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A LITTLE GAME OF MONTE
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the back, and two in the east wall. At the rear of the chamber was the judge's bench on a low dais, the jury box at one side, and at the other the witness stand and a railed-off enclosure where the clerk and other court attachés had their desks. A door in the west wall gave upon a wide hall that ran through the centre of the building. At one end of this hall a door opened upon a roofed-over, second-story porch along the front of the building, reached from the street by stairways at either end. At the other end of the hall was a room known as the armoury, in which rifles, six-shooters, and munitions of war were stored for emergency use by sheriff's posses in that unsettled time. Just in front of the armoury, a stairway led down from the hall through a walled-in passage which, halfway down, turned at a sharp angle to the left toward a ground-floor door opening on a rear courtyard. Across the courtyard stood the little adobe jail, deemed too precarious for the confinement of such a desperate character as the Kid, and another small building which served as the jail kitchen and the sleeping quarters of Old Man Goss, the jail cook.

The Kid's sleeping cot was in the northeast corner of the courtroom with the cots of the two members of his death watch near by. His prison chamber was at least light and airy. The window in the east wall near the front is known to this day as Billy the Kid's window. Sitting in a chair before it he spent much of his time looking down upon the scenes of his many adventures. In plain view were the fire-blackened ruins of the old McSween home where McSween and three of his followers had gone down in death and where the Kid, fighting for his life against desperate odds, had slain Bob Beckwith, thereby gaining the undying hatred of the devilman who now