that booted the justice from his office, voided all the legal writs and processes issued by him, and specified that District Attorney Rynerson and Sheriff Brady and his deputies were the only officers empowered to enforce civil law.

“Meaning what?”

Ex-Justice Wilson offered him an ironic smile. “Means you ain’t a constable now and never wast. Had you self no deputies never. Warrants? They’s worthless. Axtell even called em ‘disreputable.’ And how I figure it is you and your Regulators are outlaws. Oh, and also, guilty of murder.”

* * *

With their freedom in jeopardy, Alexander McSween and Dick Brewer fled Lincoln that night to hide out at Chisum’s ranch, where Susan McSween was to rejoin her husband after a few weeks shopping in St. Louis. At the South Springs ranch, Alex and Dick would hear that another two of Tunstall’s assailants were done for, Tom Hill having shot and failed to kill a Cherokee sheep drover who fired back with an old Henry rifle that finished him. Jesse Evans was Hill’s accomplice and was shot as he took flight, the Henry’s bullet shattering his left elbow and yanking him in a fall off his horse. Evans was soon arrested and taken to the post hospital at Fort Stanton for surgery, and then was locked in the post stockade to await his trial.

Of the Regulators, Doc Scurlock and Charlie Bowdre went to their women and scratch-ankle ranch on the Ruidoso while John Middleton and Billy Bonney sequestered in San Patricio, a village a few miles south of Lincoln on the Rio Hondo. The Kid was a first-rate card counter, so he made a nifty income by placing bets at faro only when the dealer got toward the end of the deck, when predicting the fall of cards got easier. Seeing the Kid was winning far too often, but not intuiting why, the saloonkeeper finally denied Billy access to the games, and he and Middleton just loitered on the sidewalks, target-practiced in the hills, and used up the nights of March courting pretty novias at the Mexican dances that were called bailes.

The Kid was particularly fond of a girl of fifteen named Carlota, and she seemed shyly responsive, flickering a smile at his jokes and courtesies. His gallantry was overseen by a judicious aunt who was the dueña, which can mean overseer, and Tía Hortensia seemed to hope for the match, praising Billito in Spanish for his fluency in their language, his Old World manners, and his gentlemanly respect for the old, the viejos, while Carlota talked of his flashing blue eyes, his sweetness, his smartness, his frequent smile.

On the night of March 31, Hortensia stood far behind her niece under the awning of a mercantile store, looking away when the Kid kissed Carlota. A hard rain was falling and the streets were flooding and the cool, clean air smelled like Armour’s laundry soap. Carlota held the Kid’s kiss for as long as he wanted, wrapping her shawled arms around his neck as his chest crushed against the cushion of her still-small breasts. She let her mouth be insistent, nibbling, and smearing, a vagabond in its wandering over his face with lips softer than the petal of a rose.

The Kid withdrew a little and asked Carlota, “Qué estás haciendo?” What are you doing?

She smiled. “Te estoy enseñando a besar.” Teaching you to kiss.

“Oh. Muchas gracias.” They resumed, and the Kid’s hands were traveling toward Carlota’s sweet rump when he felt a soft tap on his shoulder and fearfully turned to find not the dueña but San Patricio’s constable José Chávez y Chávez and John Middleton with a giggling Mexican girl playfully twisting his black handlebar mustache.

José had lost his grandfather’s farm to the Santa Fe Ring and sought to join the Regulators to extract some justice. So he told the Kid in Spanish that he’d heard Judge Warren Bristol and the semiannual meeting of the district court were due in Lincoln on April 1, and Sheriff Brady intended to arrest Alexander McSween yet again on his announced return to Lincoln from the Chisum hacienda, urge the grand jury’s prosecution of the Regulators for the homicides of Baker and Morton, and convince Judge Bristol and the jury that the sheriff’s posse was legally constituted and acted in self-defense in the February killing of John Henry Tunstall.

Middleton waited for the rattle of Spanish to

end in order to make his own contribution. “And then I’ll wager he’s gonna hunt us each down and kill us dead, just to get rid of the contrary evidence.”

The Kid was fuming as he added to the list of outrages, “The sheriff stole my Winchester rifle.”

* * *

Sheriff Brady took his breakfast of steak and eggs at the Wortley Hotel on April 1 and slogged across a sloppy street to the House, the Kid’s Winchester slung over his forearm. Rain had turned to sleet in the cold of morning, but with the sun it would just be more of the wet.

The frail and ailing old lion Lawrence G. Murphy was alone and leaning over his elbows behind the bar, his thoughts flying and his first quart of Double Anchor rye whiskey being caressed by his hands. The sheriff barging in made him bolt upright in surprise. “Jaysis, ye put the heart crossway in me, Bill!”

“Sorry. Was there mail?” The House was also the post office.