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And the Kid told Brewer, “Let’s kill em now.”
“We can’t. We caught em.”
The Kid protested, “We take them back to Sheriff Brady or Judge Bristol, and they’ll just set them
loose.”
Brewer ignored him and got off his horse to take their guns and tie their hands behind their backs. And then the seven of them rode to John Chisum’s fine hacienda on his South Spring River ranch, headquarters of the Jinglebob Land & Livestock Company.
Cottonwood trees shaded a quarter-mile avenue from the main road to the residence. Eight hundred acres of alfalfa provided forage for Chisum’s cattle. Orchards of apple, pear, peach, and plum trees had been imported from Arkansas. The hacienda was hedged with roses he got in Texas, and even the bobwhite quail and scarlet tanagers were foreign birds hauled all the way from Tennessee. In a region of rolling grasslands and a far-off emptiness, the Kid thought of the South Spring River ranch as a gorgeous, watered oasis, and he was so full of need and aspiration that he told Doc Scurlock, “I’ll own this someday.”
Doc flatly said, “Sure you will, Kid.”
Sallie Chisum, the old man’s niece, walked onto the front veranda in a high-collared teal dress to greet them. She said she was alone there with the Mexican cook and a Navajo servant and it was nice to have men around. She was a half year older than Billy and pretty and blond and welcoming enough that she at once made any men she encountered lovesick and overeager. Even the prisoners Baker and Morton, whom she’d note in her diary were “nice looking chaps with unmistakable marks of culture,” forgot the jail they were headed for and gave her a spark, as was said then. Billy Bonney she thought of as an affable, funny, and very occasional friend but nothing more, so he was vying for Sallie while the sole object of her own flirtatious attentions, the strong, august, and dashing Dick Brewer—she alone called him Richard—avoided the contest for Sallie but still seemed to be winning it.
She relished having the crowded surround of seven sentimental, admiring men at the candlelit dinner table, Baker and Morton joining the Regulators for porterhouse steaks and roasted red potatoes but without utensils and with their gun hands tied to the stiles of their chairs so that they were forced to gnash the meat off the bone like dogs.
Still, Buck Morton fought for Sallie’s notice against John Middleton and Billy Bonney. Sweet glances and winking, tee-heeing, and tickling only soured the meal for the married men Scurlock and Bowdre, and Doc chose to darken the mood by reciting to the accused, “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may, old time is still a-flying; and this same flower that smiles today tomorrow will be dying.”
“Heck, that could be a poem,” Middleton said.
And Scurlock said, “Is.”
The Kid sneered at their captives and drew a finger from ear to ear in a cut-throat warning.
Buck Morton could not hide his horror over Scurlock’s threat and the Kid’s gesture, and after hurrying his dinner he requested stationery to write a letter to his cousin, an attorney in Richmond, Virginia, lying about his innocence and noting: “Constable Brewer himself said he was sorry we gave up as he had not wished to take us alive. I presently am not at all afraid of their killing me, but if they should do so I wish that the matter should be investigated and the parties dealt with according to law. If you do not hear from me in four days after receipt of this I would like you to make inquiries about the affair.”
Sallie stamped the envelope, and Brewer promised they’d stop at the post office in Roswell on their way to Lincoln. Then the Kid heard knocking at the front door, opened it, and was grieved to see William McCloskey there. He was a scoundrel when drinking and a wheedler when not, and he’d fashioned a shoddy career of hiring on at Jinglebob roundups and branding times and otherwise handling janitorial work for the likes of Jimmy Dolan. “Saw the lights from the trail,” McCloskey said. “Sallie here?”
“Yes.”
“Wondered if the Chisums would let me stable Old Paint and rest my weary bones.”
With dismay Sallie allowed it, and soon McCloskey was hunkering in the dining room with Brewer and hot coffee, flattering him and trafficking in gossip as he sought to join the Regulators, whom he’d heard were getting handsomely paid.
Sallie allowed the murderers to stay under guard in her frilly pink bedroom that night, chosen by Brewer because it lacked windows. And when she saw the Regulators had laid out their bedrolls on the floor of the dining room and parlor, Sallie said she was too excited by the company to sleep, seeming to hope that Brewer would invite her on a moonlight stroll. Instead it was the Kid who escorted Sallie outside into the darkness, where she said with fresh wonderment, “There are so many thousands and thousands of stars here. Ever so much more than in Texas. They’re like a spill of sugar.”
“Supposed to snow,” Billy said, and then chided himself, Weather, when she was being romantic.
Uncle John Chisum grazed upward of eighty thousand cattle on rangeland that extended north one hundred miles, but only fifty or so were close enough to see beyond the fences, all watching Sallie with their sad and beautiful faces as she showed Billy the starry W of the constellation Cassiopeia.
Words were lost for the Kid. He tried to fetch a joke now and then but was so tardy in doing so that she just looked at him quizzically with no idea of his references. She stood still, hugging her overcoat, and just stared silently into the night, as though waiting for a train. She wants me to kiss her, he thought, but he hesitated and failed to touch her and finally Sallie said, “Brrr. That cold old wind cuts right through you, doesn’t it?”
“The hawk is talking,” he said.
She squinched her face at the boy oddity beside her.
“Old expression,” he said. “Because a hawk’s beak is sharp. Like a cold wind.” Each further explanation made him feel stupider.
She considered him for a while and then she quoted, “?‘We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.’?”
“So you’re going to bed now?”
“That’s what I was implying, yes.”
Billy just watched Sallie walk back to the house alone, thinking, Could’ve said you love her, Kid.
* * *
