Page:Saga of Billy the Kid.djvu/308

hear his tense question to Pete Maxwell as he steps swiftly to the side of the bed. In the sudden illuminating glare of Pat Garretts six-shooter, you have a quick vision of him standing there in the centre of the room only a few feet from you, taut, alert, suddenly at bay, his revolver pointing. He crashes down at full length at your very feet. You hear his last choking gasps for breath.…

"Right here," Old Man Foor is saying as he pokes a finger into the atmosphere at a level with his breast, "was where Pat Garrett's bullet buried itself in the west wall after passing through the Kid's heart. When Pete Maxwell hired me to fix up the old house, I covered the bullet hole under a new coat of wall paper."

Billy the Kid lies buried in what it is easy to fancy is the dreariest little cemetery in all the world. A quarter of 2 mile from the spot at which he met death is a half-acre of half-desert land enclosed by a barbed-wire fence. It might pass at a glance for an abandoned cattle corral. The flat ground is sparsely covered with salt grass, bunch-grass, prickly pear, sagebrush, greasewood, and Spanish gourd. Here and there are half-wrecked paling enclosures about neglected graves; here and there, broken, mouldering crosses half fallen or leaning at crazy angles. In the summer sunshine, the place looks God-forsaken; a mocking bird singing happily on a fence post fails to relieve its grimness. On a leaden day of cold rain, it is the concentrated essence of loneliness and desolation. When winds are asweep through the Pecos Valley, they whimper and moan in the barbed-wire fence like troubled ghosts.

"The cemetery," says Old Man Foor, "used to have an adobe wall around it with an arched gateway with a cross on top. It was the burying ground of the army post at first. Sixty soldiers was buried here, quite a few