I will pay $500 reward to any person or persons who will capture William Bonny, alias The Kid, and deliver him to any sheriff of New Mexico. Satisfactory proofs of identity will be required.
LEW. WALLACE,
Governor of New Mexico.
* * *
On December 15, Joseph C. Lea in Roswell got a note in red ink signed by “Chas Bowdre,” but he was probably helped by the far more literate Billy the Kid. “I have broke up housekeeping,” Bowdre claimed,
& am camping around, first one place & then another on the range, so that no one can say that Yerby’s ranch is our stopping place. If I don’t get my name cleared I intend to leave hereabouts this winter, for I don’t intend to have any hand at fighting no more in the territory, for it is a different thing from what the Lincoln County War was, when I was justified. The only difference between my case & my enemies is that I had the misfortune to be indicted before the fighting was over & so did not get the liberty of a pardon. It seems to me that this would occur to the government once & awhile, so they would include us warriors in their clemency & stop their running around causing havoc. I have no more sentiments to urge in my favor, except that others were pardoned for like offenses. Respectfully, Chas Bowdre.
But on that December 15 the sheriff of Lincoln County and his handpicked posse of thirteen were seeking the five-hundred-dollar reward and were heading eastward from White Oaks to Fort Sumner, stopping at Grzelachowski’s store to stand in the heat of a mesquite fire, fill up on McIntosh apples, and uncork some Jim Beam bourbon whiskey.
They generally averaged a rigorous forty-five miles per day, but on December 17 a fierce blizzard forced them to seek haven at the Gerhardt ranch, twenty-five miles from the fort. Yet Garrett was too restless to overnight there, so he and his men rode out at midnight and just before sunrise finally got to Fort Sumner. There the former rustler Barney Mason heard from Garrett’s father-in-law that the fugitive gang had left yesterday, probably for the Wilcox-Brazil roadhouse, twelve miles east. And that was confirmed by Erastus Wilcox’s Mexican stepson, a sixteen-year-old named Juan Gallegos, who’d wandered into Sumner to reconnoiter for the Kid. The sheriff threatened jail time in order to convince José Valdéz, an outlaw friend of the Kid’s, to write a note in Spanish that claimed the posse had just left for Roswell and the fort would welcome them back. The sheriff then wrote a note to Wilcox and Brazil in English saying,
I am at Fort Sumner and on the trail of the Kid and his gang and I will never let up until I catch them or chase them into Mexico. I request your cooperation.
Barney Mason said, “The Spanish one’s for the Kid. The other is for your stepdad.”
“Am I stupid?” Juan Gallegos asked.
The Kid was hankering to get back to see Paulita, whom he’d missed the last go-round, so when a sheepish Juan gave him the note from José Valdéz, the Kid read it and told his gang, “The coast is clear. We’ll go back to the fort at nightfall on Sunday.”
Billie Wilson grinned as he said, “Those poodles heard where we was and trembled to meet up with us. Headed in the opposite direction.”
Charlie Bowdre was in the sitting room with Emanuel Brazil when he heard the news, and he wondered aloud if he could still be romantic with Manuela, she having reached the days of her confinement. Emanuel offered, “Well, there’s other things she could do for ya.”
Charlie cogitated for a moment and then got outraged. “What are you incinerating? Don’t you be dementing the mother of my child!”
A larger Tom Folliard got in the way of a fracas to say, “Y’all know where I’ll be in Sumner: visiting the scarlets at Hargrove’s saloon. I needs me some femaleness.”
Rudabaugh had just walked in, and Emanuel grinned as he said, “And you’ll be getting a bath, right, Dave?”
Rudabaugh socked him hard in the ear, and Emanuel Brazil fell off his upholstered chair. His hand came away from his ear with wet blood on it. “I’m bleeding! And you got me half deaf, you bastard!”
Bowdre happily clapped his hands. Rudabaugh just shrugged. “Ain’t got no sense of humor, me.”
Sunday morning the Kid scrubbed his overworn clothes with borax in a copper scullery and then used oven-heated flatirons to press out their wrinkles on a kitchen table.
Rudabaugh idly watched and said, “You’re gonna make some fella a nice wife.”
Without looking up from his ironing, the Kid said, “Don’t get any lewd ideas, Dave.”
He then spruced up with a chilly bath, and for the Christmas gift he got Paulita in Puerto de Luna, he found a tag and string fastener, writing on the tag “For My Angel” and bracketing that with hearts. And on the late afternoon of December 19 the Kid, Rudabaugh, Wilson, Bowdre, and Folliard took the twelve-mile ride to a fort that the Kid still thought of as home.
But he was expected, of cour
se. After hiding their horses in a wing of the Indian hospital on the nineteenth, the sheriff’s men tied a wild and spitting Manuela to the iron hospital bed in the triage room, and around six went across the main access road to the old Indian commissary and killed time playing cards.
There was a foot of fresh snow on the ground, and the full moon shone off it so well that the Kid could see the fort entrance and the Indian hospital three hundred yards off. To guard against being overwhelmed in an ambush, the Kid was hanging back to ride drag just as he would when herding livestock. Bowdre and Rudabaugh were twenty yards ahead of him on the left and right wings; Wilson was the flanker, otherwise called the maverick catcher; and Folliard was far ahead, riding point on a cold night salted with stars. The horses’ hooves made squeaky, munching sounds in the snow. The Kid could hear Tom singing, “Oh my Sal she is a maiden fair. Sing Polly wolly doodle all the day. With curly eyes and laughing hair. Sing Polly wolly doodle all the day. Fare thee well, fare thee well, fare thee well, my fairy fey. For I’m going to Lou’siana for to see my Susyanna. Sing Polly wolly doodle all the day.”
Around eight p.m. in old Fort Sumner, the sticking Indian commissary door was jarred open by Lon Chambers, and Garrett looked up from a five-card-draw poker hand with an ace but junk otherwise. The nighthawk said, “I see five men with rifles coming.”
The sheriff and his posse hurried to collect their things, then edged out into a moonlit night of zero degrees, the sheriff hissing instructions that his thirteen men hold still inside the moonless shade of the commissary’s high adobe wall. Looking east they heard Folliard singing, “Oh a grasshopper sittin on a railroad track, sing Polly wolly doodle all the day. A-pickin his teeth with a carpet tack, sing Polly wolly doodle all the day.”
The Kid could see something far off slinking onto the access road, but it was like a tree walking, and then, when Tom’s racehorse was no more than ten yards from the figure, the Kid heard Pat Garrett yell, “It’s him!”
Shocked out of his song, Tom reached for his Remington sidearm but never got off a shot as thirteen men were suddenly alongside the deputy sheriff and firing a fusillade that turned the Rustlers into a gallop from whence they’d come. “A big shooting came off,” Cal Polk later wrote in a memoir. “They was about forty shots fired.”