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walls Morton and Baker were fairly safe as long as their ammunition held out, their enemies not daring to venture too close to their rude fortress. The fight turned into a siege with only desultory firing on either side. For two days and nights, the posse held the two men penned up in the dugout and then, seemingly facing death from starvation and thirst and their ammunition almost exhausted, Morton and Baker stuck a white rag out the door on the point of a rifle in token of their desire for an armistice. The possemen drew near and a parley was opened.

"We'll surrender," called out Morton, "if you'll give us your word we won't be killed."

There was silence for a moment.

"All right," said Brewer at length. "Come on out. We'll guarantee you won't be harmed."

"Not now nor later either," argued Morton.

"We'll promise you protection," answered Brewer.

Then the two men marched out with their hands in the air. When their guns had been taken from their belts, they spied Billy the Kid leaning on his rifle.

"Hello, Billy," said Morton.

"Howdy, Kid," said Baker.

They extended their hands. This boy had chummed it with them at their camp fire at Mesilla.

Billy regarded them with a look of cold deadliness.

"I don't know you and don't want to know you," he said with an oath and turned away.

The posse arrived late that same day at John Chisum's South Spring Ranch and put up for the night.

"I gave up my own bedroom to the two prisoners that night," said Mrs. Sallie Roberts, then Miss Chisum, in recalling her memories of the incident. "I don't think either of them got much sleep. Several of the possemen,