The Kid

Brewer permitted it and just pushed his food around with his fork for a while, often turning to hear snatches of Franklin Coe’s affable persuasion and Roberts’s hot refusals.

George Coe leaned from his bench to listen and commented, “That feller ain’t tall but he sure is feisty.”

They heard Franklin Coe saying, “You give up and nobody will hurt you,” and Roberts saying, “That’s what your gang told Morton and Baker.”

Coe said more and Roberts said, “No, no, no,” and in the dining room Charlie Bowdre grew impatient, clambering up from his bench and hustling outside to grab his pistol, with George Coe, John Middleton, and Doc Scurlock right behind him.

Brewer frowned at the exodus and called, “Oh, go ahead and let him argue, fellas.” But the gang followed Bowdre, as did the Kid, who overcame his pain, grinned, and said, “I’d hate to miss this little frolic.”

Brewer counseled, “You best just watch, Hop-along.”

And then, before the Kid could limp to his friends outside, he heard Bowdre yell, “Roberts, throw up your hands!”

Roberts tilted around Franklin Coe to see Charlie and flatly said, “I don’t believe I will,” lifting his Winchester up and firing it from his hip just as Bowdre shot his pistol. Franklin Coe saw dust fly off the front and back of Roberts’s jacket as he was drilled through his upper intestines. Simultaneously, the Winchester found Bowdre’s cowboy belt buckle, the force of the blow knocking him off his boots as the bullet ricocheted into George Coe’s gun hand. Blood jetted from his instantly subtracted trigger finger. Roberts still was standing and got off a Winchester shot that caught John Middleton in his chest, just missing the heart, then another shot that blasted into Scurlock’s still-holstered pistol and deflected in a fiery scrape down his thigh, and a final shot that caught the Kid in his right sleeve, scarring him with a hot stripe of blood so that he backed up into the hotel, deaf from the noise of so much loud gunfire and watching the gray haze of gun smoke float over three downed Regulators.

Holding his gut, Roberts scuttled downhill to Dr. Blazer’s adobe house, far away from his holstered Peacemaker. His Winchester was now empty, but in the house he found an old single-shot infantry model Springfield carbine hanging on hooks over the bed. The front of the house was open country with the Scranton Road and then just sand and scraggle and the creek, so he felt he could fort himself there at the house entrance. With considerable pain and with blood puddling wherever he stopped, he pulled a chain-spring mattress off a four-poster bed, slid it over to the front doorway, and lifted it, propping the Springfield atop the mattress edge to shake out cartridges from a box and push one into the carbine’s loading gate.

Dick Brewer took care to see that the Kid was fine, ordered him to pull the injured men inside the hotel, then had to endure the government agent begging him to get his Regulators to just leave and end the donnybrook. Brewer looked at the agent with dismay and decided, “You, sir, are a blithering idiot.” He twice glanced down the hill to where Roberts was hidden and told the agent, “I’ll have that hombre out if I have to burn the house down.” And then he ran out to the footbridge over Tularosa Creek and ducked his way to the sawmill without Roberts firing a shot.

At the south end of the sawmill, Dick Brewer squatted behind some raw pine timber and peeked over to see Roberts hiding beside the framework of the doorway, a carbine laid across a chest-high striped mattress, ninety yards away. Brewer fired but just hit the wooden frame. It fanned out like so many pencils. After waiting a little behind the timber, he lifted up to fire again, but Roberts had seen where the first shot came from and was aimed, his .45 caliber carbine bullet striking off pine before hitting Dick Brewer in his blue left eye and detonating his handsome head.

* * *

Buckshot Roberts fell to his seat after killing Dick Brewer, “feeling very ill,” he later said, and he lost so much strength he was effortlessly arrested by the Kid and carried unconscious into a parlor in the hotel, where he howled with pain through the night, dying before noon on April 4, the check for his farm sale uncashed. Coughing blood from his damaged lung, fat John Middleton was hauled down to Tularosa Creek to lie in the cold water and drink it until he almost drowned, and George Coe held a cold washrag around his injury through the night, marveling aloud to those who’d listen that the phantom pain made him feel his missing finger was still there and being squeezed in a vise, its nail repeatedly hammered.

A stagecoach ambulance was sent for Middleton and Coe, and Regulator shovels dug side-by-side graves for Andrew L. Roberts and Richard M. Brewer.

Sallie Chisum shrieked in agony when she heard that Richard was killed. The Kid wondered in self-pity if it was his lot in life that anyone he loved or revered would soon be taken from him. And Alex McSween wrote a valedictory letter to the Cimarron News & Press calling Brewer “physically faultless; generous to a fault; a giant in friendship; possessing an irreproachable character and unsullied honor; kind, amiable, and gentle in disposition, he was a young man of kingly nature without vices of

any kind. Sweet and pleasant be your slumbers, Dick. Ever green and fresh be your memory.”

* * *

The Regulators had been misinformed. Warren Bristol, the cranky associate justice of the supreme court of New Mexico, would convene a grand jury in Lincoln not on April 1, but a week later, on the eighth, and the ten jurors completed their consultations a full ten days later, with none other than Dr. Joseph Hoy Blazer presiding as foreman. Reading the jury’s conclusions, he began with the murder of John Henry Tunstall, “which for brutality and malice is without parallel and without a shadow of justification.” Jesse Evans, J. B. Mathews, and James J. Dolan were among those indicted for the crime. Excluded because of their recent deaths were Frank Baker, William Scott Morton, and Andrew L. Roberts. Dr. Blazer continued, “We equally condemn the most brutal murder of our late Sheriff William Brady, and his deputy, George Hindman. We find responsible John Middleton, Fred Waite, and William H. Bonney.” Seeming to believe they were not the same person, Dr. Blazer wrongly named Henry Antrim, alias Kid, as the killer of Roberts, even though he had not fired his gun. Also indicted for that were Charles Bowdre, John Middleton, Doc Scurlock, and the Coe cousins.

And finally, Dr. Blazer got to the claim that was the initial cause of the killings and counterkillings. “Your Honor charged us to investigate the case of Alexander A. McSween, Esquire, him being charged with the embezzlement of ten thousand dollars belonging to the estate of Emil Fritz, deceased. This we did, but are unable to find any evidence that would justify that accusation. We fully exonerate him and regret that a spirit of persecution has been shown in this matter.”

But Alexander A. McSween would not forgive and forget the far worse crimes that followed the accusation. With a note saying it was “Authorized by John Partridge Tunstall of London, England,” McSween placed an advertisement in various newspapers offering a five-thousand-dollar reward—a lifetime’s income for many then—“for the apprehension and conviction of the murderers of the English gentleman’s son.” Saying the “actual murderers are about twenty in number,” McSween maintained he would “pay a proportionate sum for the apprehension and conviction of any of them.”

The Regulators would seem to have been due some of the five thousand, but no transaction was ever made, possibly because the John H. Tunstall estate owed McSween more than six thousand dollars for the cattle, horses, and farms that were purchased to fulfill Harry’s grandiose plans.

Jailed as an accessory to murder, Jimmy Dolan was freed after L. G. Murphy furnished his bail. The Murphy & Company store had been reorganized as Jas. J. Dolan & Co., which McSween condemned as the loathsome “Irish firm.” But then even the House ceased doing business as Jimmy took the “extremely indisposed” Major Lawrence Gustave Murphy to Santa Fe for medical treatment at St. Vincent’s Hospital and Asylum. There, according to Franklin Coe, “The Sisters of Charity would not let him have whiskey and that cut his living off. He died in a short time and everybody rejoiced over it.” His obituary noted that the former officer and store owner, who was just forty-seven, was buried by the Masonic and Odd Fellows fraternities in their cemetery “in the presence of a large concourse of citizens”—all affiliates of the Santa Fe Ring.

* * *

The Regulators healed up in San Patricio or on their Rio Ruidoso farms, and aside from a few skirmishes there was relative calm for some time. Governor Axtell took credit for it, having signed a proclamation on May 28, 1878, that appointed as sheriff of Lincoln County George W. “Dad” Peppin, who misspelled his last name to disguise his French heritage and was called “Dolan’s affidavit man” because of his willingness to lie for Jimmy under oath. The governor also commanded “all men to disarm and return to their homes and their usual pursuits,” and he concluded, “I urge all good citizens to submit to the law, remembering that violence begets violence, and that they who take up the sword shall perish by the sword.”

And yet a gang of some twenty roughnecks calling themselves the Rio Grande Posse rode north to Lincoln from Seven Rivers and just hung around the Wortley Hotel and the House’s still-open post office for a week, ever on the lookout for Alexander McSween. Rustler and former Army sergeant John Kinney, who founded the Boys, was boss of this outfit, too. William Logan Rynerson, the freakishly tall district attorney who’d studied law with Governor Axtell, had sent Kinney there to help out Jimmy Dolan, who’d gotten Kinney sworn in as a deputy sheriff and promised him five hundred dollars for the assassination of McSween. Were the Rio Grande Posse themselves responsible for the killing, they’d get to divvy up Tunstall’s cattle.

Informers got word to the Regulators and the McSweens, who retreated far away from Lincoln, the lawyer and his wife staying in a campaign tent pitched next to a sinkhole at Bottomless Lake east of Roswell. Wearied of waiting, the roughnecks finally took their treachery south.

With the commencement of the torrential rains in late June, John Chisum offered the Regulators the haven of his South Spring hacienda, with its many rooms and fine furnishings, its fragrant orchard and garden, and the pretty, saucy, and alluring Sallie Chisum. The Kid overdressed in his fanciest, trying to cut a swell, as was said then, and Ash Upson later related that Kid Antrim let himself be recognized in the Roswell general store just so he could buy Sallie a box of Cadbury chocolates. Whether the girl was aware the Kid was romancing her isn’t certain.

* * *

On July 10, Sheriff Peppin, Jimmy Dolan and his ilk, and Deputy Sheriff John Kinney and his mercenaries were in San Patricio shaking down shopkeepers for information about the Tunstall faction, whom they denounced as “Modocs” after the famously rebellious Indian tribe.

Hearing details of it, Alex McSween left his hiding place for the South Spring ranch in order to write a report of the crimes and malfeasance for The Cimarron News & Press. And for those Regulators in the house who could not read, Alex stood in the dining room to proclaim his account aloud.