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Upon his leaving the courtroom, a journalist asked him, “Will you be found guilty in Socorro, do you think?”
“Hardly dat.”
“So you’ll be getting off scot-free?”
Jimmy smirked. “Luck o’ the Irish, boyo.”
On Sunday, July 13, in a Roman Catholic ceremony held in a friend’s parlor, Jimmy married Caroline Franzis “Lina” Fritz, the German-American niece of Jimmy’s former business partner and commanding officer at Fort Stanton, the late Emil Fritz. Lina was eighteen and exceptionally pretty, so Jimmy, who was twelve years older, had been forced to overcome many other paramours in his wooing, and he never did earn the approval of Lina’s father, who failed to attend the wedding. There was a formal reception afterward, at which Jimmy was reminded that the civil insurrection in Lincoln had commenced exactly one year earlier. “Water under the bridge,” Jimmy said. And then the small group waved goodbye as the newlyweds left for a luxurious two-month honeymoon in Texas.
Jimmy could afford it, for he had invested in gold and silver mines in the Jicarilla Mountains northeast of White Oaks and culled enough of a fortune to get into the mercantile business again, the Jas. J. Dolan General Store finding location in John H. Tunstall’s building in Lincoln because Thomas Catron held the mortgage on the House. Jimmy even acquired the Englishman’s choza and ranch on the Rio Feliz, later constructing a solid, handsome home there and joining District Attorney William Rynerson in establishing the Feliz Land & Cattle Company on Harry’s former rangeland. Jimmy would be elected Lincoln county treasurer twice, and then, despite his arrogance and contentiousness, he would become a New Mexico state senator.
But Jimmy’s family life was filled with tragedy. His first child, a son, was two years old when he died; a daughter died at age five; and his wife, Lina, was just twenty-five when she died after giving birth to another girl. Jimmy soon married his children’s nanny, a fretful, unsmiling woman who screamed back at his screaming until she cowered beneath his slaps and Wellington boots. His drunkenness became as regular, reeling, and demented as that of his idol L. G. Murphy, and James Dolan finally died of delirium tremens in 1898, aged fifty. Which was just as well, since he didn’t have to deal with the indignity of realizing that his name would have been lost to history were it not for his association with that scoundrel Billy the Kid.
* * *
To keep lawmen and cavalry patrols akilter, the indicted Kid rotated among the gambling haunts of Las Vegas, Anton Chico, Puerto de Luna, and Fort Sumner, staying just a few days at each before skedaddling off, and since Manuela Herrera was now residing with Charlie Bowdre on Thomas J. Yerby’s ranch twenty miles north of the old fort, the Kid’s trunk of finer clothes was stored in the old adobe quartermaster’s store with Celsa Gutiérrez.
She’d become the Kid’s querida, his mistress, and her generally intoxicated husband, Saval, vaguely acknowledged the arrangement before riding to White Oaks to prospect for currency metals, telling the Kid in a glum so-long, “Billito. Cuida bien de ella.” Billy. Take good care of her.
But Billito lost too much at cards and he was running out of cash, so in October of 1879, the Kid, Folliard, Bowdre, and Scurlock sought to fortify their scant wages by heading to Uncle John Chisum’s rangeland some fifty miles south of Fort Sumner. The cattle there were now officially owned by the St. Louis firm of Hunter, Evans & Company, and the executives had given up the Jinglebob way of branding, in which a hot iron burned a long rail along the cow’s flank and an ear was notched so that a large lobe of it dangled like jewelry. The Hunter, Evans brand was far easier to change, enticing the former Regulators led by the Kid to steal a herd of 118 cattle and drive them north to Yerby’s ranch, rebrand them, and sell the lot to Colorado beef buyers for about $800.
The Kid divvied up the loot four ways, and then thirty-year-old Josiah Gordon Scurlock stunned the gang by saying his nineteen-year-old wife, Antonia, was pregnant with their first child and he was collecting these earnings, quitting outlawry altogether, and heading off to Texas. His missing front teeth put a whistle in the statement.
“We sure are dwindling,
” Charlie said. “Won’t be but three of us Ironclads left.”
Tom said in frustration, “Doc, I’m so mad at ya I’m gonna find an insane asylum and have ya committed.”
But the Kid said, “Okay with me if you go, Doc. Could be wisdom is prevailing.”
“Well, I just reckon the noose is tightening for us all,” Doc said. “We retire now or be retired later.”
Doc took his past-due wages from Pete Maxwell in the form of fifty pounds of flour, and then he indeed took Antonia Herrera Scurlock in a buckboard to Potter County, Texas, where he first hired on as a mailman, then shifted to other towns where he became a much-loved schoolteacher, a histrionic reciter of poetry, and a doctor of last resort. Doc and Antonia eventually had ten children, and he died in Eastland, halfway between Abilene and Dallas, in 1929, three years after The Saga of Billy the Kid became a bestseller and made his former gang internationally famous. But Doc remained so penitently silent on the topic of his history that only an innuendo about it in one obituary alerted his neighbors to his gaudy and reckless past.
* * *
Whenever in Fort Sumner, the Kid earned his income with card dealing, favoring Beaver Smith’s saloon for the intimacy of the room and the heat of the coal-burning World & Sterling stove. The floor was tiled, there was a chandelier over the gaming table, and the ornate mahogany bar was hung with four white towels for the wet its customers carried in or slopped in their sottishness. Because of its whores, Bob Hargrove’s much larger saloon on the north side of the fort seemed to collect a gunslinger crowd.
With no takers for monte one fall afternoon, the Kid ordered a pint of sarsaparilla at the bar and then recognized the skinny and stoic bartender as the man a near-foot taller than Billy who’d been in livery at Pete Maxwell’s Christmas dinner. “You’re the one Los Hispanos nicknamed Juan Largo!” the Kid said.
“Well, yes. I’ll concede that I’m tall.” His speech had the slow cadence and syrupy accent of the Deep South.
“We met at the Maxwell house.”
The bartender seemed embarrassed—probably because of his butlering getup then. “That was just for the extra money,” he said.
The Kid offered his hand, and the bartender stopped drying a shot glass to shake it.
“William H. Bonney. Kid, my pals call me.”
Even in later photographs the future sheriff seemed to have an alien and unsettling habit of widening his eyes as if in shock or as if he were dredging his faulty memory for further information. Whenever captured in a group portrait, he was the lone man who did not fit in. And now his stare seemed to loiter over the Kid’s face until his dark thoughts finally became “I heard stories about you, Mr. Bonney. Some of them true most likely.”
“Hardly any. And your name?”
“Pat Garrett.”
* * *
