The Kid

They galloped to Yginio’s house in a placita near the ranch of Patrick Coghlan, with whom the Kid had friendly acquaintance due to rustling transactions. Hence the Kid was long gone when Army Lieutenant Byron Dawson and twenty cavalrymen arrived in Lincoln at midnight, having heard on the afternoon of the eighteenth that William H. Bonney was afoot.

The soldiers banged on house doors in their search for him and in that way happened upon Huston Chapman’s stiff corpse, still on Main Street, his face eaten away by the fire. Worthless Sheriff George Kimbrell, who’d just taken the job, admitted he had seen the body lying there but couldn’t find a soul to help him carry it elsewhere.

With disdain, Lieutenant Dawson said he’d take care of it, and his cavalrymen deposited Huston Chapman on a courthouse plaintiff’s table.

There was no inquest and no meaningful pursuit of a murderer, for, because of his notoriety, the Kid became the only suspect. But the assassination did compel Governor Lew Wallace to write the United States secretary of the interior that “I have further information that certain notorious characters, who have long been under indictment, but by skillful dodging have managed to escape arrests, have formed an alliance which looks like preparation for raids when the spring opens. With that idea I propose a campaign against them.”

- 14 -

CLEMENCY

The governor would soon meet the Kid, for W. H. Bonney sent this letter to him at the Governor’s Palace in Santa Fe:

Dear Sir I have heard that You will give one thousand dollars for my person, which as I can understand means alive as a Witness against those that murdered Mr. Chapman. If it is required that I would appear at Court, I have indictments against me for things that happened in the late Lincoln County War and am afraid to give up because my Enemies would Kill me. If it is in your power to annul those indictments I hope you will do so, so as to give me a chance to explain myself. I have no Wish to fight any more, indeed I have not raised an arm since your November proclamation. Concerning my character, I refer You to any of the Citizens of Lincoln, for the majority of them are my Friends and have been helping me all they could. I am also called Kid Antrim, but Antrim is my stepfather’s name. Waiting for an answer, I remain your obedient servant.

The governor invited him to Santa Fe, and a gussied-up Kid got there at night on March 17, 1879, St. Patrick’s Day. An Irish festival in the plaza carried the noise of the kettles, pans, and horns of a shivaree as the Kid walked up to a one-story, 350-foot-wide, porticoed Spanish palace of whitewashed adobe that was constructed in the 1600s. He knocked many times on a rough door of sawn wood, and it was finally opened by an annoyed official in a frock suit, who flinched at seeing the Kid’s Winchester rifle and holstered six-shooter.

“You must be Kid Bonney.”

“Yes sir.”

“You’re late.”

“Had to ride forever to get here.”

“Hand over your weapons.” With some hesitation, the Kid did as instructed, and as the official carried them away he told the Kid, “The governor is still dining. Wait for him in his office.” He nodded his head. “End of the hallway.”

The floor of the hallway was earthen but softened by an ill-matched variety of English, Persian, and Navajo rugs. A faint stream of dirt was trickling through a cleft in the ceiling, and fronds of water stain slurred the walls. In the governor’s office, four hurricane lamps were lit, and a grand, ambassadorial desk was heaped with books such as Antiquities of the Jews by Flavius Josephus, The Lands of the Saracen by Bayard Taylor, Innocents Abroad by Mark Twain, and a King James Version of the Holy Bible that was bookmarked with many torn scraps of paper. Tacked to a wall was a map called Terra Sancta sive Palestina, whatever that was. Billy saw a cardboard stationery box that was labeled Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ, and a quill pen and jar of India ink were next to a half-filled page of handwriting. The Kid stooped over it to read: “Let the reader try to fancy it; let him first look down upon the arena, and see it glistening in its frame of dull-gray granite w

alls; let him then, in this perfect field, see the chariots, light of wheel, very graceful, and as ornate as paint and burnishing can make them.”

Heel-thumping boot steps caused the Kid to scurry from behind the desk and stand beside a yellow tapestried armchair. The patrician governor hurried in, wearing a dark broadcloth suit and worrying his mouth with a toothpick as he glanced at Billy and said, “Sit,” then paused as he sternly added, “And take off your hat in a governor’s presence.”

The Kid complied.

Lewis Wallace was the son of a former governor of Indiana and had left Wabash College to practice law with his father. Elected to the state senate, he was later appointed to the office of Indiana’s adjutant general, then joined in the Civil War, where he became the youngest general in the Union Army at the age of thirty-four and was a judge in the trial of the eight coconspirators in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Because lawyering bored him, he wrote a novel about the Aztecs and twice ran for Congress as a Republican, losing both elections, but in 1876 he was on the commission to re-count the presidential vote in Louisiana and Florida, and he reversed the tally in favor of Rutherford B. Hayes, who, as president, rewarded him with the governorship of the New Mexico Territory in 1878. Lew Wallace was now fifty-one, a hawkish, fierce-eyed man with long, graying hair aslant on his skull, a full beard that seemed almost a bib for his chest, and a wide mustache that concealed his mouth and forced him now to comb reminders of his dinner from it.

To be ingratiating, as was his habit, the Kid said, “I lived in Indianapolis for a while. We got Indiana in common.”

Lew Wallace seemed unimpressed. “You’re younger than I imagined,” he said.

“Yet, I’m a full-grown man.”

“Aged what?”

“Nineteen.”

Wallace looked around his office with dismay. “And are you seeing for the first time our filthy, falling-down palace?”

“Heck, every house I ever lived in could fit inside this.”

“Oh yes, I have cavernous chambers, but there are vermin in the kitchen and holes in the roof. A few rooms have cedar rafters that are so overweighted with mud that they sag with the curvature of a pirate’s cutlass. Inviting my dear wife to join me here would be the acme of indecency.”

The Kid had no idea what to say, and he found himself fidgeting.

Wallace asked, “Have you heard politics called the art of the possible?”

“Nope,” the Kid answered, then worried that was rude so he added, “Your Excellency.”