And so Waite and Middleton carried the Kid into the eastern backroom of the Tunstall store, where Harry’s bachelor quarters had been. Taylor Ealy, the doctor of medicine whom Alex McSween had hired as a pastor of a still-unbuilt church, was now housed there with his wife, two small children, and Susan Gates, the teenage schoolteacher Dr. Ealy had recruited from Pennsylvania. The Ealy parents were elsewhere, and Susan Gates had been reading aloud Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland to the children until she heard the guns. Now she rushed to the Kid, for she’d developed a crush on the good-looking, good-natured rogue.
Waite got a hammer, said, “They’ll be scouring for him,” and efficiently clawed up two wide floorboards.
Hugging his Winchester, the Kid groaned with hurt as he squeezed between the floor joists but offered a false and uneasy smile of goodbye to the schoolteacher, whose hands went to her cheeks in horror as Waite hammered the floorboards over him like the lid of a coffin.
And then Waite and the three other Regulators were galloping out to the east and toward San Patricio, John Middleton halting near the eastern courthouse, the Convento, to fire back at the crowds running to rescue Sheriff Brady and the dying deputy. They scattered.
Deputy Mathews watched the four exit the town and noticed Kid Bonney wasn’t with them. Rushing to the Tunstall corral with a few men, he confirmed that the Kid’s horse was still hitched there.
In the tight, stifling darkness, the Kid heard the back door crash open as J. B. Mathews shouted, “Where is he?”
“Where’s who?” Susan Gates said. The quiet children must have been scared and clinging to her skirt.
Deputy Mathews ignored the schoolmarm, and the Kid heard a lot of boots overhead as the searchers undertook conjectures and interrogatories. He held his breath until in frustration and bewilderment they finally exited and there was silence. Then he heard the children being hustled to the front of the store to join their mother. Susan Gates seemed to be crouching close to him as she said, “Dr. Ealy is here now. He’ll get you out.”
The floorboards were lifted up again, and the Kid inhaled like he’d been underwater that whole time.
“Let me look at that leg,” Ealy said, and the Kid sat on a yellow Empire couch to have his trousers unbuttoned and yanked down to his knees. Susan Gates shyly looked away. “Kerosene,” the doctor said, and the schoolteacher carried over a crockery jug of it. The doctor dunked his handkerchief into the coal oil and told the Kid, “I have to hurt you.”
Billy nodded.
Dr. Ealy used a pencil to poke the wet handkerchief into the wound of the quadriceps muscle until a quarter inch of the blood-soaked cloth exited the other side. The Kid seized the couch cushions with the agony of it, which only increased when the doctor tugged the handkerchief completely through the injury.
The Kid sighed in the aftermath and said to the ashen Susan Gates, “That was excruciating. I don’t recommend it.”
“We have to worry about infection,” Ealy told him. “The hole won’t kill you, but sepsis will.” With a sewing needle and thread, he stitched the wound shut at entrance and exit, and the bleeding was stanched.
The Kid asked Susan Gates, “Was I wincing?” and she nodded. His left leg wrapped in a yard of gauze bandage, the Kid hoisted up his trousers and stood. “I have to go,” he said and limped outside.
He took a moment to stand over John H. Tunstall’s grave near the granary and pray a rest-in-peace and say aloud like an oath, “We’re gonna get the rest of em, too.” He managed to get onto his horse by boarding it on the right side, and he was the final Regulator to get away. He thought this would be his last visit to Lincoln, and so at the eastern extreme of town he forced himself to painfully stand on his saddle like this was a Wild West show, and he offered those lingerers who knew him a theatrical bow and a roundhouse wave of his sombrero to say goodbye forever.
But Lincoln would see him again.
- 10 -
VENDETTA
With Dick Brewer as their captain, the Regulators were on the scout again as soon as April 2. Rumor had it that some of those who’d connived to kill John Henry Tunstall had found shelter for their cowardice on the Mescalero Apache Indian Reservation southwest of Lincoln. Still holding as sacred his “disreputable” warr
ants for arrest, Brewer collected his allies Charlie Bowdre, Fred Waite, Doc Scurlock, John Middleton, the cousins George and Franklin Coe, and William H. Bonney himself, his gunshot wound resenting each jounce of the saddle. Trotting his horse down the Tularosa Creek, the Kid stayed alongside Brewer like a sidekick, his orphan’s longing for a father or highly regarded older brother causing him to revere a hale, valiant twenty-eight-year-old he thought of as royalty.
Brewer spoke of the April Fools’ Day assassination just once, solemnly telling the Kid, “I just want it to be known that I would not have advised nor consented to that dastardly act.” And then the pair rode in silence for an hour.
On the Tularosa was an eentsy settlement containing a sawmill, a store, some adobe outbuildings, a hotel, and the office of the Mescalero Apache Indian agent. It was named Blazer’s Mill after its owner, Dr. Joseph Hoy Blazer, an Iowa dentist and widower who’d tired of the villainous smell of mouths full of decay and chose instead hard labor on the frontier.
It just so happened that Andrew L. “Buckshot” Roberts was in Blazer’s Mill and stewing because the mail was late. Off and on Roberts worked for the House, and he was part of the larger sheriff’s posse that had sought to chase down John Tunstall, and he was so fearful of being indicted for the crime that he sold his farm on the Rio Ruidoso in March, and on April 3 he rode to the Indian agency’s post office, hoping to collect the purchaser’s check before seeking anonymity elsewhere. Around eleven in the morning Dr. Blazer saw Roberts waiting in the hotel and warned him he had better hotfoot it because an Apache had told him he’d seen a gang of men sleeping under the juniper fir trees on Apache Summit. The dentist wondered if they mightn’t be Regulators.
Roberts gave Blazer a Colorado address where his letter could be forwarded and hurried up into the evergreens, but from a height he saw the mailman’s buckboard rolling toward the mill town, and he forced his mule into a sliding, worried jog down the steepness.
The Regulators had arrived while he was gone, but Roberts failed to notice their horses in the corral. Middleton was posted outside the hotel and watched a little man he didn’t know hitch his mule, hang his Colt Peacemaker and holster on his saddle horn, and clomp into the post office, a Winchester rifle aslant on his forearm. When Middleton overheard A. L. Roberts give his name to the postmaster, he recognized it as familiar and hurried to tell the Regulators, who were lunching on plates of tamales, frijoles, and mole poblano.
Hearing the offender’s name, Brewer immediately stood with concern and announced, “We have a warrant for Roberts.”
“I guessed that,” Middleton said.
Even an aching old man’s rise was impossible for the injured Kid, and when his right hand instinctively reached for his gun, he found air, the landlady having forbidden weapons indoors.
The gregarious Franklin Coe stood, too, and said, “My farm’s alongside Buckshot’s. Let me talk to him peaceably like a neighbor and get him to surrender.”