The first to testify on the witness stand was His Excellency Governor Lew Wallace, who was humiliated by Henry Waldo, a partner in the firm of Catron & Elkins. The vast majority of Waldo’s objections were sustained, and he forced the governor to admit that he’d gotten there from the East months after the incidents in question, his only acquaintance with affairs in Lincoln County being through the hearsay of intermediaries. The presiding judge was condescending in excusing the governor from further attendance at the inquiry.
Susan McSween did even worse, failing to recall things, seeming disinterested and confused, and confessing that she’d not fully read Ira Leonard’s affidavit concerning the arson of her home and the murder of her husband. She was soon to marry George Barber in Lincoln and was addled by wedding details.
Then “William Bonney, called the Kid, also Antrim,” took the stand and answered Waldo’s questions, in general regarding “Where were you on the nineteenth of July last, and what, if anything, did you see of the movements and actions of the troops that day?” After two tiring days of telling and retelling what happened during the Big Killing, Billy was told, “You may retire.”
Lieutenant Colonel Nathan A. M. Dudley then enjoyed the affirmations and encomiums of a host of Alexander A. McSween’s enemies, including Jimmy Dolan, Dad Peppin, post surgeon Daniel Appel, J. B. Mathews, and Sheriff’s Deputy Bob Olinger.
Ira Leonard sent a pessimistic report to the governor, calling Dudley “impetuous, vindictive, overbearing, self-conceited, and meddlesome” and noting, “I am thoroughly and completely disgusted with their proceedings.”
The Kid registered his own disgust on June 17, 1879, by wringing the iron cuffs off his hands and dangling the irons to his hospitable jailers in the Juan Patrón store, saying, “Boys, I’m tired of this,” and then just walking out the door and heading toward Fort Sumner on his stabled horse.
* * *
Foxes have dens and birds have nests, but the Kid had nowhere to lay his head. Either he slept in rooms above the saloons in Puerto de Luna and Anton Chico or he overnighted with Doc Scurlock in Fort Sumner or Charlie Bowdre in his new wrangler’s job at the Thomas J. Yerby ranch, or he sang for his dinner in the huts of the ever-welcoming Mexican sheepherders. José Trujillo said of him, “A todo el mundo le gusta El Chivato. Su mirada penetra hasta el corazón.” Everybody likes the Kid. His face goes straight to the heart.
Like his older brother, Josie, the Kid earned as a gambler, even affecting the flat-faced gold pinkie ring that card cheats used to mirror whatever they dealt, though such hints were useless in the games of faro and monte that he favored. The house, or bank, had an edge in those games, so he was ever the house, watching pixilated cowhands guess and guess again on cards until their wages were lost. And since he never drank, he never fell ill to a case of the stupids.
The Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad was famously having its grand arrival at the Las Vegas depot on July 4, so the Kid headed there to join in the festivities and visit his medical student friend Henry Hoyt, who was then bartending at the Cherokee Hotel on Railroad Avenue. Invited by Henry to the hotel’s free lunch, the Kid took a seat in a booth and saw a finely dressed man in his thirties walk in and lean over the oaken bar to make a quiet inquiry of the mixologist. Henry seemed surprised as he answered and lifted his dishclothed hand to indicate the Kid there in the booth, sitting agreeably with a glass of lemonade. The man looked over his right shoulder at Billy and seemed to like what he saw, for he limped over on a bad ankle, a glass of Anheuser-Busch lager beer in his hand. “I hear you’re Billy Bonney,” he said.
With hesitation, he said he was.
“You been selected.”
“For what?”
“Would you be so kind as to let me sit?”
The Kid threw his hand at the bench across from him, and the stranger took off a gentleman’s hat. His blinking eyes were blue, his hair was chestnut brown, his beard was trimmed in the fashionable style of a physician. He looked like someone rich and leisured who had the common touch. Offering his hand, he said, “Thomas Howard. Nashville, Tennessee.” The Kid shook it. “I have been looking for William H. Bonney. The Kid? I been reading about you in the papers.”
“You a reporter or a cattle detective?”
“Well, neither. You might say I’m an entrepreneur.”
“I have no idea what that means.”
Thomas Howard sipped some beer like he didn’t want to and put the half-filled glass on the table. “I run a very profitable commercial enterprise that involves enormous initiative and risk.”
It felt like the prelude to some kind of sales pitch. “Would you be hankering for a ham sandwich?” the Kid asked. “They’re free.”
“Ain’t no such thing as free, Kid.”
“Still, I’m hungry,” Billy said, and he was getting up when Thomas Howard forcibly gripped his wrist with a serious, malevolent, thou-shalt-go-no-further stare.
“Siddown.”
“I’m carrying,” the Kid warned him.
With gloomy, frightening earnestness, the man gritted out, “Likewise.”
The Kid flopped back in the booth like a scolded teenager.
Having got his way, the rage gradually left him, and Mr. Howard seemed to ruminate some before saying, “We had a gang that held up banks and trains, but we had a reversal of fortune. Some pals died, some went to prison. And now we and my family are on the backside of hard times and I’m on a recruiting trip.”
The Kid had an inkling. “This reversal of fortune. Where?”
It seemed a sore point, but the man from Tennessee said, “Northfield, Minnesota.”
The Kid took it in and then tilted forward to whisper, “You’re Jesse James!”