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After introductions to those he’d never met, Grzelachowski asked, “Would you like to take something on the teeth?”
The Kid told him, “I won’t turn anything down but my collar.”
Ever the figurer, Sheriff Garrett asked, “Would you have enough for all of us?”
“We have such plenty in the kitchen! Please to sit.” Then the ex-priest and his cook carried out heaping platters of hot wild turkey, pierogi, cabbage rolls, and the gingerbread called Old Polish piernik. Padre Polaco motheringly sliced the food for the handcuffed Kid and continued refilling his plate until he finally groaned over the excess.
Ever wanting, Rudabaugh viewed the end of their meal with distress.
Headline news of the Kid’s capture got to Las Vegas before the captives did on the twenty-sixth, and a huge crowd of rowdy gawkers with their own ideas of penal correction were waiting in the Old Town plaza. The Kid grinned as he shouted out the names of acquaintances he saw, seeking out Henry Hoyt but failing to find him, for he’d gone back to medical school in Chicago. By contrast, Billie Wilson was dour, humiliated, and penitent, his head down to avoid further intimacy with the citizens, and Dave Rudabaugh was in hiding and lying sideways on the flat bed of the wagon, for the hundreds of Mexicans in the plaza sought vengeance for his jailbreak murder of Deputy Lino Valdez. The horsemen rode protectively closer to the wagon and kicked citizens away until they could hustle their prisoners inside the stone jailhouse on Valencia Street.
An Irish mail contractor who was friendly with the Kid shoved his way into the jailhouse with packages of new gabardine suits and other attire for the prisoners because he thought it only right that the notorious ruffians face execution in high style. Their ankle shackles and handcuffs were chiseled off so they could change out of foul clothing that soon would be incinerated.
Because he was about the same age and seemed agreeable, Lute Wilcox, the city editor for the Las Vegas Gazette, was granted an interview by a chipper Kid, who found himself in his element as he joked and chatted with somewhat terrified bystanders.
“You appear to take it easy,” Wilcox said.
“Well, what’s the use of looking on the gloomy side of everything? But I guess you could say this laugh’s on me.” He glanced around at his surroundings and asked, “Is the jail in Santa Fe any better? This is a terrible place to hold a fellow in.”
Sheriff Romero told him in Spanish there was nothing better in store for him there.
And the Kid just shrugged. “I guess I’ll put up with what I have to for the time being.”
Wilcox wrote, “He was the main attraction of the show, and as he stood there, stamping his boots on the stone floor to keep his feet warm, he was the hero of the ‘Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves’ romance which this paper has been running in serial form for six weeks or more.”
With some surprise and pride, the Kid said, “There was a big crowd gazing at me in the plaza, wasn’t there? Well, perhaps some of them will think me half man now instead of some sort of wild animal.”
Wilcox wrote, “He did look human, indeed, but there was nothing very mannish about him in appearance, for he looked and acted a mere school boy, with a frank, open countenance and the traditional silky fuzz on his upper lip. Clear blue eyes, with a roguish snap about them; light hair and complexion. He is, in all, quite a handsome looking fellow, and he has agreeable and winning ways.”
Sheriff Garrett and his deputies shifted the prisoners to the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe railroad depot in East Las Vegas on Tuesday, December 28, and the Kid leaned out an open window of a yellow smoking car to affably continue his interview with Lute Wilcox, hints of self-pity coloring his tone as he said, “I don’t blame you for writing of me as your editors have. You had to believe others’ stories. But then I don’t know as anyone on the outside would ever believe anything good of me anyway.” Reckoning what he’d later claim in a courtroom, he lied in telling Wilcox, “I wasn’t ever the leader of any gang—I was for Billy all the time. About that Los Portales cave, it was the start of a property I owned with Charlie Bowdre. I heard a stage line would run by there and I wanted it to become a way station. But I have found to my sorrow there are certain men who won’t let me live in the Territory, and so I was going to leave for Old Mexico. I haven’t stolen any stock. I made my living by gambling. But some forces wouldn’t let me settle down. If they had, I wouldn’t be here today.” He held up his handcuffed wrists in illustration as he said, “Chisum got me into all this trouble and then wouldn’t help me out of it.”
The Kid seemed willing to go on with his complaints, but he was distracted by hundreds of seething Mexicans crowding around and rocking the railroad car as they shouted for Dirty Dave Rudabaugh to be handed over and hung strangling from the windmill in the plaza.
Rudabaugh sank down in his seat, like a knob of butter melting on a skillet.
Sheriff Garrett sidled down the aisle of the railcar and crouched next to the Kid. “We have a situation here. Could be I’ll have to give you a gun. Would you promise me you won’t try to escape?”
The Kid sighed, but said, “You have my word. Dang it.”
The sheriff then went out to the platform between the railway cars and shouted, “I have promised these men safe passage to Santa Fe! It is my duty as a federal marshal to preserve and protect them!”
Sheriff Romero was below near the knuckle coupler. Looking up at the tall man, he told Garrett, “We have chase the engineer off, so you not goin anywheres. We no care if you take the Billies. Rudabaugh only we wants.”
Garrett’s right hand rested on the hilt of his Colt .45 Peacemaker as he glared down and dared Sheriff Romero with “Then why don’t you try to take him?”
Romero considered both the offer and its consequences for half a minute, and then he and his frightened delegation slunk away. Garrett told Barney Mason, “They look like a covey of hard-backed turtles sliding off the banks of the Pecos.”
Seeing the still-furious ruckus outside, a railroad postal inspector hurried through a dining car to get to Garrett, telling him he’d earlier worked as a railroad engineer, “But my lungs couldn’t handle the soot and smoke.”
Garrett seemed to wonder about the relevance.
“What I’m saying is I could get you out of Las Vegas real fast.”
“Good. Go do it.”
The Kid watched as the postal inspector snaked his way through the mob to get to the locomotive. “This is exciting!” he told Lute Wilcox. “It’s my first train ride!”
And suddenly the locomotive’s iron driving wheels screeched as the throttle was pulled fully open, roughly jerking the passenger cars west. The Kid tilted out his window to grandly wave his hat to the Gazette reporter and shout back, “Adíos, Lute! Call on me in Santa Fe!” And then he held on to his passenger seat between his knees as the train got close to a thrilling fifty miles per hour.
