“Headed by Axtell’s sheriff and J. J. Dolan,” he announced, “the Rio Grande Posse killed and stole horses in San Patricio. They broke windows and doors, smashed boxes of fineries and robbed them of their contents, and from an old widow who was living alone they stole four hundred thirty-eight dollars! They tore the roof off the Dow Brothers Store, threw the dry goods out onto the street, and took for themselves whatever they wanted. With women they used the vilest language when not committing more unspeakable offenses. Citizens working in the fields were fired upon but made good their escape up the river. Kinney said in town that he was employed by the Governor and that he and his men would have to be paid three dollars fifty cents a day by the County, and that the sooner the people helped him arrest the Regulators, the sooner their County would be relieved of his expense. Dolan endorsed the speech.”
After finishing his article, Alex McSween fell into a dining room chair as if flabbergasted by the indignities and injustice.
Sallie Chisum heard it all and seemed both faintish and excited by the upheaval, and she turned to the Regulators with wet, gleaming eyes as she theatrically inquired, “What say ye?”
All were silent until the Kid said with vehemence, “We need to end this!”
- 11 -
“THE FIRE BECAME PROMISCUOUS”
On Sunday, July 14, Sheriff Dad Peppin, Deputy Sheriff John Kinney, and the majority of his Rio Grande Posse were scouring the hills for their enemies, so they missed seeing Alex McSween’s partisans and the Regulators defiantly trotting into Lincoln from the east, now more than sixty in number, their shined ordnance on display, their spurs jingling, their horses nodding as if on parade, each of the Regulators hurrahing and shouting ridicule.
Seeking to control access to the town, Charlie Bowdre, Doc Scurlock, a wheezing John Middleton, and a half dozen others holed up in the easternmost store owned by Isaac Ellis, while George Coe and two others peeled off to domicile in the granary behind the Tunstall store.
About twenty Mexicans, including Martin Chaves, the Regulators’ leader pro tem, took over the Montaño house, just across from the castle keep of the Torreón, where five deputy sheriffs were on watch up top but chose to avoid their annihilation by sinking out of view and sharing their quart of Old Joel scamper juice.
Entering through the gate of the picket fence surrounding his property, Alex McSween saw Jimmy Dolan, who was on crutches because he broke a leg jumping from his horse when drunk. Watching McSween glumly from the front of the Wortley Hotel next door, Dolan seemed to be trying to slaughter him with his stare.
Alex shouted, “We have been out in the hills long enough. I have now returned and your ruffians shall not drive me away so long as I live.”
Dolan said, “Duly noted.”
The Kid took his and Alex’s horses to the fenced stable and corral behind the house, and he stole a flecked brown egg from the straw nest in a hot chicken coop where a lot of hens were roosting. Cracking the egg and eating it raw, he looked to see McSween’s two black servants, Sebrian Bates and George Washington, watching, but instead of scolding him for his thievery they silently waved him inside through the west wing’s unroofed kitchen.
It was a fairly new, twelve-room, U-shaped house with an interior patio separating the wings. It had formerly belonged to L. G. Murphy but was no longer essential to him after he’d constructed his huge House, so he’d deeded it to McSween in exchange for his steep legal fees. The east wing contained the rooms of Alex’s law partner, David Shield, and Shield’s wife, Elizabeth, Susan McSween’s older sister, as well as their three children, although David Shield was dealing with the legislature in Santa Fe. Alex and Susan, who were childless, occupied the west wing, and it was there that twelve in the McSween faction, half of them Mexican, including Billy’s cousin Yginio Salazar, were to hunker down for the civil war they foresaw. Slatted shutters were fastened over windows, sandbags were piled in front of the exterior doors, and high walls of adobe bricks were stacked on the sills to fill in all the street-facing plate-glass windows.
The Kid laid his California bedroll down in a sitting room with stacked chairs, a violet Biedermeier sofa, a Singer sewing machine, a Viennese “Regulator” clock, and a bookcase containing Little
Women, The Hoosier Schoolmaster, Farm Ballads, and Marjorie Daw. With Billy in the sitting room was Harvey Morris, a forty-year-old Kansan who’d ventured farther west in the hope of curing his galloping consumption and was now reading law in order to join the McSween & Shield partnership. With Billy, too, was Thomas O. Folliard, Jr., a red-haired Texan of Irish ancestry, six feet tall, twenty years old, and sixty pounds heavier than the Kid but otherwise similar enough to him in facial features that in an age of few photographs they were frequently mistaken for each other. There was a legend that Tom had just magically shown up in San Patricio, like a rebel angel fallen to earth, without a horse or gun or penny on him, and he told the Kid he wanted to hire on with the Regulators, that “I’m a motherless child and I’m so broke I can’t even pay attention.”
The Kid took to him instantly and said, “Well, I grew up with nothing and I still got most of it. Welcome to our fraternity.”
The Kid handed on his artistry with guns, stole a horse for Tom, and made the recruit a warrior, and it was said that Tom Folliard idolized Billy like a canine, and if there were señoritas who still wanted to dance, Tom would stand outside the salón de baile and hold the Kid’s horse without noticing if the dancing went on for fifteen more minutes or a few hours.
And now Mrs. Susan Ellen Hummer McSween walked into the sitting room with a tray of glasses and a pitcher of sweet tea. Seeing her regal entrance, Tom and Billy jumped up like schoolboys, swiping off their sombreros to introduce themselves.
She glared at the Kid. “You were one of those hotheads who assassinated Sheriff Brady.”
He shied from her scorn and looked at the hooked rug on the floor. “Yes’m.”
“Well, you just made matters worse. We had the town on our side up till then. And now we’re embattled.” She turned from him and strode out.
She was a haughty, handsome woman of thirty-two whose grandparents had been German royalty, or so she said, and even though she was Church of the Brethren, she lied that she’d been raised in a Catholic convent. Even when she married, she gave her maiden name as Homer instead of Hummer, as if she were hiding something, and rather than confess that she and Alex had fled to New Mexico because of their Kansas debts and his fiduciary misconduct, she said they’d sought the climate for his health. She dressed in elegance, clapped her hands when she wanted a servant, and wore an Antilles perfume called Flaming Hibiscus. When he felt a foreboding about his fate in late February, Dick Brewer had made her executrix of his estate. All the Regulators were just as in awe of Mrs. McSween. But William H. Bonney was loathsome to Susan, who later wrote, “I never liked the Kid, and didn’t approve of his career. He was too much like Jimmy Dolan and did not think it amounted to much to take another’s life.”
* * *
Sheriff Dad Peppin and the Rio Grande Posse got back to Lincoln on Sunday night and aimed gunshots at the house across the street just because. Regulators in the house and stores fired back, but nobody on either side was much afoot and only a dray horse was accidentally killed. Like a bad penny, Jesse Evans showed up, freed on bail by Judge Bristol until he could stand trial for the murder of John Henry Tunstall. Also joining Dad Peppin were many of the others in the posse Sheriff Brady had sent to chase down the Englishman.
Some guns went off on July 15 but in a lazy kind of way, like an old cuss in a rocking chair spitting sunflower seeds. Because of overcrowding, Susan McSween sent away the servants Sebrian Bates and George Washington, and that Monday night she entertained her houseguests on the parlor organ with “Dear Old Pals,” “Early in de Mornin,” and “Time Was When Love and I Were Well Acquainted.” Tom Folliard hunched beside her on the bench and she taught him to play “Chopsticks,” laughing with gaiety and saying, “Isn’t that fun? It was composed in England by a girl just your age.”
With some jealousy over Susan’s attentions, the Kid later noted that Tom had gotten a haircut.
“Yes, I did.”
“You do it yourself? With a bowl and scissors?”
“No, a barber fella helped me.”