The Kid

Tom Folliard had felt the wallop of a slug in his chest but no immediate fierce pain, and he swung his filly thoroughbred around and jabbed at her flanks with his boot heels. And then the hurt was like something excruciating blooming inside him and he folded over to try to submerge it. The racehorse seemed to intuit doom, for she would not run forward but circled and fought Tom’s guidance in order to linger a little, as if in deep thought, and then disobediently walk back to the fort with her rider fallen forward across her withers, his hot blood trickling down her heart girth, forearm, and cannon.

Garrett yelled, “Throw up your hands!”

And Tom gasped in the theatrical way of the nickel books, “Don’t shoot me again, for I am killed.”

The turncoat Barney Mason called, “Well, it’s high time you took your medicine, son.”

“Is it Billy?” James East asked.

“Unfortunately no,” Garrett said. “Wild West tyro is all.”

Tom gasped, “Would you help me off my horse and let me die easy?”

The sheriff and his men gently took the six-foot man down from his horse and laid him on the floor of the Indian commissary and ruined a blanket as blood became a pond around him. Tom’s eyes were shut, but when Garrett thumbed one open to check his vitals, the outlaw surprised him by rasping out, “Would you have Kip McKinney write my gramma in Texas, informing her of my demise?”

“Will do.”

“Well,” he said of his dying, “the sooner the better. This is painful.” Then other sentences deserted him.

Waiting him out, they got back to their poker game and for about forty minutes were offended by his disgusting sucking and burbling noises as he coughed up blood. Waking from unconsciousness and craving water in “Help me” pleas, Tom swallowed from a tin cup that was held to his mouth, but that seemed too much exertion for Thomas O. Folliard, Jr.’s inner workings, and he wrenched up in agony and expired with a final sigh.

Ever efficient and unemotional, the former buffalo hunter told his men, “Carry him outside in the blanket. We’ll chip a hole for him when he’s stiff. And one of you clean up his mess. You’ll find me with my wife at Celsa’s.”

* * *

Rudabaugh’s horse was shot in the posse’s ambush and got only a few miles from the fort before it keeled over and just groaned in the snow as Rudabaugh got what weaponry and gear he needed and said, “You was a fine beast of burden and I hate like Hell havin to do this.” The horse craned its head up at his voice and he fired a .45 caliber bullet just below its forelock.

Billie Wilson rode back to fetch him and helped Rudabaugh straddle the saddlebags behind his saddle. Wilson looked back at him and asked, “Are you crying?”

The Kid decided there would be no pursuit that night, so he and Bowdre walked their horses back to the Wilcox-Brazil ranch in a slow mope, with Charlie vexed by the sheriff’s scurrilous ambush. “There weren’t no ‘Hands up!’ No warning a’tall. Ain’t it the rules that you get a chance to give up?” But the Kid was just recalling his good friend’s funny quirks and queernesses, his lard-on-toast breakfasts, his honking laugh, his registering of puzzlement with “Wait, what?” And Charlie went along with that, saying, “Always the same with Tom. He not only dint know nothin, he dint even suspect nothin, ever. Innocent as an angel.”

“Well, he was always fun to be with and ever straight as the string on a kite.”

“Worshipped you,” Charlie said.

Emanuel Brazil was standing outside his stone-walled house in his grizzly bear coat and turban, his left ear whitely bandaged, but smiling insincerely as he watched the outlaws ride up. “Well, Sumner mustn’t’a been hospitable to you boys! Whores all get religion there?”

“Tom’s dead,” the Kid flatly said. “We got ambushed.”

“Oh.”

They shoved past him into the house.

* * *

Worried about his pregnant wife’s worry, a crestfallen Charlie Bowdre couldn’t sleep that night and stood guard instead, and he was making five o’clock coffee at the old Majestic stove when Emanuel Brazil innocently sashayed into the kitchen in his Navajo bathrobe.

There was an elephantine silence between them that Brazil interrupted with “We sorta got off on the wrong foot, you and me and Dirty Dave. I’d like to patch things by going into Sumner and finding out what the sheriff’s up to.”

Bowdre coldly stared at him and said, “Shove off then.”

Emanuel Brazil was dressed and on his horse before anyone else woke up.

Waking to the aroma of coffee, the Kid went into a kitchen full of the gang’s off-putting morning smells. “Where’s Emanuel?”

Bowdre tilted a kettle to refill his tin cup. “Off to Fort Sumner to see what’s up. Don’t matter; he’s tits on a bull here anyways.”

The Kid frowned at the oddity of the departure, judged it dangerous, and finally said, “Vámonos.” Let’s go.