Billy
* * *
Within the hour on July 19, Deputy Bob Olinger, a lout and bully who’d joined up with the Rio Grande Posse, hunched across Main Street to crowbar the shutters off McSween’s front windows. His accomplice smashed the plate glass and toppled the heaped adobe bricks on the sills. Olinger shouted inside, “I have warrants for you and others in the house. Will you surrender?”
Alexander McSween called, “We have warrants for you!”
Olinger was at a loss and could only inquire, “Where are they?”
The Kid yelled from inside, “Our warrants are in our guns, you cocksucking sons-of-bitches!”
His foul language caused Alex McSween to give him a disapproving glance.
Meanwhile John Kinney and some of his Boys were hauling lumber to the east side of McSween’s house, the only property the Regulators still firmly held. Inside they were hot and stinking and without water. Alex went to the east wing and heard lumber being stacked and Kinney calling for kerosene.
McSween hastily wrote a note in pencil, and his ten-year-old niece, Minnie Shield, walked it to the commanding officer in the folding chair. Lieutenant Colonel Dudley read:
Would you have the kindness to let me know why soldiers surround my house? Before blowing up my property I would like to know the reason.
Nathan Dudley replied that he sought no correspondence with Alexander McSween and, deliberately misreading the lawyer’s syntax, he stated in his note,
If you desire to blow up your own house, the commanding officer does not object.
Kinney’s fire on the east wing of the house wouldn’t catch or was doused, but Andrew J. Boyle, formerly a rowdy British soldier in Scotland and now a Seven Rivers rancher, flung lit dried wood soaked in kerosene into the outdoor kitchen of the west wing. Some firewood was stacked there, and dish towels and aprons, and flames soon crawled over the adobe walls as though ravenous for paint.
The Kid was the first to smell the acrid smoke, and he ran down the hallway with a Shaker broom, intending to swat out the flames, but he found a conflagration. And when he gave extinguishing the fire a go, he was shot at from the stables.
When he got to Alex McSween, he reported what was happening, and Tom Folliard, overhearing, said, “Don’t worry. All is not lost.”
McSween asked in exasperation, “If all is not lost, where the hell is it?”
The fire’s fierce appetite shifted southward to the McSween quarters, and with temperatures nearing a thousand degrees, the hallway wallpaper curled, then blackened, then chafed into flying ash. The adobe bricks burned like charcoal. The houseguests backed up from room to room to avoid the heat and lung-racking smoke, and were soon crowded into the front parlor, their clothing drenched in sweat, handkerchiefs and dish towels held over their noses and mouths to inefficiently filter out the fouled air.
Harvey Morris looked out at forty soldiers and civilians waiting by the front fence and its south gate, and told no one in particular, “We’re in a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t situation.”
Alexander McSween said with despair, “I have no idea what to do,” and fell onto a sofa, his head in his hands as though doomed. “I seem to have mislaid my mind.”
His wife sat on the bench of her parlor organ and seemed to be itemizing all the expensive possessions they’d lose soon. Wood smoke grayly filled the room like a dense fog. Walls were hot as radiators.
Little Jimmy Dolan now tilted forward on his crutches to drunkenly watch indigo clouds of smoke roil up from the house next door to the Wortley Hotel. His room’s plate-glass window so scalded his outreached hand that he withdrew to the hallway to continue his staring.
Erratically choosing action, then inaction, Lieutenant Colonel Dudley was eating dinner from a mess kit and worrying that no women and children were exiting the incinerating house. He’d intended to explain to higher-ups his presence in Lincoln with a previously composed memorandum that he was going there “to protect women and children; and we shall not take sides.” Charred bodies would not do. So he was relieved at nightfall to see five enlisted men hitch a wagon and go into the Tunstall store to get the Ealy belongings and to escort out of town Dr. Taylor and Mrs. Ruth Ealy, their two small children, and the schoolteacher Susan Gates.
Seeing the Ealys getting into an Army wagon and heading for Fort Stanton, Susan McSween ran next door waving a white handkerchief over her head and accosted a captain who was rolling a cigarette while leaning lazily against a post of the mercantile store. “We have three horrified children in that house,” she cried. “I beseech you to give them protection.”
The captain turned to Dudley, and he nodded. Hostilities ceased as Susan McSween, Elizabeth Shield, and the coughing Shield children walked out of the house and got into a navy blue Army ambulance. Once they were gone, a hail of bullets recommenced going every whichway, though act
ual human targets were lacking.
The captain looked at his master sergeant, a veteran of Chickamauga and Marietta as well as the Indian wars. He asked, “What’s your estimate of the gunfire? How many rounds have been shot?”
“Just today?”
“Yes.”
The master sergeant seemed lost in arithmetic, then answered, “About two thousand.”
Watching the dragon of fire grow wings, the captain told his master sergeant, “If the poor devils still in that hellhole get away, they’re entitled to their freedom.”