The Kid flatly said, “Oh my. You fellows are giving me the scares something awful.”
The Army ambulance jerked forward.
The Kid asked the deputy marshal, “You jailing me at Fort Stanton?”
“Nope,” Olinger said.
“I thought the Lincoln dungeon was filled in.”
“So, guess again.”
“I got nothing.”
“The House. Ever heard of it?”
“The Murphy-Dolan store?”
“Took over by Thomas Catron, then sold to Lincoln County for a courthouse and jail. You’ll have the major’s old upstairs bedroom.”
“Sheer luxury, huh?”
“Well, just for your last month. Sheriff took pity on you.”
Kinney asked the Kid, “Ya hear about our friend Jesse Evans?”
“I been outta earshot.”
“Him and his gang robbed the Sender and Siebenborn store over there to Fort Davis. Texas Rangers caught him. In the Huntsville penitentiary now.”
“Well, it was bound to happen,” the Kid said.
Mathews asked, “You know what a rarity you are, Kid? At least two hundred men killed in Lincoln County over the last three years, and you’re the onliest one getting hanged. They don’t even got other trials on the docket.”
“I hear they don’t try dead people in court,” the Kid said. “A lot of my friends are toes-up.”
* * *
Even before the Kid’s trial, the editor of the Las Cruces Semi-Weekly wrote, “We expect every day to hear of the Kid’s escape. The prisoner is a notoriously dangerous character and has on several occasions fled the bonds of justice where a getaway appeared even more improbable than now, and he has made it his brag that he only wants to get free in order to kill for certain three more men—one of them being Governor Wallace. Should he break from jail now, there is no doubt that he would immediately proceed to execute his threat.”
And in fact the Kid was thinking escape when they were more than halfway to Lincoln, in the high elevation of Dowlin’s Mill—now Ruidoso—where a restaurant owner wouldn’t permit a shackled murderer to dine inside. So Jacob Mathews kept watch on the Kid while the others lunched, but his head kept falling forward in sleep and then jerking up into wakefulness again.
The Kid took off the red bandanna he wore around his neck and wrapped it around the chain between his ankle shackles to hush the clanking, then slid across his bench to ever so quietly open the wagon door.
But then Mathews woke up.
“Oh, sleep, J.B.! You need your rest!”
“You’re lucky it’s me. Was Olinger you’d be killed right now.”
The Kid smiled. “Half a minute more and I’d be history. Riding off into the sunset.”
“Well, you couldn’t’ve got away,” Mathews said. “You can’t mount a horse with chained ankle irons like that.”
“I figured I could ride sidesaddle until I found a hammer and chisel.”
“Ride like a lady?” Mathews said. “Embarrassing.”
Kinney was at the wagon door waitering plates of food. “Meat loaf and mashed potatoes,” he said. “But you was hungry for a getaway, weren’t ya, Billy?”