The Kid: A Novel (31 page)

Ira Leonard had subpoenaed Isaac Ellis for the defense and was perturbed to see him huddling with the prosecution. He’d also subpoenaed Robert Adolph Widenmann, who’d been with the gang in the Sheriff Brady killing, but he, of course, saw only jeopardy for himself in an appearance. And even though she probably would not have helped his case, Leonard subpoenaed Susan Ellen Hummer McSween, newly married to a semi-invalid named George B. Barber. She also failed to show.

She would soon buy a ranch she called Tres Rios, and, with a gift of livestock from her former fancier John Chisum, she became the aristocratic Cattle Queen of New Mexico, with fine clothes and a hatbox full of jewelry she carried with her everywhere. She ended a tempestuous marriage to George Barber in 1891, took on no more lovers, lost her wealth in the Crash of 1929, and in old age was shocked to find that the “foolish boy” she’d so disliked was increasingly featured in books and was the title character of the 1930 movie
Billy the Kid
, in which she was further irritated to see that her youthful feistiness in Lincoln was rendered by a lachrymose actress in her fifties. She died impoverished in White Oaks in January 1931, aged eighty-five.

*  *  *

Seeing no possible positive outcome and with no guarantee of payment from his penniless client, Ira Leonard soon left the Kid high and dry, his case being taken over instead by a helpless public defender who was first learning about the history and nature of the crimes as the prosecutor laid them out for the Mexican jury. None of his objections were sustained, and his cross-examinations were a welter of misinformation and stammering confusion.

Jacob Mathews’s testimony was the most damning, for, in noting that Sheriff Brady’s assailants were hidden behind an adobe wall, he was indicating that the homicide was premeditated, and, in claiming that he’d seen the Kid run out into Main Street with the others, he fitted Billy inside a conspiracy to kill that would have rendered him a killer even if he’d never fired a shot.

Called to the oaken witness chair by Simon Newcomb, the Kid promptly got up but was stalled by his attorney, who voiced the judicial rule that no defendant could be compelled to testify against himself.

The Kid plopped back down but whispered, “Are you sure of this? Looks bad.”

The public defender patted the Kid’s forearm in a patronizing gesture equivalent to
tut tut
.

Old Isaac Ellis was called forward and was asked if the Kid was a prodigious shot.

“What’s
prodigious
mean?” Ellis asked.

“Would he generally hit what he aimed at?”

“Oh, you bet. With either hand!”

“Were you on Main Street in Lincoln that April first?’

“I was.”

“Sheriff Brady was in front of you? Walking toward the former convent?”

“Seemed to be.”

“And then he was shot down?”

“And don’t forget George Hindman, too.”

“Could you hazard a guess as to how many shots were fired in the altercation?”

“Oh, twenty or thirty seemed like.”

“You saw the shootists?”

“I did.”

“Was anyone in this courtroom among them?”

“Yes.”

“Would you point him out to us, please?”

Isaac Ellis reluctantly shot his left index finger toward the Kid. The Kid waved back.

“And you knew him to call himself William Bonney?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Was there a reason for his act of vengeance?”

“Oh, I reckon.”

Newcomb made an inquiry about a conversation Ellis had with the defendant in July 1879, when he was jailed in Lincoln.

Ellis said he’d gone to Juan Patrón’s house to play cards with the Kid.

“And he gave you his excuse for the killing?”

“Said they was in a civil war and he was just a soldier in it.”

“Kid Bonney hated Bill Brady, didn’t he?”

“Well, Bill, he had John Tunstall murdered.”

Simon Newcomb faced the jury. “Witness has stated a personal estimation of the facts that is without foundation and is not material to this trial.” And then he turned again to Isaac Ellis. “Have you heard of ‘malice aforethought’?”

“No. But I can guess at it.”

“It has to do with predetermination. You decide something needs to be done, and then you do it. In this case, the act your friend Billy premeditated—cold-blooded murder—was villainous and based on sheer hatred, hence the malice aforethought.”

“According to you.”

“Oh, I think there’s unanimity of opinion on that score,” Simon Newcomb said, and then the prosecutor smirked as he told Judge Bristol, “I have no more questions,” and executed half a bow before he went back to his table.

The Kid scowled at his attorney and asked, “Weren’t you going to object to any of that?”

The public defender explained, “It all happened so fast!”

Only the rites and formalities of the courtroom forced the trial to continue to Saturday, April 9, when Judge Bristol read aloud his nine-page summation of the case, instructing the jury that “if the defendant was present encouraging, inciting, aiding in, abetting, advising, or commanding this killing of Brady, he is as much guilty as though he fired the fatal shot.” Within the hour the jury returned a unanimous verdict that William H. Bonney was guilty of murder in the first degree. With sentencing announced for the following Wednesday, the Kid was hauled back to the foul jail cell he shared with Billie Wilson.

And there he found on his cot a perfumed letter from Paulita Maxwell that he read aloud to Wilson. “ ‘Dear
friend
,’ she calls me. But she goes on to say, ‘Could I but draw you a picture of my heart it would contain nothing new, just the assurance that the early possession you obtained there, and the absolute power you have obtained over it, leaves not the smallest space unoccupied. I look back on our acquaintance as wondrous days of love and innocence, and with indescribable pleasure I have reviewed our years together and only seen an affection heightened and improved by time. Nor have these months of your absence and cruel imprisonment effaced from my mind the image of the dear man to whom I gave my heart.’ ”

Although the letter did not seem finished, the Kid let the hand holding it fall to his side. Wilson asked, “Are you crying?”

The Kid lied that he wasn’t.

“Well, you should be,” Wilson said.

At five fifteen on April 13, the Kid was shackled and squired to his sentencing. In the courtroom Judge Bristol asked, “Have you anything to say before your sentence is pronounced?”

The Kid glared fiercely but shook his head.

Judge Bristol looked down at handwriting in the floral Platt Rogers Spencer style and orated, “The defendant shall be confined in jail in Lincoln County until Friday, May 13th, 1881, when between nine a.m. and three p.m. he, the said William H. Bonney, alias Kid, alias Henry Antrim, shall be taken from his imprisonment to some suitable and convenient place of execution by the Sheriff of Lincoln County.” Judge Bristol lifted his scalding eyes to the Kid and with a sneer continued, “And then and there he shall be hanged by the neck until his body be dead dead dead.”

The frustrations and injustice got to the Kid then, and he shouted back, “And you can go to Hell Hell Hell!”

- 19 -

THE CONVICT

A
uthorities widely declared the Kid would be sent to Lincoln County in the next week, but to prevent either rescue or a vigilante lynching, Sheriff Garrett’s hirelings instead shifted him eastward at ten on the night of Saturday, April 16, the saloonkeeper Jacob B. Mathews walking into the miserable Mesilla jail and waking up the prisoner. The Kid packed his finer clothing in a haversack as he groused, “Worstest jail I’ve ever been in. Hot and filthy. Lice jumping off the mattress ticking. Tortillas and beans for all our meals. Water tasted like sewer runoff. And the skeeters whined at my head all night long.”

“We’ll keep ya comfy cozy in Lincoln,” Mathews said. And then he walked with the Kid in front of him, hatless, shuffling in shackles, his hands manacled. Watching the Kid’s gait, Matthews inquired with genuine curiosity, “How’s your leg where I shot ya?”

“Healed up just fine. Thanks for asking.”

Waiting outside for their prisoner with their shotguns upright near their shoulders were Deputy US Marshal Bob Olinger, a half-time deputy sheriff named David Woods, and the newly employed John Kinney, the founder of the gang he called the Boys and many times a murderer even before joining in the gun battle at Alex McSween’s.

Smiling when he saw the Kid in chains, Kinney said, “You sumbitch, you shot half my mustache off that night.”

“Well, I see it grew back.”

“Wanted to kill you daid right then but you was catlike.”

The Kid acidly said, “All in good fun, wasn’t it?” And then he was guided to a flat-roofed, blue-enameled Dougherty wagon that was on loan from Fort Stanton and was labeled in gold
AMBULANCE.
Sitting up above them holding the reins of his harnessed mule team was W. A. Lockhart, and next to him was D. M. Reade, cradling a sawed-off shotgun. Tom Williams and David Woods got on fine saddled cavalry horses to ride along outside the ambulance.

The Kid was counting his police guard and said, “Criminy sakes, you got
seven
men watching over me? I must be a dad-blamed monster!”

“Slick as snot is more like it,” Olinger said.

Mathews admitted, “We’re sorta sponging off Lincoln County. Each of us getting two dollars per diem, a dollar fifty a day for food and room, and ten cents a mile for the hundred forty-five miles to Lincoln. We go back gradual enough, stretch four days to five or six, we’ll be sitting pretty for weeks.”

Olinger said, “Whereas you’ll be the poor have-not getting nothing but grief from me from now on.”

Mathews and Olinger wedged themselves and their guns on the bench across from the Kid, and Kinney squeezed in beside him. Kinney was shorter than the Kid but stouter, and Olinger was large, a good seven inches over Billy’s height and at least a hundred pounds heavier. The Kid heard his mother saying,
There’s a lot of body in those clothes
.

Kinney told the Kid, “We’s already reckoned if any your friendly greasers try to free ya, we’ll just go ahead and shoot ya daid, get the execution over with sooner.”

The Kid flatly said, “Oh my. You fellows are giving me the scares something awful.”

The Army ambulance jerked forward.

The Kid asked the deputy marshal, “You jailing me at Fort Stanton?”

“Nope,” Olinger said.

“I thought the Lincoln dungeon was filled in.”

“So, guess again.”

“I got nothing.”

“The House. Ever heard of it?”

“The Murphy-Dolan store?”

“Took over by Thomas Catron, then sold to Lincoln County for a courthouse and jail. You’ll have the major’s old upstairs bedroom.”

“Sheer luxury, huh?”

“Well, just for your last month. Sheriff took pity on you.”

Kinney asked the Kid, “Ya hear about our friend Jesse Evans?”

“I been outta earshot.”

“Him and his gang robbed the Sender and Siebenborn store over there to Fort Davis. Texas Rangers caught him. In the Huntsville penitentiary now.”

“Well, it was bound to happen,” the Kid said.

Mathews asked, “You know what a rarity you are, Kid? At least two hundred men killed in Lincoln County over the last three years, and you’re the onliest one getting hanged. They don’t even got other trials on the
docket
.”

“I hear they don’t try dead people in court,” the Kid said. “A lot of my friends are toes-up.”

*  *  *

Even before the Kid’s trial, the editor of the
Las Cruces Semi-Weekly
wrote, “We expect every day to hear of the Kid’s escape. The prisoner is a notoriously dangerous character and has on several occasions fled the bonds of justice where a getaway appeared even more improbable than now, and he has made it his brag that he only wants to get free in order to kill for certain three more men—one of them being Governor Wallace. Should he break from jail now, there is no doubt that he would immediately proceed to execute his threat.”

And in fact the Kid was thinking escape when they were more than halfway to Lincoln, in the high elevation of Dowlin’s Mill—now Ruidoso—where a restaurant owner wouldn’t permit a shackled murderer to dine inside. So Jacob Mathews kept watch on the Kid while the others lunched, but his head kept falling forward in sleep and then jerking up into wakefulness again.

The Kid took off the red bandanna he wore around his neck and wrapped it around the chain between his ankle shackles to hush the clanking, then slid across his bench to ever so quietly open the wagon door.

But then Mathews woke up.

“Oh, sleep, J.B.! You need your rest!”

“You’re lucky it’s me. Was Olinger you’d be killed right now.”

The Kid smiled. “Half a minute more and I’d be history. Riding off into the sunset.”

“Well, you couldn’t’ve got away,” Mathews said. “You can’t mount a horse with chained ankle irons like that.”

“I figured I could ride sidesaddle until I found a hammer and chisel.”

“Ride like a lady?” Mathews said. “Embarrassing.”

Kinney was at the wagon door waitering plates of food. “Meat loaf and mashed potatoes,” he said. “But you was hungry for a getaway, weren’t ya, Billy?”

“Oh, don’t you worry about me,” the Kid said. “I generally get what I want.”

*  *  *

Sheriff Pat Garrett was scowling and smoking a calabash pipe on the commanding officer’s porch at Fort Stanton when the prisoner detail from Mesilla finally arrived. It was Thursday, April 21.

“You’re late,” he said, but that was all.

Riding his horse alongside the cavalry’s ambulance as it followed the Rio Bonito the nine miles to Lincoln, Garrett sought to gladden the condemned man by saying, “You’ll be happy with your accommodations with us. And you’ll get your meals carried over from Wortley’s Hotel.”

“Really looking forward to my final dinner. I get to choose the recipe, right?”

“That’s customary.”

With a grin, the Kid said, “Maine lobster.”