Charlie looked down at the gun hanging below his trouser belt buckle as if working to recognize what it was.
Billie Wilson yelled outside, “You have killed Charlie Bowdre and he wants to come out!”
“Let him!” the sheriff yelled back. “But with his hands in the air!”
Bowdre floundered outside, giving vengeance no thought, his hands raised and his legs seeming soft as taffy as he woozily stumbled down to the arroyo, seeking a solemn and very tall Pat Garrett, whose Winchester rifle was held at ease in the crook of his left arm. Bowdre was gurgling and strangling on his own blood as he vaguely lifted his right arm toward the rock house and struggled to tell the sheriff, “I wish . . . I wish . . . I wish.” And then he fell forward into Lee Smith, dead. He was thirty-two years old.
With the distraction, Dave Rudabaugh untied his horse and tugged it toward the doorless entrance with the intent of saddling it and charging out of the rock house, his guns full of venom. A few of the posse had read the Police Gazette and were on to such criminal high jinks. About four of them lifted their rifles and killed Rudabaugh’s horse just as she entered the doorway. She weighed over a thousand pounds and was like a huge boulder of interference.
The Kid looked over the mare at Charlie lying facedown in reddening snow. He yelled, “Are you going to leave him there like that?”
“Cold won’t bother him now,” the sheriff told him.
“You plan to fight us?”
“We’ll just let you stew!”
The Kid slid down against a wall until he was sitting on the ground. With tears in his eyes, he sang for Charlie as he once did for his mother. “I’m just a poor wayfaring stranger. I’m traveling through this world of woe. Yet there’s no sickness, toil, nor danger in that bright land to which I go. I’m going home to see my father. I’m going there no more to roam. I’m just a-going over Jordan. I’m just a-going over home.”
His racehorse sniffed him, and he petted the soft, downy hair of her nose for a while. He noticed Billie and Dave inquisitively staring at him, and he said, “I have nothing to say.”
A half hour later, Garrett patiently called, “How are you fixed in there, Billy?”
The Kid slunk over to the entrance frame and called back, “Pretty well, but we have no wood for a fire! And no food neither!”
Garrett called, “Why not come out and get some from us? Be a little sociable!”
The Kid was hungry enough to give it some thought. “We can’t do that, Pat! We find commerce with you too predictable!”
Hours passed, with enough time for Cal Polk to go to and return from the Wilcox-Brazil ranch with firewood and a flank of pink, butchered beef in his Wisconsin wagon. A huge fire was started at sundown, and hacked meat was heaved onto the mesquite branches to roast.
Rudabaugh was near the doorway and asked, “Are you smelling that?”
Wilson said, “How we gonna get them to feed us? Right now I’d take right kindly to gettin greasy round the mouth.”
The Kid’s own mouth watered at the aroma and his stomach registered need.
“We could surrender,” Rudabaugh said.
“And then what?” Wilson asked.
Rudabaugh faced him and in a condescending way said, “You don’t always hafta go to prison. There’s this here deal called state’s evidence. You hand over other outlaws they happen to want more.”
“I could do that,” Wilson said. “I got lotsa people to get even with.”
The Kid noted, “But Billy the Kid is who they want most. And that’s dead instead of alive.”
Rudabaugh gave him a So what? look and said, “Well, I’m doin it,” and he found in his foul overcoat pocket a much-used, formerly white handkerchief that he flaunted at the rock house entrance before flinging his guns over his dead horse into the snow and crawling over the immovable mare toward the cookout, still waving his handkerchief in wild sweeps and yelling to Garrett, “Where you gonna carry us?”
“To Las Vegas!” he called back.
“If we hafta go to Las Vegas, we’d just as soon die
right here! The Mexicans there want my head on a platter!”
“We’ll take you on to Santa Fe, and I guarantee your protection from violence!”
Rudabaugh turned to the gang in the rock house for affirmation and saw the Kid’s fine bay thoroughbred hop over the other door-filling horse and run free until she was lassoed by Juan Roibal. Then Billie Wilson was scrambling over the animal and falling forward down the slope, his guns held wide and unshootable.