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Their far-and-wide acquisitions included whichever livestock they hankered for, mules from the Mescalero reservation, equestrian assets from the L. F. Pass coal mine east of Silver City, a pair of Appaloosas from a ranch near the San Agustin Pass, and some mustangs from Cooke’s Canyon, where “Henry Antrim” was identified from afar by a Silver City resident and his name was published in the Silver City and Grant County Herald as being one in “a party of thieves.” Eventually the Boys even tried to rob a stagecoach belonging to the Butterfield Overland Mail, found nothing of worth, and in an uncommon mood Jesse Evans forced the driver to partake of their Cyrus Noble whiskey.
The gang included some Indians and Mexicans, so Old West etiquette was outraged as they barged into taverns and ordered a feast and got roostered up on Old Orchard, and then moseyed out without paying the significant bill, Evans calling over his shoulder, “Chalk it up on our tab.”
A posse of six went after them once, ran into a hornet’s nest of gunfire, and retreated. The Boys exchanged bullets with George Williams at his ranch in Warm Springs but, unaccustomed to a volley of fight-back, left without unnecessary delay. In their bravura, Evans sent a letter written by Billy to the Mesilla Independent newspaper stating five resolutions agreed to by the Boys, the final one being “Resolved: That the public is our oyster, and that having the power, we claim the right to appropriate any property we take a
fancy to, and that we should exercise the right regardless of consequences.”
* * *
The gang had stolen horses and mules owned by the partnership of a lawyer in Lincoln named Alexander A. McSween, an Englishman named John Henry Tunstall, and Tunstall’s foreman, Dick Brewer, whose 680-acre ranch on the Ruidoso River was where the three men pastured their animals. Also missing were over two hundred head of Tunstall’s cattle. Brewer estimated the value of their losses at $1,700.
Richard M. Brewer was a handsome and noble man born in St. Albans, Vermont, in 1850, but raised on farms in Wisconsin, where he became renowned for his strength and, in those littler times, was called a giant. At the age of nineteen, he ran off for the West after a soul-destroying quarrel with his fiancée, during which Matilda Jane told Dick she’d decided to become instead the wife of his cousin. Ever after, in the holiness of his love for Matilda, he fancied himself an unsullied Arthurian knight like Lancelot, hardworking, resolute, courageous, and chaste, and his friendship with John Tunstall originated in their joint determination to remain forever bachelors.
Somehow happening upon the village of Lincoln in 1870, Brewer took a job with the mercantile establishment of L. G. Murphy & Company, which later loaned him, at ten percent annual interest, the $2,600 he needed to purchase the Ruidoso ranch near Glencoe that Lawrence Gustave Murphy claimed he owned but for which he finally was found to have no actual title. Still, Brewer was forced to continue payments to avoid foreclosure, so he was in a cantankerous mood over the West’s general lawlessness even before the cattle and remuda were stolen, and after that subtraction he became relentless in his angry pursuit of the Evans gang, racking out on the scout for them with an intensity that was playing out his horses.
Within the week he found the Boys on a San Agustin ranch that had a handsome porticoed house on the hillside and on the flats a windmill and corrals crowded with his, McSween’s, and Tunstall’s horses. The cattle seemed to have already been sold. With no lack of fortitude, Brewer walked up to the house and encountered Jesse Evans and his minions loitering on the porch. His hugeness may have stunned them, because he wasn’t immediately shot. And then he had the grit to demand the return of his and his partners’ horses.
Still sitting in his rocking chair, Evans smiled. “Well now, I don’t think we can do that after all the trouble we went to to get em.”
It eventuated that Brewer would have nothing of it.
Impressed by his gumption, Evans offered him just his own horses back.
Brewer looked down on the collection and saw John Henry Tunstall’s favorites, a matched pair of dappled, pearl gray ponies that pulled his surreyed buggy. He told Evans he needed the Englishman’s horses, too.
“Well, I guess you’ll get nothing at all, then,” Evans said.
Ire and menace smoldered in the faces of the Evans gang as Brewer regarded them, and he judged it healthier to leave without his stock.
The Kid later walked out of the house interior with just socks on and peeling an apple as he viewed a horseman riding off. “Who was that?”
Soon and very soon he was going to meet the man.
* * *
In mid-October Billy left the Boys at the south fork of the Tularosa River, and they headed down to Hugh Beckwith’s ranch, where a half mile off from the adobe farmhouse the Boys overnighted in an abandoned dirt and straw hut that the Mexicans call a choza.
The news of the sheltering outlaws was taken to Dick Brewer by a Beckwith girl who was plainly smitten with the bachelor Adonis, and he thence went to Sheriff William Brady in Lincoln and urged him to get a vigilance committee together. The sheriff’s reluctance shocked him, but Brady finally relented and even made Brewer foreman of a hastily assembled grand jury. And then Brewer and his force of legalized authorities galloped south after the banditti with the sheriff riding trail.
Sheriff Bill Brady was an Irishman from County Cavan, born in 1829, the son of a potato farmer. When he was twenty-one he enlisted for a five-year hitch with the US Army and left a sergeant, then reenlisted for another five before joining a New Mexico volunteer infantry, achieving the rank of major and adjutant to the commanding officer before he was mustered out and married a Mexican widow with whom he would have nine children. With no job but as an entered apprentice with the Masonic Grand Lodge, he went to his old Army pal and fellow Mason Lawrence Gustave Murphy and was given employment at his we-got-everything store that was being called just the House, and then Murphy connived to have him elected sheriff. Which meant the sheriff was also in cahoots with the Boys, who did L. G. Murphy’s bidding.
It was a tangled web.
Semicircling the choza and the Boys just before sunup, the Brewer-Brady posse waited for the stirrings of life and finally saw Jesse Evans cracking his neck as he walked out of the hut, full tilt with dual holstered pistols and the chest of his flannel shirt x-ed with two cartridge belts.
The citizens had the decency to let him relieve himself and shake as steam rose up from the blue grama grass, then the foreman stood from his hiding and yelled, “Hands up, Jesse!”
Hot-blooded as he was, Jesse answered with both six-shooters, firing three shots that were just enough imperfect that Brewer heard the sizzle as the bullets zipped by his head. The posse did not stay reticent but retorted with similarly inaccurate shots as Evans crouched back under the Mexican blanket hanging in the hut’s doorway. A hand would reach a gun out through the one window and go off and be withdrawn, then a rifle would angle out and only manage to crack a branch off a hackberry tree, or the door blanket would be touched aside by a nickel barrel and there’d be a bang! then a zing as a rock jumped in the air. And the posse themselves would reply with shots at the choza, exploding fists of dried mud from the walls and whapping the blanket into a toss. The wild riot of the gunfire was all so random, unaimed, and without consequence that each side seemed to grow tired of the melee and there was silence for a minute.
Sheriff Brady was lying in weeds, his gun silent, but he got up on his elbows to yell out, “Evans! You and your boys surrender in the immediate and you won’t be lynched!”
Brewer was astonished by the lenience and gave the sheriff a look that he ignored.
They could hear the outlaws deliberating. The scarcity of food and water seemed an issue of importance. And then a hand lifted the door blanket aside a little and shook a handkerchief that was once white.
The sheriff called, “Okay. Walk on out slow with your hands on your heads.”
Out came Evans and three other owl hoots. William H. Bonney was not among them. Their guns were collected and their hands tied behind them once they were saddled, and the citizens took the reins of their horses to trot them to Hugh Beckwith’s hacienda for coffee and a feed since it would be a long ride to the new Lincoln County jail.
