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“He don care.”
The Kid held them in his hands for half a minute, taking uneasy pleasure in it as he wondered what he would be doing next. He withdrew his hands. “They’re exceptional.”
She smiled shyly as she buttoned up her dress. “Entonces, te gustó tu regalo?” So, did you like your present?
“Oh yes,” he said. “I’m very, very grateful.” Yet he stood, hiding his erection, and went for his overcoat and hat.
Manuela was surprised and disappointed. “No te vas a quedar?” You’re not staying?
“It’s the wanting you,” he said. “I don’t have the discipline to handle it. And my only claim to virtue is my loyalty to my friends.”
* * *
The Kid ended up sharing Dick Brewer’s hundred-foot-long adobe ranch house and, with weaponry close at hand, cowboyed the cattle herd with Brewer and the mostly silent Chickasaw, Fred Waite. Waite and the Kid fantasized about owning a ranch together on the Rio Peñasco, but neither was good at husbandry so they were just spinning wool. Waite asked him once, “What do you really want, Kid? Wanting comes first, then the getting.”
The Kid gave it so much thought Waite wondered if he’d heard. And then the Kid said, “To belong. To be liked. To be famous. To be feared.”
Wordless, Waite just nodded.
* * *
The hands hunted snow geese for a Boxing Day dinner with John Tunstall, who sought to preserve his English customs even in the “Wild West.” Watching from afar, Harry saw Waite and Widenmann fire into an overhead flock with shotguns and fail to bring anything down while the Kid lifted revolvers in his right and left hands and nailed geese with one shot from each gun. The felled birds flumped to the ground near the Englishman, and as Harry ran to get them he yelled, “How absolutely marvelous, Kid! That’s really so cracking well done!”
George Coe was visiting that December 26 and later recalled that as the Kid painted butter over a crackling cooked goose the Englishman confided, “Billy’s the finest young chap I’ve ever met. Each day he’s a new and welcome revelation. I suspect there’s nothing he won’t do to please me, and in requital I shall yet make a proper gentleman of him.”
Before dinner the Englishman heaved in a heavy box and handed out to each of his gunslingers there the mutually advantageous gift of fifty rounds of .44-40 cartridges. “I do hope you shan’t need to use them in anger,” Harry said, and then he entertained them by singing the British anthem “God Save the Queen,” giving emphasis to the stanza:
O Lord our God arise,
>
Scatter her enemies,
And make them fall.
Confound their politics.
Frustrate their knavish tricks.
On Thee our hopes we fix.
God save us all.
* * *
Evenings in January were spent by the hearth fire with the cowhands slouching in chairs or on the floor as they read books on loan from Alex McSween’s hundred-volume home library. Because of the author’s surname, Dick chose Reverend Ebenezer Brewer’s popular Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. And Billy became absorbed in Oliver Twist, seeing his impoverished childhood self in the orphan Oliver, recognizing in his own Wichita and Silver City experiences many bullying oafs like Bill Sikes and juvenile pickpockets like the Artful Dodger. And he found himself pining for a sweet and nurturing Miss Rose Maylie, who so reminded him of his mother.
The Kid asked Dick, “Have you read Oliver Twist?”
Brewer turned a page of the Brewer book. “Yes.”
“Me too,” said Waite.
The Kid was not yet fully acquainted with the locale, so he asked, “Who’s the Fagin of Lincoln County?”
Without looking up, they both replied, “Major Murphy.”
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