Carlyle glumly finished a fresh dose of whiskey, and Rudabaugh holstered his Colt.
The cook served steak and eggs, and Bowdre, Wilson, and Folliard hunkered over their dishware as they chatted about the coldest they’d ever been. Rudabaugh finished one rib eye and tore into another. The Kid cautioned, “Easy on the chow there, Dave. You’re swelling up like a tick on a bloodhound.”
“I like to be full up,” he said and jawed the meat with a wide-open mouth.
The Kid looked out at loitering men fogging the air with each irritated breath and trying to stamp feeling into their feet. A few aimed at his face in the window. They seemed close to storming the house. “Your pals are getting restless,” he said.
Rudabaugh told Carlyle, “We’ll kill em all. You know we will.”
“You’re outnumbered.”
“Don’t matter. We’re professional killers. They ain’t.”
“I haf chores to do?” the German cook said. “I haf to go outside now?”
The Kid waved him out.
Soon, though, the cook was back again with a note from Deputy Sheriff Hudgens stating that if Carlyle was not free in five minutes, the posse would execute their hostage, Greathouse.
Rudabaugh grinned at Carlyle. “Where do you want my bullet? Ear? Eye? Lotsa choices.”
Wanting to get as far away as possible from Dirty Dave, Carlyle rose from the breakfast table and tilted with intoxication as he sought the Kid. “Would you,” he began, and just then a loose and impatient shot was fired from outside. In his drunkenness, James Bermuda C
arlyle seemed to think it was from inside, from Rudabaugh, and in a sudden panic he dashed for freedom, crashing through the window glass and wrecking the sash before getting shot by his White Oaks friends, bang bang bang! He fell into the snow, crawled just a few yards trailing ribbons and scarves of blood, and then gave himself up to death.
“You idiots!” Hudgens shouted. “That wasn’t Kid Bonney! It was Jimmy!”
Still the firing went on for a while, with sixty or seventy bullets pocking the adobe and making that vwimp sound as they zipped into the house and at the Kid’s command “Don’t shoot!” missed the gang that was not yet bothering to fire back. In the chaos and confusion outside, Whiskey Jim Greathouse just stepped backward from the frustrated posse and got on a horse that his partner Fred Kuch trotted forward. They both galloped off without getting shot at.
* * *
Who knows how it went? The Kid claimed the White Oaks shooters were dispirited over having killed Carlyle and slunk off in their despondency. But so much was unexplained. Greathouse and Kuch rode back a full day afterward and found Jimmy Carlyle still dead there on his back, frozen stiff, with snowflakes collecting in his gaping mouth and eye sockets. Their way station had been torched and was nothing but hissing rafters, charred adobe, and defeated furniture. There were no signs of blood anywhere except around Carlyle; no sign at all of the Rustlers. Hoofprints seemed headed west to White Oaks and east toward Fort Sumner.
* * *
In Roswell, J. C. Lea got word of the Kid and his gang’s depredations in and around White Oaks and on November 27 sent a descriptive letter to Deputy Sheriff Pat Garrett, who’d already collected a posse comitatus that included his gambling buddy Barney Mason, a half dozen neighbors from his four-section homestead outside Roswell, and the Lincoln deputies James W. Bell and Robert Olinger. Riding up the Rio Pecos, they achieved Fort Sumner and found out Tom Folliard and Charlie Bowdre had been seen in the vicinity of Las Cañaditas, twenty miles to the northeast, on rangeland that belonged to the cattleman Thomas J. Yerby. Garrett held a warrant for Charles Bowdre for the homicide of Andrew Roberts at Blazer’s Mill, so after a hasty breakfast in Beaver Smith’s saloon, the posse of nine men grudgingly took off across a prairie deep with snow, favoring the vales and ravines to stay hidden from the criminals, with Garrett frequently forging up steep hills on his own to scan with field glasses a periwinkle blue horizon.
Eight miles from the Yerby ranch house, the deputy sheriff spied a red-haired horseman a half mile off who could have been Tom Folliard rocking in his saddle on a splendid filly thoroughbred, heading east. The geography was familiar enough to Garrett that he wisely elected to take a shortcut through a gorge that was hard going with its yucca, sagebrush, and tricky shale, but he soon got the posse within three hundred yards of the horseman they sought.
Tom glanced south and saw a sudden gang of nine riders hurtling toward him with guns in their hands. But their mustangs were scuffling through hillocks of snowdrift and seemed overused after a far journey, while his was a racehorse that vaulted forward at the first jab of his spurs, all four hooves flying with thrilling speed as he crouched like a jockey over her withers and crest and fired six rapid shots behind him. They could not overcome gravity and gashed up spits of snow far ahead of the challenging posse.
Even having the advantage of an angle toward the Yerby ranch house, Garrett could see the gap between himself and Folliard widening as the possemen’s own horses heaved for air and gradually gave out. He yanked his Winchester out of its saddle scabbard and halted his progress to fire three useless rifle shots at the fleeing thief, then slow-walked to Yerby’s before the government horses could keel over dead.
Tom Folliard had raced up to the Yerby barn and called, “Charlie, you in there?”
Wearing a blacksmith’s apron, the wrangler hunched outside, shading his eyes from the sun.
“Sheriff’s men are after us.” Which got his attention. Folliard freed his left boot from the stirrup, and Bowdre inserted his own and swung up behind the saddle cantle and hugged Folliard as the filly racehorse exploded forward again, Bowdre waving back to a concerned Manuela on the bunkhouse porch as she watched her husband vamoose.
After a quarter mile, Folliard veered the horse toward a deep coulee, and a jouncing Bowdre called, “Where the hell you goin?”
“To get outta sight,” Folliard called back.
And Bowdre yelled, “But there’s a creek!”
Exactly then the racehorse crashed through the snow and ice in the coulee to four feet of ice water below, and Bowdre fell off the filly as she floundered in fear, thoroughly drenching her riders. “This is just awful!” Folliard yelled, but the horse finally found a purchase and scrabbled up onto an earthen bank and shook herself like a dog.
Bowdre wetly crouched in the snow, holding himself and shivering. He said, “I’ve seen fun times before and this ain’t it.”