All Tom's arguments to dissuade the Kid from his purpose were useless. Said he: "I would rather die fighting than to perish from thirst, like a rat in a trap." Boldly, but cautiously, the Kid entered the dark and gloomy passage. Crouching low, he noiselessly followed its windings some one hundred yards, as he judged, then he suddenly came to an opening, about thirty feet wide, and stretching away towards the southwest, gradually narrowing until a curve hid its further course from his sight. The passage and opening were walled with rock, hundreds of feet high.
Grass and weeds were growing luxuriantly in this little amphitheatre, and a glance to the left discovered a bubbling mountain spring, gushing forth from a rocky crevice, bright, clear and sparkling.
Hugging the base of the cliff, creeping on hands and knees, the Kid, with canteen in readiness, approached the brink of a little basin of rock. The ground about was beaten by horses' hoofs, and water, recently splashed about the margin of the spring, evidenced that the reds had lately quitted the spot. Face and canteen were quickly plunged into the cool stream. The Kid drank long and deep, his canteen was overflowing, and stealthily he moved away. Entering the passage, he was congratulating himself on his good fortune, when suddenly a fearful Indian yell and a volley of musketry from, almost, directly over his head, on the right, dispelled his vision of safety. His signal cry rang out in answer, then, dashing his canteen in the faces of the Indians, who could only approach singly from the defile, he snatched his six-shooter from its scabbard, wheeled, and swiftly as any Mescalero of them all, plunged into the gorge he had just quitted, pursued by how many savages he did not know, and by yells and showers of lead.
Let us return for a moment to O'Keefe. He heard the Kid's dreaded shouts, and, simultaneously, the rattle of fire-arms and the blood-curdling war cry of the Indians. He followed the Kid's instructions so far as to bring the horses out to the trail, then the irresistible impulse of self-preservation overcame him and he mounted and fled as fast as the sinuous, rugged path would permit. The yells of the bloody Apaches, multiplied by a thousand echoes, seemed to strike upon his ears, not alone from his rear, but from the right of him, the left of him, the front of him, and as it resounded from peak to peak, he was persuaded that myriads of dusky devils were in pursuit, and from every direction.
Spying a cleft in the rocks, on his right, inaccessible to a horse, he threw himself from the saddle, gave the affrighted mustang a parting stroke, which sent him clattering down the steep declivity, then, on hands and knees, crawled into the chasm. Never casting a look behind, he crept on and up, higher and higher, until, as he reached a small level plateau, he thought he had surely attained the very summit of the mountains. The discharge of arms and savage shouts still fell faintly on his ears. Tremblingly he raised to his feet. His hands and limbs were scratched, bruised, and bleeding, and his clothing nearly stripped from his body. Faint with loss of blood, exertion, and thirst, he cast his blood-shot eyes over the surrounding crags and peaks. For some moments he could discern no sign of life, except here and there a huge bird, startled from his lofty perch by unwonted sounds, lazily circling over the scene of conflict beneath.
Tom's eyelids were drooping, and he was about to yield to an uncontrollable stupor, when his unsteady gaze was caught by a weird, to him incomprehensible, sight. Away off to the southeast, right on the face of a seemingly perpendicular mountainside, high up the ragged peak, as though swinging, without support, in mid-air, he descried a moving object, unlike beast or bird, yet rising slowly up, and higher up the dizzy cliff. His eye once arrested, gazing long and steadily, he could clearly discern that it was the figure of a man. Sometimes hidden by the stunted vegetation, cropping out from clefts of the rock, and sometimes standing erect, in bold relief, he still ascended—slowly, laboriously. Tom could also see masses of rock and earth, as they were dislodged by daring feet, and hear them, too, as they thundered down into the abyss below, awakening a thousand echoes from surrounding mountains.
It dawned, at last, upon O'Keefe's bewildered senses that this bold climber could be none other than the Kid, that he had essayed this fearfully perilous ascent as the only means of escape from the Indians. Again Tom's momentarily aroused intellects deserted him, and, utterly exhausted, he sank down upon the rock and slept profoundly.
Let us return to the Kid, whom we left in imminent peril. He had secured a copious draught of water, and felt its refreshing effect. He had left his Winchester with Tom, as he was preparing to run and not to fight. Thus, he had only his trusty six-shooter and a short dirk to make a fight against twenty well-armed savages thirsty for blood.
As the Kid darted into the narrow passage which led back to the spring, the Indians were but a few paces behind; but when they reached the opening, their prey was nowhere to be seen. Instinctively they sought his trail and quickly found it. They followed it for a few moments silently. The moments were precious ones to the Kid. The trail led them straight up to an apparently inaccessible cliff; they voluntarily raised their eyes, and there, as if sailing in open air, high above their heads, they descried their quarry. The Kid, however, quickly disappeared behind a friendly ledge, while such a yell of baffled rage went up as only an Apache can utter, and lead rained against the mountain side, cutting away the scant herbage and flattening against the resisting rock.
In an instant a half-dozen young braves were stripped for the pursuit. One, a lithe and sinewy young fellow, who appeared to possess the climbing qualities of the panther, quickly reached a point but a few feet beneath where the Kid had disappeared. For one instant an arm and hand projected from the concealing ledge, a flash, a report, and the bold climber poised a moment over the space beneath; then, with arms extended, a death-cry on his lips, he reeled and fell, backward, bounding from ledge to ledge, until he lay, a crushed and lifeless mass, at the feet of the band. The Kid made a feint, as if to leave his concealment, thus drawing the fire of the savages, but ere their guns were brought to bear on him, he darted back to shelter, again quickly appeared, and amidst yells of hate continued his ascent. Two or three desperate leaps from crag to crag, and he found another uncertain place of concealment. The pursuers, undaunted by the fate of their comrade, held steadily on their way. The Kid's body was now stretched forth from his hiding place in full sight, his gaze directed below, and amidst a shower of bullets his revolver again belched forth a stream of death-laden fire, and another Apache receives a dead-head ticket to the Happy Hunting Grounds. The inert body of this converted savage caught on a projecting ledge and hung over the chasm.
And now our hero seems to scorn concealment and bends all his energies towards mastering the ascent of the precipice, where not even an Apache dared to follow. As he several times paused to breathe, he leaned away out of the yawning gulf beneath, jeered his foes in Spanish, and fired wherever he saw a serape or a feather to shoot at. Bullets showered around him as he boldly but laboriously won his way, foot by foot. He seemed to bear a charmed life. Not a shot took effect on his person, but he was severely wounded in the face by a fragment of rock rent from the face of the cliff by a bullet.
The magic pen of Scott portrays the "frantic chase" of Bertram Risingham, in pursuit of the supposed spirit of Mortham, over "rock, wood and stream." The feats of the fabled Bertram, the pursuer, and the actual feats of the veritable the Kid, the pursued, bear strong comparison. Sings Scott:
Sidelong he returns, and now 'tis bent Right up the rock's tall battlement,
Straining each sinew to ascend, Foot, hand and knee, their aid must lend.
Now, to the oak's warped roots he clings, Now trusts his weight to ivy strings;
Now, like the wild goat, must he dare An unsupported leap in air;
Hid in the shrubby rain, course now, You mark him by the crashing bough,
And by his corslet's sullen clank, And by the stones spurned from the bank,
And by the hawk scared from her nest, And ravens croaking o'er their guest,
Who deem his forfeit limbs shall pay Th
e tribute of his bold essay.
"See, he emerges! desperate now All further course—Yon beetling brow,
In cragged nakedness sublime, What heart or foot shall dare to climb?
It bears no tendril for his clasp, Presents no angle to his grasp;
Sole stay his foot may rest upon, Is yon earth-bedded jetting stone.
Balanced on such precarious prop, He strains his grasp to reach the top.
Just as the dangerous stretch he makes, By Heaven, his faithless foot stool shakes!
Beneath his tottering bulk it bends, It sways, it loosens, it descends!
And downward holds its headlong way, Crashing o'er rock and copsewood spray;
Loud thunders shake the echoing dell! Fell it alone—alone it fell.
Just on the very verge of fate, The hardy Bertram's falling weight
He trusted to his sinewy hands, And on the top unharmed he stands!"
More than once on that mountain side, like Bertram, the Kid trusted his whole weight to his "sinewy hands," and more than once did he dare "an unsupported leap in air." In after days he used to say that the nearest he ever came to having (a) nightmare, was trying to repeat that journey in his dreams.
Safely the Kid reached the top of the peak. He felt no fear of pursuit from Indians, as he knew they had abandoned the perilous route himself had taken, and it would require days to make a detour so as to intercept him on the south. Yet his situation was forlorn, not to say desperate. Almost utterly exhausted from exertion, bruised, bleeding, footsore, famishing for food and water, yet sleep was what he most craved, and that blessing was accessible. Like O'Keefe, he sank down in a shady nook and wooed "balmy sleep, Nature's sweet restorer."
Chapter VIII
*
The Kid Joins his Companions—"The Lincoln County War"—The Rights of Property a Myth—The Kid Takes a Change of Base, on Principle
WE LEFT THE KID, at the end of the last chapter, sleeping peacefully on the top of one peak of the Guadalupe Mountains, and O'Keefe, also asleep, on a bench of another peak of the same range. The distance between them, air line, was not so far, but there was more than distance intervening. Canons, precipices, crags, and brush to say nothing of a possible band of savages, burning with baffled hate and deadly revenge. "So near, and yet so far." They both awoke the next morning, as the sun appeared in the east. Each speculated on the fate of the other. The Kid made a straight break towards the rising sun, after reaching the valley beneath his last night's resting place, and reached the cow camps on the Rio Pecos in three days. He procured water at long intervals, but no food except wild berries during the whole trip. He had walked the entire distance and was pretty essentially used up when he reached the camps. After a few days rest, having informed himself how his entertainers stood as between the two factions in the Lincoln County War, he made himself known and was immediately armed, mounted, and accompanied to a stronghold of the Murphy-Dolan faction by one of the cattle-owners, where he again met Jesse Evans and his comrades, with whom he had parted on the Rio Grande.
The Kid was very anxious to learn the fate of O'Keefe, and induced two or three of the boys to accompany him again to Las Cruces, intending, should he hear no tidings of him there, to return by the Guadalupe route and try to hunt him up, or, failing in that, to "eat a few Indians," as he expressed it. He never deserted a friend. He had another errand at Las Cruces. His favorite gray was there, and he pined to bestride him once more.
Let us go back to O'Keefe in the wild passes of the mountains. Like the Kid, he had slept long and felt refreshed. But, less fortunate than his fellow, he had failed to get water the day previous, and was suffering intensely, not only from thirst but from hunger.
His first impulse was to place the greatest possible distance between himself and the scene of horror which had been enacted so recently; but his sufferings for lack of water were becoming acute. He felt a sort of delirium, and the impulse to return to the spring and procure water was irresistible. Yet he lingered in concealment, listening in terror and suffering untold agony, until night fell—the moon afforded a little light—and he found both the spring and the canteen. Hastily slaking his thirst and filling the canteen, he returned to the spot where he had left the Kid's horse and the pack-mule. He found the dead body of the horse, pierced with balls, not a dozen yards from where he had last seen him, but there was no sign of the mule, and Tom addressed himself to the task of journeying, on foot, back to the settlements.
Throughout the night and long into the following day he plodded on. Like the Kid, he found a few green berries with which he "fed hunger." Near noon he ran into a deserted Indian camp where they had recently stopped to roast mescal. Poking about amongst the stones and earth around the pits, he found plenty of half-roasted refuse, which furnished him an ample feast and more than he cared to burden himself with for his after use on the journey.
In a few hours the wanderer reached the level prairie at the foot of the mountains in the south. His good luck had not deserted him yet. In the soft earth he espied the foot prints of his own horse which he had deserted. Night was coming on, but weary as he was, he followed the trail until darkness hid it from view. Just as he was about to seek a "soft place" on which to pass the night, he saw on his right, and a hundred yards distant, a moving object. To be brief, it was his own horse; he slept in his saddle blankets that night, and, in due time, made his way safely back to the Rio Grande.
The meeting, at Las Graces, between the Kid and O'Keefe was a surprise and a satisfaction. The Kid's efforts to induce Tom to join him in his Lincoln County enterprise were without avail. He had seen enough of that locality and did not hanker after a second interview with the Mescaleros.
"The Lincoln County War," in which the Kid was now about to take a part, had been brewing since the summer of 1876, and commenced in earnest in the spring of 1877. It continued for nearly two years, and the robberies and murders consequent thereon would fill a volume. The majority of these outrages were not committed by the principals or participants in the war proper, but the unsettled state of the country caused by these disturbances called the lawless element, horse and cattle thieves, footpads, murderers, escaped convicts, and outlaws from all the frontier states and territories; Lincoln and surrounding counties offered a rich and comparatively safe field for their nefarious operations.
It is not the intention, here, to discuss the merits of the embroglio—to censure or uphold either one faction or the other, but merely to detail such events of the war as the hero of these adventures took part in.
The principals in this difficulty were, on one side, John S. Chisum, called "The Cattle King of New Mexico," with Alex A. McSween and John H. Tunstall as important allies. On the other side were the firm of Murphy & Dolan, merchants at Lincoln, the county seat, and extensive cattle-owners, backed by nearly every small cattle-owner in the Pecos Valley. This latter faction was supported by Hon. T. B. Catron, United States attorney for the Territory, a resident and eminent lawyer of Santa Fe, and a considerable cattle-owner in the Valley.
John S. Chisum's herds ranged up and down the Rio Pecos, from Fort Sumner way below the line of Texas, a distance of over two hundred miles, and were estimated to number from 40,000 to 80,000 head of full-blood, graded, and Texas cattle. A. A. McSween was a successful lawyer at Lincoln, retained by Chisum, besides having other pecuniary interests with him. John H. Tunstall was an Englishman, who only came to this country in 1876. He had ample means at his command, and formed a copartnership with McSween at Lincoln, the firm erecting two fine buildings and establishing a mercantile house and the "Lincoln County Bank," there. Tunstall was a liberal, public-spirited citizen, and seemed destined to become a valuable acquisition to the reliable business men of our country. He, also, in partnership with McSween, had invested considerably in cattle.
This bloody war originated about as follows: The smaller cattle-owners in Pecos Valley charged Chisum with monopolizing, as a right, all this vast range of grazing country—t
hat his great avalanche of hoofs and horns engulfed and swept away their smaller herds, without hope of recovery or compensation—that the big serpent of this modern Moses, swallowed up the lesser serpents of these magicians. They maintained that at each "round-up" Chisum's vast herd carried with them hundreds of head of cattle belonging to others.
On Chisum's part he claimed that these smaller proprietors had combined together to round-up and drive away from the range—selling them at various military posts and elsewhere throughout the country—cattle which were his property and bearing his mark and brand under the system of reprisals. Collisions between the herders in the employ of the opposing factions were of frequent occurence, and, as above stated, in the winter and spring of 1877 the war commenced in earnest. Robbery, murder, and bloody encounters ceased to excite either horror or wonder.
Under this state of affairs it was not so requisite that the employees of these stockmen should be experienced vaqueros as that they should possess courage and the will to fight the battles of their employers, even to the death. The reckless daring, unerring markmanship, and unrivalled horsemanship of the Kid rendered his services a priceless acquisition to the ranks of the faction which could secure them. As related, he was enlisted by Mc-Daniels, Morton, and Baker, who were adherents to the Murphy-Dolan cause.
Throughout the summer and a portion of the fall of 1877, the Kid faithfully followed the fortunes of the party to which he had attached himself. His time was spent on the cattle-ranges of the Pecos Valley, and on the trail, with occasional visits to the plazas, where, with his companions, he indulged, without restraint, in such dissipations as the limited facilities of the little tendejons afforded. His encounters with those of the opposite party were frequent, and his dauntless courage and skill had won for him name and fame, which admiration, or fear, or both, forced his friends, as well as his enemies, to respect. No noteworthy event occurred during the Kid's adherence to the Murphy-Dolan faction, and he declared that all the uses of his life were "flat, stale, and unprofitable."
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