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VERY SAD, was Antrim’s insufficient reply.
Without his mother’s pastry income, and with Josie unwilling to share his scant earnings from the Orleans Club, where he fetched and carried, Henry was forced to ignore the eighth commandment and conceived a scheme to steal the jewelry in the front window display of Matt Derbyshire’s furniture store, inveigling another schoolmate to join him in the burglary. “We’ll fence it in Old Mexico,” Henry said, having read the gangster lingo in the Five Cent Wide Awake Library.
But on the night of the heist, his schoolmate weakened and confessed the plan to his father, saying he’d joined the Kid in plotting the crime because “Henry had me hypnotized.”
Both boys were sternly chastised by the owner of the furniture store, but were then let go since nothing illegal had actually been done. Yet his bedridden mother heard gossip of it and got up as high as she could on her chair of pillows to wheeze for air as she scolded her favorite son, saying she had a mind to put him over her knee for a paddle and worrying that if he went on thieving he’d be hanged before he was twenty-one. Soon worn out with speaking, she shut her eyes and covered them with a forearm, and Henry guiltily listened as she wept.
Henry’s lunkish, lubberly, hard-to-love older brother feared the hex of Illness, so he hung shy of his mother to silently observe the dying from afar like a vulture. But each evening Henry would feed and tend to Catherine, tenderly holding her hand or petting her damp-with-fever hair as he sang her to sleep with Scottish ballads like “Annie Laurie” or, because of her maiden name, “My Bonnie Lies over the Ocean.” When she was near the end, Henry softly sang for her a final, old, mournful hymn: “I’m just a poor wayfaring stranger. I’m traveling through this world of woe. Yet there’s no sickness, toil, nor danger in that bright land to which I go. I’m going there to see my father. I’m going there no more to roam. I’m just a-going over Jordan. I’m just a-going over home.”
She died on Wednesday, September 16, 1874, at the age of forty-five.
Henry was fourteen.
- 2 -
THE HABIT OF LARCENY
The funeral service was on Thursday in the Antrim house, Clara Truesdell in attendance with her husband and joined by Lincoln County Coroner Harvey Whitehill and his wife. The sons were stoic; her husband, Billy Antrim, was, as ever, not present.
But Antrim had sent a telegram to arrange for the boys to reside in the home of Richard Knight, the butcher whose shop Antrim had once helped out in, and weeks later, when Antrim feared they’d exhausted the patience of the Knights, he shifted Henry to the former Star Hotel, which was now owned by the Truesdells, while Josie was sent into the home of Joe Dyer, the proprietor of the saloon called the Orleans Club, where he ran errands, served whiskey, swept up the peanut shells on the floor, and became addicted to the opium tar he would smoke through a dream stick in Chinatown.
The Kid’s grief over Catherine’s death first caused him to feel disoriented and in a trance, then fiery in his anger at Billy Antrim and, irrationally, the Silver City that had failed to heal her. There was a lot of Why me? in his ruminations. And it was his undoing that in his aloneness and loss he fell in with a wild and vice-laden crowd. Would have become an adored, happy, skylarking captain of all he surveyed had he not first linked up with miscreants like Sombrero Jack—so named because of the spangled Mexican hatwear he favored. Jack was ten years older, held a stonemasonry job, and just for company let a lonely fourteen-year-old orphan tag along like a tolerated little brother when Jack was pursuing thievery, an excess of whiskey, or the card games of monte and faro.
Was Jack who urged the Kid to leave his lodgings in the Star Hotel, where he was a waiter and dishwasher, and join him in Mrs. Brown’s rooming house. And it was Jack who goaded him into stealing three pounds of fresh-churned butter from a buckboard, selling it to a grocer on Texas Street for fifty cents. Coroner Harvey Whitehill had just been given the job of sheriff, after the former officer of the law ran off with some of Lincoln County’s funds. And the Kid was one of Whitehill’s first arrests. But the new sheriff just smacked the boy’s cringing head three, four times and wagged a finger as he lectured him, since he knew folks reacted hard to the loss of a mother.
Was Sombrero Jack, too, who one Saturday night smashed out a front window of the Chinese laundry owned by the Celestials Charley Sun and Sam Chung, Jack crawling through moon-glinting shards of glass in order to scavenge two Ruger Old Army cap-and-ball pistols, a stack of wool blankets, and the fineries floating and puffing on the backyard clotheslines in the soft October breeze. Skedaddling out of town and hiding his loot in Crawford’s Mill, Sombrero Jack later realized it was doing him no good there, so he retrieved it and returned to Mrs. Brown’s, telling the Kid he’d go halves with him if the worshipful boy would sell it.
A few days after that their landlady espied Henry Antrim, as he was still called, in an English gentleman’s shirt with a stiff, winged collar and in frock trousers so overlong he’d folded the cuffs up high as his calves.
Mrs. Brown said, “You got yourself some fancy clothes of a sudden!”
With no hesitation other than forcing a smile, he answered, “My uncle died and left em to me in his will.”
“Oh yes, passing on and passing the remnants along; that’s what we all bound to do,” she responded.
But she doubted him enough to investigate a steamer trunk in his closet when he was gone and found a soap-scented bundle of lady things and a Livingston suit he couldn’t afford, so she hustled out to the sheriff’s office to rain overdue judgment down upon Henry.
Sheriff Whitehill felt the late Mrs. Antrim would approve of him scaring her son into gallantry by locking him up in the county jail on the charge of larceny. Whitehill’s children, however, were friends of Henry, sharing a pretty Englishwoman’s classes in the one-room public school, and those seven children raised their voices against their father in high dudgeon that evening, and
even the sheriff’s wife wanted him to at least escort the fourteen-year-old to their house for a nice breakfast in the morning.
Sombrero Jack, by then, had heard of the Kid’s arrest and skinned his way out of town and out of this narrative, but he would find Jesus and finally reform his life and wind up a justice of the peace in Colorado.
According to a jailer, the circuit court would meet in session in Silver City the third week of November, six weeks hence, so, forlorn with fear of a final conviction, the Kid conceived a plan to extricate himself from his dilemma. Working on the sheriff’s instinct for leniency, Henry conned him into a free half hour of exercise each morning in the corridor outside his cell, and then when a jailer for once wasn’t watching, the Kid ducked down into the fireplace and, skinny as he was, clawed and scraped and laddered his way up the narrow chimney flue until he could fall out onto the roof and then hurtfully to the ground.
A gardener with a hoe saw the Kid’s soot-blackened hands and face and asked, “You playing in a minstrel show?”
“You won’t tell on me, will you?”
“Oh, I’ll tell. The fix you’re in don’t mean nothing to me.”
Hearing of the escape and getting on his knees to peer up the tight fit of the chimney, Sheriff Whitehill was impressed, telling the jailer, “Henry has an ingenuity with which I have heretofore not been acquainted.”
“You could tell he’s a hard case,” the jailer said. “He’s got them dancing eyes.”
Meanwhile Henry hightailed it to the kitchen of Clara Truesdell’s hotel. She got him cleaned up and harbored him in the pantry for a spell, then put the orphan and his box lunch on a dusty, jouncing stagecoach through hostile Apache territory to Chloride Flat in the Arizona Territory, where his stepfather was.
The Kid formulated some high hopes for his meeting with Antrim, whom he had not seen for half a year, but then he found the former Hoosier fruitlessly panning for gold upstream on a trickling creek that ran into the San Francisco River.
