The Kid understood that, yet he still went northeast 150 miles to the locale of his familiars, walking the final 20 miles from Conejo Springs because his stolen bay stallion got spooked one night and galloped away. He was footsore, parched, and exhausted when he got to Fort Sumner and the Indian hospital on May 7. “I feel like I been rode hard and put away wet,” he said, and Manuela Herrera, whose new baby boy was sleeping, prepared the Kid a bath.
Watching him lather his hair with soap as she poured in more hot water, the young widow asked in Spanish how long it had been since he’d been with a woman, and he admitted that with jail and being on the run it was too long ago to remember. She said she’d been without for six months, since before Charlie died, and as she toweled him off she saw his interest and they quietly took comfort in each other’s bodies.
His hands were still desiring her afterward, but she was nettled with concern as she asked in Spanish, “Why are you here?”
He answered in Spanish, “Here’s where my friends are.”
“Celsa? Paulita?”
“And you. And others.”
“I’m not jealous. We can share. But don’t you see you’ll be found out? Even getting here you were noticed. Many love you and will keep the secret. Some won’t.”
He laid his cheek against the scented crook of her neck as his free hand idly floated over her seascape of rise and fall. “I have no roots anywhere else. I have no ‘at home’ but here. And I feel doomed. Like I’m riding to Hell on a fast horse. I’m not afraid of dying, but I don’t want to die alone. I don’t want some no one finding me finished off and asking a sheriff, ‘Who’s that?’?”
The baby woke and cooed to himself, but then hunger changed his mind and he cried until his mother got to him.
The Kid found fresh clothes for himself in the trunk he’d left behind, and after a skillet of fajitas, there was nothing for him to do on a Saturday night but steal a fine horse hitched in front of Beaver Smith’s saloon and ride it fifteen miles along the Rio Pecos to a Mexican shepherd’s camp.
The horse’s owner hammered a barracks door to wake up Deputy Sheriff Barney Mason, and he promised the rancher he’d launch an investigation. Because of the Kid’s fame, he was no problem to track, just a “Donde está el Chivato?” was enough to get children to give Mason a heading, and he and a friend, an oddly unarmed cattleman, got to the shepherd’s camp near Buffalo Arroyo that Sunday evening.
The man hunters were still a quarter mile off when the Kid spied them on the open range of sideoats grama grass, and, embittered by Mason’s abandonment of their former friendship, he enlisted four Mexican friends to back him up with rifles as the agents of justice ever more gradually rode in.
Some years later, Paulita Maxwell recalled that whenever Billy rode into Fort Sumner, the fearful Deputy Mason would find a reason to ride out, and he lost courage again when from a hundred yards he saw the Kid rise up and shoulder his Winchester. The deputy felt it unlikely he could be hit from that distance, but he wasn’t in fact certain, so he wheeled his horse fully around and raced off. And he would soon hurriedly collect his wife and child, head to Roswell, and have no other part in this drama.
But the cattleman found the wherewithal to hold up his hands as he ambled his own horse forward, and he was surprised at the Kid’s affability as the cattleman told him how much the owner wanted his stolen horse back. It was a gift from his late wife.
With a smile the Kid said, “I’m real upset that I inconvenienced anyone, but you see I’m without transportation otherwise. When circumstances are better with me, I’ll either return his horse or give him good money for it.”
And with relief the cattleman said, “Well, my business here is done,” and he cantered off.
The Kid did return the widower’s horse the next noon, doffing his hat to the man in a much-obliged gesture, and then he stole another.
* * *
Although the Kid was still on the loose, on May 13, Governor Lew Wallace signed a pro forma warrant of execution as if the hanging were going to happen in Lincoln that day as planned. And then he returned to packing for his long journey east on a Pullman sleeper to Indiana in order to finally join his wife, Susan, and then go onward to the Port of New York and, a few weeks later, to his ministry to the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire. He served four years there, but with Grover Cleveland, a Democrat, taking the presidential oath of office in 1885, Lew Wallace retired from diplomacy and politics in general to focus on his writing, publishing a biography of Benjamin Harrison, the novel The Prince of India, and the narrative poem The Wooing of Malkatoon. Surpassing even Harriet Beecher Stowe in book sales, he became a hugely wealthy man, and at age seventy-seven he died of gastritis while in the midst of writing a two-volume autobiography in which Billy the Kid was hardly mentioned.
* * *
On May 19, the Las Vegas Gazette either found out or inferred, “Billy keeps well-posted on matters in the outside world as he is well thought of by many of the Mexicans who take him all the newspapers they can get hold of. He is not far from Fort Sumner and has not left that neighborhood since he rode over from Lincoln after making his break.”
Like the town of Lincoln after its civil war, Fort Sumner and its outlying placitas were losing hundreds of residents because of the wildness and continuing violence, and that left as its majority Mexicans who were generally sympathetic to the Kid, as well as some hard and dangerous characters who shrugged at the Kid’s outlawry, and no more than a dozen Anglos who followed all the potboiled accounts of his wickedness and were terrified of him.
Was it fear that made Garrett reluctant to go there? In late May the sheriff called off his methodical manhunt for William H. Bonney after he or his deputies had interrogated the Kid’s enemies and visited all his old haunts—Los Portales, San Patricio, Puerto de Luna, Anton Chico—but fou
nd no sign of him. Garrett later claimed he’d failed to investigate Fort Sumner because it seemed like madness for the Kid to go where he was so well known. The sheriff was operating on the presumption of what he himself would do if on the run, which was that the Kid had wisely crossed the Rio Grande into the freedom of Old Mexico.
As May became June, Garrett surprisingly still avoided Fort Sumner, in spite of multiple reports of the Kid’s presence there. The sheriff said he just didn’t buy it, for there’d been fabrications that the Kid had been killed in El Paso or murdered a trio of Chisum’s cowboys outside Roswell or he was in Seven Rivers, Tularosa, Las Vegas, Albuquerque, Denver. Writing Lionel Sheldon, the new territorial governor, the sheriff noted, “I have never taken Bonney for a fool, but have credited him with the possession of extraordinary forethought and cool judgment.” So to him none of those rumored locales seemed right. And there was the awkwardness of the Kid’s connection to Celsa, his wife’s sister, and to the Maxwells, his old friends. He’d rather find Billy far from there, and in Lincoln County. So he handled chores on his ranch outside Roswell, cared for his and Apolonaria’s newborn, Ida, and busied himself with official tasks as he became patient as a spider where the Kid was concerned, waiting out a desperado who was too outgoing and free-spirited to stay hidden for long.
And it was true that with heedlessness, overconfidence, and pluck, the Kid larked in and out of Fort Sumner as if he weren’t wanted for murder with a reward offer available to anyone doughty enough to lift a gun against him.
The Santa Fe New Mexican for June 16 noted, “A man who came to Santa Fe from Lincoln County says that Billy the Kid gets all the money he wants, steals horses when he needs them, and makes no bones of going into and out of various towns. The people regard the sneaks-by with a feeling half of fear and half of admiration, they meekly submit to his depredations, and some of them go so far as to aid him in avoiding capture.”
* * *
The Maxwell house faced eastward and overlooked the old parade grounds and, farther off, the enlisted men’s barracks. South of the house was a garden of wildflowers such as poppies, mariposa lilies, hoary aster, and amaranth. And then there was a dance hall with bailes on the weekends where the Kid would carry on in his fine clothes like his old self, flouncing Celsa around in a schottische, formally waltzing with Manuela, and generally agreeing to join on the floor any of the fanning coquettes in mantillas who yearned for him.
Charlie Siringo would later become a Pinkerton detective and gain fame with his cowboy memoirs, but in 1881 he was a Texas rangehand in his late twenties who now and then helped out Pat Garrett in hunting the Kid and his gang. In that way he became familiar with the famous dances at Fort Sumner, and Siringo fell hard for the dark, alluring, high-spirited widow of Charlie Bowdre. Walking Manuela back to the old Indian hospital one night, Siringo confessed that he was smitten and they became affectionate at the hospital door. But though he begged to be invited inside where they could go a little further, she wouldn’t let him. She was being virtuous, he thought. And only weeks later, when it no longer mattered, did she tell Siringo that Billy the Kid had been hiding there.