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Half of the Boys stayed on horses facing every direction while the other half, including the Kid, hitched theirs to a rail and walked right into an unlocked jail shack. The jailer was snoring in a Victorian smoker’s chair until the Kid shocked him by pressing a cold gun barrel to the jailer’s forehead, warning, “Try me and you’ll have a sleep you won’t wake up from.”
He was trying out a hoodlum persona.
The jailer looked up at the Kid and then to the others. “This job ain’t nothin but puny wages for me,” he said. “You fellers go on and do what you have to do.”
Crew members with gunnysacks that were heavy with rocks smashed the cellar door again and again until the boards splintered and gave way. Village residents must have wakened from the noise but wisely pretended to be deaf to it.
“Well, it’s about damn time,” Evans called up.
A man the Kid didn’t yet know slid the ladder down. “Mr. Kinney wanted y’all to stew for a bit for givin up so easy that time there at Beckwith’s.”
“We was powerful thirsty is all” was a jailed man’s excuse.
Jesse Evans was first up and free from encumbrance because of his fierce use of a garden file ever since dinner, but he was followed by three still in shackles that were soon chiseled off. The Kid stuffed a handkerchief into the jailer’s mouth and tied it in with a bandanna as another character roped the jailer’s hands and feet to the chair legs.
And then they vamoosed.
- 6 -
THE HIRELING
Who knows why, but the Kid took ownership of Tunstall’s favorite dapple-gray buggy team and was found out and locked up in the same hoosegow he’d released Evans and his misfits from. But no one came for him, which contaminated his trust in their camaraderie. When he soon grew tired of his fetid dungeon, he asked a jailer to send for the offended party, and the Englishman, whose J. H. Tunstall & Co. wareroom was now open and vying with L. G. Murphy & Co., walked over to what Tunstall would spell as the “gaol.”
Even in the November cold, the Kid was enjoying his hour of outdoor exercise, a jailer watching for any funny business with a rifle slack in the crook of one arm. When he saw the victim of his horse thievery approaching, the Kid adopted a forlorn expression.
The Englishman was an inch under six feet tall, slender, twenty-four, and seemed genteel in his cashmere overcoat and swank suit of Harris tweed. His jawline was fringed with a quarter-inch scruff of whiskers, his mustache was hardly there at all, and wings of longish brown hair fanned out from under a slouch hat of ivory wool. Elegance and good grooming met in him. He wore no gun. “So you are the rascal who purloined my horses,” John Henry Tunstall said in a lilting, patrician accent.
The Kid swerved his estimation of him off toward a Rio Bonito that was swollen with rainwater and loudly brawling eastward to the Pecos. “Embarrassed to say so,” he said, “but I’m the culprit all right.”
“I’m afraid my nose is a bit out of joint,” the Englishman said. “All this stealing has cost me like the mischief, and scoundrels like you have chaffed me to the fullest extent of my patience. I have a mind to scold you in terms too true to be palatable.”
Owing to his having had an English schoolmistress in Silver City, the Kid felt he understood, and he foresaw how politicking could help. “I deserve whatever you hand out in regard to admonishment,” he said. “I done wrong and judge myself kindly in need of correction.”
Surprise and happy ignorance gave the Englishman a flush. “What an extraordinary admission from a rustler! I never heard the like from Jesse Evans and his serviles.”
The Kid hung his head some. “Well, I’m different from that ilk.”
Still rheumatic, headachy, and faint from drinking alkali water on his new ranch on the Rio Feliz, Tunstall took a seat on the board sidewalk and gloved off the space beside him. “Please sit and we’ll parley.”
With a glance, Kid Bonney begged permission of the jailer and he nodded. The Kid sat.
“You’re different from the rest how?” Tunstall asked.
“I feel like I was never given the scope to do other than. I’m an orphan since fourteen and I been making my own hard way with few means available to me. And there’s so much thieving in the territories it just came to seem natural as a way to make do.”
“And you fell in with bad company?”
“Afraid so, sir. And each mistake kept on breeding others.”
“Are you a gunslinger?”
Tunstall seemed to be hoping for a yes, so the Kid said, “I’ll admit I have been a shootist on occasion. I’m not a flagrant criminal, though. Each time my hand has been forced.”
Seconds passed. Tunstall seemed to be examining him. “Are you given to strong drink?”
“Whiskey? I haven’t never acquired a taste for it.”
“And if you don’t mind my prying: señoritas?”
