The Saga of Billy the Kid/Chapter 15

The West was in the golden period of its development in 1880. Days of the covered wagon were gone. The Oregon and Santa Fé trails were memories. Colonists were swarming westward over trails of steel. Towns, churches, schools were springing up all over the old ranges of the buffalo. The prairies were being turned into farms. Kansas, Nebraska, and Dakota had become rich agricultural states. Settlers were pouring into Texas, Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, and on into Utah, Idaho, California, and the states of the Pacific Northwest. Land was cheap; much of it was free; prosperity and a farm home awaited all who cared to come and work. The West was calling poor men, rich men, investors, labourers, with a voice of welcome. It was the continent's last wonderful land of opportunity—bonanza land—and boom days were upon all the country west of the Missouri.

But with the human tides sweeping westward, New Mexico was neglected. The vast, vague land beyond the Pecos was as little known to the people of the East as Timbuctoo to-day. It was regarded as a region of lawlessness, desperadoes, and sudden death. The Lincoln County war and the subsequent reign of terror Billy the Kid had set up had given the territory an evil reputation. Yet the Santa Fé railroad had crossed the Ratons. Vast areas of rich soil awaited the seller. Opportune fields for ​livestock breeders lay in the boundless, unfenced pastures. Irrigation projects promised wealth to investors. It was a country of many-sided opportunity lying practically uncultivated. If New Mexico was to build for the future and take advantage of the immense westward movement of home-seekers it was vitally necessary that it first clean house. If this potentially rich territory was to share in the prosperity of the new day that was dawning in the West, the desperado must be exterminated and lawlessness suppressed.

John Chisum had the future of New Mexico at heart and recognized the crisis. If law and order were to be established, a war was necessary. Chisum launched that war. It was a war primarily against lawlessness. Incidentally it was a war against Billy the Kid as the head and front of lawless forces. The extinction of the outlaw was imperative. The new era demanded it. The call of statehood was the desperado's trump of doom.

Pat Garrett had moved to Roswell. John Chisum, J. C. Lea, and other cattlemen, casting about for a man they deemed qualified to conduct the war against lawlessness, selected him. They urged him to run for sheriff of Lincoln County. They promised his election. In making him the offer they laid their cards on the table. The position was to carry one positive obligation—the extermination of Billy the Kid. Garrett had been a friend of Billy the Kid. So had Chisum. That made no difference. This was to be a fight for New Mexico. Sentimental considerations must be waved aside. Friendships must be forgotten. The work called for a man of shrewdness, courage, determination, and force of character. Garrett was that kind of man. He accepted the proposition, was nominated and elected.

​With Sheriff Garrett in the saddle, the toils began to tighten about the Kid. All the forces of law were marshalled to the aid of the new sheriff. The United States Government sent Azariah F. Wild, a Secret Service operative, into Lincoln County. Frank Stewart, with a posse of man-trailers in the employ of a cattleman's association of Texas, was out on the hunt for the outlaw. John. W. Poe, in the service of cattle interests in the Panhandle and the Canadian River country, was on the trail.

The Kid was growing wary. With Billy Wilson, Dave Rudabaugh, Charlie Bowdre, and Tom O'Folliard he spent his twenty-first birthday in White Oaks; but he did not celebrate the occasion hilariously in saloons and dance halls. He kept under cover, and a few swigs out of a bottle among clandestine friends were his only commemoration of the event. As he and his band rode out of town next day, the Kid remarked Deputy Sheriff Jim Woodland standing on the main street in front of the Pioneer saloon. Riding along a hillside, the Kid dropped a bullet close to the deputy's feet by way of hail and farewell. "It was only a friendly shot," he explained to O'Folliard, who protested that Woodland had been an old friend in Texas and they had come to New Mexico together. Misinterpreting the Kid's winged message of friendliness, Woodland, with Jim Carlyle and J. N. Bell, also deputies, sent a six-shooter volley after the Kid which was not friendly but happened to be futile.

White Oaks thereupon agreed officially that the Kid's impudence merited drastic punishment and a posse was organized to pursue him. With Deputy Sheriff Will Hudgens in command, the posse consisted of Johnny Hudgens, brother of the leader, J. N. Bell, Jim Carlyle, Jim Watts, John Mosby, Jim Brent, J. P. Langston, Ed ​Bonnell, W. G. Dorsey, J. P. Baker, and Charles Kelly, all White Oaks men, Will Hudgens being a saloon keeper as well as deputy sheriff.

Early in the morning, with heavy snow on the ground and bitterly cold, they came upon the Kid's camp at Coyote Springs. The outlaws, eating breakfast about a camp fire, leaped on their horses and dashed away under a fusillade of bullets. The Kid's horse was shot dead. On foot and hard-pressed, he escaped into the high hills. His overcoat and gloves were found in camp, and Carlyle appropriated the gloves. After following the rustlers for several miles, the posse gave over the pursuit and returned to White Oaks.

Word came on November 27th that the Kid and his men had rounded up at Jim Greathouse's ranch and roadhouse forty miles from town on the trail to Anton Chico. Again the posse took up the hunt, and dawn found them lying in ambush around the Greathouse building. John Steck, the Greathouse cook, emerging to gather firewood, was captured and gave the posse definite assurance that the Kid and his followers were inside. Will Hudgens sent in a note by Steck demanding the Kid's surrender. Greathouse himself brought back the Kid's reply. It read simply: "Go to hell."

Deputy Carlyle suggested that he himself go in and have a talk with the Kid, whom he had met often at White Oaks bars and with whom he had been on terms of cautious friendliness. Leader Hudgens refused to permit such foolhardiness. Then up spoke Greathouse. "The Kid won't hurt him," said he. "I'll agree to be your hostage. If the Kid kills Carlyle, you can kill me."

Hudgens accepted this proposition, still with vague doubts. Carlyle, he thought, might be able to make clear ​to the Kid the hopelessness of his situation and persuade him to surrender without bloodshed. The Kid was to be given to understand, Hudgens impressed upon his emissary, that Carlyle must return to the posse by two o'clock in the afternoon. If he failed to return, Hudgens was to assume that the Kid intended to kill him, and Greathouse's life was to pay the penalty. So, laying aside his six-shooter and rifle, Carlyle walked into the house.

He found the Kid and his men in the barroom in the front part of the building. The Kid received him with indifferent friendliness, told him that gang outside never would take him alive and invited him to have a drink. Espying his gloves sticking from Carlyle's pocket, the Kid snatched them out. "What are you doing with my gloves?" he asked. Carlyle attempted to explain. "I suppose you've got my overcoat, too," said the Kid. No, somebody else had that. The Kid looked a little ugly. "I thought you were a friend of mine," he said, "and here you are hunting me and trying to kill me." Carlyle argued that he was there to try to save the Kid's life by inducing him to give up. For a moment the Kid glowered resentfully.

"I'll just kill you while I've got a good chance!" he said at length, and drew his six-shooter. "Go on and drink your drink. It's the last you'll ever take on earth."

Carlyle turned off his whisky and the outlaws drank with him. The Kid set down his glass, smiled, and slipped his gun back in its scabbard.

"I was just joking, Jimmy," he said pleasantly. "I wouldn't kill you."

Carlyle found that talking surrender was useless; he suggested that he go back to his own men. But the Kid ​would not let him go. Two o'clock came, marking the expiration of the time limit of his mission. One of the posse outside foolishly shot off his rifle. Carlyle jumped to the conclusion that Greathouse had been killed and his own death would follow. He made a sudden dive through a window, crashing through glass and framework. The Kid jerked his revolver, and while Carlyle was in midair, sent a bullet through him. Badly wounded, Carlyle struck the ground on his hands and knees and began to crawl away. The Kid's second shot stretched him out dead in the snow.

At once the posse opened a bombardment of the house with their rifles. For hours they kept it up, and during the excitement Greathouse escaped. Shortly after dark, half-frozen, with fingers so numb from the cold they could hardly pull a trigger, without blankets for the night and not daring to kindle a fire, the posse gave up the adventure and went back to White Oaks. An hour or so later, the Kid and his band, with six-shooters blazing in the empty darkness, dashed out the door, thinking themselves still hemmed in by hidden foes. Discovering the enemy gone, they made their way to Anton Chico. Here, having refreshed themselves and obtained new mounts, they rode away to Fort Sumner.

Greathouse showed good wisdom in flight. Carlyle's death inflamed the possemen, who, regarding Greathouse in a measure responsible, would have murdered him doubtless in retaliation. The next day the posse returned and burned the Greathouse place to the ground. Greathouse did not venture back. He was later killed while asleep by Joel Fowler, a drunken desperado, who was lynched by a mob in Socorro for another and equally cowardly murder.

​Christmas Eve in old Fort Sumner. Good cheer and happiness in the air. Latchstrings hanging out. Warm-hearted hospitality in every home. Healths pledged in cheerful bumpers in old Beaver Smith's saloon. A great amphora of egg-nog standing invitingly on José Valdez's bar. Women with happy faces slipping through the streets with furtive bundles tucked beneath rebozos. Deluvina Maxwell, the Navajo servant, roasting the family turkey in the Maxwell kitchen. Christmas trees hung with gifts and lighted with wax tapers to be seen through the windows. Happy little ones tucked in beds to dream of Santa Claus. Snow on the ground; the Pecos frozen over; a clear sky spangled with stars.

There was to be a great ball in Fort Sumner on Christmas night. All the gay young fellows and the pretty girls of the upper Pecos Valley were to attend. Paulita Maxwell had had a costly gown made for the occasion by a fashionable modiste in Las Vegas. Billy the Kid and his merry men were to ride in and give the affair its last touch of dashing gaiety. The gallant young outlaw, so the village gossip ran, had sent word that he would surely be present. And, his message added, he would come in from the north by the Texas road and arrive in Fort Sumner late on Christmas Eve.

Barney Mason, having a sly and eager ear for village gossip, spurred hard across bleak, wintry wastes to carry these tidings to Sheriff Pat Garrett at Roswell ninety miles away. To Garrett the welcome news was like a direct message from Billy the Kid inviting him to keep an appointment and setting the trysting place. Hastily gathering together fifteen men seasoned in fighting and upon whose courage he could rely, he set out for Fort Sumner and, by hard riding, reached it on Christmas Eve. ​After nightfall, he slipped unnoticed into town and, having put up his horses in Pete Maxwell's barn, went into comfortable ambush in the old military hospital at the edge of the village on the Texas road and settled down to await the coming of his quarry.

So on this night when all the world was happy, a bare room in the old hospital was filled with heavily armed men. A fire of pitch-pine knots roared in the chimney, irradiating the chamber with ruddy light. Smoke from pipes and cigarettes hung in the air in strata and lazily drifting whorls. The men, the majority Mexicans, stalked about restlessly or sat cross-legged on the floor along the walls, their rifles across their laps. There was desultory talk.

Sheriff Garrett, Barney Mason, Tom Emory, and Bob Williams played poker on a blanket on the floor. Frank Stewart, the cattle detective from Texas, Lee Hall, Louis Bozeman, and Juan Roibal stood watching the game. Jim East took his ease stretched out on a blanket and whiffed at a meditative pipe. Lon Chambers mounted guard in the road outside.

"What time is it?" drawled East.

"Quarter to twelve," replied Lee Hall, pulling out his old silver timepiece.

"Old Santa Claus in his reindeer sleigh has snow to travel on to-night and he ought to be in Fort Sumner pretty soon," reflected East. "Only a quarter of an hour till Christmas. Wish I was with the folks back in Tascosa."

"Two cards," said Garrett at his poker game on the blanket.

"One to me," chimed Emory.

There was a jingle of silver coins as the men tossed their bets into the pot.

"I'll call," said Emory. "What you got?"

​"Three kings," replied Garrett.

"Beats aces up."

Garrett was raking in his winnings when Chambers burst in at the door.

"All right, boys," he called. "The Kid's coming."

The four poker players left their cards scattered on the blanket. A thrill of excitement ran through the crowd. Each man gave his rifle a hasty examination and hitched his six-shooter a little to the front. They rushed out of the door into the white clear night. A little distance out the road, hidden by a corner of the building, they could hear the thud of horses' hoofs approaching at a gallop.

"Five of them," whispered East, peeking around the corner.

They waited for the horsemen to come nearer. The hoofbeats sounded just beyond the building. The men crowded out into the road, rifles cocked and ready. Less than fifteen yards away the five outlaws were bearing down upon them. One rode a little way in front.

"Throw up your hands!"

It was Garrett's voice and he had his rifle at his shoulder.

The foremost horseman whipped out his six-shooter. Before he could fire, Garrett sent a bullet through his body close to the heart. The rifles of the possemen began to crack. The four other riders wheeled their horses and raced away in the darkness under a rain of bullets.

The man whom Garrett had shot, still sitting upright in his saddle, his horse suddenly reined to a walk, rode in among the possemen.

"Get those hands up quick or I'll kill you," cried Garrett.

"Don't shoot any more," answered the man. "I'm as good as dead already."

​He began to waver. As Garrett and Barney Mason stepped to his horse's side, he fell over and slipped down into their arms. It was Tom O'Folliard.

They laid him in the snow. He had lost consciousness and they thought him dead. Suddenly he revived and began to scream curses on Garrett's head.

"I'll put a dead man's curse on you," he shouted. "You've killed me but you'll die like a dog yourself some day, and I hope you burn in hell."

Barney Mason bent over him.

"No use making a fuss, Tom," said he. "Be game. Take your medicine like a man."

They carried him inside and laid him on a blanket in a corner. There, as he writhed in agony, he raved and swore and called down maledictions on Garrett. His voice gradually grew weaker. Weaker still. He was plainly dying. He could not last much longer.

Garrett, Emory, Mason, and Williams went back to their card game.

"I'm betting two dollars on my hand," remarked Mason.

"That's a lot of money, Barney," returned Garrett, "but I'll just see what you've got."

He tossed some coins to the centre of the blanket.

The curses from the corner ceased. The dying man went into a spasm. His limbs twitched and straightened. He made a convulsive effort to sit up.

"God damn Pat Garrett," he muttered, and fell back dead.

"Jacks and eights," said Barney Mason.

"The dead man's hand," answered Garrett. "It wins."

For several hours, on the authority of Jim East and ​Barney Mason, the poker game continued while O'Folliard lay dead on his blanket in the corner.

The four outlaws who had been with O'Folliard when he was shot were Billy Wilson, Tom Pickett, Dave Rudabaugh, and Charlie Bowdre. Billy the Kid had separated from them a few miles from town for some prudent reason of his own and was riding alone along the cottonwood avenue when he heard the firing. He swung about on the back trail and rejoined his companions in their mad dash to escape which ended at Wilcox's ranch ten miles north of Fort Sumner. Here the outlaws passed the night in warm beds, and after breakfast next day struck northward, disappearing like gray ghosts in a blinding blizzard. Dave Rudabaugh's horse had been shot by Garrett's men and fell over dead a mile from town, where it subsequently was found, Rudabaugh mounting behind Wilson to continue his flight.

It would have been useless for Garrett to take up the pursuit of the outlaws next morning. Before dawn, a driving snowstorm had set in and extinguished the trail as one blows out a candle. The posse remained in Fort Sumner and buried O'Folliard in the little cemetery east of town. It was a strange little funeral, without bead or book or ceremony, fit period to the futile, wild career of the youth who had followed blindly and faithfully the fortunes of Billy the Kid. Only a handful of men stood about the grave as the rough pine box containing all that was left of Tom O'Folliard was lowered into the earth; among them, Pat Garrett, who had killed him, tall and grim in the slithering, wind-blown snow.

When the storm ceased after nightfall, Pecos Valley lay buried a foot deep in feathery whiteness; the skies cleared as if the clouds had been swept away by a broom; a wind​less calm followed the blizzard, and it fell bitterly cold. Rancher Wilcox rode in with the information that the outlaws had headed in the direction of Stinking Spring, otherwise known as Tivan Arroyo, where there was an old abandoned stone house once used by sheep herders, in which he surmised they probably would take shelter. With this clue, Garrett and his posse set out from Fort Sumner at midnight, following a blind trail through the endless drifts and the white silence.

The first glimmer of dawn was in the east when they arrived at Stinking Spring. Before them, the little gray stone hut took form in the blue obscurity, the snow drifted about it, three horses shivering with drooping heads in front, tethered by ropes to the viga poles of the flat roof. The house had no windows and only one door; within was profound stillness. Leaving his horses concealed in a draw in charge of Frank Stewart and several Mexicans, Garrett posted sentinels around the house. Then with Jim East, Lee Hall, and Tom Emory, he stole silently through an arroyo and halted under shelter of its embankment within thirty feet of the door.

The glow of approaching sunrise was red on the snow when the silent watchers in the arroyo heard sleepy voices and the slight stir of awakening life inside the hut. Out the door stepped Charlie Bowdre, in his hand a canvas nose-bag half-filled with oats for his pony.

"We've got you covered, Charlie. Throw up your hands," called Garrett.

Bowdre, with the automatic gesture of old custom, snatched his six-shooter from its holster. The movement was fatal. A bullet from Garrett's rifle crashed through his chest. He swayed and staggered convulsively in the snow as if in half-delirious dance. Another ball from Lee ​Hall's gun struck him in the shoulder, almost knocking him down. He turned and blundered back into the house.

Here was a man who had been Billy the Kid's comrade for years, dared death with him, gone with him through innumerable dangers. It might be fancied the Kid caught his sorely wounded bosom friend in his arms, laid him gently down, made his last moments on earth as comfortable as possible. But the strange psychology of the young desperado had been fashioned in a mould of ice. There was no hope for his old-time companion in arms whose life was fast ebbing. Dying, he appealed to the Kid merely as an opportunity—an opportunity for vengeance. The voice of the Kid came with cold clearness to the ambushed men in the ditch.

"They've got you, Charlie," said the Kid. "You're about done for. Go out and see if you can't kill one of those fellows before you die."

The door opened meagrely. Bowdre staggered out, helped by a slight push from the Kid's hand. The rising sun shone full in his face. With unsteady, zigzag steps, he walked toward his hidden foe, his six-shooter clutched in his hand dangling helplessly at his side, his eyes staring blankly, his face of ashen pallor. Garrett and his comrades knew he was dying on his feet and did not fire. Faltering and weaving, Bowdre reached the brink of the arroyo. "I wish—I wish——" he murmured. What did the poor devil wish? No one will ever know. He pitched dead into the arroyo, into Pat Garrett's arms.

In addition to the three horses tethered to the viga poles, the outlaws had two horses inside the house. The horses offered the one vague hope of escape. Resting their rifles on the bank of the arroyo and drawing careful beads, ​Garrett and East cut the ropes of two of the ponies with bullets and the frightened animals galloped away. Garrett killed the third horse, which fell in such a position that its body blocked the doorway. It was a piece of strategy that rendered the two horses inside useless to the outlaws. No chance now for the Kid to ride out of the door and make a wolf-dart for freedom.

Garrett opened a parley; across the thirty feet intervening between besiegers and besieged it was possible to carry on a conversation with distinctness.

"You'd better surrender, Billy," called Garrett. "You haven't a chance to escape. You won't have any more chance to-night than you have to-day. If you fellows try to make a dash, we'll kill you as fast as you come out the door."

"Go to hell, Pat," sang out Billy cheerfully. "You haven't got me yet. I'll show you a trick or two by and bye."

Garrett heard the outlaws picking with their knives at the mortar between the stones on the far side of the house with evident design to open a hole, through which escape after nightfall might be attempted. He sent East and Emory around the house to guard against such an eventuality.

Never before had the Kid been in more desperate plight; nor in one more poignantly uncomfortable. The one chance in a million seemed lacking. The door, which offered the one avenue of escape, opened on sure death. He and his men had had nothing to eat since breakfast the day before. Hungry and numb with cold, they sat miserably in their bleak prison and debated contingencies.

"It looks bad," Billy the Kid was heard to remark. "But you never can tell. We may get a chance yet. ​No use surrendering. They'll hang us if we do. I'd rather die by a bullet than the rope."

"Garrett will kill every man who shows up outside the door," argued Tom Pickett. "He's killed O'Folliard and he's killed Charlie Bowdre and he'll kill us. We'd better give up."

Late in the afternoon, Garrett sent over to Brazel's ranch house not far away for food and coffee for his men. A wagon brought back bacon, eggs, coffee, and utensils in which to cook them. He kindled a little fire in the bottom of the arroyo and prepared a hot meal. The appetizing savours of the cooking penetrated to the four dispirited men cooped up in their stone jail.

"Hey, Pat," the Kid shouted, with what humour remained in him, "send us over a pot of coffee."

"Come on out and get some, Billy, but come with your hands up," called back Garrett. "Hot coffee goes mighty good this cold weather."

The end came quickly now and the smell of that camp-fire coffee may have been the deciding factor. The sun was setting when Garrett spied something white fluttering above the roof. It proved to be a handkerchief fastened to a rifle barrel and poked up out of the chimney.

"We'll surrender, Pat," the Kid called, "if you give us your word you won't shoot into us as we come out."

Garrett gave his promise and the Kid and his three companions filed out the door, hands up, into the crimson sunset.

Despite Garrett's promise, Barney Mason, "that traitor," as East calls him, remembering Billy's threats against him and his threats against Billy, levelled his rifle at the Kid's breast; but East and Hall covered him with their guns instantly and prevented the assassination.

​With Bowdre's body rolled in a blanket in a wagon, Garrett took his four prisoners to Brazel's ranch house, where they spent the night; and so to Fort Sumner next day. Jim East and Louis Bozeman carried Bowdre's body into his home. When Manuela Bowdre saw her husband dead, she went into a hysteria of weeping. With the madness upon her, she seized a branding-iron and bent it over East's head, his hat alone saving him from a cracked skull. The two men dropped the corpse on the floor at the feet of the grief-crazed woman and hurried out the door.

"I always regretted the death of Charlie Bowdre," wrote East in after years. "He was a brave man and true to his friends to the last."

This tribute of a warrior to a vanquished foe is worth remembering. Bowdre was an outlaw and a member of a cut-throat band. But what nobler qualities can any man possess than courage and loyalty to his friends "to the last?"

They buried Bowdre beside O'Folliard. There were two graves in a row now in the little cemetery. Before many moons waxed and waned there was to be a third. Sheriff Pat Garrett's campaign for law and order was progressing notably.