Olinger glanced upward at the worrisome voice and in that half second must have recognized what was next. The Kid then fired both Whitney barrels with their thirty-six heavy shot into the deputy’s head and chest. Ameredith R. B. Olinger was dead before he hit the ground, his face torn to pieces.
The Kid rammed his shoulder into the frail closet door to the armory, and it gave way. Choosing twin holstered pistols, a Winchester rifle, and a box of bullets, he clanked out to the hallway again and looked through the north window to Main Street. Half of Lincoln seemed to be there, but no one was venturing to do more than murmur.
Looking down the courthouse staircase, he saw Gauss hesitantly ascending. “I won’t hurt you, Gottfried. Just get me that prospector’s pickax, won’t ya?”
Whether it was in friendship or fear, Gauss obliged and went out.
The Kid sat down to load his stolen weapons, and when he finished Gauss was tossing up the pickax. Widening his legs on the stair step, the Kid slammed down the little pickax over and over again until the chain that connected the ankle irons was chewed apart.
Like the Kid himself was a gun that could go off, Gauss was holding still. And then he was given the instruction to go to Judge Ira Leonard’s stable and saddle a horse.
The Kid walked out onto the balcony with his guns. Most of Lincoln’s wary citizenry was scattered in front of the Wortley Hotel but exercising restraint in halting Billy. Whether friends or foes of the Kid, no one manifested a disposition to molest him.
He yelled, “I fulfilled Bob Olinger’s ambition and sent him to Hell! I liked Jim Bell and did not want to kill him, but it was a case of have to! I haven’t considered myself bad heretofore, but I guess I’ll have to let people know hereafter what it is to be a bad man! And now I just want to ride out of town without interference!”
“We ain’t gonna stop ya, Billy!” Sam Wortley called back.
The Kid collected his worldly goods and headed downstairs.
Ira Leonard’s horses were elsewhere, but Gauss managed to thieve and saddle a skittish pony belonging to a clerk of the probate court, and he tugged that to the front hitching rail. The Kid got on the frantic, dancing animal after a few failed tries and told Gauss to tell the clerk he’d be sure to send his cayuse back to him. And then the Kid peaceably rode west on Main Street toward Fort Stanton, softly singing the Spanish waltz tune “La Golondrina,” about a flying swallow, worn-out and tossed by the wind, looking so lost and with nowhere to hide.
- 20 -
THE MANHUNT
Sam Corbet, a former clerk at the Tunstall store, sent an anonymous letter to Silver City’s New Southwest and Grant County Herald frankly and dispassionately detailing the facts of the jailbreak, and that account was repeated even in New York and London.
The editor of the Daily New Mexican seemed exhilarated by the escape, for though he lamented that the swashbuckling outlaw was again on the loose, “one can not help but admire the Kid’s coolness and steadiness of nerve.” The jailbreak was, the editor commented, “as bold a deed as those versed in the annals of crime can recall. It so far surpasses anything of which the Kid has been guilty until now that his past offen
ses lose much heinousness in comparison with it, and it effectually settles the question whether the Kid is a cowardly cut-throat or a thoroughly reckless and fearless man.”
Another paper reported that the happenings in New Mexico were so sensational that Ned Buntline, the highest-paid writer in America, the author of over four hundred dime novels, “is on the way to our territory to interview various men about the outlaw and thus secure material for blood and thunder literature.”
With hard riding Garrett made the forty miles from White Oaks to Lincoln right after he got the telegram with news of the tragedy. He held a kind of vigil in the dark shed where Olinger’s and Bell’s bodies were laid out, the red blood on their shirts now dried and stiff and maroon, Olinger’s face so mutilated it could have been mistaken for a heaped plate of food.
Gottfried Gauss walked in and told him, “The undertaker is here to undertake them.”
And Garrett admitted, “I feel responsible. I knew the desperate character of the man, that he was daring and unscrupulous, and that he would sacrifice the lives of a hundred men if they stood between him and liberty. And now I realize how inadequate my precautions were.”
Walking out into the fading light of evening, he found a journalist who was waiting there and who questioned the sheriff concerning people’s worries about the Kid being on the loose. The sheriff’s mood darkened even more as he caustically responded, “Don’t matter what the public feels about it. I’ll follow the Kid to the end of time, and there will be a fierce reckoning. There will be a whirlwind he will reap while desperately begging for my forgiveness.”
* * *
A quarter mile out of Lincoln after the jailbreak on the night of April 28, the Kid turned north to cross the rushing Rio Bonito and headed to the foothills of the Capitán Mountains. In Salazar Canyon, he found the jacal of José Cordova, who chiseled off the rivets to his ankle shackles, and near Las Tablas in the wee hours, the Kid woke up Yginio Salazar, who was now eighteen and still idolized his cousin.
Rattling with adrenaline, the Kid told Salazar about his jail escape and his killings, and Yginio took it all in with the solace of approval, telling the Kid that Olinger, for sure, needed killing and with Bell he was given no option. It was kill or be killed in a war that seemed to be never-ending. “Your Spanish friends love you and we’ll all hide you,” Yginio said. “But wouldn’t Old Mexico be safest?”
“There’s no job for me there. I need to get some loot first,” said the Kid.
Exactly as he’d promised he’d do, the Kid slapped the hindquarters of the Indian pony he’d stolen, and it trotted back to its owner in Lincoln. Then he stole a prized roan stallion and headed south past Agua Azul, weaving through shady forests of ponderosa pine and spruce to overnight at the farm of a John Tunstall ally. There he traded for a fresh horse and headed farther south to the Rio Peñasco, riding in melancholy over the sunny Los Feliz rangelands where he used to cowboy in order to get to the neighboring ranch and choza of Harry’s friend John Meadows. The Kid told his tales of woe, and then Meadows, too, urged him to continue down to Old Mexico for a fresh start. Ciudad Juárez was on the Rio Grande a little over one hundred miles southwest, and in the opposite direction was Fort Sumner, half again as far. The Kid failed to mention Paulita as he said his old friends there were enough of a draw that he felt the fort ought to be his destination, telling Meadows that he’d just hole up with shepherd pals for the summer or until he’d earned enough cash to head south.
John Meadows scolded the twenty-one-year-old that Pat Garrett had relatives in Sumner. The sheriff would hear he was there and find him and kill him, or the Kid would have to kill Garrett.
But the Kid would not be dissuaded, and rode northeast through sun-bleached grasses as high as his horse’s hocks, zephyrs dipping and lifting great swaths of fresh wild barley that seemed to rise and roll like the swells of a storm green ocean he’d never see.
* * *
On May 3, 1881, Lew Wallace again published the government’s offer of a five-hundred-dollar reward for William H. Bonney. Announced via the newspapers, it did not mention “dead or alive,” but those conditions were presumed.