The Kid

Witnesses saw Blazer furiously stare at Bernstein before flatly announcing, “No one can call me a liar and stay alive.”

On August 5, for old times’ sake, a final collection of Regulators rode to Blazer’s Mill to visit the grave of Dick Brewer. The Kid felt overheated, and he was joined by some parched Anglo friends as he veered off to dismount alongside a shaded mountain stream. He and Waite and the Coes knelt to dunk their faces in the water and drink, just as their horses did. And there they heard the gunfire of a disturbance among some off-the-reservation Apaches and Mexican Regulators, among them Atanacio Martínez, the former Lincoln constable. The Apaches thought the Regulators were there for some more horse stealing. Which was not yet true.

“Morris” Bernstein and the Indian agent were allotting salted meat rations to some Apache women when the bookkeeper also heard the gunfire and left his government office to ride out and calm things.

Seeing his opportunity, Dr. Blazer went from the mill to his house to get the Springfield carbine that Andrew Roberts had used to kill Dick Brewer, and he cantered his horse until he was just behind the bookkeeper. The Apaches and the Mexicans were already straggling away from each other and were shocked when they saw Blazer lift the carbine and fire it just inside Bernstein’s left shoulder blade, where he knew the heart was. Bernstein fell dead into the tall blond cheatgrass. Blazer got off his horse and the Apaches and Mexicans got onto theirs, scattering elsewhere. Anglo trouble, not theirs.

Inventing in his head a gun battle with the Englishman as the luckless victim, Blazer used Bernstein’s pistol to kill him three more times, then changed the tale into an Apache robbery, collecting all the bookkeeper’s worldly goods, even turning his pockets out. Then he went back to the hotel, claiming he’d been running the Belsaw in the mill. Was that gunfire he’d heard?

The Kid’s horse had scared with the gun noise and scrambled away, so he had to hop up behind George Coe and latch on to his waist as they loped toward a final three oddly successive gunshots. But they happened into the peeved and shot-at Apaches, who took off after them, rifles raised. Coe spun his horse around, and he and the Kid went to fleeing, hanging off to the side of the horse like trick riders do in Wild West shows to avoid more than fifty zipping bullets until the Apaches got bored with the chase and rode elsewhere, whooping and caterwauling in victory.

And then there was nothing for the Regulators to do but steal all the Indian agency’s horses and mules in what they reckoned was fair trade for the disquietude they’d put up with.

* * *

Because it was a federal problem involving the military, Lieutenant Colonel Dudley ordered a thorough investigation, and an Army captain interviewed all those staying at Blazer’s Mill, each with a vested interest in agreeing to the owner’s fiction. The investigator suspected anti-Jewish prejudice was behind the homicide, but only noted in his report that “Dr. Blazer neither expressed surprise nor regret at the murder of Mr. Bernstein, nor sympathy for his friends. He also insinuated to me that Mr. Bernstein frequently tampered with his letters.”

Weighing all the evidence, there was only one thing Lieutenant Colonel Dudley could think to do: indict “the McSween band of outlaws” and “Antrim, known as Kid” for the cold-blooded murder.

Cavalrymen were sent over hill and dale in pursuit of him and were told one night he was holed up in the jacal of a Mexican sheepherder and his wife. In spite of their hammering continually on the flimsy door and hollering for access, it took some minutes for the nightgowned wife to let the cavalry in, excusing her tardiness with the claim of deep sleep. Some friction matches were lit. The jacal was just one earthen-floored room with some kitchenware, a few pieces of parlor furniture, and a high bed that the couple huddled together on, their stocking feet dangling. There was nothing more to see. “We been duped,” a corporal said, and the hunting party left in a huff.

Hearing the hooves of the horses grow faint, the husband and wife scooted down and hauled the upper mattress that did not belong there off the hiding Kid.

With laughter he admitted, “I just about suffocated.” And then he was too excited to sleep so he entertained them by singing in his Irish tenor “Beautiful Dreamer,” “Aura Lee,” and “Turkey in the Straw.”

In frustration Lieutenant Colonel Dudley recalled his hapless cavalry to the fort.

* * *

Jimmy Dolan and his crew rustled a hundred John H. Tunstall cattle that were still being held for probate, so in a tag-you’re-it, the Kid and his crew stole the Jimmy Dolan horses corralled on the ranch owned by kin of the deceased Emil Fritz. Included among the stock was an Arabian sorrel that was branded BB, being the horse that Sheriff Bill Brady rode into Lincoln on the day he was assassinated. The Kid took that sorrel as his own, saying the brand stood for Billy

Bonney.

On the Kid’s initiative, they took the herd to John Chisum’s vast Jinglebob Ranch on the Pecos River, Billy presuming Chisum’s hundreds of cowboys would be continually in need of fresh animals, and also hoping Sallie Chisum would still be there. She was. She hugged the Kid with delight and kissed his cheek and called him Willy, Sallie’s proprietary name-changing being his first clue as to her new hankering. She looked over his shoulder at Waite, Folliard, Middleton, and the Coe cousins, still mounted and smirking or squirming over the public display of affection. She called, “We only have room enough for Willy here. But you all can find cots in the bunkhouse.”

There were vulgarities and catcalls from his friends as they urged the stolen horses into a fenced corral.

Sallie linked her forearm inside his to guide the Kid down a wide hallway air-conditioned by a middle ditch of flowing water that was called an acequia. Crossing an interior footbridge, she told him he needed to heel his boots off because Uncle John hated filth on his fine Wilton carpets. She told him he could have Uncle’s room as his lair. She’d have the maid heat water for his bath. Were those his only clothes? Well then, she’d find him some nice things in Uncle’s closet. And as he was beginning to get undressed, she paused at his bedroom door to say, “Ever since you sent me that lovely letter from Lincoln, during the outrage, I have been thinking of you with such felicity and fondness.”

Shying a little, he confessed that Susan McSween had helped him with it.

“Really?” she said. “Forsooth? But the sentiments were yours?”

He smiled. “Verily.”

She evaluated him like a worried schoolteacher. “You’re so adult now, so brazen, so something-or-other. I feel like I’m meeting you for the first time.”

“I’ll take real pleasure in getting acquainted.”

She flirtatiously smiled, then turned away with “Ta ta.”

* * *

The Kid took a bath in the kitchen with Sallie’s teenage brothers, Walter and William, hunching forward on chairs near his scrubbing-up and questioning him about his storied role in the Lincoln gun battle. Walter offered to use a scullery brush on him but was denied, and William wrapped him in a voluptuous towel as the Mexican and Navajo cooks smiled at his nakedness and Billy scurried to his room. There Sallie had laid out John Chisum’s scavenged “morning wear” of laced-up drawers, knee stockings, an overlarge black frock coat, gray trousers and a silver waistcoat, a white shirt with pleated front and a stiff white collar, and a cravat he chose not to wear to avoid the comments of the five comedians who’d be joining them for dinner.

The loyal friends Billy called Ironclads took off their guns, hats, and boots as instructed, but the noise was not softened as their footfalls shook the silverware and chair legs shrieked with their seatings. Each was as spruced as possible, his hair still wet, and even the Coe cousins’ hillbilly beards had been scissored and combed. Sallie was the lone woman at the feast and reveled in the Regulators’ smitten attentiveness, quietly queenly as she encouraged topics of conversation or ordered food to be passed counterclockwise, affectedly demurring when she was flattered, and often letting a hidden hand rest on the Kid’s thigh. Quoting her uncle, she’d said, “Eat till you get tired, boys.”

“Oh my yes,” Tom Folliard said. “It’s my intention to get stuffed like a turkey.”