The Kid

Garrett fancied the weapons and took them as his own before calling out, “How about you, Kid?”

“Just a sec!” The Kid’s rifle and handgun were on the ground inside the building, and he was urinating on them with wide arcs of his hose.

Wilson and Rudabaugh were handcuffed before the Kid got outside, his hands high over his head, his boots plunging so deep in the snow that he tottered, and yet grinning in a way that made Garrett skeptical. The Kid said, “Long time no see, Pat!”

“Been over a year. But not for want of trying.”

The Kid looked at each man in the posse, some with their rifles trained on him, some hungrily gnashing rib eye steaks that they held in their gloved fingers. He smiled as he said, “This is a historical occasion. I’d like to shake the hands of you heroes who accomplished it.”

With deputies holding guns on the Kid, and the sheriff-elect going up to the rock house to collect the possessions there, many in the posse took turns walking up to the Kid and jerking a firm handshake as they smiled and said their names. “Frank Stewart.” “Lon Chambers.” “Jim East.”

Barney Mason shook the Kid’s hand as he sheepishly said, “I changed sides.”

“I see that. Good wages?”

“Well, they’s regular at least.”

Others crowded forward. “Tom Emory.” “Lee Hall.” “Charlie Rudulph.” “Buenas tardes, me llamo Juan Roibal.”

“Hola, Juan,” the Kid said.

- 18 -

TRIALS

The possemen and their prisoners overnighted at the Wilcox-Brazil roadhouse, filling its rooms, and on Christmas Eve went west to Fort Sumner with Wilson, Rudabaugh, and the Kid shackled on the flat bed of the Wisconsin farm wagon, each of them skirting his legs away from Charlie Bowdre’s white, openmouthed corpse, each of them working hard at not noticing his rocking, his jouncing, his seeming to breathe as they hit frozen ruts in the road.

Manuela Herrera was hanging sheets on a clothesline by the Indian hospital when she saw the caravan approach, and when she glimpsed a deputy riding Charlie’s horse she ran out into the snow of the entrance road, heavy with child and screaming hatred of Garrett and the justice system in Spanish as she pounded fists against his long thigh.

“You have my sympathy in your loss,” he said in a practiced way. And thinking of his five-hundred-dollar reward, he felt some largesse. “Will you buy a suit for Charlie to be buried in and charge it to my account?”

The Kid translated into Spanish for him, and then he softly consoled Manuela as she hugged him and pressed her tear-wet cheek to his own, groaning over and over again the words for husband, “Mi marido. Mi esposo.”

Cal Polk got down from the wagon, and Barney Mason joined him in hefting Bowdre into the Indian hospital triage room and swinging him up onto a dinner table, knocking salt and pepper shakers onto the floor.

Polk said, “Quite the character, Charlie was.”

And Mason said, “?‘Quite the character’ is what gets you kilt.”

The horse thief from Mississippi would be buried next to his pal Tom on Christmas morning.

* * *

The three prisoners first were escorted to the old enlisted men’s stockade, but when the Maxwells heard that the Kid had been captured, they sent their Navajo servant, Deluvina, with a handwritten note in English from Señora Luz Beaubien Maxwell.

I request that Kid Bonney be brought to our home in the former officers’ quarters so my daughter can say goodbye.

Garrett consented and assigned Jim East and Lee Hall as the Kid’s police guards. They walked to the house in a narrow furrow that had been haphazardly shoveled between snowbanks.

Sixteen-year-old Paulita greeted the Kid on the front porch in an emerald green formal gown with crinoline petticoats that shaped a bustle. Tears glimmered in her café eyes.

The Kid said, “Don’t you cry, Sweetheart. I’ll be fine.”

She hurried a kiss of his cheek and lingered in a hug, her right ear to his hammering heart, and then looked beseechingly at East and Hall. “Would you let Billy join me in my room so we can have some privacy?”

East told the girl that the Kid was too slippery, with an earned reputation for escaping custody. They couldn’t risk it.

“Will you all join us then in the Yuletide room?”