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But he had his reverses, too. Such as when he stole a sergeant’s horse from the tie-up at Milton McDowell’s store in November 1876. The sergeant and four privates tracked the horse into Pinal County and overtook the Kid near the Stonewall Jackson mine, seemingly on his way to McMillen’s Camp, where his stepfather now labored and perhaps had a hankering for a 6th Cavalry mount. The Kid never got ther
e, but he had such a way about him that the five soldiers let him go once they had collected the gelding. Still, to get home Kid Antrim would have had to walk a hundred miles in wild country filled with hostiles. Instead he went to the tiny village that called itself by the highfalutin name of Globe City, and there in its only saloon he was accidentally reunited with John Mackie.
Went on stealing Army horses, this time at Cottonwood Springs from soldiers posted to Camp Thomas on the Gila River. Hearing that an arrest warrant for horse theft had been filed against “Henry Antrim, alias Kid,” he and the Scot sought exoneration by giving up five stolen horses to the surprised quartermaster at the camp.
Incorrectly presuming legalities were now squared away, in February 1877 the horse thieves returned to Camp Grant and soon were served warrants for their arrest at their eggs-and-bacon breakfast in the Hotel de Luna, the officer of the court being Miles Wood, the hotel’s Canadian owner and the recently elected justice of the peace. The horse thieves were promptly locked up in the Camp Grant guardhouse, and none other than Windy Cahill was called in to rivet iron shackles and chains around their ankles.
In his dejection Mackie sank down to a hard sit on the dirt floor, but Kid Antrim clanked around in his shackles and chains, looking at the hasps and locks on the one door, the knit of the stone and mortar foundation, and the upright, overlapping planks that formed the twelve-foot-high walls. Seeing there was about a foot of space for ventilation between the ledge of the walls and the roof overhang, the Kid noted, “I hear the regimental band is playing in the officers’ quarters tonight.”
“So?” Mackie said.
Still looking up, the Kid smiled. “I love music.”
At eight o’clock the Army band commenced their concert with the Civil War song “When Johnny Comes Marching Home,” then “The Little Old Log Cabin in the Lane” and “Silver Threads Among the Gold.”
Kid Antrim was standing on Mackie’s shoulders. “That song was my mother’s favorite,” he said.
With suffering Mackie said, “Joost reach the sill, will ye?”
The Kid got both hands on it and scraped his boots against the planks to get higher, finally achieving enough leverage with both elbows to heave his right leg up and over. Then it was just a matter of hanging on the outside and falling five feet to the ground as the band played “Beautiful Dreamer” and a female contralto sang the lyrics:
Beautiful dreamer, wake unto me,
Starlight and dewdrops are waiting for thee.
Sounds of the rude world, heard in the day,
Lulled by the moonlight have all passed away!
Cumbered by his shackles, the Kid found it slow going out of the fort, but as he’d predicted, the soldiers on duty were caught up in the music and failed to look in his direction. In fact, Kid Antrim was in the back room of George Atkins’s cantina, having a bartender use a crowbar to pry off Windy Cahill’s rivets, before the sergeant of the guard reported the escapee to Major Compton as he was dancing with his wife.
The Kid did not find a way to free John Mackie, but the Scot was let go when an Army adjutant determined there was insufficient evidence to convict him of horse stealing. Mackie even ended up reenlisting at Fort Walla Walla in Washington and did not retire from the Army until fifteen years later. And it was not until 1920 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, that John Mackie died peacefully at the age of seventy-two.
- 4 -
THE KILLER
Henry Antrim got hired again as a hay reaper, this time for an Army contractor named Sorghum Smith, whose ranch was near Camp Thomas. The Kid’s horse and tack and guns and such had been confiscated in his arrest. Easy enough, for him, to steal another horse, but he felt he needed weaponry and finally had to request an advance on his wages from Sorghum Smith. The rancher offered him ten dollars, but Henry said he needed forty. The Kid had a talent for wooing folks into obliging him, and it worked again on Smith, so that the boy came back from the post trader’s store with a six-shooter, a holster, and a fifty-cent box of cartridges.
And then in August of 1877, orphaned by his worthless stepfather, his mother nearly three years gone, his luck took a turn for the worse. Homesick for his friends in the saloons outside Camp Grant, he thought he could sneak back, have himself a time, and get out of the settlement again before Sixth Army officials found out he was there.
The Kid wasn’t yet eighteen but even looked shy of fourteen, being just five and a half feet tall and no more than a hundred fifteen pounds. Ever smiling. And now he was prinked up and citified, in a Sunday-go-to-meeting suit and foulard necktie, with laced black shoes instead of boots and with his felt hat cocked off his head like a pretty child about to be photographed.
Strolling into George Atkins’s Bonita Cantina, he saw some youngish ladies of the evening who were familiars, and he spoke a little with them in Spanish, letting one touch the six-gun stuffed in the front of his trousers as he confided a joke that made the girl giggle.
Kid Antrim, as they knew him, was hunting a card game and found an empty chair at a poker table, its only disadvantage being that Windy Cahill was there. As the Kid took a seat, the stout, thirty-two-year-old farrier was holding forth as was his habit, full of false information and lies. The subject now was Cahill’s free congress with a virgin from Tucson whose ignorance of manly things desperately excited her curiosity. To hear Windy tell it, as a Sixth Army cavalry private he was quite the paramour, and she was so pleased with the overwhelming pleasure of him that she turned to full-time prostitution.
The Kid seemed confused as he anted. “You mean she lived through it?”
Windy eyed him.
“I figured the story would end with you crushing her flat.”
“Are you saying I’m fat, Kid?”
“Oh no. You’re not overweight, Windy. You’re just underheight.”
There was general laughter, and that riled the smithy. Cards were dealt as he thought out an insult. The Kid folded his nothing hand, and Windy finally offered, “I guess you get to know lots about whores hanging out at the Hog Ranch like you do.”
