She faced her food. “Am not.”
“She finds the bad boy fetching!”
“Quit it,” she said, her face flushing.
All the dinner guests were fondly looking at the two. The Kid stood up from the table. “This has been lovely,” he said. “Scrumptious dinner and there was such”—he sought a high-flown word and found it—“conviviality.”
Pete lifted his golden chalice in a false farewell toast and then finished it.
Paulita got up, too, saying, “I’ll walk you out.” And she touched the Kid’s forearm with a soft, consoling hand in their walk as she said, “I’m so sorry for my stupid brother’s rudeness. And none of the others sticking up for you. It’s indecent.”
The Kid smiled and said, “I was about to lose my cherubic demeanor.” He put on his gentleman’s derby hat and gallantly offered, “But I guess I gave Pete ammunition with all my disorderly doings.”
She seemed serious and old beyond her years as she asked, “So, are you changing your ways?”
“If they let me.”
“They,” she repeated. She seemed to find some wifely satisfaction over his tardy improvement, and then was all formal politeness. “I do hope we’ll see you again in spite of this evening’s unpleasantness.”
“I’d take kindly to that.” Then he remembered his gift and reached into a velvet side pocket as he said, “Oh here, for you. I didn’t have a bow or paper or anything to wrap it.” And he drizzled into her waiting hands the gold lady’s watch that Henry Hoyt had given him in exchange for Sheriff Brady’s horse.
She held it up to candlelight. “But it’s dazzling, Billy! You take my breath away! Oh, I’m so happy! I love it!”
“Well, good.”
She hesitated and in a sudden flash kissed his cheek. Embarrassed by that forwardness, she withdrew into the frilly white feminine bedroom as he let himself out, snugging the front door quietly closed.
And then he found himself at the old quartermaster store. “Saval’s still butlering,” he said. Celsa smiled as she let him in and she invited his carnal enjoyment.
* * *
Hard winds and slanting snowdrifts as deep as his horse’s stifle slowed his uphill journey from Fort Sumner to a full six days, but the Kid managed to get to Lincoln on the afternoon of February 18, exactly one year since John H. Tunstall was assassinated. He’d heard that Jesse Evans, his former captain with the Boys and in the sheriff’s posse that killed Harry, was using Fort Stanton like a free hotel, going and coming as he pleased, so the Kid had written him there, saying,
I have been shifting from can to can’t and am wanting to shuck our fractiousness. Won’t you and Jimmy meet me in Lincoln on Tuesday, the 18th instant?
The Kid first went to Juan Patrón’s house and store, where Tom Folliard was holing up. Juan’s wife, Beatriz, served them Arbuckles’ Ariosa coffee and told them Jimmy Dolan had effected a truce with Susan McSween so he could buy the Tunstall store. Susan would be holding a piano recital that evening in the home Juan still referred to as Saturnino Baca’s. Half the town would be there.
Around five Tom and Billy sloshed through wet snow and mud on Lincoln’s only street until they got to Frank McCullum’s Oyster House, which overlooked the charred joists and rot of the late Alexander McSween’s home. They ate hearty as Tom chattered boastfully about having defiled “a pretty doxy from Socorro just behind the Torreón. Locals got a name for the area but I forget.”
“El Chorro,” the Kid said.
“Yes! Exactly! What’s that mean?”
“The squirt.”
Tom Folliard guffawed in a way that caused him to lose some food.
Just before seven they got to Baca’s, where children were scrunched up on the floor, genial women were laying their overcoats on a bed, Jimmy Dolan was lurking near the Steinway piano with Jacob B. Mathews, Sheriff Brady’s deputy on the morning BB was killed. Jesse Evans was seemingly on parole, for he was sitting there with a ferocious Texas cowhand named Billy Campbell and they looked like they hadn’t heard a good joke in years. Jesse noticed the Kid but did nothing since he was dealing with the sour wreckage of drunkenness.
Susan McSween seemed none the worse for wear in a fine gown and an excess of jewelry, and she delightedly greeted the fine-looking “Red Tom” Folliard with a lingering hug and, as an afterthought, Billy—whom she still condemned as “one of those foolhardy boys.” She said, “There’s someone very important to me that I should like you to meet.”
So they were introduced to Huston Ingraham Chapman, a heavy attorney and railroad engineer whom she’d met in Las Vegas and with whom she was cohabiting. Chapman had lost his left arm to a hunting accident in Oregon at the age of thirteen and overcompensated with high dudgeon and irascibility in his practice of law—he was a rule-or-ruin sort that few people liked. And now his right hand kept tenderly petting his red, windburnt face, for he was, he explained, “suffering from neuralgia.” Seeing Tom Folliard’s frown, he defined it as “sudden intensity of pain in a nerve.” Still, he was feisty, and as he talked there seemed to be no lack in him of affidavits, motions, stipulations, and outrage. Enemies aplenty he had, some identical to the Kid’s—Judge Warren Bristol, District Attorney Rynerson, and in particular Lieutenant Colonel Nathan Dudley, whom Susan McSween intended to have prosecuted for murder and arson. Huston Chapman’s hazel eyes never strayed from the Kid’s face as he talked about the miscreants, until he finally asked, as if he’d found a new client, “Aren’t there civil warrants out for your arrest?”
But then Susan McSween was sitting at the pianoforte and announcing, “I shall be performing Chopin’s Études this evening. Opus ten. Composed in eighteen thirty-three. The first is called ‘Waterfall.’?” When that was over she announced
in sequence “Chromatique,” “Tristesse,” “Torrent,” “Black Keys,” “Lament,” and “Toccata.” Each was mercifully short, but little Jimmy Dolan would not leave the Kid alone with his restless eyes, and Chopin’s music seemed to hath not the charm to soothe the savage Evans and Campbell. When the opus was finished with “Revolutionary” and Susan McSween stood to more fully absorb the adulation and applause, Evans and Campbell were impatiently standing, too, and giving Jimmy and J. B. Mathews the high sign.
The Kid and Tom shouted some praise to Susan, and she offered a queenly wave as they went outside, following the Dolan faction. Yginio Salazar was healed up from the gun wounds of the Big Killing, and he scrambled up from Susan’s fainting couch to follow his cousin.