Lost Trails Page 12

  Twice was plenty.

  The front door squealed open and Wes heard the rustle of Hattie’s skirts as she squeezed past its frame. A substantial woman, she swept toward him on an uneven course, pressed Wes’s face into her deep décolletage, kissed the top of his head. He breathed in a noxious stew of her perfume and the stale sweat and cigar smoke of the men she had been with during the night.

  “Martin came around again,” she said when she released his head. “He wants to make trouble for us.”

  Martin Morose—her husband—had wanted to make trouble ever since Hattie had taken up with Wes. Wes had a plan to deal with it, and a meeting scheduled later this afternoon with the participants in that plan.

  One of them was the town constable called Old John.

  He would meet John Selman for the third time in his life. As before, he hoped the man didn’t recognize him. If Selman did know him, then this might be the time, at long last, that Wes would have to add him to his list of victims.

  Just the same, he decided, he would leave those two deaths out of his book.

  No sense in tempting fate, he thought. No sense to that at all.

  El Paso Courier-Gazette

  August 20, 1895

  “A scourge of all Texas was eliminated last night when El Paso Constable John Selman tracked killer John Wesley Hardin to the Acme Saloon and finished his career with two bullets to the head. Law-abiding citizens will sleep better knowing that Selman’s quick hands and steady aim ended the gunman’s life.

  “Selman, who has sent many a hard man to an early grave, said of the nighttime encounter. . . .”

  What Really Happened to Billy the Kid

  John Duncklee

  “Grab the sky, Bonney, and don’t even think about goin’ for your ‘Thunderer’!”

  I knew who it was as soon as he said my name because he always had pronounced it like the “o” was a “u,” making it sound like “bunny.” I thought he did that just for ridicule, but we never had time to discuss that matter. Finally, I figured out it was his natural accent because Patrick Floyd Jarvis Garrett had been born in Chambers County, Alabama.

  I did as I was told and dropped the sack of money I was carrying after selling the herd of cows my friends and I rustled. Doggone, I had enough gold in that sack to retire. It was so heavy that I probably could have been clear of Fort Sumner if I had not been afoot. While I was counting out the coins, that fool horse I had stolen from the livery stable at the other end of town had snapped the reins from the hitch rack and taken off at a fast gallop. I saw him just as I was leaving the bank with the sack of money.

  “All right, Mr. Garrett, I am reaching as high as I possibly can. Don’t be getting in a hurry to yank that trigger.”

  “Just stand right like you are, Bonney, or I put enough holes in you to ventilate all the air from here to Carrizo Springs.”

  I stood right still because I certainly had no desire to become the home for Sheriff Pat Garrett’s .44-caliber slugs. I cannot say I blame him for being angry with me because while he was holding me for hanging, I had killed two of his guards and escaped from his jail. Mr. Garrett hated to have prisoners escape from his jail. What surprised me more than anything in my thus-far-short, young life was what Mr. Garrett did next.

  But before I tell you about that strange occurrence, I must say that in spite of the fact that a lot of my activities were really against the law of the land, I had a passel of really good friends. You have to understand that I am essentially a very good person. I am calm, most of the time. I speak softly without malice toward anyone. I seek fairness and honor. Mr. Garrett is the first to back that statement.

  After he took my “Thunderer” and stuck it into his own waistband, he told me to pick up the sack full of money and we were going to his camp. I thought that quite strange since Garrett’s jail was fairly close by. But I did as I was told because he still kept that carbine pointed toward me in a very serious way. Having been around firearms for a considerable part of my life, I can tell the difference between a serious and a frivolous way of pointing a rifle. Mr. Garrett seemed essentially serious.

  Garrett had made a camp just outside of town in a grove of cottonwoods down by the Pecos River. It was not much of a camp to my way of thinking. He had a fire circle and a pot of coffee ready to heat. When we arrived, he stirred the coals and put a few sticks of kindling on. Then he took off his beaver hat and commenced waving it to get a flame going. I suppose I could have jumped him right then and there, but there was something in the way he was acting that really got my curiosity going full speed.

  “Take a seat on that cottonwood log, Bonney,” Garrett said when the fire got going under the coffeepot. “We’ll have some Arbuckle in a few minutes. I might just as well tell you right off what I have in mind to do with you.”

  “I expect you might be planning on shooting me right here and now since I escaped from that jail of yours.”

  “No, Bonney, what I have in mind is far from that. I am glad I caught up with you again, especially after you pulled off that rustlin’ job without a hitch.”

  “That was easy, Mr. Garrett. The night guard didn’t get his old Navy Colt out fast enough. I just shot him in the foot.”

  “Bonney, I’ve known you quite a spell and frankly I have seen your side to a lot of the trouble that you seem to attract. I know for a fact that you were abused when you were a youngster, and I reckon that has a bunch to do with why you are the way you are today.”

  “How do you know so much about me, Mr. Garrett? I was born in New York and my sickly mother brought me to Silver City. My father was a Civil War soldier who did not survive Confederate bullets.”

  “It don’t matter how I know all this stuff about you. What does matter is I have a plan. I aim to send you east to a New England preparatory school so you can get into Dartmouth College.”

  “Mr. Garrett, pardon me, but have you lost your mind?”

  “No, Bonney. I recognize your intelligence and think very strongly that you have a great deal more potential than bein’ a gunslinger, even though you are the fastest and most accurate gun I have ever seen or heard tell of.”

  “All right, Mr. Garrett, so you see all this potential. What I am curious about is why are you doing this for someone who just escaped from your jail while waiting there to be hanged?”

  “Well, Bonney, you and I used to be friends. Good friends. Now I’m callin’ you Bonney and you’re referrin’ to me as Mr. Garrett. There’s somethin’ wrong about that.”

  “All right, Pat, tell me what you have in mind.”

  “Until I got appointed sheriff in this Lincoln County, I always felt kind of like your big brother. I hated to see you gettin’ into trouble and involved with so many killin’s. I always thought that with an education you’d amount to somethin’. What I aim to do is take this cow money you stole and use it to get you an education.”

  “That is sort of against your oath of office as sheriff, isn’t it?” I inquired.

  “I expect it is, but that doesn’t seem to bother me like it should,” Garrett said, and chuckled. “Remember when you told me about the mischief you got into over in Bonita, Arizona? They tossed you into jail and you escaped after killin’ two guards. You told me that Bonita is real close by Arivaipa Canyon, where that citizens’ committee from Tucson went and killed and raped all those Apache women and children. The citizens’ committee were found innocent by the jury.”

  “I remember telling you about that and how I thought there was little justice dealt me when they tossed me in jail for just a prank that did not hurt anybody,” I said.

  “I remember all that. I agreed with you before as I do now. About this school. I had a great-uncle, or some such relative, who started the Garrett School outside Bellows Falls, Vermont. It’s a private boarding school that mainly prepares boys for Dartmouth College up there in New Hampshire.”

  I liked the way he pronounced Vermont with the accent on the “Ver” and how, for New Hampshire
, the “New” got all the emphasis.

  “Tell me more about this Garrett School.”

  “I don’t know any more to tell except I can get you in there and I have enough of this cow money to pay your way. However, if you hanker to go on to college later on, you had better find some way to pay for it yourself.”

  “How easy for robbing are the farms back there?” I asked, making myself sound serious.

  “I assume you are joking, Billy.”

  “I suppose I might as well accept your offer, Pat. The other alternative does not appeal to me at all.”

  And so it was done. Pat went into town and bought me some new traveling clothes, including a brand-new silver-belly Stetson beaver hat, at the Lincoln Mercantile, rented a good stout sorrel gelding at the livery stable, and came back to the camp with his purchases. We finished what beef and beans Pat had at camp, and by dusk we saddled up and headed for Santa Rosa to catch the eastbound train. We did not say much during that forty-mile ride.

  As the train chugged into the station, I could see that I was the only passenger on the platform. Pat and I said our good-byes and he wished me good luck at the Garrett School. We had talked all that out at supper. I was to lie about my age because there was no way that the headmaster would allow a twenty-two-year-old to enter the junior class. Pat had faked my credits in a letter he had written to Ethan Everett, the admissions officer. I had no worries about telling them my phony age because I was small and rather scrawny as it was. My beard had never amounted to much either. Pat had changed my name before writing the letters to the Garrett School. We decided that Patrick Henry McCarty was as good a name to go by as any. I decided to sign it as P. Henry McCarty because it looked more distinguished.

  I wondered why Pat had given me back my “Thunderer.” I could have gotten off the train at Tucumcari and gone back to stealing livestock. I reckon he knew I was curious as all get-out about going to the Garrett School in Vermont. After I got settled in my seat aboard the train, I felt a twinge of homesickness even though I didn’t really have a home since my mother took up with Antrim. That Lincoln County War, when Old Man Tunstall got himself killed, put me into a situation that kept building every time there was any trouble. When Pat Garrett told me that I was being held responsible for twenty-some-odd killings, I laughed out loud. “If you believe all that, Mr. Sheriff,” I said, “you probably believe Mexicans do not eat chili.”

  I have no idea how long after I dozed off that the sudden stop occurred. It almost jolted me off the seat and onto the floor of the railroad car. I saw out the window that dusk had nearly settled in. Glancing around at the other passengers, I noticed them looking around as if they might discover the reason for the slamming stop. It occurred to me that the engineer may have halted the train to take on water as he had before. I had not long to wait for the answer.

  Through the forward door to the car, a gunman suddenly entered waving a .44-caliber Remington revolver in the air. Another man busted through the rear door, and the first one ordered everyone to toss their money and valuables into the canvas sack the second man was carrying with both hands. I took note of that by glancing quickly to the rear of the car. I eased my “Thunderer” from its holster, cocking it as the man waving his gun blabbed on about nobody making a move. The fellow was a rank amateur. First of all, he should have made everyone in the car raise both hands. Not only a novice train robber, but a durned fool to boot.

  I jumped up and fired a .41 slug into his heart before he knew I had jumped up. Then, spinning around, I fired another round into the poor sucker holding the canvas sack with both hands. Two rank amateurs. Both would-be robbers slumped to the floor of the railroad car dead and harmless, blood staining their shirts. I slipped the “Thunderer” back in its holster, sat back down in my seat, exhaled with relief, and again looked outside through the grimy window.

  I reckon the sudden episode took every passenger by complete surprise because there was an awesome silence throughout the car until a woman toward the rear screamed. I glanced around and saw that the robber who had been holding the canvas sack had fallen so that his head rested on the woman’s feet.

  Just as the conductor walked in, two of the passengers approached him, turned to point back toward me, and told him that I had saved all their lives. The conductor made sure the gun-waver was dead, and then came down the aisle and stopped by my seat. “Well, young feller, it looks like you’re a hero today. What’s your name?”

  “P. Henry McCarty,” I answered, wishing the man would go about his business.

  “There’s a reward for you from the railroad, young feller. Give me your address and I’ll make sure the reward gets to you.”

  “I am a student at the Garrett School in Spring River, Vermont.”

  The conductor wrote down all the information in his small notebook, shook my hand, and said, “It’s my pleasure meeting a brave young man, P. Henry McCarty. Have you traveled this railroad much? Your face seems familiar.”

  “This is my first trip, sir,” I said, and tried to look away so he would not eventually recognize me from some wanted poster.

  “Well, on behalf of the railroad, I want to thank you for your bravery and what looks like damn fine marksmanship.”

  I nodded and looked out the window at the darkness that had enveloped the land. I didn’t care about any reward. All I wanted was to be left alone to finish the trip to Vermont without anyone recognizing that I was many times a worse threat than any train robber they might encounter from here to Chicago. Then I happened to think of the biggest joke of all. If I was appointed a sheriff because of this so-called bravery, then Pat Garrett and I would be on equal ground.

  Chicago was a big temptation for me. I had an entire day to wait for the train to New York City. I found a restaurant that had ice-cold sarsaparilla, and I drank three delicious glasses of it before my stomach filled up and I felt as bloated as a desert cow suddenly put out on green feed. I looked around here and there for a monte game, but there was no action anywhere I went. I ambled back to the railroad station and sat down in the waiting room so I wouldn’t forget where I was and miss the train to New York. As I sat there, it suddenly occurred to me that there would probably be no Mexican girls in Vermont. I was surprised I had not thought of that before Garrett and I started riding to Santa Rosa. I reckon I just got caught up with the idea of going to the Garrett School and forgot about how much I loved Mexican women and how much they seemed to love me. I thought about the time I spent in Chihuahua learning Spanish and loving every minute in the arms of so many señoritas I lost track of their names.

  New York City teemed with people and all kinds of horse-drawn carts, carriages, and buggies. The streets smelled like a New Mexico horse corral that hadn’t been cleaned in five years and a rainstorm had just passed through. I found a restaurant close to the railroad station and ordered a plate of bacon and eggs with biscuits. The coffee tasted lots weaker than I was used to. Mexicans made coffee that would make a teaspoon stand up in the cup without touching the sides. I noticed that the waitress gave me some funny looks, as did some of the customers. When she came over to fill my coffee cup, I asked her what was so funny. Her face turned reddish pink with embarrassment. “It’s your hat, sir. I have never seen one so big.”

  “I reckon you have never been out West.”

  “No, I have never even been to New Jersey. Are you a cowboy?”

  “I sure am. What is your name?” I asked, thinking she might invite me home.

  “Sadie,” she replied.

  I kept her in conversation for a few minutes until her boss yelled at her to get to work. So much for a chance at some female companionship, even though Sadie was not Mexican.

  I looked through the window of the railroad car and saw forests and farms along the way. We crossed several rivers as the train moved steadily north, first to Connecticut, then through Massachusetts and into Vermont. There was still plenty of daylight left when the train stopped at Bellows Falls. I jumped down to t
he platform and made my way over to the stationmaster’s office, where I inquired about transportation to Spring River. The man at the desk told me about a stage that would be by in a half hour, so I sat down in the small waiting room. I was glad he did not inquire about why I wanted to go to Spring River.

  When the stage finally pulled in, I asked the driver what the fare was to Spring River. He looked me up and down and asked if I was going to the Garrett School as a student. I told him that I was to be a student there if I ever got there.

  “Well, sonny,” he said. “If you’re a Garrett boy there’s no charge. I collect from the school office every month with the passenger count.”

  I was delighted that the stage was free. I still had a bunch of double eagles, but I wanted to make sure I had enough to get back to New Mexico Territory in case the Garrett School gave me the willies.

  The stage driver let me off at the entrance to the main building. A sign told me that the red-brick structure, three stories high, was where I could find the headmaster. I must say that when I walked into Mr. Haroldson’s office, I nearly turned around to leave. He had received Garrett’s letter and tuition money, but he sounded like he cared little about my arrival. I wondered if he had ever been to the West. Somehow, it seemed to me that coming such a distance to attend his school should have made the man appreciate my presence more than he sounded. I was soon to learn that Haroldson considered himself so far above anyone else at the Garrett School that it wouldn’t have made any difference if I had come in from China. He gave me a cold welcoming talk about what was expected of me, and then gave me directions to the office of Jacob Logan, the master who would assign me a room in one of the two dormitories and tell me what my schedule of classes would be.

  They assigned me a room on the second floor of Jackson Hall because I was entering as a junior classman. Logan asked if I would prefer a single room or have a roommate. I didn’t hesitate to tell him I would much rather live alone. He said that ordinarily there would be no choice, but there was a dearth of students enrolled for the year. I didn’t have any idea what he meant by dearth, but I wanted to remember the word when I found a dictionary.