“Oy, yes! And from hisself, Judge Bristol.” L.G. staggered a little as he got an official letter from a warren of mail slots and handed it to the sheriff.
Brady slit it open just to see that it was the signed warrant for Alexander McSween, then shoved it in his overcoat pocket.
“You’ll have a dram with me, Major Brady?”
“Oh, don’t be troubling yourself.”
“Ah, go way outta that, of course ye will.” L.G. poured an inch of the rye into a square tumbler and slid it to him. “Cheers,” he said as he lifted and finished his own glass, adding, “I always drink with my gun hand, to show my friendly intentions.”
The sheriff’s deputy George Hindman limped in with another mustached deputy, Jacob B. Mathews, who was also the House’s bartender, the clerk at semiannual meetings of the circuit court, and a participant in the thirty-man posse that had hunted down John Henry Tunstall.
“Where’s Jimmy?” Hindman asked.
“Out in the beyont,” Murphy said. “Havin a whale of a time.”
The sheriff swallowed what was left of his whiskey and carefully set the tumbler down. He asked his deputies, “Are we ready for the routine?”
They seemed to be.
He told Murphy, “We have a prisoner to release from jail, and then we’ll camp out on McSween’s porch. We’re told he’s heading in from Roswell.”
“Hope it’s any use,” L.G. said and refilled his tumbler with whiskey.
J. B. Mathews later remembered that it was about half nine of the morning.
Sheriff Brady’s men went ahead of him, for he was slow and overweight and far older than his forty-eight years because of the too-muchness of drink.
Ike Stockton’s wife, Ellen, was stamping mud from her shoes in front of the McSween house, and the sheriff chatted with her as he caught his breath. “It’s a quare cold morning, isn’t it?”
“Tis. But will you still be planting on your farm yet?” she asked. “Ike is.”
“Would otherwise with the earth so loose, but my walking plow got banjaxed.”
“Ike might could fix it for ya,” she said.
“I have tools meself,” he said and tipped his hat before heading onto the wooden porch of the Tunstall store, stooping and peering through its windows to see the pretty schoolteacher reading to children from a book.
Hindman called back, “Shall we wait for you, Bill?”
Sheriff Brady stepped off the porch, yelling, “I’ll be right there!” Then for some reason he glanced down the alley beside the store to a high gate of upright planks hiding a view into Tunstall’s corral. And suddenly the gate swung open and a gang of men stood up and raised their rifles or pistols and fired. Shots hit his gut and wrist and spun him into a fall on the street. Sitting there in a daze, he said, “Oh Lord,” and as if recognizing he was late for the train, he struggled to get up, only to be hit with another volley of gunfire, which hammered his left side and back and tore off a chunk of his skull.
Deputy Jacob Mathews ran into Lola Sisneros’s house, and Deputy George Hindman was floundering for the Torreón when he was shot in the back just below his gun belt and fell face forward into the puddled street. Rolling over, he held his innards inside the exit wound and gasped with pain. Soon he was calling for water.
Dick Brewer wasn’t among them, but William H. Bonney, John Middleton, Fred Waite, Rob Widenmann, and José Chávez y Chávez were seen walking to the street and standing over the very dead sheriff.
The Kid resisted kicking him but said, “Ooh, that feels good!”
“Don’t it?” said Middleton.
Billy hid the jitter of excitement in his hands and grinned with achievement. “We got even!” José took the credit for killing the Irishman, and the Kid said, “We all did,” as he retrieved his confiscated Winchester.
Seeing their slackened wariness, Deputy Mathews fired on them from the Sisneros house, his bullet whapping through Rob Widenmann’s trouser leg and scorching his skin before squarely ripping into the Kid’s left thigh. Even as he fell, the Kid fired back at Mathews, splintering a doorjamb and sending him into hiding. Then Fred Waite helped Billy up, and he hobbled back to their horses in the corral as the others retreated with them, their guns blazing at nothing much, a stray bullet skewering Juan Batista Wilson’s buttocks as he hoed his onion patch on a hillside.
John Middleton frowned at the Kid’s leg and said, “You’re bleedin.”
The Kid gave him a no-kidding look.
The lull was a minute old. Soon other guns would be gotten and there would be a fray in which they were outnumbered. Some Regulators got on their horses as Fred Waite deliberated. “You can’t ride like that,” he finally told the Kid.