The Saga of Billy the Kid/Chapter 20

Ho! For old Fort Sumner. You set out gaily. Your fancy conjures up quaint pictures of the romantic old place. How does it look now? Is it the same as in old frontier days? You propose to ramble through the old home of Pete Maxwell and his sister, Paulita. You will see the room in which Billy the Kid was killed. You will stroll through the shady aisles of the old peach orchard. You will visit old Beaver Smith's former drink-parlour. You revel in pleasant anticipations.

From new Fort Sumner, the commonplace town by the railroad, your road leads south along the famous avenue of cottonwoods through irrigated farmlands. The avenue is still an avenue but there are woeful gaps in the twin rows of giant trees. Pecos Valley farmers care more for wheat, beans, potatoes, than for beauty. Where the old trees shut off the sunlight from their precious acres, they have chopped them down. Which in this treeless land seems a sort of crime.

"Under ditch, this land's worth two and three hundred dollars an acre," says Old Man Charlie Foor, your guide. "But where you can't get water on it, it ain't worth settin' a Mexican to plough it."

You come at length to the southern edges of cultivation. The double row of cottonwoods ends abruptly. Before ​you, to the south, as far as the eye can see, stretches a grassy level plain between the Pecos River and the table-top hills along the east. Range cattle are pasturing here and there. Coming from the northwest, the river bends to the south and loses itself in the far distance. You have a view of a broad reach of bronze water which, in the sun, looks like a highway paved with gold. Old Man Foor halts. You look at him curiously, expecting an explanation.

"There it is," he says.

"There what is?"

"Old Fort Sumner."

He sweeps the empty landscape with a casual wave of his hand.

You gulp down your astonishment. You had expected to find much. You find nothing.

"There ain't no such place as old Fort Sumner," Foor tells you. "Not now. It's gone."

Gone absolutely. Engulfed in the past. A town that was. As if it had never been. Not a house standing. Nothing to suggest its old life, business, bustle, gaiety. Its site a waste expanse of grass and weeds. Gone back to wilderness. Wild flowers waving above it like banners of victory. The old four mile avenue of cottonwoods, once the trail to romance, now a road to desolation.

Surely, you think, Old Man Foor has made a mistake. But no. Old Man Foor has lived in and around old Fort Sumner for forty-odd years. He kept a saloon in the town. He was postmaster for twenty years. He knows the old place like a book. He is knocking around seventy now, as he tells you; a white-haired, white-moustached, kindly old philosopher; a good, steady-going, old-time Western man, who has seen hard knocks in his day and ​emerged out of rough pioneer experiences into a mellow old age.

He conducts you to a great, irregular, grass-grown mound.

"This," he says, "was the old military hospital. Where that steer's grazin', the old Texas road come in from the east. Charlie Bowdre used to live here with his wife, Manuela. Pat Garrett killed Tom O'Folliard right over there. Over yonder was the old peach orchard where Garrett, Poe, and McKinney hid on the night Billy the Kid was killed. It used to spread over a powerful lot of ground. You never seen anything prettier than when it was in full bloom in the spring o' the year. See them two lone trees? They're all that's left of thousands. They're the old peach orchard now."

A little to the south across an irrigating ditch emptying into the Pecos River is a long, low, tumbled mound buried under bunchgrass and sunflowers. This, Foor tells you, is the remains of the barracks of the soldiers. Fifty yards farther south is another mound of the same kind, marking the second row of barracks. Along this mound, Foor points out where stood the home of Saval Gutierrez, out of which Billy the Kid walked to his death.

Main Street was once along the river bank. Now it is an indistinguishable part of the cattle range. The Pecos has eaten away most of the land on which stood the stores and bars that formerly fronted on the ancient thoroughfare. The site of Beaver Smith's famous old saloon is probably by now at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. Off to the east, still plainly marked, is the old parade ground, a gravelly tract on which weeds and grass grow thinly. As you skirt its edges, a jackrabbit jumps up ​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, "Quién es?" as he stumbles upon Poe and McKinney on the porch. You ​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 ​of 'em killed in Indian wars. When the Government decided to abandon Fort Sumner as a military post, the bodies was moved to the national cemetery at Santa Fé. The graveyard was then laid out with gravelled paths. The headstones and wooden crosses had names and dates on 'em. You'd see flowers on the graves now and then. The place, you might say, was a decent spot for dead men to sleep in. It looked like holy ground—a campo santo, as the Mexicans called it. But that was long ago. Now the name it goes by is 'Hell's Half-Acre.' It looks blighted; like it had a curse on it. It's a graveyard of murdered men. Twelve men who died with their boots on are buried in it. They say it's haunted. Some folks'll drive a mile out of their way at night to keep from passin' it."

Old Man Foor knocks the dottle of tobacco out of his pipe against the heel of his boot.

"Of the twelve men who was killed," he goes on, "two was Mexicans, one a Negro soldier who had deserted from the army, and the other nine white men. Maybe I can remember 'em—le'me see. There was Billy the Kid, Charlie Bowdre, and Tom O'Folliard; they're buried together in a row. There was George Peacock, killed by a fellow named White. Then Felipe Beaubien. They said he was killed while tryin' to hold up Felipe Holtman's store, but I never believed that; I think it was plain murder. Francisco Gallego, killed by Tom Moran, a cow-puncher, was another. And John Legg, a saloon keeper. John Farris, killed by Barney Mason, is buried here, too. Joe Grant, killed by Billy the Kid in José Valdez's saloon, lies just a few feet from the man who killed him. That's nine. The Negro deserter makes ten. I forget who the other two were. They were all killed in old Fort Sumner. ​It was a right lively little town in its day and a powerful easy place to get killed in. None of the graves are marked and mighty few people now know where any of them are."

Old Man Foor looks at the gate to get his bearings, walks a little distance, as by a compass, and halts. With a knotted forefinger he points down to a strip of flat, yellow, sun-cracked earth that is strangely bare.

"This is the spot," says the old man. "Under this strip of baked clay lies Billy the Kid."

The bare space is perhaps the length of a man's body. Salt grass grows in a mat all around it, but queerly enough stops short at the edges and not a blade sprouts upon it. A Spanish gourd vine with ghostly gray pointed leaves stretches its trailing length toward the blighted spot but, within a few inches of its margin, veers sharply off to one side as if with conscious purpose to avoid contagion. Perfectly bare the space is except for a shoot of prickly pear that crawls across it like a green snake; a gnarled, bristly, heat-cursed desert cactus crawling like a snake across the heart of Billy the Kid.

"It's always bare like this," says Old Man Foor, standing back from the spot as if half-afraid of some inexplicable contamination. "I don't know why. Grass or nothin' else won't grow on it—that's all. You might almost think there's poison in the ground."

Narrow cracks made by the blistering sun have outlined on the hard yellow surface the crude suggestion of a picture.

"If you stand at a certain angle," says Foor, "them cracks look a little like a skeleton hand. Stand over here. See? Can you make it out? Them four lines there look like a dead man's long, crooked fingers reachin' out for ​something; and this short line here mightily resembles a bony thumb. Funny, ain't it?"

You look closely, curiously, at the sun-drawn skiagraph. The resemblance is unmistakable. The weird shape startles you. Can it be the thing has some cryptic, fathomless meaning? What are those long, bony fingers reaching for? Who knows? But there it is clearly sketched in the hard yellow clay-a skeleton hand, reaching … reaching .…

"I reckon if you dug down under there, you wouldn't find much of the Kid left," says Old Man Foor. "It's more than forty years since they put him away. You might, maybe, find his skull. They say the skull goes last. The Kid used to have buck teeth that made him look like he was laughin' when he wasn't. And like as not, his buck teeth make his skull look like it's laughin' yet. It kind o' gives you the creeps to think of him down there under the earth still laughin'."

Foor takes a few steps toward the north.

"Bowdre's grave is here," he says, "and O'Folliard's here at the other end of the row. Them three fellers was pals in life and they're pals in death. There wouldn't be no finding the graves they sleep in unless you knew where to look. There's mighty few people left alive who know exactly where Billy the Kid's grave is. There's Mrs. Paulita Jaramillo, who was Paulita Maxwell when she was a girl—she knows; and Francisco Medina, who dug the grave; and Deluvina Maxwell, the old Navajo woman who lives with the family of Don Manuel Abreu; and myself. I reckon that's about all. There was once a path running through the centre of the cemetery from north to south, and the Kid's grave was three feet west of this path and thirty-one steps from the gate. I knew ​the grave when it was new-made and had a cross with the Kid's name on it at the head of it, and fresh flowers on it every day that the Mexican women of old Fort Sumner used to put there. The cross was shot away in 1883. Some soldiers passing through in charge of a bunch of Ute Indians sat on the adobe wall around the cemetery and popped away at the cross with their rifles in drunken devilment. Shot it plumb to kindling wood. And it never was replaced. I came out here with Pat Garrett years after the cross had been shot away. He knew about where the Kid's grave was but I had to show him the exact spot.

"'God rest his soul,' said Pat. 'If it wasn't him sleeping here it might be me. He would have killed me if I hadn't killed him.'"

Old Man Foor tamps some plug-cut into his pipe and, lighting a match on the seat of his trousers, gets a smoke under way with a few resounding puffs.

"There was once some talk about erectin' a monument over the Kid's grave," he resumes. "Somebody tried to start a public subscription. But people in New Mexico seemed scandalized. 'Why, he killed twenty-one men,' they said. 'Contribute to a monument for such a terrible desperado? Not on your life.' So the scheme fell through. Then I heard talk of Frank Coe settin' up a tombstone. He was a great friend of the Kid, and he's pretty well off now and could afford to do it if he wanted to. But he ain't made no special move in that direction yet that I know of. Anyway, the Kid's grave is still unmarked."

Old Man Foor pulls reflectively at his white moustache.

"Seems to me the grave ought to have some sort of marker," he says. "Sightseers and tourists come out ​here every year to see it. You might think it was some kind of a shrine, to hear them talk. There was one lady I brought out here once who got all riled up when she didn't find no tombstone. 'It's a shame,' says she. 'It ain't decent. The State of New Mexico or the State Historical Society or somebody owes it to posterity,' she says, 'to set up some kind of a tablet or a monument or a tombstone. Why,' says she, 'Billy the Kid's grave is one of the shrines of romance of the Southwest.' I never heard nobody carry on so. She seemed real disturbed about it.

"Well," concludes Old Man Foor, shooting a stream of tobacco smoke out into the sunshine, "the Kid was a bad feller; I ain't disputin' that. But he made considerable history in New Mexico as long as his trigger finger held out. I wouldn't say the kind of history he made entitled him to no monument, but it does seem to me that a fellow that raised as much hell as he did in early days deserves some kind of a marker over his last resting place. It don't have to be a equestrian statue nor nothing big and fine. Just a plain little slab of gray granite would do. If they don't hurry up and put up some kind of stone the site of his grave will be lost. The old-timers who know where it is are dying off mighty fast these days."

Romance weaves no magic glamour in this Hell's Half-Acre where the Kid sleeps his last sleep. From this coign of disillusion one sees his tragic life in stark perspective, crowded with outlawry, vendetta, hatreds, murders; twenty-one dead men like ghostly mile posts marking his brief journey of twenty-one years, a journey that through all the twists and turns of its crimson trail marched inevitably toward this lozenge of cactus-shadowed desolation.

As you stand in a mood of reverie above the lonely spot, ​a vagrant wind whisks across the plain a tiny dust-devil that spins for a moment madly, futilely, and is swallowed up in nothingness. This, in quick apocalypse, is the life of Billy the Kid—a little cyclone of deadliness whirling furiously, purposelessly, vainly, between two eternities. A little space of bare desert earth lost in the sagebrush is the guerdon of all his glory. For this, he lived and died. Here in his nameless grave on the dreary, wind-swept Pecos flats under sun and rain and drifting snows, the boy of the tiger heart rests at last in peace.