* * *
John William Poe was a cattle detective for the Canadian River Stock Association in Tascosa, and because so much rustling seemed to have its origin in Lincoln County, he went there and established headquarters in White Oaks in March 1881. Chancing upon Sheriff Pat Garrett in a saloon, Poe chatted about his job scouring the rangeland for stolen livestock, and Garrett finished a jar of whiskey and asked, “Why don’t you become my deputy, haul in evildoers, and get paid twice over?”
Poe did that, and it was he who rode the forty miles from White Oaks to Lincoln to find his boss in the Wortley Hotel, telling him that a White Oaks drunk was sleeping off his hard night in a haymow at West & Dedrick Livery & Sales when he overheard Sam and Dan Dedrick talking about the Kid hiding in and around Fort Sumner.
“Was your informer still squiffed?” Garrett asked.
Poe said, “I just know the Dedricks are old friends of Bonney.”
In June the sheriff had written a letter of inquiry to Emanuel Brazil, but it was not until July 11 that he’d gotten a reply, with Brazil admitting, “The Kid’s so much in the proximity that I am afraid to go outside.” And now this. John Poe was looking at him with the furrowed brow of Why not? Garrett felt forced to act and finally decided, “We’ll go get Kip McKinney.”
Thomas C. McKinney was a deputy US marshal with his office in the still-small town of Roswell. Garrett scared him up there on July 12 and took McKinney and Poe out to his homestead ranch to have Apolonaria’s menudo soup and tamales. Garrett had warned his deputies to make no mention of the Kid, but Kip McKinney thanked Garrett’s wife for the scrumptious food and just to make conversation said, “Heard you once lived where we’re heading!”
With a fierce stare Garrett hushed him, then he turned to his wife. She had a stricken look. “Celsa will be fine,” he said.
At sundown on the twelfth, the Lincoln County lawmen headed north for Fort Sumner, achieving about thirty miles of the eighty before finally picketing their horses in the wee hours and sleeping just off the Rio Pecos in their fewest clothes for the cool.
Waking at sunup to the noise of critters thrashing in the weeds in one of nature’s kill-or-be-killed dramas, the sheriff found Poe and Kinney awake, too, fully dressed and squatting by the river as they smoked in silence. Lying back with his hands behind his head he told them, “The Kid is a likable fellow. Often quiet. There’s no fuss or bluster in him. Wasn’t ever quarrelsome, never hunted trouble. But there’s something about him even when he’s friendliest that makes you feel he could be dangerous to take liberties with. I never saw him mad in my life. Can’t remember when he wasn’t smiling. But he’s the most murderous youth that ever stood in shoe leather, and he’s game all the way through.”
* * *
July 13 the Nugget newspaper in Tombstone, Arizona, reported, “Parties now in Las Vegas bring the information that Billy the Kid is on the Red River, near the Texas line, at the head of twenty men.” And on that Wednesday, the sheriff and his deputies instead journeyed another fifty miles on the Goodnight-Loving cattle trail in a hundred-degree oven, hearing the sizzling noise of locusts in the sagebrush and snakeweed, feeling their sweat soak their shirts and vests and scallop their hatbands, riding in silence into each heat shimmer ahead before finally halting to camp in sandhills near Taiban Creek. Emanuel Brazil was to meet them there, but fear of the Kid’s vengeance made him a no-show.
Still fruitlessly waiting for him at midnight, Garrett finally ended his silence to confide to his men, “I know now that I will have to kill the Kid. We both know that it must be one or the other of us if we ever meet.”
- 21 -
“QUIéN ES?”
After a breakfast of hardtack and coffee on Thursday, July 14, Sheriff Garrett and his deputies walked up a high hill and Garrett used his field glasses to scan the prairie between them and the fort, finding nothing but far-off sheep and boy herders with sticks long as fishing poles. The sheriff determined that he and Deputy McKinney were too familiar in Sumner, and that Deputy Poe, who’d never been there, should ride in and reconnoiter.
Hitching his horse in front of Beaver Smith’s Saloon at ten, Poe saw the old owner tilting back in a front porch chair. Smith frankly asked, “Who are you and why are you here?”
John Poe offered his name, told him he’d scavenged too little ore from Lone Mountain near White Oaks, and now, “With my tail between my legs, I’m wandering back to my homestead on the Red River, in Mobeetie, Texas.”
“Hidetown?”
“Yep, we used to call it that. When there was still buffalo.”
Smith stood up. “Are you thirsty?”
Soon there were ill-humored and questioning men crowding around him in the saloon. Poe ponied up for house whiskeys and introduced various topics of conversation until he could innocently worm in a few tourist questions about this Billy the Kid. Wasn’t he a resident once? Any of you see him kill Joe Grant? Who’s this sweetheart I been hearing about?
Each time the Kid was mentioned, silence chilled the room and glances were exchanged so that he was forced to return to homely saloon talk, like him getting to watch the Albuquerque Browns play semiprofessional baseball on the fairgrounds. Couldn’t make head nor tail of the game.
At noon Poe lunched alone on tacos and then loitered in the shade, making affable comments about the hot weather to passersby and finding some willing to get into conversations. But whenever he would undertake even a casual inquiry about the Kid, his companions would just walk off. He later told Garrett, “The fort’s residents were secretive and suspicious of me, and it was plain that many of them were on the alert, expecting something to happen.”
* * *
With the heat again at a hundred degrees on July 14, Celsa Gutiérrez doubled up on the Kid’s stolen palomino and they rode out to the salty alkali lake of the failed Apache and Navajo reservation at Bosque Redondo. Billy took off Celsa’s clothes and she took off his. They admired each other’s bodies and kissed and fooled around, then they swam and floated and splashed like children. Then the couple lay naked on the salt-limed shore, letting the fury of the sun dry them and then induce crooked trickles of perspiration.
The Kid woke to find Celsa up on an elbow, a full breast pillowing against him as she softly glided a finger over the gunshot wound in his thigh. She said in Spanish, “I forget how you got this.”
“Jacob Mathews shot me in Lincoln.”
“But why?”
“Well, fair’s fair, I guess. I was trying to kill him.”