Authors: Ron Hansen
Fred Waite handled a buckboard to stock up on groceries in the village, and when the shortcut along the hilly Ham Mills trail got too rutted for apt-to-crack wooden spokes, Waite veered off toward the flatlands of the Wagon trail. Continuing on with Tunstall on horseback were just Dick Brewer, Robert Widenmann, William H. Bonney, and John Middleton, a heavyset horse thief of twenty-four who was wanted for killing a man in Texas.
Kid Bonney trotted a gray and spotted Appaloosa horse that was on loan to him and got up alongside Tunstall and his handsome but blind bay thoroughbred, Colonel. Looking to Billy, the Englishman said, “A splendid equine, wouldn’t you agree?”
“Without question,” Billy said.
“I have taught Colonel to high-step when the road gets choppy so his fetlocks aren’t injured. And he’ll prepare for changes of grade, up or down, just with my cautioning. Without any urging, he can walk twenty-five miles in five hours and a half. And he comes when I call him and follows me around as if he could see.”
“Wish envy was a more honorable emotion.”
Tunstall smiled. “I do hope I get to know you better, Kid Bonney. You have a certain
élan
, a
je ne sais quoi
that I find delightful.”
“Well, I recognize that last word. Thank you.”
Watching his forward cowhands rock in their saddles, Tunstall fondly said, “I feel the same way about Dick Brewer and Rob Widenmann. Rob takes as much care of me when I’m ill as if I were a fainting dowager. I get impatient with his coddling and once fetched my bulldog to snarl him away, but for generosity, courage, and the general manly virtues, Rob is truly a cracking good fellow.”
“Wasn’t aware you were sick,” the Kid said.
“Oh, it’s just rheumatism and too little sleep. Actually, I’m
still
very much below par, but I imagine I shall find my pins again by the time the buffalo grass greens up. In the meantime I have so many plans. Shall I tell you?”
His face gleamed with such childish exultation and fanciful sparkle that it felt a little like flirting. “Sure, Harry. Tell,” the Kid said.
“Well, betwixt you and me, there is a ranch adjoining mine that I want very badly. It could be got for only six hundred pounds and I believe I could reap over three hundred per annum. I am more convinced every day that land here is as fine an investment as one of my father’s merchant ships.”
“Like to get myself some cattle property one day. Fred Waite and I have a notion to partner on a ranch soon’s we get some cash.”
“Oh do it, Kid. Put down roots. I’ll help you.”
“I’d appreciate it.”
His employer’s stare then went to the horizon as he ruminated in silence. The Kid could hear the shrill cowboy whistles far ahead as Widenmann and Brewer collected the troop of delinquent horses and mules whenever they threatened to wander. The frozen fescue grass crackled under the hooves of the Kid’s horse. His Colorado saddle and doghouse stirrups creaked whenever he shifted his weight. Off in the distance there were galleons of shock-white cumulus clouds gathering in the wide sky’s cerulean harbor, and their azure shadows floated over the flatlands. Billy surprised himself by saying, “I love it here. I’ll never leave.”
And Harry smiled. “Nor shall I.”
* * *
Even at fifty-five, the white-bearded German, Gottfried Gauss, seemed too old and fat and harmless to harass, which is why John Tunstall had him stay behind at his hovel of a ranch house. And Gauss was squatting to tend a Dutch oven on a hissing fire outside when he heard the far-off racket of thirty horses and riders galloping toward the Los Feliz and stood with his hands on his aproned hips. Although he was so nearsighted that he often failed to make out faces less than five yards away, the cook recognized some of the gang called the Boys, but there were so many others with whom he wasn’t familiar, their horses panting, neighing, shaking their manes, and bumping as the jammed intruders sought and lost ground with each other. And then Jimmy Dolan rode up and loomed over the cook from his fourteen-hand pinto, his face scarlet with windburn and fury. “We’re a posse duly authorized by Sheriff Brady,” he said. “Where’s your boss?”
“A-vay,” Gauss said and flung a hand northward. “Lincoln.”
“He just left?”
“A-vile ago.”
“Who all’s with him in the beyont?”
“His hired hands.”
“I needs a number.”
Gauss counted no more than one right hand of fingers and said, “Five.”
Jimmy told Jesse Evans, “We don’t all need to go, then.” And so he called out names: Jesse Evans, Frank Baker, and Tom Hill of the Boys. Deputy George Hindman of Lincoln. And Andrew “Buckshot” Roberts, Robert Beckwith, John Wallace Olinger, and William S. “Buck” Morton of the just plain ornery.
Gottfried Gauss would later testify that he heard Buck Morton cry out, “Hurry up, boys. My knife is sharp and I feel like a scalping.” And then Dolan and his handpicked men vigorously raced toward the Ham Mills trail while those now with nothing to do shoed and curried their horses or partook of the old cook’s food.
* * *
Around five o’clock and still ten miles from Lincoln, Widenmann rode back to Tunstall and said, “Vee haf seen a flock of wild turkeys. Would you like a goot dinner?”
“Capital idea,” Harry said. And he told Rob to go off on the hunt, he’d mind the horses.
The Kid was two hundred yards behind, riding drag with John Middleton, who was claiming there was a twelve-hundred-dollar reward for his hide in Texas. And Billy said, “Well, if you die, and I hope you never do, I’ll try to collect it.”
“At least I’d be good for somethin,” the horse thief said.
Off to the Kid’s right and far ahead, Brewer and Widenmann were in a kind of steeplechase over sagebrush and rills and runnels, hollering and laughing as they fired their pistols at wild turkeys that hopped aside or ran in a zigzagging way or flew in an ungainly flapping of wings that seemed to be without practice. And then the Kid heard galloping and spun in his saddle to see nine riders racing like floodwater over a hillcrest, firearms in their hands and lifting and holding on him. He saw spurts of smoke from the guns before he heard the gun reports, and then there was a sizzle as one bullet flew past his head.
Widenmann and Brewer were still lost in their childish joy in the canyon, hurrahing and circling as the wild turkeys succeeded in evading their horse-jolted and horse-waggled aims in the scrub oak and chaparral. The Kid spurred his gray to warn them and looked over his shoulder to see that a trio of pursuers were in a sprint right behind him, though their mounts seemed to be hard-used and tiring, a pinto whose owner was Jimmy Dolan being one of them. The Kid cried out to his friends and frantically waved both arms. Brewer noticed and frowned at the ruckus, then wheeled his horse around and fired his gun before ducking behind his horse’s head when a fresh volley answered him. Widenmann hurried for a hillside that was jagged with tombstones of rock, and Brewer and the Kid did, too, jumping down from their steeds and hiding, then raising to shoot at the villains who’d grandly called themselves a posse.
The Kid called to Brewer, “Is that Buck Morton?”
Brewer shouted over the gun noise, “And Jesse Evans, I think.”
The Kid said to himself, “We used to be friends.”
John Middleton had seen that John Tunstall was far enough ahead to not recognize what was going on, so he sprinted his horse forward with half the posse in flagging pursuit and now getting out of pistol range, their horses were so done in. Middleton sang out, “Mr. Tunstall! Hey! Look here!”
Tunstall turned in his saddle. “What, John?”
“For God’s sake, follow me!”
Tunstall seemed not to get why his hired hands were fleeing. “What, John?” he called again. And then he appeared to recognize Jesse Evans running hard at him, guns no longer firing, and since they’d joked and shared a flask of whiskey when Jesse was in the Lincoln jail, Tunstall must have thought Evans was delivering a helpful message, for instead of galloping away he swerved Colonel around and loped toward the three men, a free hand raised up in hello or do-not-be-afraid.
The trio halted and instructed each other as Tunstall trotted forward with a friendly smile for Evans and some familiar faces, including the frowning one of Tom Hill.
His heart racing, the Kid stood up from the cold protection of a doghouse of stone, seeing the separated gang of Jimmy Dolan, George Hindman, and others skirt their horses around and away from Harry’s cowering ranch hands and head toward a trio some hundred yards off that seemed to be formally waiting for the genial Englishman. His horse Colonel nearly touched the nose of the horse of Buck Morton as greetings seemed to be exchanged. There followed a stillness, as if a secret judicial deliberation was going on, as if they were waiting for a verdict. And then the Kid watched in horror as Morton just calmly lifted his pistol and shot Harry in his chest. The force of it slammed him into a fall from his horse, and he was as quiet on the earth as a heap of coats.
Wanting to answer but realizing their guns would just spit up dirt at that range, Widenmann, Brewer, and the Kid could do nothing but hate as Tom Hill jumped down and, because his own gun was shelled out, took the Colt Peacemaker from the Englishman’s holster and, for officious assurance, executed John H. Tunstall with a shot through his head.
Jimmy Dolan seemed to say something and Tom Hill turned to listen. Then he looked at Tunstall’s solemn, unseeing bay horse, and Hill shot it in the head, too. Colonel fell on his front knees and then on his flank, fully dead. And in an insult they found hilarious, Evans and Hill laid Tunstall’s body out and tucked his saddle blanket around him as if he were sleeping, his head bleeding onto the pillow of his folded overcoat. Likewise, Jimmy Dolan had the hoot of squashing Tunstall’s felt fedora under the head of his favorite horse. And then the nine rode off.
John Middleton yelled out, “Boys, they have killed Harry!”
And I just watched
, Billy thought.
– PART TWO –
THE REGULATORS
(FEBRUARY 1878–JULY 1879)
- 9 -
“WORKING UP A GOOD HATE”
S
heriff William Brady wisely stayed on his dear-bought eighty-acre farm four miles east of Lincoln for all of February 18, playing with a few of his eight children when they were freed from the schoolroom run by Susan Gates. In the cold of twilight he wandered through his fruitless orchard and ghostly dry vineyard in his old blue Army officer’s overcoat. Watching the sun flare red as blood against the scraps of cirrus cloud in the west, he wondered if the deed had been done. And then he went inside for dinner.
On Tuesday morning the ex-major rode his Arabian sorrel horse into Lincoln and heard that forty outraged villagers had congregated in Alexander McSween’s house on the yesternight, offering Tunstall’s hired men and the McSweens their sympathy over the loss of their friend and demanding some kind of judicial retribution. Worried about a reprisal, Sheriff Brady used his old connections at Fort Stanton to get a detachment of soldiers to ride into Lincoln with the object of preserving the peace.
John H. Tunstall’s corpse was hauled the ten miles to the village in an oxcart and was examined in a postmortem by the post surgeon, Major Daniel Appel, who was assisted by Dr. Taylor Ealy, a Presbyterian medical missionary who’d just arrived in Lincoln at Alexander McSween’s invitation. They found that one bullet fractured the right clavicle and tore through the victim’s artery, which would have caused him to bleed to death within minutes; but there was another bullet that exploded just above the orbit of the left eye, fracturing the skull at entrance and exit.
In his diary that night, Taylor Ealy noted, “This is truly a frontier town—warlike. Soldiers and citizens armed. Great danger of being shot.”
At a coroner’s inquest into the death of John Henry Tunstall, employees and eyewitnesses Robert Widenmann, Richard Brewer, John Middleton, and William H. Bonney testified to the facts as they knew them with the result of a verdict of homicide against the so-called deputies Jesse Evans, William Morton, Frank Baker, Thomas Hill, George Hindman, and James J. Dolan. Recognizing that the sheriff would do nothing affecting his own posse, on Wednesday Lincoln’s justice of the peace issued warrants that were to be delivered to the indicted by the village constable, Atanacio Martínez, and his newly sworn deputies, Fred Waite and Kid Bonney.
With Winchester rifles crooked in their left arms, the trio took their warrants to the House and found idling with whiskeyed coffee inside the store William Brady, Lawrence G. Murphy, and Jimmy Dolan—Irish who’d gotten out of their country during the Great Potato Famine but still felt the pangs of not-enoughness.
“We don’t serve youse kind,” Dolan warned.
And Waite said, “The fact is we’re not interested in buyin what you’re sellin.”
“Aw, sure look it,” Major Murphy said. It was an Irish expression that could mean anything. Seeing the wrath in the faces of Waite and the Kid, Murphy drunkenly fell his way toward the storeroom door and hurriedly spoke inside, and immediately there was commotion as a lieutenant and six gloomy soldiers with weaponry joined the Irishmen. “Ready” was the lieutenant’s warning command, and the soldiers let their index fingers find the triggers.
Constable Martínez was cowed by the intimation of force, but Waite said, “We have warrants for the arrest of
you
, Jimmy, and for other members of the posse that the so-called sheriff here sent out to execute John Tunstall.”
Little Jimmy Dolan glowered. “It was self-defense.”
“The inquest said otherwise.”
Sheriff Brady stood up. “Let me look at those warrants.”
Lincoln’s constable handed them over, and Brady scoured them one at a time, his lips moving as he read. And then he smirked and tore the papers in half. “All these names belong to a legally constituted posse of the finest citizens procurable.”
Seeing the Kid inching up his Winchester, the Army lieutenant yelled, “Aim!” and six carbines were suddenly shouldered and leveled on the constable and his two deputies.