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An hour before sunup he tramped through fresh-fallen snow with his tack and petted the left side of a fourteen-hand roan called Tabasco that Alex McSween had loaned to him. He swatted the black saddle pad to free it a little of reddish hair and flew it up over the horse’s withers, then hooked the stirrups over the horn and flipped up the cinch before hefting the saddle onto the horse’s back.
Dick Brewer was drinking coffee from a tin cup as he humped his own tack to his stallion. “Up and at em early, Kid.”
“I figure I’ll sleep when I’m dead.” He inserted and inserted again the leather latigo through the D ring at the end of the cinch and then necktied it.
Brewer put his tin cup on a fence post, and steam twisted from it. Catching up with his saddling, he said, “McCloskey tells me Jimmy Dolan already heard we caught Buck and Frank. Some pards of theirs saw the chase. Jimmy’ll have lookouts posted east of Lincoln, so I figure we’ll go north and around the Capitán Mountains and ride in from the west at night.”
Sallie called from the front porch, “Richard? Shall I refresh your coffee?”
“I’m fine!”
“I’d like some,” the Kid called back, but she was heading inside again. In his frustration he yanked Tabasco’s flank billet too taut, then apologized to the horse as he loosened it.
Brewer stared over his saddle at the Kid. “McCloskey also heard Mr. Chisum is going to pay each Regulator five dollars a day.”
A stolen calf fetched five dollars then. Rooms rented for that by the month. “Seem likely?”
“Well, this isn’t a job, it’s an obligation.”
The Regulators were genial as they ate breakfast in the dining room, but the criminals seemed to be fasting. Frank Baker theatrically presented Sallie with a fine gold Waltham pocket watch, a horsehair bridle he’d plaited himself, and a farewell letter to be mailed to his sweetheart. William Scott Morton spoke only to insist that he wanted a fair trial.
Soon the Regulators and the accused, with their hands tied in front of them, were riding through the main gate. Wondering if Sallie was watching from the front porch, the Kid turned in his creaking saddle, and she was. He waved his sombrero in a haymaker goodbye, and she smiled and waved back.
Some time later William McCloskey asked him, “Why are you grinning?”
The Kid ignored him, jabbed Tabasco with his boot heels, and trotted forward to ride point ahead of his friends.
Roswell was just four miles north of the Chisum ranch. An Omaha gambler had invested in the arid emptiness by constructing a two-story hotel and an identical general store, giving the village the first name of his father. The next-to-nothing population would not increase much until a few years later when a farmer found an underground aquifer and water ceased being scarce.
Ash Upson was the government postmaster inside the general store, and he would have remembered Billy from his rooming with the Antrims in Silver City, so the Kid stayed outside and incognito, but he gazed though the front window glass as his friends happily purchased things with the income they now expected from John Chisum.
At the till, Morton confided to Upson, “I have a bad feeling, Ash. I’m afraid they’re gonna lynch me.”
“Well,” said Upson. “That would be unfortunate.”
McCloskey was a friend of theirs and swore, “Any harm comes to you two, it means they must’ve kilt me first.”
Charlie Bowdre brought outside for himself and Billy dill pickles still dripping from the barrel, and after Buck Morton’s letter to Richmond, Virginia, had been registered and mailed, Dick Brewer pushed him out of the general store.
McCloskey asked their boss, “Is there time for me to visit the hotel whore?”
Brewer looked at him like he was something the cat dragged in, and they all saddled up.
Could be that some skulking Apaches saw them; but otherwise no one spied the party until a Mexican shepherd with a flock of merinos viewed them from a hillside as they turned in to Agua Negra Canyon.
Night began to lower its curtain with the
party strung out for two hundred yards fore to aft, the Kid and Brewer riding drag far behind the straggled Bowdre, Middleton, and Scurlock and overlooking the central three of McCloskey, Morton, and Baker. The trio were old gambling buddies yacking about electric dice and marked decks of cards you could buy for two dollars when Morton suddenly jerked McCloskey’s six-shooter from its scabbard with his tied hands. And when McCloskey shied from the outreached barrel, Morton shot him under his jaw and upward. Alive one second, dead the next, McCloskey fell from his horse like furniture off a wagon.
Both the former captives then thundered off, ducking low and heading for a fort of high rocks, with Morton holding the only gun and crazily firing at the men who gave chase. The Kid counted five more shots, so the gun was used up as the still-tired horses of Sheriff Brady’s possemen wore out and the avenging hunters caught up. And then it was nothing more than an execution as the Kid finally got his way and with John Middleton thoroughly killed the fleeing Frank Baker with five shots in the back as the other Regulators finished William S. Morton with nine.
It was a collective thing, but only Kid Bonney got accused of the murders.
* * *
Dick Brewer rode alone into Lincoln that night, slow-walking his exhausted horse toward the House, where the upstairs veranda was filled with loud, jolly suited men in rocking chairs and overcoats, tipping back square glasses of whiskey and smoking green cigars. Sheriff Brady was one, and his deputy George Hindman; Lawrence Gustave Murphy, of course; then a few citified strangers and, lo and behold, Governor Samuel Beach Axtell.
Axtell was an Ohio attorney who’d failed at gold mining on the American River in California but succeeded in being elected a congressman in San Francisco. A Democrat then, he changed his affiliation to curry the favor of the Republican president, Ulysses S. Grant, and was given the post of Governor of the New Mexico Territory in 1875. Axtell was secretly in the thrall of Thomas Catron’s Santa Fe Ring, and a federal agent would later claim he was more inept, corrupt, fraudulent, and scheming than any governor in the history of the United States. In fact, Interior Secretary Carl Schurz would soon investigate his administration and within months would have him dismissed from his office.
