To Hell on a Fast Horse

by Mark Lee Gardner

  The outlaws initially suspected that Wilcox and Brazil were in on Garrett’s ambush scheme, but the ranchers finally convinced them otherwise. Tired and demoralized, they tried to figure out what to do next. Leery of making a move until they knew Garrett’s whereabouts, they decided to send another spy to Fort Sumner. They drafted Manuel Brazil for the job, and he left the ranch the next day. Brazil, of course, went straight to Garrett upon his arrival in Sumner. The outlaw bunch was all at his ranch, he told the lawman, and feeling rather dejected. Garrett then conspired with Brazil, telling the rancher to carry the news to the boys that he was at Sumner with only Barney Mason and three Hispanos, and that though he wanted to go back to Roswell, he was worried about leaving the safety of the plaza after having made the gang so mad by killing Tom Folliard.

  As Brazil prepared to leave the next morning, December 22, Garrett went over the plans with the rancher. If the gang was still at his ranch, Brazil was to remain there. But, if the outlaws were either not there, or if they left a short time later, Brazil was to ride back to Sumner and report to Garrett. If Garrett did not hear from Brazil by 2:00 A.M., Garrett would assume the gang was still holed up at the ranch, and he and his posse would start out from Fort Sumner.

  At midnight, Brazil rode back into Fort Sumner, his beard crusted over with icicles. The gang had left his place after supper, he reported. Garrett immediately ordered his men to mount up; they were going after the outlaws. The night was clear and bone cold, the type of cold that causes the snow to make a tight crunch sound with each step. Garrett sent Brazil on ahead (in case the gang had returned) while he and the posse pushed on to the Wilcox-Brazil place. Three miles from their destination, Garrett and his men met Brazil. The Kid and gang had not returned, he said, but he could easily show the posse the trail the outlaws had left behind. With four inches of snow on the ground and the moon high in the sky, Garrett had no trouble following the tracks Brazil pointed out to him. The tracks led east, and Garrett instantly knew where he would find the outlaws. About three miles beyond the Wilcox-Brazil ranch, at a place known as Stinking Spring, there was a small, one-room rock and adobe house that stood by itself on the edge of a wide arroyo. The dwelling had been built years before by a Hispanic sheepherder, but now it was abandoned. Garrett was convinced he would find the gang camped there for the night.

  Well familiar with the country he was now leading his posse over, Garrett halted his men a half mile from Stinking Spring and cautioned them that silence was critical for them to trap Billy and the others. Then, when within four hundred yards of the rock house, Garrett divided his posse into two groups. By this point, it was 3:00 A.M. Leaving posse member Juan Roybal to hold the horses, Garrett circled around the side of the house with half his men and dropped into an arroyo, which allowed his party to creep up to within seventy-five yards of the front of the structure. Frank Stewart and the rest of the posse took up positions within two hundred yards of the building. The house, which was only twelve feet wide and thirty feet long, had a single narrow entrance and no door. Plainly visible in the moonlight, Garrett counted three horses tied up outside. Two horses, he reasoned, were sharing the small space with the gang. There were no sounds inside, and Garrett assumed that the outlaws were asleep with no idea what was waiting for them out in the cold.

  Excited to finally have the Kid within his grasp, and sensing the kill, Garrett sent Stewart a message suggesting that they quietly slip in on the sleeping men, guns drawn, and then hold the outlaws until daylight. Posseman Lee Hall was all for the idea, but Frank Stewart was against such a bravado move. He would rather sit out in the freezing cold than run the risk of getting into a gunfight inside that small space. So, lying flat on their blankets in the snow, they waited for the dawn, which was more than three hours away—posse member Charlie Rudolph suffered frostbite to his feet before the whole thing was over. After what surely seemed an eternity to Garrett and the others, they finally saw the predawn glow rising in the east.

  Billy had let it be known more than once that he would never be taken alive, and Garrett was perfectly willing to forgo any efforts to obtain his surrender. A dead Billy the Kid would be much less to worry about than a live one. Garrett had already told his men that if he saw the Kid, he was going to kill him. Garrett believed that once the Kid was gone, the rest of the gang would simply give up. The sheriff-elect had a good description of what the Kid was wearing, which included a distinctive sombrero. Garrett told his men that the signal to begin firing was when he raised his rifle to his shoulder.

  Although it was not yet daybreak, it was light enough now for Garrett to easily make out the frigid faces of his men. They stared at the dark entrance to the house, trying to detect anything inside when, suddenly, a man appeared in the doorway holding a feedbag. There was the sombrero—he looked to be the Kid—he had to be the Kid. Garrett raised his rifle and drew a steady bead on the man. Seven shots broke the winter silence like claps of thunder, followed instantly by the loud slap of lead bullets slamming into flesh and bone. The man spun back into the building. The next thing the posse heard was Billy Wilson yelling that they had mortally wounded Charlie Bowdre and he wanted to come out. Garrett had sent the wrong man on his final journey.

  All of Bowdre’s pals were wide awake now, and they realized how desperate their situation was. Billy looked at his friend, who was white as a ghost, deep-red blood soaking his clothing, and he heard someone outside shout that it was okay for Bowdre to come out—with his hands up. The Kid grabbed hold of Bowdre and tugged on his gunbelt until the holster was positioned just below Bowdre’s navel.

  “They have murdered you, Charlie,” Billy said to his pal, “but you can get revenge. Kill some of the sons of bitches before you die.”

  Bowdre stumbled out of the doorway, with his hands in the air. He took several steps toward the posse, looking across each man until he recognized Garrett. As he approached the lawman, Bowdre pointed back to the house. He tried to speak, but it was a struggle because blood was gurgling up with every breath: “I wish—I wish—I wish…,” he said. Then, as Garrett grabbed him, Bowdre whispered, “I’m dying!” A remorseful Garrett carefully laid Bowdre down on some blankets, and in the time it took the six-foot-four lawman to straighten back up, Charlie Bowdre was dead.

  All eyes turned back to the rock house. Able to reach the tethers of the horses tied outside, the outlaws were trying to bring one of the horses in through the door. Billy’s plan was to mount up and make a mad dash out the narrow entrance—this was just the kind of hairbreadth escape the Kid was famous for. Garrett knew exactly what they were trying to do, and his first thought was to shoot the first horse’s lead rope in two, but it was swaying too much from the outlaws jerking at it. Ultimately he concluded that it was easier to kill the damn horse, and as the animal’s head and shoulders passed into the doorway, Garrett sent a bullet into its chest. The horse collapsed in its tracks, blocking the entrance and making it difficult to get another horse in or out, especially one with a rider on its back. To be sure, Garrett and his men shot the lead ropes of the other two horses, and they slowly walked away, their noses nuzzling the snow in search of grass.

  At first, Billy was not sure who had them surrounded, because Manuel Brazil had fed them a good amount of false information. It came to them soon enough, however. Garrett hailed the Kid and asked him how he was “fixed in there.”

  “Pretty well,” the Kid answered, “but we have no wood to get breakfast.”

  “Come out and get some,” Garrett said. “Be a little sociable.”

  “Can’t do it, Pat. Business is too confining. No time to run around.”

  Garrett could not resist throwing some of Billy’s big talk back at him. (Brazil had told Garrett how the Kid had been eager to go after the lawman after the rancher informed him it was only Garrett, Mason, and three Hispanos back at Fort Sumner.)

  “Didn’t you fellows forget a part of your program yesterday?” Garrett asked. “You know you were to come in on u
s at Fort Sumner, from some other direction, give us a square fight, set us afoot, and drive us down the Pecos.”

  The Kid had no response. Garrett then told the outlaws the obvious: they were surrounded, there was no chance to get away, and they might as well come out and surrender. Garrett got a response this time—the Kid told him to go to hell.

  Not long after that, the posse heard the sounds of digging and picking. The outlaws were using their knives and firearms to make gun ports in the walls of the house. Garrett directed Jim East and Tom Emory to shoot at the area of the wall where the sounds were coming from, and the digging stopped. As the hours passed, the posse periodically fired a shot or two into the doorway, just as a friendly reminder to the outlaws that they were still there.

  At some point that morning, Garrett decided to get his men some breakfast. He took half the posse with him to the Wilcox-Brazil place, leaving the others to watch the house. When Manuel Brazil anxiously asked Garrett the news, the sheriff-elect was still kicking himself about Charlie Bowdre.

  “I told him the news was bad,” Garrett wrote later, “that we had killed the very man we did not want to kill.”

  What Brazil said next, however, caused Garrett to rethink Bowdre: “I don’t see why you should be sorry for having killed him. After you had the interview with him the other day, and was doing your best to get him out of his troubles, he said to me, as we were riding home, ‘I wish you would get that damned long-legged son of a bitch out to meet me once more. I would just kill him and end all this trouble!’ Now, how sorry are you?”

  After breakfast, Garrett asked Wilcox to take one of his wagons and haul out to Stinking Spring some provisions, firewood, and forage for the horses. The Kid, Garrett knew, was stubborn enough to hold out in the rock house for a long time, all the while working his brain to come up with some kind of escape plan. The posse might as well be comfortable. When Garrett returned to the spring, Frank Stewart took the rest of the posse back for their turn at the breakfast table.

  The hours passed with not a sound from the outlaws. At approximately 3:00 P.M., movement in the doorway of the house excited the posse, but it was only the two horses that had been inside with the outlaws, one of which was the Kid’s noted bay mare, beautiful and fast. Having abandoned a mounted getaway, the outlaws were turning the horses loose. The horses hopped over the dead beast in the doorway and were taken in by the posse. An hour later, the wagon arrived with the provisions.

  Garrett had the men build a big fire and told them to get a meal going. Soon, the smell of flame-roasted beef drifted in the direction of the rock house, and the outlaws, who had not eaten or had a drop of water all day, received a strong whiff—the gang quickly began to weaken. The Kid tried to convince Rudabaugh, Wilson, and Pickett to hold out longer, at least until dark, but they voted to surrender. Billy, disgusted, called them a bunch of cowards, but his rants did not change their minds. Dave Rudabaugh tied a dirty rag to the end of a Winchester and shoved it up through the old chimney and yelled out that they wanted to surrender.

  Garrett told them to come on out with their hands up, but only Rudabaugh walked out the door. He walked up to Garrett and said the whole bunch would surrender if Garrett promised to protect them. Garrett gave his word and Rudabaugh went back inside. After an anxious few minutes, a scruffy-looking foursome, their hands up, stepped across the dead horse and through the doorway. Billy was the last to walk out. This was the first time that most of the men in the posse had laid eyes on the notorious rustler. Garrett, still just a deputy sheriff, was about to fulfill his promise to the people of Lincoln County to bring the notorious outlaw to justice.

  “Kill the son of a bitch,” Barney Mason shouted, pointing his gun at the Kid. “He is slippery and may get away.”

  But East and Lee Hall had heard Garrett’s surrender terms and threatened to kill Mason if he fired a shot. Mason lowered his weapon. Garrett’s reaction to this incident is not recorded, but he surely recognized that his friend was acting out of fear of what the Kid might do to him if he ever got the chance.

  The Kid never really got over the humiliating surrender at Stinking Spring. “If it hadn’t been for the dead horse in the doorway I wouldn’t be here,” he later told a Las Vegas newspaper reporter. “I would have ridden out on my bay mare and taken my chances of escaping. But I couldn’t ride out over that, for she would have jumped back, and I would have got it in the head.”

  ONCE THE GANG WAS disarmed and fed, they were taken to the Wilcox-Brazil place. Garrett then sent Brazil, Mason, and Rudolph back for Bowdre’s body. Both the posse and the prisoners spent the night at the ranch headquarters, where the possemen took turns watching the prisoners, two guards at a time. Garrett’s orders were that if any of the prisoners tried anything, they were to be shot. After breakfast the next morning, the entire entourage—including Bowdre’s corpse—departed for the Pecos, arriving at Fort Sumner before noon. It was Christmas Eve. As Garrett’s party neared the Indian Hospital, Manuela Bowdre ran out in the snow to confront them.

  She frantically looked for her husband with the other prisoners, and then she saw one of Garrett’s men riding her husband’s horse. The men driving the wagon with Bowdre’s body did not want to deal with the visibly angry woman and drove on past her. As Manuela screamed and cussed at Garrett, the two men stopped the wagon, took hold of Bowdre’s body, and carried it into his widow’s quarters and laid it out on a table. When Garrett finally got an opportunity to speak, he told Manuela to go to the store and pick out a suit of clothes for her husband. He would pay for it, and he would pay to have the man buried as well.

  The prisoners were taken to the blacksmith shop to be fitted with irons, but, because of a lack of materials or time, only Billy and Rudabaugh were shackled and chained. Wilson and Pickett, obviously deemed the two least dangerous members of the gang, went without irons for the time being. The Kid and Rudabaugh were then led across the plaza to a long, two-story structure that had once served as officers’ quarters but now housed the Maxwell family. Garrett had been approached by Deluvina Maxwell, the Maxwell’s Navajo servant, with a message from Mrs. Luz Beaubien Maxwell. Would Garrett permit the Kid to be brought to their residence so that her daughter, sixteen-year-old Paulita, could tell the Kid good-bye? The nice-looking sister of Pete Maxwell was not the only Fort Sumner female Billy had wooed in recent months, but she had become his favorite, and the young lady was equally taken with him. Garrett acquiesced, but he told Jim East and Lee Hall, the two guards, to keep a close watch on the Kid.

  Before the prisoners and their escort reached the Maxwell place, the shackle on Rudabaugh’s ankle somehow broke loose. “That is a bad sign,” Billy said. “I will die and Dave will go free.” He was not joking—the Kid, it seems, had a superstitious streak. After the prisoners entered the house, Mrs. Maxwell politely asked the guards if they would release Billy so that Paulita and the Kid could say their good-byes privately in another room. East and Hall said no—they had worked too hard to catch the outlaw, and it would take more than these women’s transparent machinations to get him away from them now.

  “The lovers embraced,” East wrote later, “and she gave Billy one of those soul kisses the novelists tell us about.”

  After a few respectful moments, the guards pulled Paulita and the Kid apart and then escorted the prisoners to Garrett, who was ready to leave for Las Vegas.

  With the fighting over and what was left of the gang well in charge, Garrett and Stewart no longer needed the entire posse. It was decided that Barney Mason, Jim East, and Tom Emory would accompany them; the rest of the men were dismissed. The prisoners were loaded into a two-mule wagon loaned by Brazil, who also served as the vehicle’s driver, and with the slapping of the reins and a couple of sucking clicks from Brazil’s clenched jaw, the entire cavalcade departed Fort Sumner, the Kid and Rudabaugh laughing and chatting as if they were on a Sunday stroll. In fact, over the next few days, Garrett learned a lot about Billy Bonney. Tom Pickett, on the other h
and, seemed worried, and Billy Wilson was withdrawn and dejected. The wagon made for slow going in the snow, but by about 8:00 P.M., Garrett’s party had reached John Gerhardt’s ranch, twenty-five miles up the Pecos, and stopped for the night. Twelve hours later, the men were back on the road, arriving at Padre Polaco’s Puerto de Luna store at 2:00 P.M. It was Christmas day, and the jolly Padre Polaco served Garrett, his men, and the prisoners a hearty meal.

  The Christmas dinner was served in shifts, and Jim East was the first to guard the prisoners. East and the prisoners were sequestered in a long adobe room in the store building. Its single door was locked, and Garrett had the key in his pocket. East sat on a woodpile near the door, facing the prisoners, who were gathered around the fire-place at the opposite end of the room. After a bit of small talk, the Kid asked East if he had anything to smoke. The guard replied that he did, to which the Kid responded that he had some rolling papers. East got ready to throw the tobacco to the Kid, but the outlaw offered to come over and get it, and with that, he and Rudabaugh started for the guard’s end of the room. They were halfway across the open space when East shouted to them:

  “Hold on, Billy, if you come any farther I am going to shoot you.”