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Waite seemed unsurprised, but Martínez protested, “Pero por qué?”
The sheriff answered, “Well, for disturbing the peace. And impersonating an officer of the law. And things I haven’t thought of yet.”
Eventually the lieutenant got the three arrestees in a tight formation with his Fort Stanton detachment around them, humiliatingly marching them to the jail like they were oafish new recruits.
Atanacio Martínez was let out of la cárcel before nightfall, but Waite and the Kid were held in the cold, fetid underground dungeon, and they were still there when the funeral for John Henry “Harry” Tunstall took place on Friday and he was buried in the horse corral behind his looted store.
The Kid said, “You and me, we could take over Harry’s ranch and run his cattle for him.”
Waite said, “You’re no rancher, Kid. Hell, you don’t even garden.”
“So what am I s’posed to do?”
“Well, you’re an able gunman.”
Mrs. Susan McSween’s foot-pumped reed organ had been carried into the corral, and the Kid could faintly hear the village congregation singing the hymns “Jesu, Lover of My Soul” and “My Faith Looks Up to Thee.”
Handsome Fred Waite leaned against an earthen wall with his flat-brimmed hat tilted far back on his head. His black mustache was wide as a comb. Hearing the hymns, he stared across the darkened room to where the Kid was listening, too, as he squatted down, his arms hugging his knees.
Waite asked, “You know about the lawyers Thomas Catron and Stephen Elkins? Of the Santa Fe Ring?”
“A smidge.”
“They were friends and classmates at the University of Missouri. But Smooth Steve served with the Union Army and Tomcat with the Confederacy. Enemies. Yet they’re partners in their Santa Fe law firm now, letting bygones be bygones. Water under the bridge. And that’s how it’s gonna be with us. Civil war, with friends and neighbors against friends and neighbors. Afterwards it may be different, but for now it’s unto death that we’re parted. Lincoln County is a house divided.”
The Kid was rocking back and forth on his boots, saying nothing.
Waite asked, “What’s hamstering in your head, Kid?”
“Working up a good hate.”
Within thirty hours Waite and the Kid were released from jail, in a rage over the injustices of the legal system, the factious stance of the Army, and the refusal of Sheriff Brady to go after murderers still very plainly at large.
Seeing their side of things, Lincoln’s justice of the peace made twenty-eight-year-old Dick Brewer, whose record was clean, an official constable, and all of John H. Tunstall’s former employees joined him as deputies when he formed a vigilante group he called the Regulators. Their stated purpose was to restore law and order in the enormous county, but each Regulator had his own fealty and resentments, his own scheme to make a dollar, his own childhood education in the uses of violence, and a wild craving for vengeance.
The Kid went to the grocery and tavern of Juan Patrón in Lincoln and took pleasure in telling the tequila drinkers there in Spanish that he was Brewer’s deputy now and finally on the right side of the law and he intended to stay there. Could maybe run for sheriff next election.
* * *
The first arrests of the Regulators came on March 6, when Brewer, Middleton, Bowdre, Scurlock, and Kid Bonney found Frank Baker and William “Buck” Morton watering their horses on the far side of the Rio Peñasco. Baker was raised in an educated and cultured family in Syracuse, New York, but took a wrong turning, joined the Boys, and found sick pleasure in several homicides even before he signed on with Sheriff Brady’s posse to hunt down John Tunstall. Twenty-one-year-old Buck Morton grew up on a tobacco plantation in Virginia, clerked in a hotel in Denver, slit the throat of his gold-mining partner in Arizona, and was a sixty-dollar-a-month foreman on Jimmy Dolan’s cattle ranch on Black River when he joined the sheriff’s posse and shot Tunstall in cold blood. They both still rode with the Boys at times and were hightailing it to Texas when their means of locomotion got thirsty.
Wide-eyed at seeing the Regulators, the culprits fired at the five from a crouch, and in a wild panic hopped on their horses and spurred them southward. The Regulators crashed their own horses across a pretty fly-fishing river and gave chase through open but jagged country, the pursued in a hot gallop and twisting in their jolting saddles to shoot backward, hitting nothing but earth and sky, then having to frantically reload on the run. The Regulators sent a fusillade of gunfire at them, too, but the leaps and lunges of their horses also jostled their aims into ever-miss. Yet their five animals were fresher and Morton’s and Baker’s were hard-used and playing out, heaving for air and lathering up and stumbling with weakness until one just halted in a head-shaking statement of I shall go no farther and then the other horse joined him in sharing their exhaustion.
There was nothing for the murderers to do but jump down and hide in some tall, crackling tules in cold marsh water. Reeds nodded whenever they shifted position and guns could find their sloshing noise even when they couldn’t be seen.
“Fish in a farrow,” Bowdre said.
The Kid corrected him: “Barrel.”
Constable Brewer shouted, “We could set fire to these weeds and burn you out! So surrender and we won’t harm you!”
The Regulators could hear the hissing of whispered discussion and then, “Okay, we give up. Don’t shoot.”
One fell in the high reeds, making a commotion, and his partner criticized him, and then both sodden men showed themselves with their hands held high overhead but seeming skeptical about their futures.
Brewer said, “We’d rather have shot you both and had it done with, but as it is I guess you’re under arrest.”
Wet Buck Morton said, “We never did anything wrong. It was all justifiable.”
