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The Kid considered his victim and said, “Sorry, Joe, but I’ve been there too often.” Recalling Windy Cahill and Arizona, he looked around through the acrid gray haze of gun smoke. The saloon customers were still holding their ears from the noise and cautiously inching away, like this was finally the frightening Kid they’d heard so much about. “You saw what happened, right? It was self-defense.”
“He was spoilin for it!” a far-off man yelled out.
Another man agreed, “You had yourself no option in the matter.”
Jack Finan bent down to extract his ivory-handled .45 from the corpse’s surprisingly firm grip.
“We’ll clean all this up,” the bartender said. “But you better go, Kid.”
Tom Folliard had heard the shots and was running into the main room, his face full of horror as he buttoned up his trousers. “What’d I miss?”
With the jazzy exhilaration he always felt when he found himself still alive, the Kid told him, “Oh nothing. It was a game of two and I got there first.”
* * *
Because Celsa wanted his company and because Saval was still prospecting northeast of White Oaks, hunting for fortunes that would never be found, she invited the Kid to Pat F. Garrett’s Wednesday marriage to her cousin Apolonaria in the white, twin-spired San Jose Catholic Church in Anton Chico. Garrett was nearing thirty, his wife was twenty-two. Joining them in the double wedding ceremony was a Virginian named Barney Mason, who still worked for Pete Maxwell, and Barney’s seventeen-year-old bride, Juanita Madril.
Apolonaria’s father, José, owned a successful freighting company, and he hosted a fiesta afterward in the Abercrombie general store, founded by a Scottish father and son who’d frequently been hospitable to the Kid. And though Garrett wouldn’t himself dance, he howled encouragement and fervently applauded the hilarity of friends making, he thought, fools of themselves. Celsa fed the Kid some wedding cake and got up to see if the quartet would play “Turkey in the Straw.” The Kid found the tune irresistible, and he was encircled and cheered as he sang, dancing an Irish jig his mother had taught him. And Celsa noticed that Garrett’s face was now solemn, for the Kid of course was famously indicted and Celsa knew that Patrick F. Garrett was considering a run for Sheriff of Lincoln County.
- 16 -
THE RUSTLERS
Ever in motion, the Kid recruited into his gang his cousin Yginio Salazar and his pal Pascal Chaves, Garrett’s friend Barney Mason, and Billie Wilson, a headlong eighteen-year-old petty thief originally from Ohio with whom the Kid was often confused by the authorities. Wilson had owned a livery stable in the burgeoning tent city of White Oaks, which, since its founding in 1879, was filling up with optimistic miners. But Billie Wilson sold out his faltering business in exchange for a sack full of counterfeit hundred-dollar bills that looked pretty darn good to him. Also in White Oaks, at West & Dedrick Livery & Sales, the Kid recruited the worshipful Dedrick brothers and even thrilled them with the gift of one of his ferrotype portraits. Handed down for generations, it is still the only certifiable photograph of William H. Bonney, age twenty.
Calling themselves the Rustlers, the night-riding gallants reportedly stole forty-eight Indian ponies from the idly guarded Mescalero Apache reservation and roamed up and down the Rio Pecos in the hostile cold of February selling them off to horse traders who could not resist a bargain. In March, it was claimed that the gang went after the livestock of Uncle John’s kid brothers, Jim and Pitzer Chisum, riding off with ten steers, ten bullocks, and two pregnant cows. Charlie Bowdre joined them for an eastward foray into Los Portales in May, stealing fifty-four cattle from a Canadian River ranchers’ association, steering them cross-country all the way to White Oaks and selling them for ten dollars a head in a deal that the Dedrick brothers had arranged. They thieved from a cattleman at Agua Azul, from a cattleman named Ellis near Stinking Springs, and even supposedly stole seven thoroughbreds from Uncle John Chisum, daring him to try to retrieve them.
But much of that accounting was Ash Upson’s and written insincerely in 1882, when he thought exaggeration, outrage, and garish lies would help Pat Garrett’s book sales. And Upson could have claimed in 1880 that the Kid was the source of any crime perpetrated in Lincoln County, from burglary to hijacking a train, and a lot of the Anglo citizens would have believed it. The Kid was not yet twenty-one, he still didn’t need to shave, and even wary people on meeting him remembered his cordial smile and fun-loving nature. Yet he was increasingly considered a fiend with a lust for blood by those seeking commerce and prosperity for New Mexico, for whom he seemed the impediment, the hitch in the get-along, the enemy of progress. And the Kid was not yet aware that there was a faction that desperately needed to have him done away with.
* * *
Heading up the hunt for a new sheriff was Joseph C. Lea, a former Confederate Army officer who’d fought alongside Cole Younger. Lea would later be called the father of Roswell, but in 1880 he was just the owner of its few buildings and a homestead ranch. Hearing praise of Pat Garrett from an excited Uncle John, Lea invited the saloonkeeper to stay in his own Roswell home just long enough to establish residence in Lincoln County. And John Chisum joined them on the homestead one evening for dinner, skirting political topics until Mrs. Lea took the dinner plates and cutlery away and the three men lit Chisum’s gifts of La Flor de Sanchez y Haya cigars.
“I guess it’s up to me to broach the subject first,” Chisum said. “We want to get your mind right on what our intentions are for our new sheriff.”
Garrett grayed the air in front to him with smoke before he asked, “Which are?”
“Well, we frankly need you to kill the Kid dead.”
Captain Lea used the rim of a saucer to carve the ash from his cigar and took a more lawyerly, brick-by-brick approach. “Uncle John and I have ambitions for Roswell and in fact for all of New Mexico. We foresee a time when most every major town will have a railway depot, a schoolhouse, even a doctor’s office. We want land that is platted and fenced. We want roads instead of cattle trails. We want factories and merchants and all the niceties of civilization.”
“What we got is wildness and anarchy,” Chisum said. “We got Kid Bonney on the loose taking whatever he pleases, whenever it suits him. Carefree, headlong, guns in every hand.”
Lea said, “The Kid’s days are numbered, and I imagine he knows that. We think of him and the frontier he inhabits as doomed, for—”
Interrupting Lea, Chisum spoke around the cigar in his mouth as he said, “Your job will be to uproot the Kid and his lackeys like chokeweeds in the garden patch!”
Pat Garrett rocked back on his dining room chair and quietly considered his fine cigar. With his Southern formality he said, “Elect me sheriff and I’ll be a cold and impersonal legal machine. Without sentiment or malice or resentment, I’ll carry out the law to the last letter.”
“Exactly what we hoped to hear,” said J. C. Lea.
* * *
At the Democratic Party’s nominating convention, Garrett was vaunted as a strict disciplinarian of impeccable morals who would persevere in an endless manhunt for the Kid and his ilk. Joseph Lea shouted in his convention speech, “Whosoever has encountered Pat Garrett will have noted how coolness, courage, and determination are written on his face! He alone shall bring law and order to the Territory and spell doom to the villains wreaking havoc on our lands!”
Running against him was Sheriff George Kimbrell, a former government scout and justice of the peace and an easygoing Republican who was thought to be too friendly to Billy and too timid in his prosecution of criminals. Even though both he and Garrett had Mexican wives, Kimbrell was far more liked by a native community that despised the wealthy associates of the Santa Fe Ring because of the thefts of their lands.
Louisiana-born George Curry would become governor of New Mexico in 1907, but in 1880 he was just nineteen and working for the firm of Dowlin & DeLaney, when the Kid, whom he didn’t know from Adam, rode onto the ranch and was invited to join Curry for dinner. In his twentieth-century autobiography, Curry recalled, “He asked me how I thought the election for sheriff would go in Las Tablas, our voting precinct. I told him our votes would be for Pat Garrett. He asked, bluntly, why I thought Garrett would win, and I replied just as bluntly that Garrett was a brave man who would arrest Billy the Kid or any other outlaw for whom a warrant was outstanding.”
