Page:Saga of Billy the Kid.djvu/307

This page has been validated.
HELL'S HALF-ACRE
293

almost from under your feet and scuttles off in a lop-sided run.

Between the river and the old parade ground is the site of the old Maxwell home. Its adobe foundation walls, now rounded, grass-green mounds, mark off a great rectangle, divided into what were once the ground-floor rooms. Foor helped to tear down the old house when Lonny Horn, a cattleman of Trinidad, bought it and took out its timbers and beams to be used in the house he built on his cattle ranch thirty miles to the east.

"This is the room," says Foor, standing in the sunlight knee-deep in grass in a square depression, "where Billy the Kid was killed. There in that corner stood Pete Maxwell's bed. Against that east wall sat Pat Garrett. Right out there was the corner of the porch where Poe and McKinney was waitin' for him. Here where this bunch of sacatone is growin' was the door the Kid come in at, and here in the centre of the room where I'm standing now, he fell dead."

The scene is undramatic. You see some grass, an old man mopping his perspiring brow with a red bandanna, over there a cow grazing; the river in the background. Sunlight is picking out all the secret places of the midnight tragedy of long ago. This is the bare stage of the drama, all the properties vanished, all the actors gone. Yet somehow the spot is or grippingly impressive. It pulls at the imagination. For one tense, thrilling moment you see the old tragedy enacted over again almost within arm's reach. There is Billy the Kid coming silently toward you across the yard in the moonlight. You hear his sharp, "QuiƩn es?" as he stumbles upon Poe and McKinney on the porch. You