The Saga of Billy the Kid/Chapter 7

Bitterness of years flamed into war with the murder of Tunstall. The unprovoked killing was Murphy's challenge to both Chisum and McSween. For all his unsophistication and gentleness of soul, McSween must have foreseen the impossibility of avoiding further violence. But he laid his plans seemingly for justice rather than revenge.

His problem was as delicate as it was dangerous. Justice seemed chimerical at that wild moment. The situation was inflammable. The mood of his men was lawless. They cared no more for law just then than did Murphy's followers. They were restlessly eager for vengeance; their trigger fingers itched to pay off the score against their enemies with blood. Plainly there was no hope in Sheriff Brady for the maintenance of law. His posse had committed the murder; that he would arrest the murderers was not to be expected. If they were to answer the law for their crime, McSween himself must bring them to book. There was no other way.

In a crisis in which law was a dead letter, McSween was still the lawyer to whom law was both theory and practice. His enemies had acted under the guise of law and he did not propose that his own actions should lack colour of legal authority. His course was made easy by Justice of the Peace John P. Wilson of Lincoln, who found it convenient to trim his sails to factional winds and ​managed with diplomatic shrewdness to steer a safe and neutral course between Scylla and Charybdis. Through his influence with this accommodating official, McSween brought about the appointment of Dick Brewer, the leader of the field forces, as special constable; and Brewer, having assembled a legal posse of deputies and obtained legal warrants for the arrest of Tunstall's murderers, set off for the Seven Rivers country to fulfil his legal mission.

McSween's explicit instructions were to serve the warrants without bloodshed and bring back the prisoners for trial. It is possible that, with his faith in the goodness of men, McSween expected the posse to carry out his orders. He may, perhaps, be given the benefit of the doubt. But whatever his intentions, it is certain the possemen themselves were inspired with no such pacific purpose. They rode out of Lincoln not as champions of law but as personal avengers; their warrants were mere scraps of paper and their dearest wish was for the opportunity to serve them from the muzzles of their guns.

With Special Constable Brewer on his expedition were Billy the Kid, Charlie Bowdre, Doc Skurlock, Hendry Brown, Jim French, John Middleton, Fred Wayt, Sam Smith, Frank McNab, and a man named McCloskey. The very personnel of the posse was fair earnest of its designs. It would have been difficult to rake together even in that country more desperate and lawless men. But they were bold fellows, whatever else they were, and they rode straight for the heart of the enemy's country, undoubtedly prepared neither to give nor to take quarter. The region of the Seven Rivers was a Murphy stronghold; in the midst of it was the Murphy ranch with its "miracle herd"; it had served as a base for forays against Chisum's ​cattle; its people were either Murphy sympathizers or active Murphy partisans.

The posse travelled down the Bonito and Hondo cañons and turned south in the Pecos Valley. At the lower crossing of the Peñasco, six miles from its confluence with the Pecos, they caught sight of five horsemen, dismounted and resting under a clump of trees near the ford, who, when they saw the posse approaching, hurriedly climbed into their saddles, drove the spurs into their ponies, and went careering away in a cloud of dust, Brewer's men tearing pellmell after them, firing at every jump. After several miles of this mad race, two of the fugitives separated from the other three and headed for the hills to the west. Billy the Kid recognized these two for his former friends of Mesilla days, Billy Morton and Frank Baker; both Morton, as leader of the Tunstall murder posse, and Baker, as a member of it, in at Tunstall's death and participants in the orgies over his dead body. These two and any others of that murderous band he might chance to meet the Kid had sworn to kill.

The Kid wheeled his horse off after Morton and Baker, and the remainder of the posse followed his lead. The pursuers gained gradually; their bullets began to sing close about the ears of the fugitives and knock up spouts of earth around them. Turning in their saddles, Morton and Baker returned the fire. A sudden change in their course brought them broadside to the posse and both their horses were killed under them. On foot, their case seemed hopeless. It chanced there was a deserted dugout not far off, with low sod walls and dirt roof, offering protection. They made this on the run and found refuge in the cavernous interior.

The dugout was in open land, and behind its bullet-proof ​walls Morton and Baker were fairly safe as long as their ammunition held out, their enemies not daring to venture too close to their rude fortress. The fight turned into a siege with only desultory firing on either side. For two days and nights, the posse held the two men penned up in the dugout and then, seemingly facing death from starvation and thirst and their ammunition almost exhausted, Morton and Baker stuck a white rag out the door on the point of a rifle in token of their desire for an armistice. The possemen drew near and a parley was opened.

"We'll surrender," called out Morton, "if you'll give us your word we won't be killed."

There was silence for a moment.

"All right," said Brewer at length. "Come on out. We'll guarantee you won't be harmed."

"Not now nor later either," argued Morton.

"We'll promise you protection," answered Brewer.

Then the two men marched out with their hands in the air. When their guns had been taken from their belts, they spied Billy the Kid leaning on his rifle.

"Hello, Billy," said Morton.

"Howdy, Kid," said Baker.

They extended their hands. This boy had chummed it with them at their camp fire at Mesilla.

Billy regarded them with a look of cold deadliness.

"I don't know you and don't want to know you," he said with an oath and turned away.

The posse arrived late that same day at John Chisum's South Spring Ranch and put up for the night.

"I gave up my own bedroom to the two prisoners that night," said Mrs. Sallie Roberts, then Miss Chisum, in recalling her memories of the incident. "I don't think either of them got much sleep. Several of the possemen, ​armed to the teeth, sat up with them all night long to prevent any possibility of escape. These poor boys—both nice-looking fellows, too—knew they were doomed and didn't have a chance on earth. Nobody told me but I knew it, too, and everybody at the ranch knew it. We sensed it in the grim looks and the silence of the possemen.

"Morton and Baker were as pale as corpses when they came out of the prison room for breakfast in the morning. When they had eaten, Baker came to me and gave me his gold watch, his horsehair bridle, and a letter he had written in the night to his sweetheart.

"'I want to make my last request on earth to you, Miss Chisum,' he said. 'I will never live to get to Lincoln. When you hear of my death, I wish you would send my watch and bridle, which I plaited myself, to my sweetheart and mail this letter to her.'

"The letter was addressed to Miss Lizzie N. Lester, Syracuse, New York. I mailed it to her a little later and sent her the watch and bridle, and we kept up a correspondence for quite a while. I never saw her and never learned a great deal about her, but from her letters she must have been a sweet, fine, educated girl. When Morton told me good-bye, he merely gripped my hand hard: he couldn't talk."

The posse set out for Lincoln with their prisoners that morning. They halted in Roswell, then a straggling village, five miles away, to allow Morton an opportunity to write a letter to his cousin, H. H. Marshall of Richmond, Virginia, a lawyer, and a wealthy man, according to report, of an old and aristocratic family of which Morton had turned out to be the black sheep. In the letter, as was learned afterward, Morton informed his relative he was on his way to death and bade him a last farewell.

​Ash Upson, who a few years before had lived at the boarding house of Billy the Kid's mother in Silver City, was postmaster of Roswell at this time.

"I wish," said Morton to Postmaster Upson in turning the letter in to him, "you would write my cousin the full particulars of my death when you hear of them."

Posseman McCloskey, an old buffalo hunter, and according to all accounts a brave, decent man, was standing near by.

"If they kill you two men," he said to Morton within hearing of several others of the posse, "they will have to kill me first."

When the posse started out from Roswell, they took the main road to Lincoln which ran westward across the Pecos Valley, over Pecacho Hill and by way of Hondo and Bonito cañons. Martin Chavez of Pecacho, later merchant and politician in Santa Fé, riding toward Roswell, saw them turn from the travelled highway and head for Agua Negra by a dim, unfrequented trail.

Agua Negra is a spring at the eastern foot of Capitan Mountain in an uninhabited country through which few travellers pass. It gushes from a cliff a little way inside the wide mouth of Agua Negra Cañon. Steep hills dark with piñons rise above it and the great peak towers beyond. The spring pours through lichened boulders into a spacious basin where cattle and sheep sometimes come to drink and where the still, clear waters lie so dark in the shadows of trees that the pool has been named Agua Negra—the Black Water. A haunted, lonely spot it is, fit scene for crime. When Chavez reached Roswell, he reported this strange turning aside from the main travelled road to Ash Upson, who read sinister meaning in it.

"It's all over with those poor boys," said Upson. ​"Billy the Kid has taken them there to that deserted spot to murder them."

It turned out as Ash Upson prophesied. Morton and Baker were murdered at Agua Negra but the details of the tragedy are still an enigma. There was a story generally believed in those days and widely believed now that when the posse reached Agua Negra, Billy the Kid marched Morton and Baker a little apart from the posse and, on the margin of the water hole, while they begged on their knees for their lives, blew out their brains. Billy the Kid and the members of the posse, however, stoutly denied this and gave their own account of the affair, which at least seems plausible and may be true.

As the posse approached Black Water Spring, according to Billy the Kid's account, the Kid and Charlie Bowdre were riding in the lead, McCloskey and Middleton were jogging beside the two prisoners, and the other possemen were strung out in the rear. Suddenly Frank McNab and Hendry Brown spurred up their horses and drew rein alongside of McCloskey and Middleton.

"So you are the brave hero," roared McNab to McCloskey, "who will die before he sees these two fellows killed. All right. We'll send you to hell along with them."

He stuck his six-shooter into McCloskey's face and pulled the trigger. The flame leaping from the muzzle burned McCloskey's eyebrows and blackened his skin with powder burns and he fell out of his saddle dead.

When he heard the shot, so the tale goes, Billy the Kid turned to see Morton and Baker spurring their ponies in a breakneck dash for liberty. He made no attempt to pursue but, sitting still on his horse, fired twice. Morton and Baker threw up their hands and, toppling over backward, plunged lifeless to the ground.

​Once again on the road to Lincoln, Billy the Kid rode in silence, and his companions left him to his thoughts.

"Say, Hendry," he said at length to Hendry Brown, who rode beside him.

"Yes, Billy."

"Do you know what?"

"No, Billy, what?"

Brown had an idea the Kid's memories were still grimly on the murders and the corpses left lying to stare at the sky.

"Well, I'll tell you what," said Billy. "Juan Patron's beer is as good as any ever served across a bar in these mountains and I aim to have two or three cold glasses as soon as I get back to Lincoln."

Some sheep herders driving their flock to water at the lonely pool a week later found the three corpses and buried them. But where their graves are no one knows to-day; how they died and where they sleep are alike secrets of the Black Water. The spring gurgling among the boulders sings their requiem. Capitan Mountain is their only headstone.