The Authentic Death of Hendry Jones

by Charles Neider

  And that’s the way it went for a while. Meanwhile the ranchers told Dad to get the Kid out of there and Dad sent the Kid word he was going to get him, to which the Kid replied,

  “Just come on and stop the jawing.”

  From then on it was war between them. But after the Kid’s escape it was hot for Dad in that country and he sent the Kid word that it was him or the Kid. To which the Kid made no reply at all, only laughed in that strange way of his.

  *

  I can still remember the first time I saw him, in the spring of 1881. It was in the Gabilan hills near the Rancho Rincón de la Puente del Monte and I was camping out alone. I had a very good horse and two good ones besides and was about to make my supper under a live-oak tree when these four fellows rode up, one very big, unshaven, dirty, about thirty years old, with a heavy gruff voice, two others medium-sized ordinary-looking cowhands but rough-dressed, their horses sweating, and the fourth a small sandy-haired boy, all carrying Winchesters across their pommels and wearing two guns on their hips. I had been squatting over my manzanita fire, thinking of the quiet supper I was going to have and how it would be a good thing if I had some company that I could trust not to put a bullet into my back, and I had been squatting there fooling with the fire and thinking what good country this was, the hills golden and peppered with mesquite and live-oak, the sky blue and clean and the sun very golden, and thinking that I was going to enjoy what I was going to eat because I felt in very good health, when I had heard the horses coming up, and I had turned and seen four horsemen trotting toward me from the east. They made no sign as they came. They rode up to where I was and looked down at me, saying nothing. I had a funny feeling up my back as if I had made a mortal mistake and my mouth began tasting dry and bitter.

  I said, “Hi. Join me in some chow.” They said nothing, just eyed my horses. The big fellow got down, hooked his thumbs into his gunbelt and spat into the fire.

  “You don’t want them horses,” he said.

  “You’re mistaken,” I said.

  He went over to the two horses and took hold of the reins. I grabbed his shoulder and spun him around. He went for his gun but before it was halfway out he heard the click as I cocked mine and his hand let go in a hurry. He looked up at his friends. The boy was grinning.

  “Go ahead Bob,” he said. “Shoot him.”

  One of the others laughed.

  “Go ahead Bob,” said the boy.

  The big fellow growled. The boy laughed a long and peculiar laugh. I watched them, thinking they would crack down on me and give me my death. The manzanita fire was smoking heavily. The big fellow started coughing. The boy laughed again.

  “We don’t want your horses,” he said softly.

  “Mister,” I said, “get onto your horse.”

  “That was a fast draw,” said one of the men.

  The big fellow said, “What do you want for them?” in a voice that growled.

  “They’re not for sale,” I said.

  “Come on,” said the boy, partly turning his horse.

  “They’re good horses Kid,” the big man complained.

  “Come on,” said the boy and the man mounted.

  “You the Kid?” I asked.

  The boy smiled and looked at my gun.

  “Put it away,” he said. “We got no trouble with you.” And he jumped down and came over to me.

  I jammed the gun away, wondering if they would corpse me now. He was small, with soft cheeks and boyish eyes and a boy’s quick body. When he walked he walked softly, like a cat, and his spurs clanked and the large rowels slowly turned. He had a funny smile, his mouth breaking into tight wrinkles and showing the teeth, his mouth doing that almost all the time when he spoke, so that I wondered if it smiled like that when he slept. The wrinkles were cut into his face and even when he was not smiling I could see the lines. I would not have guessed then that I would see that smile on him when he lay dead and that I would be with him at his wake, his last and best friend.

  “If you’re not busy why don’t you join us?” he asked.

  “How you know you can use me?”

  “I can use you all right Doc,” he said.

  “How you know my name?”

  “Heard you were around these parts. I heard what you look like. And there’s no mistaking a draw like that.”

  “A deal,” I said.

  We shook hands. The Kid turned to the big fellow and said, “Bob rustle us up something to eat.” I saw the big one didn’t like that and I said, “Hell I’ll do it Kid. Come on down boys and have some chow.”

  And that was how it began.

  *

  I watched him a lot after that. He was different all right. He was such a small fellow—it made you want to laugh to think of it. I remember the time at a baile when a big farmer who had had too much rotgut and who, being from up Oregon way, did not know him by sight, ambled over to him and said, “Sonny you sure are small. Where you come from they cut you so small?”

  The Kid laughed in the man’s face.

  The farmer stared at him and said, “Why you runt. You aiming to get broke in two?”

  Another fellow grabbed his arm and whispered in his ear. The Oregon man piped down and kept looking over his shoulder for the next half hour. He lit out after that and was never heard of again in those parts.

  There was the other time when a fellow in a saloon, watching the Kid drink, came over and said, “You sure got a lady’s hands boy.”

  Upon which the Kid threw his drink in the man’s face. When the man went for his gun the Kid caught his gun hand, armlocked him to the door and shoved him into the street. The man came back with his gun in his hand and the Kid shot him through the arm. We wanted to know why he hadn’t killed him but he just called for another drink and picked up the talk where it had left off. It was not like him to let a man live after a thing like that but you couldn’t predict him.

  We liked him for a lot of reasons. Some liked him because they were afraid of him, others because they admired him and still others because they hated him. But I think most were drawn to him because of his luck. You could not help wondering how a fellow could have such luck. I heard people say his kind of luck was the kind that comes once in a hundred years and that when it comes nothing can change it. Others said it was the kind that belongs to kids and later I heard them say he was a kid no longer. They had given him that monicker when he was just a boy and it was time he had gotten himself another, for the years had changed him, but he died with that name and would have kept it if he had lived to be eighty.

  He was a wonderful horseman. He had a small and quick body for it. When his horse bolted or reared, bucked or slid, he was just part of him and the wilder the horse was the better he liked it, holding the reins in one hand, raising the other, smiling that smile and whooping. Most of the fellows thought no more of a horse than of a cow but he liked horses, the way a fellow will like a dog. He was different in that respect too.

  I can still see him now, walking around the Punta, smiling, his hands in his back pockets, his sandy head hunched. He had a funny laugh. To hear it you’d think he had asthma or something. His mouth would draw back, his head would go up, and out of his mouth would come a wet longdrawn sound, the teeth bright and solid, the upper lip curled back, showing purple and looking blistered, and his face so red that you thought he was about to have a stroke. But there was nothing asthmatic about him and despite his hunched head and tight shoulders his chest was open and loose and you knew he was breathing well. He was in good shape when I first met him, although he had already begun to run down from bad living.

  I can still remember him clearly: that slightly hunched stroll, that smile, the face that sunburned so easily (I think that was one of the reasons he liked the foggy Punta), the red-rimmed slate-colored eyes, the close-cropped small sandy head, the golden hair of his eyebrows and the golden hair that grew up from his chest to his throat, the milky fingers with the faint freckles, the smoky lips, dry and creased
, the small ears hugging his head, his pointed chin, the way he walked on the outsides of his feet, his toes pointing outward, his high throaty drawling voice, the powerful curves of his arches, his milky muscular body, the light down on the back of his hands, the way when he laughed and flushed his eyes gleamed like white enamel buttons and his hair seemed brightly hay-colored.

  Hell I could go on and on about him.

  *

  I joined up with them—I was a wild kid myself in those days—and we had some great times—rustling, fighting, shooting up towns we didn’t like, doing just about what we wanted to and getting away with it. I was twenty then. My name was Edward Richard Baker (they called me Doc because I had once assisted a traveling dentist back around Albuquerque). My father was John Farley Baker, known as “Jimmy Boy,” a smith in Las Cruces, New Mexico Territory, where I was born. He had emigrated from Ohio and married a girl in Santa Fe. I grew up in the Territory, learned to ride and shoot there, and had to beat it out of there after a scrape. Of schooling I had very little, about as much as a poor boy could get on the frontier; but I liked to read and my mother put some good books in my way, which started a habit ending by my becoming a self-taught as well as a self-made man. Which is nothing to brag about when I consider what I might have become in that place and time.

  I was a tall husky fellow then, about six feet high, with light brown hair and blue eyes, in very good health. I remember I had a habit the fellows used to rib me about: when I walked I swung from side to side. Inasmuch as I had long legs for a rather skinny body my co-ordination was not too good for running and some of the fellows used to call me “Skeleton Man” but it was in fun. I remember too that I had trouble with my voice. It was hollow in sound and on the loud side and I tried unsuccessfully to change it. Which about winds up the picture of me at that time.

  *

  There are a couple of matters I ought to set straight before we get going. One of them was the Kid’s capture. People have come up to me and said, “How come a fellow like the Kid allowed himself to get caught?” Well there wasn’t much to it, it was just one of those things. We were breakfasting one cold morning in the early spring of 1883 in an old shack on a hillside south of the Valley and the first thing we knew we heard Dad Longworth’s voice call out, “We got you surrounded. Come out with your hands high.”

  We shot at each other for a while with nobody getting hurt and then we saw that Dad and his men had settled down for a long stay, long enough to starve us out. Even then we didn’t quit but when our ammunition ran low and Dad shouted they would burn us to the ground there was nothing for us to do but come out, especially when he promised we wouldn’t be shot down.

  The Kid came out smiling and said, “Hi Dad. How are things? Pretty good for you I reckon.”

  “I reckon,” Dad grunted.

  “One thing I wish you’d tell me,” said the Kid.

  “What’s that?”

  “How’d you know we were here?”

  Dad grinned and said, “A little bird told me.”

  “I’ll bet,” said the Kid.

  And that was all there was to it. There were five of us in the shack. They had to let the rest of us go for lack of evidence but they kept the Kid on a warrant for an old murder. There was that trial in Salinas and he was sentenced to be hung. But that was only the beginning of it, as you know. It was a quick trial all right, with the result never in doubt. The Kid had killed many men. I don’t know why they decided to hang him for the killing of Johnson, which was in self-defense. Except that they wanted to see him hang regardless and weren’t particular about the charge. Johnson was a Monterey teamster. He had gotten drunk in a Monterey saloon and had approached the Kid, who had been drinking too, and told him he ought to be hounded out of that country. When the Kid told him to shut up Johnson had gone for his gun. After the Kid shot him in the head he had continued drinking and for an hour no one had gone up to the body, pretending it wasn’t there. These details had come up at the trial, together with the interesting one, sworn to by witnesses who had not been in the saloon as well as by some who had, that Johnson had been killed while unarmed.

  It was a quiet trial. The Kid said very little, just smiled, and his lawyer did not have his heart in the job. The crowd was very quiet. Some people commented on how the Kid did not look dangerous at all and how it was not possible he was such a desperate. They said he looked just like a kid and what a shame it was he had taken to such a bad way of life. The judge, a Salinas man, said it would have been better if he had tried to escape and gotten himself killed, because it would have saved the county money, but the Kid just grinned when he heard it, having plans of his own that didn’t include getting himself killed just yet.

  The morning after the sentencing they put him in a buckboard and brought him over to Monterey town, shackled hand and foot and dressed as usual. He had on tight-fitting black woolen trousers, of the kind we used to wear in those days, modeled, I guess, on the trousers the Spanish gents wore in that country, and black narrow-toed high-heeled boots, and a white soft-collared shirt and a wide black belt and a large black sombrero.

  The stories you sometimes hear of how we used to dress in those days, looking like pigs, are mostly untrue. In the hills, of course, living out, hunting, camping, doing a cowhand’s work, it was another matter, for then we were at work, wearing shaps, eating dust and not minding much how we looked. But in town and around the Punta we were always well dressed, taking a kind of pride in it, like the Spanish gents themselves, for we were not exactly working men but rather a kind, like gamblers, that lived off their wits. We rarely if ever lacked money for the things we wanted. We bought the finest boots and sombreros from down in old Mex and had hand-tooled saddles filigreed in silver and all the sorts of things that please a young fellow.

  As for the Kid, he was the neatest of us all except when we were out on the range, and he always wore black except for his white shirts, and on more than one occasion I saw him in a black suit with a black string tie and a black top hat, and he cut quite a figure in those towns, dressed like that in the middle of the week and with his jacket always unbuttoned so that he could get at his forty-four without trouble if he wanted to.

  When they brought him over from Salinas after the trial we were hiding out midway between the two towns—four of us—planning to give him a little reception. But the cover was bad, the hills naked, and when we saw how many men they had guarding him we put the notion of an escape out of our minds. They had two men riding up front and two covering the rear and one on each flank and these were special deputies, carrying their rifles where they would do the most good in the quickest time. Dad Longworth drove the pair of horses, with the Kid on the seat on his right, and behind them rode Pablo Patron and Lon Dedrick, with Dedrick just behind the Kid, his shotgun across his pommel. I figured Dedrick would kill the Kid before we had a chance to do a thing and even if I was wrong I knew we had no chance against that bunch and so we let them pass and thought of ways of rescuing him from the jail.

  But we gave that up too. It’s true Dad sent the six extra deputies away but we weren’t sure of it, we thought they were planted in houses around the plaza; and anyway the lynch mob in town was armed and so were the Dedrick boys and we knew we would be slaughtered if we tried to come in there on them.

  It was a very bright day when they brought him to the jail on that thirtieth of May. There were lots of people in the plaza waiting for a look at him, Nika Machado among them. He saw her in the crowd and waved. There were people milling around the jail door and kids running around on the plaza. Dad, I believe, expected us to try to take the Kid then and he also thought a mob would try to lynch him. Certain citizens had declared that lynching was the only just end for the Kid, inasmuch as Johnson had been a Monterey man and the Kid had been operating in the Monterey area. I don’t know if the judge was in cahoots with them but he might have been. It was on their petition that he sentenced the Kid to hang in Monterey rather than in Salinas, where he
already was.

  But nobody tried anything. There were catcalls and whoops but nothing happened and the Kid seemed to be having a great old time. Dad went ahead of him into the jail, with Pablo just behind and with Dedrick behind Pablo. The six extra men covered the crowd with their rifles. Shortly after they disappeared inside, the Kid appeared at the front window of what was to be his cell, the southernmost room upstairs, facing the plaza, and he smiled and waved his shackled hands at the crowd.

  2

  He had followed Dad inside the jail and had at once begun making himself familiar with it. He knew it in a general way, the way he knew Pablo and Lon and Charley’s across the plaza, having been inside it a couple of times but not for incarcerating reasons. He entered the vestibule and began following Dad up the stairs.

  “What’s up? Why upstairs?” he asked. He knew the cells were on the ground floor.

  Dad turned and smiled. “We got a special room for you.”

  “Any other prisoners?”

  “Three.”

  “Downstairs?”

  “Yep.”

  “No company.”

  “No company.”

  It was a steep flight and not easy to manage with irons on his hands and legs but he pretended it was harder than it was. He gripped the banister and pulled himself up. Dedrick had gotten behind him. He shoved him hard in the back with the muzzle of the shotgun. The Kid was surprised, thinking that Pablo was still behind him and not believing that Pablo would do a thing like that. Turning around, he saw Dedrick’s grinning face and, gripping the banister, swung his legs into the air and dug his heels into Lon’s chest. Dedrick staggered and let out a bellow. He threatened the Kid with the shotgun but Dad had spun around and drawn. Dad said flatly, “None of that,” and Lon lowered the gun and complained of what the Kid had done.

  “Why’d you do it?” asked Dad.

  “He rammed that thing into my back,” the Kid said mildly.

  Dad looked at Dedrick. “How come you’re behind him? I thought Pablo was behind him. Lon you try anything—”