The Sons of Grady Rourke (33 page)

Two thousand rounds criss-crossed the street inside the brilliant orange cloud of smoke and fury. Alexander McSween and two men ran from the house moments before the roof burst into flames.

Harvey Morris, McSween's law clerk, dropped mortally wounded.

Five bullets thumped into McSween's body. He fell into a bleeding heap. Sparks rained down on the dead lawyer's muddy face.

Sean Rourke crawled toward a corner of what was left of an adobe wall. Moving on his elbows, his revolver led him toward the corner. At the instant he hesitated, a muzzle eased around the corner from the other side. Sean backed away as the Remington at his face extended further. Gunfire rang so loudly in Sean's ears that in a moment he could hear nothing.

As Sean continued to crawl backward, an arm followed the Remington around the corner. Sean rested the grip of his pistol on a hard pile of horse droppings. A sweating face bathed in orange light poked around the corner. The Regulator's wide eyes met Sean's face.

The Regulator earred back the hammer on his revolver. When he looked up, he saw Sean's face illuminated by the burning house. The Regulator blinked when firelight swirled around the folds of wrinkled, purple skin on Sean's right cheek. In the instant the Regulator's face filled with terror at the sight of Sean's grotesque wound, Sean squeezed the trigger that rested just under the stranger's chin. Sean blinked when the blast exploded the top of the Regulator's head in a red and gray slurry.

The crackling of gunfire trailed off at midnight.

The shooting from the Regulators trickled to nothing. Only the roar of the fire filled the night and Susan McSween's face.

George Peppin and John Kinney walked up the street. Approaching the house, they found Alex McSween's body beside two dead Regulators. One of Peppin's deputies lay dead nearby.

Sean holstered his handiron and rubbed the manure from his knees and elbows. Jesse came up to his side.

“Did you find Patrick?” Jesse asked. Although the fire was waning and the shooting had stopped completely, Sean could hardly hear the question.

“Patrick?”

“Yes, did you find him.”

“No. Where's Liam?” Sean squinted into the darkness which quickly rolled over the glowing embers of the destroyed house.

“He was just with me.” Jesse Evans looked around. Deputies and Rangers walked through the ruins.

“Over here.” The voice was Liam's.

Sean and Jesse found him kneeling by the collapsed fence. He was tossing broken rails into the street. Beneath the pile of wood was Patrick's limp body. Sean rolled him over onto his back.

The last of the flames illuminated a ragged and purple, thumb-size hole in Patrick's forehead.

A
S THE RUBBLE OF THE
M
C
S
WEEN HOME SIMMERED ALL
Friday night, the looting started. The Rio Grande Posse cleaned out Tunstall's store by dawn, Saturday. When the shelves were bare, they broke into Tunstall's bank and emptied its coffers. When the looting ended because there was nothing left to steal, Colonel Dudley marched his cavalry out of Lincoln at four o'clock in the afternoon. He left a sergeant and two privates behind to patrol the streets.

As the Army rode slowly out of town, they passed Susan McSween standing beside another hole in the ground between Tunstall's store and the muddy Rio Bonito. Scowling at Colonel Dudley as he passed, she threw a clod of earth into her husband's grave next to Cyrus Buchanan and John Tunstall.

S
EAN AND
L
IAM
rode up the lane of Grady's Rourke's ranch on Sunday afternoon, July 21st, 1878. The two women and the child met them at the doorway. Liam dismounted. Sean did not.

Under a dazzling mountain sky, Sean Rourke removed his hat and set it on his saddle horn. Beneath him, Liam stepped onto the porch.

Bonita spoke first.

“Patrick's dead, ain't he?”

“Yes.” Sean looked uphill toward Liam's garden. “Doc Ealy will bring him home tomorrow. Put him, gentle, up there, next to Ma and Pa.” He looked back at the wet-eyed women. Liam unbuttoned his muddy shirt and pulled out a folded piece of paper. He handed it to Melissa Bryant. Tears ran from her eyes, the color of the Sunday sky.

“That's why we didn't come up yesterday.” Sean spoke slowly and looked down lovingly at Melissa. “McSween's partner, Mr. Shield, drawed that up for me last night. It's what he called an election against Patrick's estate. Pa ain't left me nothing here. But when Patrick died”—Sean blinked hard and looked back toward the garden—“his half of the ranch under Pa's will went half to me and half to Liam.” He looked back at his family. “That there paper is my quarter of the ranch. I'm giving it to you, Melissa. You and Abbey have a home now. Liam will take care of all of you. That goes for you, too, Bonita. Cyrus would have wanted you to stay here. None of you needs to be kept by no Jimmy Dolan no more.”

“But Sean,” Bonita stepped forward and raised her hand to the mounted man's leg.

“No.” Sean squinted in the sunshine at John Chisum's steers and Liam's full garden. “This is good land. You can all grow old here. The war in Lincoln is over.”

“What about you?” Bonita's face softened and her eyes glowed. It was the face Cyrus had loved.

“There's still gold in California. I'm going to find it.”

Melissa and Abigail stepped to Bonita's side. Liam stayed in the porch shadows.

Sean looked at Melissa.

“Give my brother his soul back, Melissa. Make up for the one in you that I killed.”

Melissa held her daughter's shoulder tightly.

“Maybe one day, I'll come home.” Sean gathered his reins. “God bless you all.”

The women and Liam watched the lane until the hot earth sucked up the last of the cloud of dust that followed the first son of Grady Rourke.

S
UNDAY NIGHT WAS
closing in on Sean after riding easily for thirty-five miles. On the stage road into the Sacramento Mountains, he reined up beside the Rio Tularosa and Blazer's Mill. He could still see the bullet holes in the old sawmill under the quarter moon in a perfectly clear sky. He groaned when he climbed down and tied his weary horse to the front porch.

“Ain't your ranch the other way?”

William Henry Bonney stepped out of the shadow.

Sean looked hard at the boy who was not yet twenty. When Sean saw that he was not wearing his gunbelt, he lifted his hand from his handiron inside his duster.

“I made some coffee inside,” Billy said with his front teeth shining in the moonlight.

“Thanks.”

Sean uncinched his saddle and laid it on the porch.

“Where's Doc Blazer?”

“Gone to Santa Fe. Too hot for him lately.” Billy smiled.

“Yes.”

“You can bed down here, if you want. It's just me.”

“Where you going, Billy?”

“Sheriff Peppin still wants my hide. Thought I'd hide out in Silver City for a piece. My ma is buried down there. She died of the consumption when I were just fifteen.”

“It's hard, ain't it, Billy?” Sean's face sagged in the moonlight.

“Sometimes.” Billy smiled easily. “And sometimes, it ain't.”

Sean nodded.

“What about you, Sean? Where you headed?”

“California.”

“Ain't been there. Maybe one day.”

“Look me up.” Sean stepped onto the porch. He inhaled the delicious smelling coffee through the broken window.

“You can tell folks out there you know'd me when.”

“I'n do that, Billy.”

William Bonney's clean-shaven, boyish face became serious.

“When you do, I'm thinking of changing my name.”

“Oh?”

“Yes, sir. I'm going to call myself Kid.”

“Kid Bonney?” Sean tried not to smile as he walked inside. His spurs made music on the wooden floor.

“No. Billy the Kid.”

An historical novel should be slightly less than a post-graduate dissertation and must be slightly more than a pack of lies. Nearly all of the principal players in this story are real, historical figures from the 1878 anarchy in New Mexico now known as the Lincoln County War. Actual names are used for such persons. The author assumes responsibility for offense taken by their living heirs and descendants. Of the primary characters in this story, only Grady Rourke and his sons, and Cyrus, Melissa, and Bonita are fictional.

The author acknowledges his debt and abiding gratitude to the scholars of the Lincoln County War whose texts are the sources for the historical accuracy of this story:

Maurice G. Fulton,
History of the Lincoln County War
, University of Arizona Press, Tucson, 1968 (Robert N. Mullin, editor). Susan McSween's frontispiece quotation is from page 270.

Joel Jacobsen,
Such Men as Billy the Kid:
The
Lincoln County War Reconsidered
, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 1994. John Tunstall's frontispiece quotation is from page 20.

Donald R. Lavash,
Sheriff William Brady: Tragic Hero of the Lincoln County War
, Sunstone Press, Santa Fe, 1986.

John P. Wilson,
Merchants, Guns and Money: The Story of Lincoln County and Its Wars
, Museum of New Mexico Press, Santa Fe, 1987.