The Kid

“Oh, don’t you worry about me,” the Kid said. “I generally get what I want.”

* * *

Sheriff Pat Garrett was scowling and smoking a calabash pipe on the commanding officer’s porch at Fort Stanton when the prisoner detail from Mesilla finally arrived. It was Thursday, April 21.

“You’re late,” he said, but that was all.

Riding his horse alongside the cavalry’s ambulance as it followed the Rio Bonito the nine miles to Lincoln, Garrett sought to gladden the condemned man by saying, “You’ll be happy with your accommodations with us. And you’ll get your meals carried over from Wortley’s Hotel.”

“Really looking forward to my final dinner. I get to choose the recipe, right?”

“That’s customary.”

With a grin, the Kid said, “Maine lobster.”

Garrett gave it serious thought and offered, “Won’t be very special after six days dead in a railroad car.”

The Kid smiled. “I’ll have to avoid it then. Eating seafood that old could kill me.”

* * *

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The Kid’s cell in the House was a high-ceilinged, oak-floored, twelve-by-twelve upstairs room with floral wallpaper on one end, iron jail bars bolted against the east wall, and unscreened, double-hung, north and east windows. Entry to L. G. Murphy’s former bedroom was only through his sitting room, now Sheriff Garrett’s office. Crucially, the fireplace and chimney were outside the jail bars, so there could be no shinnying to freedom. The hallway above the staircase crossed to a room formerly occupied by Mrs. Lloyd, Murphy’s housekeeper, but now was a jail for some petty thieves and public brawlers. A locked storeroom next to that was the armory.

Recognizing that Billy the Kid was ever a flight risk and that it was only a sixteen-foot jump from window to ground, Garrett chained the Kid’s ankle irons to the floor with just four feet of leeway and assigned deputies Jim Bell and Bob Olinger to share his watching.

Within the Kid’s earshot, the sheriff told his deputies, “You know the desperate character of this culprit. He is daring and unscrupulous and he will sacrifice the lives of any man who stands between him and liberty.”

Crossing his eyes and dangling his tongue, the Kid devil-horned his head with his fingers from behind the jail bars. Deputy Jim Bell smiled.

James W. Bell was a kind and likable man of twenty-seven who was raised in Georgia, failed at gold mining in White Oaks, and joined the posse that mistakenly killed Jimmy Carlyle. He took the ever-risky government job just to have a regular income and was one of the deputy marshals who escorted Bonney, Rudabaugh, and Wilson to Las Vegas. Whenever he forced the Kid to do anything, he first apologized by saying, “I’m just doin whatsoever’s required.” And once Bell said, “Cain’t never could work it out in my mind why a fella like you, sharp as a tack, would break bad like you done.” Always considerate, he even asked permission of the convict to continue his slow and preoccupied reading of Ben-Hur, fearing the governor’s name on the novel would be offensive to the Kid. It wasn’t.

Whereas Olinger continued his arrogant, sneering, bullying ways. The Kid would be on his cot, peaceably reading Ned Buntline’s The Black Avenger of the Spanish Main, and Olinger would rock back in his Victorian dining chair and admire his cocked Whitney shotgun as he irritated the Kid with taunts.

Olinger said, “Oh, but I would love it if you tried to escape. I got fat ten-gauge shells with eighteen buckshot waiting in both barrels. Would blow your pretty face to smithereens. You’d look like a spill of spaghetti and sauce on the floor.”

Another time he said, “Sometimes when they hang a man, things get catawampus and he strangles for a long, long time, gargling, glugging, his legs dancing an Irish jig. And sometimes, maybe in your case, his neck is so puny his head snaps right off with the weight of the drop. You hear a punk like the pop of a champagne cork. A fountain of blood wetting all the gawkers. Wouldn’t I love to see that!”

And he loved talking about the murder of John Tunstall on the Ham Mills trail. Hated it that he was in the larger group that failed to give chase, but his brother Wallace was with the posse that ran down the flummoxed Englishman. “Said after your Harry was hit he wet his trousers like a diapered child. Be sure to empty yourself beforehand so you don’t piss yourself on the gallows.”

Olinger once took his time loading his Smith & Wesson Schofield .44 pistol, then softly laid it on the floor and kicked it between the iron bars near the Kid’s stocking feet. With his shotgun in the crook of his left arm, Olinger grinned and gently said, “Reach for it, Billy.”

“I’d still be jailed.”

“Well then,” Olinger said, and he got up with his big ring of keys and unlocked the jail door, then the Baldur padlock that chained the Kid to the floor. “This is your chance, sweetie pie. Folks say you’re so quick you could dive and fan four shots into me before I even got this Whitney cocked.”

The Kid looked and looked at the pistol, then sneered at the deputy and kicked the Schofield back to him.

Olinger smirked. “Scared, huh?”

The Kid confided to Sheriff Garrett that “Olinger’s needling gets me so hot I can hardly contain myself.”

Garrett shrugged. “Well, good thing you’re contained, then.”

* * *

Gottfried Gauss had shifted occupations yet again: from chuck wagon cook for John Tunstall on his Los Feliz ranch to a general handyman in Lincoln and then to a job as a half-blind factotum for the courthouse and jail. His quarters were in the old bunkhouse and shared with Sam Wortley when Wortley felt the need to get away from his hotel. It was Gauss who brought the Kid his three meals a day from Wortley’s or Frank McCullum’s eatery, and as he sat and watched Billy eat he’d smile as if each scrumptious dish were his own creation. His English was fair, but he’d found less ridicule in silence, so he generally walked around unnoticed, humming Brahms’s Lullaby when sweeping up or hoeing his garden patch.