“It’s complicated,” John said. “You remember when Emil Fritz died a couple of years ago? He was Lawrence Murphy’s partner. He had a ten-thousand-dollar insurance policy naming his siblings as beneficiaries, but the insurance company wouldn’t pay out the policy. Fritz’s sister hired my partner Mac to collect the insurance money. Mac sued and got the money, then he paid his fees and expenses and gave what was left to the beneficiaries. Murphy now claims that Fritz owed him money. He says that Mac should have paid him with the insurance money before Mac paid himself. So he filed a claim against Mac, and he’s trying to collect by attaching my property. He wants my cattle as payment for his claim. The judge agrees with him.”
“I ain’t no abogado,” Dick Brewer said, “but I don’t see how your cattle can settle Murphy’s beef with the Fritz estate.”
John laid aside his knife and fork and leaned back in his chair.
“Mac assures me they can’t. If Murphy has a legitimate claim it’s against the Fritz estate. The insurance money wasn’t part of the estate. It belongs to the insurance beneficiaries, not Fritz’s heirs. Mac collected his fees from the insurance money, not the Fritz estate. The claim against Mac is bogus.
“But even if Murphy did have a legitimate claim against Mac he has no right to my cattle. Mac and I are partners in the mercantile business, not the cattle business. Murphy convinced the judge that Mac has a half interest in my cattle. Mac told the judge that I’m the sole owner, but the judge didn’t believe him. Instead he gave Murphy my cattle.”
“Anyone wants your cattle better act quick,” Dick said. “We don’t get rain and grass this spring you won’t have enough beef for a barbeque.”
“Why we taking the horses and mules to Dick’s?” Rob Widenmann asked.
“Sheriff Brady executed a writ for my cattle. He could show up any time. I don’t want a fight, but I don’t want to lose my horses and mules. Murphy has already overreached. The insurance was for only ten thousand dollars, but the writ’s for all the cattle and they are worth twice that much. Brady will take any livestock he can find. If he takes the horses and mules I won’t see them again. Dick can hide them at his ranch. Hopefully, when the wrangling is over Murphy’s claim will be cleared up and I’ll get my cattle back.”
“Believe I’ll have another huevo, Billy,” Fred said, holding out his plate. “A dog biscuit too. Leave off them rashers. They taste like a dead skunk. How come you favor dog biscuits ’stead of Gauss’s tortillas anyway?”
“Aunt Cat taught me how to bake them,” I said, thumping a biscuit on his plate. “Surprised you ain’t asking for fry bread. Chickasaws eat fry bread don’t they?”
“We eat fry bread. Yeah, fry bread once in a while ain’t a bad idea. It would give these dumbass cowhands a taste of Chickasaw. Maybe they wouldn’t be so ignorant.”
“I’ve eat fry bread,” Rob said. “Had some at Miz Godfroy’s a few days back. It ain’t bad.”
“There goes your argument, Fred. Rob’s eaten fry bread and he’s as ignorant as ever.”
“I’m surprised Murphy’s coming after you,” Henry said. “I hear his guts are punky as a rotten log. He’s already half a leg in the ground. Folks say he’s drinking hisself to death so’s he won’t die of gut rot.”
“You are not far from the truth,” John said. “Murphy’s cancer is killing him. Jimmy Dolan is running the business now, and he wants a war.”
“So this campaign for your livestock ain’t about insurance money?” Dick said.
“It’s just an excuse. What is really at stake is the contract to sell beef to the army. I get my cattle from John Chisum at a good price. I can under-cut Murphy. Murphy and Dolan want rid of the competition, permanently. That’s why he’s after the cattle.”
“Dolan’s the pissant to start a war,” Dick said. “He’s a flesh-eating maggot with the black heart of a banker. He’ll shoot you for pesos.”
“I know. He pulled a gun on me after the last court hearing. He baited me, calling me a coward.”
“What’d you do?”
“Ignored him.”
“Be careful, John. Dolan’ll plug you in the back if he’s of a mind.”
“Jesse Evans got plugged in the butt a few days back,” I said.
“I thought Jesse was in the calaboose for rustling,” Dick said as he stood up from the table. “Did he bust out?”
“Brady let him out. Said he escaped, but he couldn’t escape from that cellar without a pickax and shovel. No doubt the sheriff has plans for him. Hope it don’t involve you none, John.”
By then everyone had left the table. Most of the boys carried their plates and cups to the wash bucket on the sideboard, but Rob and Middleton headed straight for the door.
“Hey, you bungholes, don’t leave your dishes on the table. I’m the cook, not your ma.”
Middleton waved his middle finger, but him and Rob came back and picked up their dishes. Middleton set his plate on the floor beside Benedick. The wolfhound wiped it clean.
“Thanks, Middleton. I’ll save that plate for you.”
CHAPTER 2Tunstall
My Dear Parents, I am still alive & well . . . You have no idea of the press of business & annoyance I am staggering under.
—JOHN H. TUNSTALL, LETTER, NOVEMBER 16, 1877
SHORTLY AFTER BREAKFAST WE WERE saddled up, waiting on Rob Widenmann to take off for Lincoln. I’d packed leftover biscuits, jerky, coffee, and oranges John’d gotten from California. First oranges I’d ever seen. I put the provisions in the buckboard. We were taking the buckboard to bring back supplies and books for the ranch. John bought books from a drummer in Colorado. He ordered books from London too and had them delivered to his mercantile.
In a few minutes Rob brought around the string of horses and mules to leave at Dick Brewer’s ranch. All but one mule belonged to John. Ownership of the odd mule was up for negotiation. Jesse Evans said it was hisn. I said it was mine. Jesse knew the mule was at John’s. I figured he’d be in the posse when they came for the lot. Me and Jesse’d been friends and had rustled a few head together, but we’d disagreed about the mule. I didn’t intend to give it up without a fight.
“Sheriff Brady may be on his way,” John said. “He’ll come down the Lincoln Road. I hope we don’t run into him before we get to Lincoln. We’ll take the Ham Mills Road if we reach the cutoff before he does.”
“Okay, boss,” Dick said. “We’d best be going.”
We started down the ranch road, Dick and Rob in the lead. John followed in the buckboard with Benedick loping beside him. I brought up the rear, trailing stock. My horse Buck was a gift from John. He was an unusual buckskin color and a fine compadre.
The ranch road ran beside the Río Feliz most of the way. Cotton-woods lined the river on both sides. The few piñons and junipers scattered across the hillsides weren’t much taller than a man on horseback, but some of the cottonwoods were huge. Five men, maybe six, couldn’t wrap their arms around the trunks.
“Hey, Biscuit Boy,” Dick called. “One of them álamos would warm the bunkhouse for the winter.”
“You cut it, I’ll burn it,” I said, “but it’ll pop like a Gatling gun and stink like Rob pissed on it. While you’re snoring, sparks’ll set you ablaze.”
When we got to the Lincoln Road we turned north. It’d snowed a couple of days earlier. The road was rutted from wagon wheels and had froze solid during the night. The horses picked a path around the ruts, but John was in for a butt-busting ride in the buckboard. When the road split we took the Ham Mills fork into the mountains. It was shorter and steeper, but the rougher terrain added hours to the trip. We left the piñons and junipers and got into the ponderosas. Late in the afternoon we were riding through scrub oaks when a flock of turkeys crossed the road. Must of been a dozen. Benedick took off, silent as a spook.
“Supper,” Dick said.
He pulled his Winchester from its scabbard and headed into the woods. Rob followed. I reached for my Winchester and spurred Buck ar
ound the wagon. The flock ran a few more yards then took to the air, Benedick close behind. The birds broke out of the oaks and glided down the mountain. We spread out. I’d gone a couple of hundred paces looking for the birds to light when I heard a rifle crack behind me. Figured John’d seen another flock, but then I remembered that he’d left his rifle at the ranch. In a moment there was more gunfire.
I turned Buck and started back toward the ruckus. Hadn’t gone far before I saw John standing in the buckboard. Tom Hill from Jesse Evans’ gang and Buck Morton, foreman of Dolan’s cow camp, rode up to him with a posse close behind. I recognized a few, Jesse among them.
John was turning around when Morton fired point blank. John fell sideways out of the buckboard. Hill shot him again when he hit the ground. I reined up and dropped off of Buck. Dick and Rob were coming up behind me. I waved them down and put my finger to my lips. Benedick raced past before I could grab him.
“They got John,” I whispered. “Looks like maybe a dozen.”
“Damn,” Dick muttered. “There goes Benedick. Shit.”
“What now?” Rob said.
Dick motioned and we backed down the hill.
Morton had climbed off his horse about the time Benedick broke out of the woods.
“Look out, Buck,” Hill yelled.
Morton spun around as Benedick leapt and Hill fired. Benedick crashed into Morton. Both fell to the ground.
“¡Puta madre! Where’d that cabrón come from!”
Morton scrabbled out from under the wolfhound.
“Thanks, Hill. He’s one fierce sonofabitch.”
The string had broken and scattered at the sound of gunfire. Two of the mules cut into the woods. Morton took John’s bay out of the traces.
“Hill, you and Evans round up the rest of the stock. Let’s get outta here.”
Hill went after the horses down the road. Jesse followed the mules into the woods. I raised my Winchester in case Jesse crossed our tracks in the snow.
“Got my mule without a fight,” Jesse said when he emerged with the mules. “Too bad about you, Billy Boy.”
When all the stock was back together, Morton grabbed Benedick by the hind legs and swung him hard, whacking his head against a tree.
“That’ll fix you, you weird shit. We’re done here, boys. Let’s go.”
Morton swung onto the saddle, and the posse took off at a trot toward Lincoln, our stock in tow. We waited till they were out of earshot, then came out of the woods. John was balled up in a hump on the ground. A hole in his temple was leaking. Blood stained the back of his jacket.
“No need to kill him.” Rob said. “He didn’t have no gun.”
Dick and Rob lifted John and laid him in the back of the buckboard. I picked up Benedick and half dragged him out of the woods. Rob helped me lay him beside John.
“What now?” Rob said. “Back to the ranch, bury ’em?”
“We started for Lincoln,” Dick said. “That ain’t changed. Now we’ve got a murder to report.”
“Two,” I said. “And two sidewinders to send to hell.”
Dick didn’t say anything. He pulled at an Apache charm hanging from his neck. I backed Buck into the traces and climbed onto the buck-board. There was blood on the seat. I reached for a canteen and saw John looking past me into the woods. I closed his eyes then flooded the seat with water and wiped it off with my sleeve. I looked at Dick and Rob then giddyuped Buck toward Lincoln.
A short while later we crossed a gap in the mountains and left the snow behind. Toward evening we found a flat spot in the ponderosas to bed down for the night. The trunks were broad as a man’s outstretched arms and rose thirty or more feet before putting out branches. There were grasses and weeds and small shrubs but mostly the ground was covered with pine straw.
I unloaded the supplies and gathered pine straw and branches to build a fire. Rob fed the horses. Dick scouted up the road to make sure the posse was out of earshot. He returned with an armload of firewood. I scraped away pine straw and dug a fire pit. I always carried pine sticks soaked in coal oil for starting a fire. When I got the fire going I made coffee and set out biscuits, jerky, oranges. We sat on logs and ate in silence.
After we finished Rob said, “Wished we’d shot one of them turkeys.”
“If we had,” Dick said, “we’d be in the wagon back yonder waiting on the buzzards.”
That pretty much ended the conversation. I stretched out a tarp where the pine straw was deep, and we laid out our bedrolls. We hadn’t seen a cloud all day. The temperature tumbled when the sun went down. Then the moon came up. Somewhere off in the night a lobo howled. Another answered. We huddled round the fire. Had enough firewood to last the night.
“Whadda we do about the bodies?” Rob said. “Won’t they draw wolves or bears or shit?”
“It ain’t bodies,” Dick said, “It’s John and Benedick. They won’t draw varmints. It’s bitter cold tonight. They won’t stink no worse’n you.”
We sat up awhile talking about John and the ranch and the troubles ahead. Dick finally called it a night, but me and Rob were too fired up to sleep. I threw more logs on the fire, then me and Rob listened to Dick snore for the next few hours.
“You ever think about dying?” Rob asked.
“Some maybe. Not much.”
“You afraid to die?”
“No. Don’t want to. But I have to some day. Expect it’ll be sooner than later.”
The moon had climbed high overhead. Another lobo called from a far-off ridge.
“I’m afraid to die. Why ain’t you?”
“I figure to go out with a bullet. Like John. Won’t see it coming. One minute I’ll be standing there, next minute I’ll be gone. No fuss, no pain. Or very little. Of course, if I’m gutshot, lying in an arroyo baking in the sun for a day or two, that could get ugly. Get one of them logs. This fire’s about to fade.”
Rob handed me a couple of logs and I laid them on the fire. The heat burned my legs. I backed away and sat down again.
“Suppose you die at the hands of a Comanch taking his time?”
“That’s a different proposition. I ain’t afraid to die but I am skittish about the how. If I was buried to my chin in a fire pit, my eyeballs peeled, or staked out naked like a blanket on an anthill, my privates sewed in my mouth, I’d sure as hell wish I’d shot myself.”
“It terrifies me.”
“I don’t speculate it much. My grandpap said that most of the bad things he worried about never happened. If they did they weren’t that bad.”
“He’d of been wrong about John.”
CHAPTER 3The Wake
The public regard this as the most inexcusable murder
that has ever taken place here, but unless you cause the matter
to be looked into I have but small hopes of the matter being
properly prosecuted. . . . I have written to Tunstall’s father.
—ALEXANDER A. MCSWEEN, LETTER TO BRITISH ENVOY,
FEBRUARY 25, 1878
WHEN I WOKE AT FIRST light a raven prowling around our gear was staring at me. I tossed a pinecone at him and he flew off. I made us a quick breakfast, then we packed up and were on our way.
Shortly after noon we rode into Lincoln. It’s little more than a flat spot beside the Río Bonito, fenced in by cornfields and barren hills. Back then it had a hotel, a courthouse, a calaboose, a few mercantiles, and a dozen or so houses. A couple of hundred families lived within a day’s ride, most of them Mex. It had a stone tower, a torreón, for defense against Apaches. Today I reckon the town’s pretty much the same. A few more houses. McSween’s house is gone. The San Juan Mission Church was built after I left. Your brother told me about it.
When we pulled up at McSween’s, Mac came out. We told him what happened.
“My God,” Mac said. “Lawrence Murphy and Jimmy Dolan did this?”
“His boys shot John like a polecat,” Dick said. “They’ll be after you next.”
“After me? Great God a
lmighty. I should never have left Wichita.”
Mac was silent for a moment, then he said, “There’s nothing I can do about it now. We’ve got John to take care of. Sue’s not here. We had guests this morning. Dr. Taylor Ealy and his wife. They just moved here. Sue took them to Fort Stanton. Bring John into the parlor. Do something about Benedick too.”
Mac and Rob and Dick lifted John from the buckboard and carried him into the parlor while I dragged Benedick to the backyard.
Mac’s house backed up to the Río Bonito. The house was U-shaped. The McSweens lived in the left wing, the Shields in the right. A parlor joined the two wings and faced the street.
Elizabeth Shield was Sue’s sister. Her husband was a lawyer like Mac. Mac’d offered him a share in the business. Mac didn’t need a partner but Sue needed her sister. Sue’s Spanish was poor and she wanted a woman to talk to. Promise of a partnership was enough to get the Shields to abandon Missouri for New Mexico.
The house was adobe but Sue had fixed it up like her house in Wichita. Paintings on the walls, curtains on the windows, a piano in the parlor. The parlor was my favorite room. Lined with books. I spent many an hour there. Mac had three or four times as many books as John. I was interested in most everything and read most any book I came across. Mac had law books, lots of them. I ignored them. But he had books on animals, history, novels, poetry. If I was in Lincoln and wasn’t running errands or running after señoritas, I was shooting targets or reading in Mac’s parlor. The Iliad was my favorite. Read it twice. About the Greeks and the Trojan War in the old days. Achilles was the hero. Back then I figured he was a warrior to model your life after. Today he seems more like a Comanche.
Tunstall’s mercantile was in the building next door. John kept sleeping quarters there. The building housed Mac’s law office and a bank run by Mac and John Chisum.
“A couple of you fellas go to the stable and grab some boards along the back wall,” Mac said.
Rob and me went through the kitchen and out the back to the stable a few steps off of Sue’s kitchen. Under a tarp behind Mac’s wagon we found a stack of pine boards. They were long and wide and heavy. We chose two and brought them back to the parlor one at a time. When we came in with the second board, Mac had moved the piano and chairs back to the bookshelves. He brought in two benches from the kitchen and set them a few feet apart in the center of the room. We laid the boards on the benches to make a low table. Then the four of us lifted John off the floor and laid him on the boards.
The Gospel According to Billy the Kid Page 2
