“And like I say, I’m recruiting.”
“I hardly do nothing with people involved. Railroads and banks, that’s complexicated.”
“All’s I need is a wizard gunslinger with sand in him. And has to be smarter than the dirt-farmin Reubens I been with. They’d swat at a hornet’s nest with their hands.”
The Kid said, “I honestly feel flattered that you looked me up. I mean, it’s a privilege to meet such a famous person, but I’m riding opposite of the owl-hoot trail now and not interested in your livelihood.”
Jesse James seethed like he was chewing rocks, and the Kid’s hand inched toward his sidearm in case it came to that. But then Jesse looked around the restaurant and at all the reasonable people there and his hot temper went on ice. “Look at me getting wrathful with a boy just exercising his freedom. Which is all I’m trying to do. I do swear, I’ll be the death of myself someday.”
Henry Hoyt walked over just to chat, but Jesse was already standing. He shook Hoyt’s hand in a genial way but got close to his ear to whisper, “You have met Jesse James. Now you can go ahead and die.” And then he was gone outside.
The Kid watched him cross the street and vanish in an alley, and he thought, If that is an outlaw, you are not an outlaw.
* * *
On July 5, in a scathing, eight-hour peroration to the court of inquiry at Fort Stanton, Henry Waldo sought to exterminate all enemies of Nathan Dudley, calling them ignorant, lying, irresponsible, and shameless. “Especially does Ira E. Leonard loom up above the waste water of the dead sea of selfishness,” he said, but he had not yet gotten to the Kid. “Then was brought forward William Bonney, alias ‘Antrim,’ alias ‘the Kid,’ a known criminal of the worst type although hardly up to his majority, a murderer by profession, as records of this court connect him with two cowardly and atrocious assassinations. There were warrants enough for him on the nineteenth day of July last to have papered him from his head to his boots. Yet he was engaged to do service here as a witness and his testimony aptly illustrated that he would not hesitate to swear falsely about soldiers firing at him that night as he was escaping. ‘A liar once is a liar all the time.’?”
Eight weeks after the court of inquiry commenced, the result was this:
In view of the evidence adduced, the Court is of the opinion that Lieut. Col. N. A. M. Dudley, Ninth US Cavalry, has not been guilty of any violation of law or of orders, that the act of proceeding to the town of Lincoln on the 19th day of July, 1878, was prompted by the most humane and worthy motives and of good military judgment under exceptional circumstances. None of the allegations made against him by His Excellency the Governor or by Ira E. Leonard have been sustained and that proceedings before a Court Martial are therefore unnecessary.
– PART THREE –
WHO IS IT?
(JULY 1879–JULY 1881)
- 15 -
SHERIFFS
That summer a smart-aleck journalist asserted that hundreds were in pursuit of the Kid and dearly hoping not to find him. But word got to Sheriff George
Kimbrell that Billy was hiding out in a shack alongside the Rio Bonito just six miles from Lincoln, and because his deputies were in his office and heard the rumor as well, the sheriff felt obliged to go after the Kid.
There was some dillydallying and a host of invented tasks that he said first needed tending to, so the sheriff and his posse didn’t get to the pinewood shack until sundown. They saw no sign of movement from afar, just a wisp of smoke from the chimney. But a forward scout did find a fettered horse near the river. Looked like a hard keeper of an animal indulging in green foliage and watching the timid scout with unblinking disrespect.
Sheriff Kimbrell thought someone ought to crawl up to the only window and have a look-see, but he got no volunteers.
“You could do it,” a deputy told him.
But a fluttery reluctance befell the sheriff and he confessed, “Nah, it’s not just that I like the Kid, it’s that I also like living.”
Kimbrell changed his strategy to cautious waiting throughout the night in a semicircle sixty yards distant. Soon enough the Kid would open the door and their guns would catch him in a crossfire.
Hunger was overtaking them and skeeters whined at the ears of the posse. They kept slapping themselves in the head and grousing.
Inside the shack, the Kid cooked frijoles in a saucepan, then roasted green coffee beans in the same pan and stirred in water with a fork until he got the coffee to a boil. He let the grounds settle, then filled his tin cup. Hearing an unfamiliar sound, he sidled to a knothole in a plank and peered out into the pitch-black. Humps of infrequent motion lay on the earth and whispering heaps leaned against fir trees.
Wasn’t but one way out for a normal person, but the Kid crouched under the window to get to the fireplace, where he doused the wood embers with his coffee and quietly shoveled them, still hissing, into a bucket. Wrapping his firearms, hat, and necessaries into a woolen poncho and tying it to his left ankle with twine, he stooped inside the fireplace and squeezed up inside the hot chimney just as he’d done at age fourteen in the Silver City jail. Alternately reaching up his arms and kicking his feet as in an Australian crawl, the hot bricks scalding and soot-blackening him, he did manage to get out and onto the shingled roof, squatting to haul up the jutting burdens in the poncho and assemble himself in full armory as he looked down at a semicircle of men in front who were either sleeping or swatting at insects. And then there was nothing left to do but jump and jar his legs with the hard hit to the ground and to roll in loam, where he halted on all fours, his finely tuned ears seeking the sounds of notice or stirring. But he heard nothing but an older man mumbling in dream, “Oh dear, oh dear.” The Kid stood up and walked toward his horse like just another deputy selecting a night pee in the river, and he left in an easterly direction.
Sheriff Kimbrell and his posse plodded into Lincoln the next morning, slumping with hangdog looks and scratching their itches. Inquiries were made about what had happened, but the sheriff only stated, “I don’t want to talk about it.”
Confidence in him was forever lost, and some of the wealthier cattlemen in Lincoln County began seeking a finer and more stalwart candidate for the sheriff’s office when next election time came.
* * *
Early in July 1879, James Joseph Dolan was examined in a habeas corpus hearing concerning the homicide in the first degree of Huston Ingraham Chapman. Although he’d initially testified that he wasn’t there when the murder occurred, then that he was there but without a gun, he now claimed in his own defense that he’d seen nothing because he was so drunk and he did fire a shot but at the ground to call off his friends from their hazing of the lawyer. The contradictions and inconsistencies in Jimmy’s sworn testimony would have gotten him locked up for perjury anywhere else, but Judge Warren Bristol’s affection for him was such that he decided to release Jimmy on $3,000 bail until the next term of court in Socorro.