The Saga of Billy the Kid/Chapter 16

Sheriff Garrett planned to take his four prisoners on horseback across country to Las Vegas, forty miles by the Santa Rosa road, and then on by rail to Santa Fé. Before starting he bought them a drink in Beaver Smith's saloon as a warm bracer for the hard, cold journey. Now that Billy the Kid was his prisoner, there was no show of resentment or enmity on the part of either. As far as appearances went, a spirit of cordial camaraderie prevailed between them. They addressed each other as "Billy" and "Pat" and seemed as friendly as they once had been in their days of intimate association in Fort Sumner. They talked of old times, discussed old friends, recalled old incidents.

"Remember, Billy, the time you knocked over the jackrabbit with your six-shooter when I had missed it six times?"

"Yes, I remember. That was a joke on you, Pat."

"I'm better with a rifle. Ought to be. Had enough practice killing buffalo for a living in the Panhandle."

"I'm better with the six-shooter. Ought to be. Had plenty of practice with it. At tin cans and men."

So they fraternized in pleasant talk. Except that the Kid wore handcuffs and Garrett was never without rifle and six-shooter, you might have thought them comrades with only affection for each other. But if the occasion had warranted, either would have killed the other between ​anecdotes. Laughter and death were accepted as mere details of the day's routine by these men who carried their lives in their hands and never knew what moment would be their last. When it was requisite to kill, they killed; when there was no immediate necessity for murder, they observed the ordinary amenities.

Deputy Sheriff Jim East, a distinctly human sort of man, as kindly as brave, had found especial favour with the Kid and the Kid presented him with his Winchester rifle as a keepsake. "But," says East, "old Beaver Smith made such a roar about an account he said Billy owed him that, at the Kid's request, I let the old reprobate have the gun. I am sorry now I did not keep it."

Accompanied by Deputies East and Emory, Sheriff Garrett with his prisoners rode across the hills to Las Vegas, Billy the Kid wearing about his throat the heavy scarf the Indian woman, Deluvina Maxwell, had given him. Las Vegas was a danger point. Only a few months before Rudabaugh had killed the jailer there and broken to freedom. But it was the only convenient point at which the railroad could be reached. When Garrett arrived, the Santa Fé train, which made up at Las Vegas, was standing in the depot yards almost ready to pull out. As the spot was in the outskirts, the sheriff got his prisoners into a coach without attracting much attention. But somehow the news of his arrival was quickly bruited through the town, and in a little while citizens, still nursing their wrath against the slayer of the jailer, were swarming to the train from all directions. In vain Garrett jerked at the bell-cord to signal the engineer to start. The mob had anticipated him by dragging the engineer from the locomotive cab. This bit of strategy accomplished, it ​surged hooting and yelling about the coach in which the prisoners were held.

"Where's Rudabaugh?" shouted the blood-mad citizens. "String him up to a telegraph pole."

"Hang Billy the Kid, too."

"Make a clean sweep and lynch 'em all."

While the crowd stormed outside, Garrett turned to Billy the Kid, who sat in his seat without sign of perturbation looking out a window with half-smiling, curious interest.

"Billy," he said, "it looks ugly. If they rush the door, I'm going to take off your handcuffs and give you a six-shooter and I'll expect you to help stand them off."

"All right, Pat," returned the Kid cheerfully. "You and I can lick 'em all. I'll guarantee to kill a man with every bullet."

Garrett's appeal to the outlaw in this desperate crisis showed clearly the estimate he placed upon Billy the Kid as a fighting man.

Leaving East and Emory to guard the prisoners, Garrett stepped out on the platform alone and faced the howling, swirling mob. He raised his hand for silence.

"Take my advice, men," he said. "Don't break the law yourselves. Play the part of good citizens. Go back to your homes. The law will take care of these men. As an officer of the law, I am here to protect them and I'm going to do it. You can't take any of these men away from me, and if you try, some of you are going to be killed."

The mob greeted the speech with curses and crushed forward. Several clutched at the platform rails, swung upon the car steps, but fell back when they looked into the muzzle of Garrett's revolver. Suddenly the train be​gan to move. Deputy Sheriff Tom Malloy of Las Vegas had jumped into the engine cab and thrown the throttle wide open. With a rattle and click of wheels on rails, the train gathered quick headway and went skimming out of town, leaving the baffled mob cursing, yelling, shaking impotent fists.

Billy the Kid and the three other prisoners finally were landed in the jail at Santa Fé, the penitentiary now there not having yet been built. Placed on trial for the murder of the Las Vegas jailer, Rudabaugh was sentenced to be hanged. Sent back to Las Vegas, he broke jail a second time and never was heard of again in that country nor is it known to this day what became of him. Pickett and Wilson, after serving a jail sentence in Santa Fé, were set at liberty and returned to peaceful pursuits. Billy the Kid was taken to Mesilla in March for trial.

Mesilla was not unfamiliar to the young outlaw. In the little town, predominantly Mexican, on the west bank of the Rio Grande opposite Las Cruces, he had been baptized for all time in quaint cowboy nomenclature as Billy the Kid. Here, too, he had adventured pleasantly in younger days with Jesse Evans, Jim McDaniels, Billy Morton, and Frank Baker, the latter two murdered by him at Agua Negra. But only a few gamblers and saloon keepers had now any definite memories of the boy who once had hung about the town bars and picked up a precarious living at faro and monte. Everybody knew him by reputation, however, and everybody wanted to see the famous man-killer who for years had terrorized New Mexico.

The trial was a memorable event in Mesilla's history. The town was crowded as it never had been before. Country folk came in from miles around. Wagons and ​saddle horses stood in close ranks up and down the streets. Men and women elbowed their way along the usually empty sidewalks toward the old courthouse in the public square as if to a theatre in which the curtain was about to rise on a fascinating drama.

When the doors were thrown open, the courtroom was packed to the walls in a trice, and those who failed to gain entrance stood at the windows on boxes and barrels and peered over the heads of the more fortunate ones inside.

Judge Warren H. Bristol was on the bench. This was the magistrate whose life the Kid once had threatened and who had refused to hold court in Lincoln while the desperado in the rôle of frontier Robespierre drew up his proscription lists and directed his reign of terror.

A scuffle of feet sounded at the door. "Make way," cried a voice. A buzz of excited interest swept the courtroom. There was a craning of necks. All eyes were bent upon a slender youth who walked through the aisle to a chair in front of the tribune, guarded by Deputy Sheriffs Bob Ollinger and Dave Woods. The crowd gasped. Was it possible that this pale, smiling. neatly dressed lad was the notorious man-slayer? With his wavy brown hair and smooth, beardless face, he locked like a clean, unsophisticated, good-natured boy. If there was murder in his soul, there seemed none in his frank, friendly gray eyes. The daintiness of his feet in their half-boots of soft leather did not escape attention. His hands, as small and delicate as a woman's, seemed unequal to dealing death from heavy six-shooters. In comparison the two armed deputies looked lowering and brutal. It seemed a shame that this harmless-looking youth should be in the custody of such burly savages. Feminine eyes softened with pity.

​"Have you a lawyer?"

It was Judge Bristol who asked the question, leaning forward with manner that was at once courteous and impersonal, and looking into the eyes of the youth who once had sworn to kill him. The Kid shook his head.

"No money with which to hire a lawyer?"

"No." The Kid's eyes tightened and his mouth hardened at the admission. This was an unexpected humiliation. He had had promises of financial assistance. But not a friend had dared come to his aid in his extremity. The famous outlaw stood before the court as a pauper.

Again with impassive, formal courtesy, Judge Bristol appointed Ira E. Leonard of Lincoln to conduct the defense. It was the Kid's first acquaintance with the machine-like precision of court procedure. He began to sense for the first time in his life the cold, inexorable power and momentum of the law.

The Kid was placed on trial for the murder of Agency Clerk Bernstein on the Mescalero reservation. There had been no eyewitnesses except members of the Kid's own band. These were dead now or driven out of the country. The evidence for the prosecution was inconsequential. The jury brought in a verdict of acquittal without leaving the box. The Kid took heart. He smiled broadly. His prospects were looking up.

He was tried immediately afterward for the murder of Sheriff Brady. There had been several eyewitnesses to this assassination. "Dad" Peppin, Billy Matthews, "Bonny" Baca took the stand. Peppin and Matthews had been Brady's companions; Baca had witnessed the murder from the old stone tower in Lincoln that the pioneers had built as protection against the Indians. One after the other they told clear, straightforward stories that fastened ​guilt irrefutably upon the Kid and that Attorney Leonard, for all his shrewdness as a cross-examiner, was unable to shake.

The speeches were made. That of the prosecuting attorney was packed with facts; that of the counsel for the defense, fervid with eloquence. Lawyer Leonard emphasized "the reasonable doubt." He sounded the sentimental note … "this poor persecuted boy" … "a conspiracy of hatred to railroad an innocent youth to the gallows" … "the dead mother who loved him tenderly" … "if he were your own son" … The jury retired.

The courtroom relaxed. The crowd gossiped, weighing the case with light comment, advancing guesses on the outcome. "He's innocent." "Ought to be hanged." "You never can tell." "The dear God himself does not know what a jury will do."

Loud raps sounded on the door from inside the jury room. A bailiff bustled out. The jurymen came back into court and filed into the box. An instant hush fell upon the crowd.

"Gentlemen," said the judge, "have you agreed upon a verdict?"

"We have."

"The clerk will read it."

The clerk took the folded paper from the foreman's hand. As he opened it and smoothed it out, the crackle of the sheet of foolscap could be heard to the farthest corner in the perfect stillness.

"We, the jury, find the defendant, William H. Bonney, guilty of murder in the manner and form charged in the indictment and we fix his punishment at death."

The Kid received the verdict stoically. It was hardly a ​surprise. He had always said he would have no chance in any court in New Mexico. Well, he was right. But his trial struck him as a sort of farce. He had seen sportsmen refuse to shoot a jackrabbit sitting in the sagebrush. They must first kick him up, let him run, and then neatly bowl him over. That was like this court justice that had been dished out to him. The judge had been polite. He had given him a lawyer. He had let him think he had a chance. And then the verdict of death. In the rabbit's case, it was sportsmanship; in this case, it was justice. Humph!

"William Bonney, stand up."

The Kid stepped before the bar.

"Have you anything to say," asked the judge, "why sentence of death should not be passed upon you?"

"No," replied the Kid with conversational nonchalance, "and if I did have anything to say, it wouldn't do me any good."

"Your crime," said Judge Bristol in austere tones, "was atrocious. You have had a fair trial. Everything has been done to protect your interests. After weighing the evidence, the jury has found you guilty. It is now my duty to pass judgment upon you. It is the order of the court that you be taken to Lincoln and confined in jail until May the thirteenth and that on that day, between the hours of sunrise and noon, you be hanged on a gallows until you are dead, dead, dead. And may God have mercy on your soul."

The solemn words of doom fell upon the silence in the courtroom like clods upon a coffin in a grave. The Kid stood erect, staring at the judge with unblinking eyes. There was neither defiance nor bravado in his look. He listened to the judgment with a certain grave dignity.

​Back to his cell in the little jail he marched between his guards. When the iron door had slammed upon him, Bob Ollinger, his ancient enemy, stood outside the bars and surveyed him with a sneer.

"So you got the rope, Kid?" he taunted. "Serves you right. They'll hang you like a dog. And I'll be standing right under the gallows. I want to see you kick."

An unpleasant character was this Bob Ollinger, with whom it is requisite, for a brief term, to get on terms of more intimate acquaintance. He played a definite part in the drama of Billy the Kid and left a certain fame in New Mexico, due, perhaps, more to his death than his life, though his life was not without colourful episode. A broad-shouldered, powerful man, well past forty, dour, inflammable, of quick energy, with red face and whitish-blue eyes. Of colossal egotism, he fancied himself a hero of melodrama and was for ever dramatizing himself with spectacular tricks. He posed as a desperado and delighted in the awe his pose inspired.

He was vain of his personal appearance, which, in fact, was picturesque. He wore his hair so long it fell upon his shoulders, imagining his flowing locks made him look like Wild Bill Hickok, though he in no wise resembled that famous frontiersman either in appearance or character. He loved to parade in public in a buck-skin hunting coat, fringed and elaborately decorated with designs in coloured beads and porcupine quills after the manner of the scouts and Indian fighters of an earlier day. He always carried a six-shooter hanging from his cartridge belt on one side and a long bowie knife on the other.

Thus gorgeously costumed and armed to the teeth, with his sombrero cocked on the side of his head, his pants tucked in his gaily embroidered boots, he was an eye-​filling spectacle and looked as if he might have stepped out of the pages of the most lurid dime novel that ever thrilled the soul of boyhood. No chance tenderfoot ever set eyes upon him tricked out in his frontier bravery who did not immediately accept him as the beau ideal of the traditional bad man. When he visited such polite centres as Santa Fé and Las Vegas, he caused a furore. In the rôle of a daredevil of the plains, he swaggered about the streets, followed by crowds of small boys, and luxuriated in the sensation he created; lounging regally after meals in front of a restaurant and nonchalantly picking his teeth with his ten-inch blade for the benefit of an admiring populace.

It might be fancied that such grotesque play-acting was laughed at in that country of tragic realities and disillusion. But Ollinger took his melodrama seriously and laughter was safest behind his back. Though he revelled in his mock heroics, he was not all actor. He set himself a dangerous rôle in that hair-trigger land, but the worst part about it was that he lived up to it. His character was worse than his pose. Beneath his histrionism was the spirit of murder. He acted the part of desperado, but he lived it also without ever stepping out of character. There was some doubt as to his courage, but none as to his deadliness. He was unquestionably a killer. He placed no more value on human life than Billy the Kid, but he lacked that youthful desperado's cheerful willingness to risk his own. He was generally and cordially hated. Judged by his deeds, he was merciless, revengeful, treacherous, murderous, devoid of magnanimity or sense of fair play. Certain of his exploits might suggest a psychopathic taint which made blood as satisfying to him as drink to a drunkard. He was less a fighter than a murderer and the murders he committed stand out through the ​perspective of the years in unrelieved blackness and brutality. Most bad men have their apologists. Ollinger has none. The Southwest to-day has only obloquy for his memory.

He had killed three men, treacherously and brutally, without danger to himself. While Ollinger was marshal at Seven Rivers, Juan Chavez, who had known him for years and always had been on friendly terms with him, offended him in some small way. Nursing the grudge in secret, Ollinger kept up a show of friendship. He met Chavez on the street one day.

"Hello, Chavez," he said pleasantly.

Chavez extended his hand. Ollinger seized it with his left hand and with his right drew a revolver and shot Chavez to death.

Circumstances under which Ollinger was himself killed years afterward seemed an echo of this old murder. A voice called to him in friendly wise and death followed hard upon the salutation. With this treachery standing against him, Ollinger's death seemed to smack of atonement and retribution. "With what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again."

John Hill was another of Ollinger's victims. The details of this crime of a half century ago seem to have passed out of living memory. All that is known is that Hill was shot without warning—some say in the back—and was given no chance for his life.

Ollinger's third murder was equally heartless. There lived in Seven Rivers a man named Bob Jones. Between him and Ollinger bad blood existed. Jones was said to be dangerous and Ollinger was said to be afraid of him. Though the two men met on the streets every day Ollinger had never deemed it wise to bring the quarrel to a crisis ​and shoot it out in fair fight. A warrant was issued against Jones for some misdemeanour and placed in the hands of Deputy Sheriff Pierce. Ollinger volunteered to assist Pierce in making the arrest. Jones surrendered peaceably. While he was under arrest, unarmed and defenseless, Ollinger shot him—three times, it is said—killing him instantly. The crime was unprovoked and without extenuation. Ollinger's assistance in making the arrest was not needed. The charge against Jones was of minor consequence. Serving the warrant upon him was a mere formality without danger. But it gave Ollinger the opportunity his bloodthirsty soul desired, and he murdered the man he hated under a thin disguise of law.

When Ollinger first appeared in New Mexico he worked for John Chisum as a cowboy. He had a bad name even then. He lived at Seven Rivers for years and was identified with the Murphy faction during the Lincoln County war. He took part in several skirmishes in the vendetta. Some say he was in the three-days' battle in which McSween was killed. Some say he was not. As Billy the Kid fought on the opposite side, he was naturally Ollinger's enemy, but Ollinger's deadly hatred of the Kid dated from Bob Beckwith's death. Beckwith was Ollinger's closest friend. He killed McSween in the three-days' fight and Billy the Kid killed him a moment afterward.

Sheriff Pat Garrett had no illusions regarding Ollinger, and excused Ollinger's appointment as his deputy on the ground that deputies in that dangerous period were hard to find.

"I was out once with Ollinger on a hunt for a Mexican," said Garrett. "We ran on the Mexican hiding in a ditch. Ollinger began to manœuvre for a position from which to kill him. I managed to get the drop on the Mexican and ​took him prisoner. He was badly scared. He believed Ollinger would kill him and begged me to save his life.

"When I brought the Mexican out, Ollinger came running toward us, his six-shooter cocked in his hand and his long hair flying in the wind. I never saw such a devilish expression on any man's face. The Mexican jumped behind me but Ollinger circled around trying to get at him. 'Leave him alone, Bob,' I said to him sharply, but he paid no attention to me, continuing to dodge around in an effort to get in a shot. I finally threw my gun in his face and told him I would kill him, if he didn't behave. That brought him to his senses.

"Ollinger was a born murderer. He was the only man I ever knew who I believe was literally bloodthirsty. I never camped with him that I did not watch him closely. After I had acquired a little fame, I believe he would have killed me if possible for the reputation it would have given him. I was always careful never to give him a chance to shoot me in the back or when I was asleep. I don't know that he was exactly a coward; he may have had a certain sort of courage; but he was a devil and had murder in his heart."

Mrs. Susan E. Barber said: "After Ollinger was killed, I met his mother. I had never had any use for Ollinger; he was a ruffian and a brute and was more generally hated than any man in the country. But out of courtesy, I expressed my sympathy to his mother in what I supposed was her bereavement. I was greatly shocked when the old woman said to me, 'Bob was a murderer from his cradle and if there is a hell, I know he is there.' I never heard or read of any other mother using such terrible words about a son."

Emerson Hough, in drawing a comparison between ​Ollinger and Billy the Kid, had this to say: "One was a genuine bad man and the other the genuine imitation of a bad man. They were really as far apart as the poles and they are so held in the tradition of that bloody country to-day. Throughout the West there are two kinds of wolves—the coyote and the gray wolf. Either will kill and both are lovers of blood. One is yellow at heart and the other is game all the way through. In outward appearances both are wolves and in appearance they sometimes grade toward each other so closely that it is hard to determine the species. The gray wolf is a warrior and is respected. The coyote is a sneak and a murderer and his name is a term of reproach throughout the West."

The day after the Kid had been sentenced, Deputy Ollinger and Woods set out on horseback with the prisoner through the mountains for Lincoln. Throughout the long journey, Ollinger never ceased to revile the Kid in tirades of scurrility and billingsgate.

"If you don't like the idea of cashing out through a trapdoor, Billy," he said, "why don't you try to escape? There's a good spot in the road ahead of us to make a break for it. Suppose you just fall off your horse and take to the woods. Then I'd have my chance to pot you like a rabbit. My only objection to the gallows for you is that it will rob me of the pleasure of murdering you."

Occasionally the Kid sent back a joking reply to his tormentor's sallies but usually he kept silent.

So at last they arrived in Lincoln. The Lincoln jail being insecure, the Kid was confined in an upper room in Murphy's old store. There, manacled hand and foot and under close guard, he awaited the hour set for his death upon the gallows.