Looking out the north window, the Kid could see the newly leafing branches of a Rocky Mountain maple tree and beyond it the few adobe remains of Alex and Susan McSween’s house, now being overgrown with Russian thistle and foxtail grass. He avoided the northern window.
The east window he liked. Underneath it and the Kid’s cell was a first-floor post office run by Ben Ellis, Isaac’s son, who often slept there. After getting their mail, various Lincoln residents would pause below the east window so the Kid could lean out on the sash and chat. Each afternoon, Juan Patrón pitched him an apple and even once tossed up a small box of Hasheesh Candy, which called itself “enchantment confectionized” and was said to cure “nervousness, weakness, and melancholy.”
Saturnino Baca’s little girls visited frequently but usually only blushed and giggled.
Isaac Ellis was cradling mail-order packages under each arm when he whistled and the Kid poked his head out. “Don’t know if apologies are in order. I was just abiding the law, but that I did you no good is a fact. I’m real sorry you have to get hanged. Course you brung it on your own self, but that don’t give me no sort of satisfaction.” And then Ellis walked east to his store.
Even the young schoolteacher Susan Gates strolled over to gaze upward and softly talk with him, saying, “I heard folks saying you’d become a nuisance, but I never believed all the evil they associated you with. Excuse my ending with a preposition. Seems to me you’re unfairly maligned and misunderstood.”
“My, how very sweet and pretty you are, Miss Gates!”
She shyly looked to the ground and may have whispered, “Thank you.”
“Why is it I never courted you?”
She seemed to find fascination in her shoes. “I would have liked that,” she admitted. Then in embarrassment she hurried off.
Sheriff Pat Garrett shared lunches with the Kid a few afternoons and in an offhand way hoped he could get Billy to admit to his misdeeds, make, as they say, a clean breast of it. The sheriff could have been a reverend as he sat in Murphy’s old dining room chair and hunched forward over his lengthy legs and oh so earnestly investigated the Kid’s record.
Calmly relighting a churchwarden pipe, he said, “The county justice system needs to clear its books. I’d be grateful if you was to erase some felony cases for me, free me for other things.”
“Will that make your pony gallop?”
The sheriff twitched a smile. “Can’t hurt.”
Like a Roman emperor, the Kid languidly waved a hand. “Proceed.”
“Well now, it’s been said that you have killed a man for every year of your life.”
The Kid frowned and made a pff sound.
“How many, then?”
“Just two that I know of. Windy Cahill in Arizona. And Joe Grant at Fort Sumner. And those were both in self-defense.”
“Are you forgetting Sheriff Brady and George Hindman?”
The Kid grinned. “Objection: asked and answered.”
“All right, what about Buckshot Roberts?”
“My holster was hanging on a peg and I was still a hop-along inside the restaurant on account a my hurting leg. Heard the loudness and saw a glide of smoke under the porch roof and to my startlement Charlie and George and John was lying down in gunshot misery underneath it. Roberts was already lurching off.”
Sheriff Garrett rocked back in the walnut chair and sucked on his pipe as he looked down his tilted-up nose in a scornful, assessing way. “You appear to have a plausible excuse for each and every crime charged against you.”
“Well, I can’t alter what’s true. Wouldn’t that be so-called perjury?”
“And how about Jimmy Carlyle? Murdering a innocent hostage may have been your most detestable crime.”
“Had no hand in it.”
“Rudabaugh said you did.”
“And liars lie.” The Kid lifted his tray of lunch from his thighs and got up from his stool. “I’m tired of this,” he said. “I have to go lie down now.”
“Are you feeling the prickings of conscience?”
The Kid wrenched off his boots and said, “An old vaquero saying has it that there’s a thin line between catching an outlaw and becoming one.”