* * *
In the house, the Kid said, “We can’t just stay here and fry.” With handkerchiefs to their faces, they all turned at the sudden liveliness. “I’m thinking a few of us might could sneak out the kitchen for the east gate. We’ll draw fire and distract the shooters enough that you can get out the river gate and slide down to the Rio Bonito.”
The crack and collapse of an overhead joist fostered their agreement.
Harvey Morris, José Chávez y Chávez, and of course Tom Folliard joined the Kid in hanging out by the east wing’s kitchen. The Kid took the loan of a gun for his left hand to twin with his right and was, as usual, smiling. “Okay, how do we get outta this?” he asked. When they frowned, he said, “Quick, fast, and in a hurry.” And he took the lead in crouching outside into a night illumined by the bonfire of the once stately home before he raced to the east gate.
John Kinney’s men and a few infantry and cavalry soldiers noticed and fired at his party, felling Harvey Morris before he’d gone three yards. But the Kid was shrewd and sudden at whatever he did. Gun sights would find and then lose him. Certain kills ended up cracking pickets and chopping dirt. With his Regulators running past him, the Kid fired with both hands like a trick shot artist, finally holding his aim on the face of his former employer, John Kinney, and in a rare miss shooting off only a wing of his mustache. The Kid then jumped the picket fence and took a hunkered run for the tamarisks alongside the Rio Bonito, followed by those who’d joined him.
They escaped homicide but others did not. Waiting by the north gate on the east side of the backyard were the Seven Rivers ranchers and possemen Robert Beckwith, Ma’am Jones’s son Johnny, and Andy Boyle. Jones and Beckwith hated each other because of a cattle dispute, but they had been ordered by Kinney to position themselves near McSween’s chicken coop. They saw McSween run out of his house with some Mexicans around nine p.m., but with the barrage of gunfire from the sheriff’s men, they hustled back inside.
Andy Boyle later recalled, “Then the fire became promiscuous. And that was the time the big killing was made.”
Robert Beckwith shouted, “I am a deputy sheriff and I have got a warrant for your arrest!”
A half minute passed in a lull as Alex McSween considered his dilemma, and then he called out, “Will you take us as prisoners?”
“I have come for that precise purpose!”
McSween then stated, “I shall surrender!”
Beckwith walked cautiously toward McSween’s voice and found him crouching near the east kitchen against an exterior wall. Alex was without a gun, but when Deputy Beckwith held out a hand to help him stand, McSween so hated the loss of his possessions and his livelihood that he changed his mind, yelling, “I’ll never surrender!”
An infantry soldier mistaught by the Indian wars took that as an invitation, and in friendly fire killed Robert Beckwith with a head shot.
Johnny Jones just considered the soldier with curiosity, like he’d been calculatingly rude, then he looked back at the scene. Hundreds of bullets chattered at Alexander McSween’s crew, with the Canadian stuttering forward in his dying walk, hit four times from waist to neck until a shot located his skull and he fell dead, his three flourishing years in Lincoln ended by gunfire from every whichway. Vincente Romero and Francisco Zamora were next to die, and then the youth Yginio Salazar was hit with gunshots to his shoulder and back.
All was still except for a few far-off gunshots that popped like fiesta firecrackers. John Kinney and his Rio Grande Posse delicately walked into the yard to stand over the bodies and watch for breathing.
Oozing blood and playing possum, Salazar felt his ribs kicked testingly by Andy Boyle and heard Kinney say, “Don’t waste a shot on that greaser, he’s dead as a herring.” Even as scavengers looted the Tunstall store and the victors celebrated with whiskey, Salazar waited.
The officers and men from Fort Stanton joined in the anarchy for a while but, once filled with rations and drink, were ordered into their tents and slept without nightmares of having done nothing to halt the bloodshed, help the wounded, or even bury the many dead, whose bodies stayed overnight where they’d fallen.
An hour before dawn, when only a few infantry guards were not sleeping, Yginio Salazar finally risked his hesitant, bloodletting crawl for help, squirming forward on his belly for more than a mile to reach the home of Miguel Otero. Much later Miguel would recall that Yginio told him in Spanish, “Even in our great danger, the Kid was the coolest man I ever saw.”
* * *
Lieutenant Colonel Dudley took pride in waking before five, and he was fully dressed and inhaling the fresh morning air when he strolled to the incinerated house at sunrise, seeing only embers and ashes and a few kites of smoke. Robert Beckwith had been carried away by other deputies, but Harvey Morris, Alexander McSween, Vincente Romero, and Francisco Zamora were just where they’d fallen eight hours earlier. Some hungry chickens were pecking at their faces. In a gesture he thought of as gallant, the post commander found a patchwork quilt that had been looted from the Tunstall store and slung it over Alexander A. McSween’s corpse, scattering hens, then he headed for a hot coffee.
- 12 -
ADRIFT
Excited, jittery, and still electrified by the threat of death, the Kid snuck back into Lincoln that night and stole cavalry horses for himself and Tom Folliard. Then they splashed north across the Rio Bonito to the foothills where Regulators in hiding whistled to them. They congregated on a mesa, and each squatted with his soft horse’s head next to his own, reins in hand just in case there were soldier pursuers. A few partook of some kitchen rye. His heart still hectic with the could-haves of the murderous night, the Kid even smoked one of Fred Waite’s machine-made cigarettes just to see if it would calm his jangling nerves.
Doc Scurlock read his Elgin pocket watch in the moonlight and announced, “Almost three in the morning. I was about to siwash.”
Tom Folliard asked, “What’s that mean?”
“Sleep. Old Indian term.”
Charlie Bowdre told Billy, “Real sorry we had to absquatulate earlier.”
Tom Folliard began to ask, “What’s ab—”
“Decamp,” Doc Scurlock said. “Hurry off. Leave abruptly.”
“It’s just a word,” said Bowdre and returned to Billy. “We was sore tormented that they had that howitzer square on us so we hightailed it, but we sorta made you boys the escapegoats.”