Читать книгу The Saga of Billy the Kid - Walter Noble Burns - Страница 4

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From South Spring Ranch you can see in clear weather across bare, rolling plains one hundred miles west as the crow flies the purple peak of El Capitan standing up against the horizon. Almost in the shadow of that mountain, a new power was rising to challenge Chisum’s supremacy—a power bold, sinister, and predaceous. It was inevitable that eventually the King of the Valley and the Lord of the Mountains should clash. They were competitors in business; their dominions adjoined; self-interest begot jealousy and hatred. So war clouds began to gather; at first no bigger than a man’s hand, darkening and bellying out portentously as the years went by and breaking at last in the thunder-drive of the Lincoln County war, bloodiest vendetta in the history of the Southwest.

About the time that Chisum settled in the Pecos Valley, Major L. G. Murphy, who had come to New Mexico with the California Column in Civil War days, was mustered out of the United States Army at Fort Stanton, an old military post dating back to 1854 and nine miles from Lincoln. For several years in partnership with Colonel Emil Fritz, mustered out at the same time, he ran a sutler’s store at the fort. He sold out his interest in this establishment at the suggestion of Major Glendenning, the commandant, who expressed disapprobation of his business methods.

 But Murphy had come to know the business possibilities of the well-populated mountain region isolated on every side by semi-arid plains from all other settlements in New Mexico, and he moved over to Lincoln and opened another store with John Riley and James Dolan as partners. He developed in time other business interests—a cattle ranch, a flour mill, a hotel, a saloon—and entered politics. He became in a few years the wealthiest man in the mountains and a political power to be reckoned with in Lincoln County.

Murphy had been educated for the priesthood, but at the last moment had entered the army instead of the Church. He had a certain scholarship which gave him prestige on a rude frontier. His character was a blend of priestly subtlety and soldierly boldness. With a flair for intrigue and conspiracy that might have won him distinction at the court of some mediæval monarch, this frontier Machiavelli was a master diplomat and was never more suave and urbane than when plotting the ruin of an enemy. But whatever his impulses or his plans, they were masked behind a cold and inscrutable face. Sagacious, crafty, clandestine, he kept in the background of his machinations and left to others the carrying out of his designs. By his opponents he was called treacherous, unscrupulous, and heartless, but whether or not he was as black as he was painted, there is no need to doubt that he was as dangerous a man as ever hid a sinister purpose behind a smile.

His partners were his puppets. He was the brains, they were the tools. Riley was a sly, malignant, subterranean little busybody with a gift for tunnelling, prying, ferreting out secrets. Dolan was a fire-eater and swashbuckler. For frictionless efficiency in team work, the triumvirate was above reproach. Murphy was the generalissimo, Riley the spy and scout, Dolan the fighter.

Fate weaves strange patterns. When Murphy was at the high tide of his prosperity in 1875, Alexander A. McSween and his bride, Mrs. Susan Hummer McSween, set out overland for New Mexico from their home in Atchison, Kansas. McSween was a native of Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, and had been educated for the Presbyterian ministry. With a pulpit open to him, he decided to take up the legal profession, moved to Kansas, graduated in law at Washington University, then a well-known school in St. Louis, hung out his shingle first at Eureka, Kansas, and later practised in Atchison. Mrs. McSween was born in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, where her colonial ancestors settled in 1731, and traced her ancestry back to the Spanglers of Frederick Barbarossa’s court, and of soldierly fame during the Crusades.

The McSweens were married in Atchison. McSween’s health not being robust, they decided to migrate to New Mexico, where in perennial sunshine and dry, pure air, McSween expected to regain his strength and establish himself in practice. Their tentative destination was Santa Fé; but they intended to look about them after their arrival and settle in whatever growing town seemed to offer the most promising opportunities for an ambitious young lawyer.

Their westward journey was a honeymoon trip, and as they travelled in leisurely fashion along the Santa Fé trail, this ancient highway of romance and adventure seemed to these young honeymoon gypsies a pathway of dreams leading surely to happiness and fortune. So it might have been but for their chance meeting with Señor Miguel Otero at Punta de Agua, once a famous landmark on the old freight trail, a short journey from Las Vegas.

Of a distinguished family, Otero was a member of the territorial legislature and knew almost everybody in New Mexico. He was bound on an eastern trip, and his camp at Punta de Agua was near that of the McSweens. While he smoked a cigarette after his camp-fire supper, a coyote began a serenade in the hills.

“That fellow,” called Otero to the McSweens, “sounds like he is a dozen.”

Well, so he did. The McSweens laughed. And Otero strolled over to their camp fire for a casual visit. As he stepped into the circle of light, the McSweens saw a dapper young Spaniard beaming friendliness. “I am Señor Otero,” he said. He might better have said, “I am Destiny.” If the coyote in the hills had kept silence that night, one of the chapters of New Mexico’s history that was written in blood might never have been written at all.

So, Señor McSween was a young lawyer looking for a good town in which to settle and build up a fine practice. Very well, Señor Otero knew just the place. Lincoln. The McSweens did not know there was such a place on the map. But Señor Otero should not be surprised to see it become a great centre some day. It was in the midst of a wonderful country. Growing. Becoming important.

But doubtless Señor McSween and his charming wife had heard of Señor Murphy. No? Never heard of Señor Murphy? Passing strange. Señor Otero gasped in astonishment to find two persons in the world who had never heard of Señor Murphy. A great man, rich, powerful, destined to wonderful things. If Señor McSween should desire to go to Lincoln, Señor Otero would be glad to give him a letter of introduction to his dear friend, Señor Murphy. Well, that might not be a bad idea, after all. So the letter was written by the light of the camp fire. Next morning the McSweens set out for Lincoln.

The little incident seems absurdly trifling. No rhyme or reason to it; it came out of thin air; just happened. Yet it is a sphinx’s riddle as inexplicable as life or gravity or the swing of the stars. Why did it occur? Why should it have occurred? What gods were asleep at the switch? Was the coyote some demon of darkness? Was Otero Mephistopheles in masquerade? Did some witch riding her broomstick against the moon hurl down a curse? A letter of casual courtesy, written by a stranger, met by accident, to a man they had never heard of in a town of whose existence they had never dreamed, changed the whole course of life for the McSweens, turned them aside from the happiness which apparently was their just due, and involved them in a strange tangle of tragedies which apparently they did not deserve. Fate crooked a beckoning finger from the Capitans, and without hesitation, blindly, blithely, they obeyed the summons.

The arrival of the McSweens in Lincoln was an event. Well-bred, well-dressed, well-educated, the couple introduced a new note into the village life. McSween’s scholarly attainments gave the gossips something to roll over their tongues, and when the pretty Mrs. McSween had unpacked her trunks and appeared on the street, tricked out in gowns that were the last word in Kansas City and St. Louis fashions, she caused a flutter among the wives and daughters of the town who had never feasted their eyes on apparel of such chic and elegance. Murphy received the couple with great cordiality. McSween in a short time was comfortably settled in a newly built home, a spacious adobe of one story after the manner of the country, and began the practice of his profession under singularly auspicious circumstances with Murphy’s firm as his most lucrative client. The favour of such an important personage as Murphy gave the young lawyer immediate prestige; the frontier took with considerable enthusiasm to litigation, if not to law, and McSween’s practice grew with amazing rapidity.

To add the completing detail to her pleasant and hospitable home, Mrs. McSween, an accomplished musician, ordered a piano shipped out from St. Louis, and her announcement of the coming of the instrument was the most exciting piece of news Lincoln had had since the Horrel boys shot up the town. The remote mountain village had only vague knowledge of pianos, based chiefly on pictures in infrequent newspapers and on the hearsay evidence of such of its citizens as had made the grand tour to Santa Fé. It knew fiddles, guitars, banjos, accordions, mouth-harps, and tin whistles, but not pianos. There never had been a piano in Lincoln and there probably was not, at that time, a piano in all the wide stretch of country between Las Vegas and the Staked Plains.

The fifteen-hundred-mile journey from St. Louis of Lincoln’s pioneer piano was not without interesting adventures. There was not a mile of railroad in New Mexico. The Santa Fé had reached only as far west as Trinidad in southern Colorado and was not to get south of the Raton Mountains until 1878. From St. Louis to Trinidad the piano travelled by rail. From Trinidad to Lincoln it was borne in state on a wagon drawn by four horses. No sooner had it made the toilsome passage over Raton Pass and headed southeastward for the Capitans than its progress became a matter of public moment. The news of its coming ran before it; the little Mexican towns along the way turned out as for a circus and watched it pass in awed silence. It was one of Lincoln’s big, historic moments when the four-horse team with its precious cargo came swinging into town through lanes of people in a sort of Roman triumph and backed up at the McSween door.

Lincoln took its pioneer piano to its heart. The instrument was a civic achievement that shed a certain metropolitan lustre on the community. The village swelled out its chest and boasted of its superiority over neighbouring villages. Las Cruces, Seven Rivers, Fort Sumner were good towns, in a manner of speaking, but—Lincoln shrugged a complacent shoulder—they had no piano. And to give colour to Lincoln’s proprietary interest in the piano, the whole town shared in enjoyment of its melodies. When Mrs. McSween let her fingers wander among its keys, the music could be heard in almost every house in the village, from Murphy’s store at one end to Juan Patron’s at the other. Mexican urchins in the street danced to it; labourers in the hay vegas along the Bonito swung their scythes to its rhythm; it set the entire village humming, singing, whistling. Lincoln came to date its lesser affairs from the red-letter day in the calendar that marked the piano’s arrival. If a housewife remarked with a severe wag of her head that her dominick rooster was hatched two days after the McSween piano landed in Lincoln, that settled all arguments about that chicken’s age.

For the frontier, McSween was a quaintly impossible character. A man of cultured intellect and an able lawyer, he was a visionary dwelling among ideals and dreams. He was instinctively and sincerely religious. Among the gambling, swearing, fighting men of the border, he was an island of Christian virtue entirely surrounded by tumultuous wickedness.

 His religion was not a carefully kept suit of clothes to be put on for church services on the Sabbath and left to hang in the closet the rest of the week; he lived it every hour of the day. It was not a spiritual abstraction but as real to him as sunshine. “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” was not merely a verse in the Bible, but the golden rule of his daily conduct. The Sermon on the Mount was not only gospel, but law as binding on him as if printed in one of the calf-bound statute books on his library shelves.

His ideal was the Christ ideal, and he did his honest best to live up to it. He had a childlike faith in the basic goodness of humanity. As there was no evil in him, he did not suspect evil in others. With pure motives himself, he was incapable of understanding the lengths to which passion and hatred could go. “Murder” was a dictionary word to him, but deep down in his heart he had no real conception of its meaning. So, in a sort of beautiful innocence, he moved through his tragic personal drama like Sir Galahad with serene eyes fixed on the Holy Grail.

What he lacked in physical bravery, he atoned for in moral courage. What he believed to be right he stood for unflinchingly, and neither danger, violence, nor threat of death could swerve him a hair’s breadth to right or left. It was unfortunate that he had not entered the ministry in his youth. He would have made an ideal pastor of some little church in a quiet countryside, and a sheltered parsonage, with family and friends about him, would have been his logical spiritual background. He was meant for a cozy chair and a book in some cheerful fireside ingle. The way in which his career was distorted by grimly sardonic circumstances seems less a psychological problem than an ironical enigma of destiny. He became a pawn in a mad, whirlwind game. Born for a cerebral life and the peaceful happiness of home, with no adventure in his soul, he was forced into the position of leader of a fighting faction in a bloody vendetta on a swashbuckling and lawless frontier.

Mrs. McSween was an entirely different kind of character. She was a good Christian but not of the meek and lowly type; militant rather; touched with the spirit of the old Covenanters of Presbyterianism’s fighting, moss-trooper days. When her husband had attained eminence as a lawyer in Lincoln, he often had to ride on long journeys to distant towns to try a case in court. Always on these trips the good man carried his Bible in his saddlebags and no matter how hard the day’s ride or wearying the day’s work, he was never too tired to read a chapter and then kneel down and say his prayers before he went to bed. This met with his wife’s whole-hearted approval.

“But,” she urged, “if you take your Bible in one pocket of your saddlebags, carry a six-shooter in the other. And if any man attempts to smite you on the right cheek, don’t lose time turning the left to him, but get out your gun and be sure to shoot first.”

“Why should I carry a gun?” replied the mild McSween. “I cannot conceive of any circumstances which would lead me to take the life of a fellow man.”

If McSween was an idealist and dreamer, his wife was intensely practical. She saw life clearly through the medium of sharp eyes and a shrewd brain. There was in her the quality of Ithuriel’s spear at whose touch sham and fraud and deceit stood revealed in their naked truth. She had no illusions regarding the men about her. She had lived in Lincoln but a little while before she saw through Murphy’s veneer of friendship and knew him for the dangerous man he was. Her personality was distinctly feminine, but it was also distinctly fearless. In the later times of feud, which tested the courage of men and women, she was no background figure sitting in silence in her home and shedding futile tears, but played her part in the thick of things and fought her own and her husband’s enemies by every means at her command, and bore herself with the dauntlessness of a Bayard sans peur, sans reproche. Of the many brave women who suffered and bore their crosses with stout hearts and uncomplaining fortitude through the long tragedy of the Lincoln County war, she was the outstanding heroine.

Lincoln was a busy little town in those days. It was the county seat of Lincoln County, which embraced a fifth of New Mexico and was as large as Pennsylvania and included what to-day are the counties of Lincoln, Chavez, Eddy, Otero, and a part of Doña Ana. It was the principal business centre of a country two hundred miles square, of high hills, agricultural cañons, valleys, and plateaus, isolated, in a way, from the outer world by the sentinel ranges of the Capitan, Jicarillo, White, Sacramento, Guadalupe, Organ, and San Andreas mountains. The region was drained eastward into the Pecos by the Bonito, Ruidoso, Hondo, Feliz, Peñasco, and the Seven Rivers, limpid streams fed by mountain snows, brawling over bars and riffles, spreading into quiet pools, and as beautiful and as musical as their names. To Lincoln, picturesquely situated where Bonito Cañon opens out into broad vegas and farmlands, people from all this region came to trade.

The lion’s share of the business went to Murphy’s store, housed in a large two-story adobe building, known through the country as “the Big Store,” and in fact the most important establishment of its kind in all eastern New Mexico. Murphy’s teams were constantly on the trail hauling in merchandise and supplies from Las Vegas, Santa Fé, and from the railhead at Trinidad, and Lincoln in that prosperous era was filled with people who came from miles around to shop and trade. Murphy’s hotel across the road from the Big Store could hardly accommodate the crowds, and money was jingling day and night across the bar of Murphy’s saloon which, on a thirsty frontier, was like the shadow of a rock in a weary land.

Life in Lincoln had stepped to a lively tune since the town was founded back in the ’fifties. War parties of Apaches sometimes swarmed down upon the village. The round stone tower with embrasures and loop-holes from which the first settlers fought the Indians remains as a reminder of those grim days. Cattle thieves, outlaws, fugitives from justice found the little hamlet, snugly tucked among its mountains, a safe hiding place and rendezvous. Gamblers drifted in. Saloons opened. The town grew into a tradition of lawlessness. It was hard-boiled from the first.

The Horrel boys helped along its sinister fame. There were five of them: Ben, Bill, Jack, Tom, and Bob; Texas-born, a roistering, stiff-necked, bull-headed crew. They rode in one evening from over Ruidoso way and shot up the village for fun. The villagers argued with them over the quality of the jest, and when the smoke cleared Constable Martinez, former Sheriff Gillam, Dave Warner, and Bill Horrel were dead—Bill Horrel, you might say, a martyr to his sense of humour. Offended at the town’s lack of appreciation of their pleasantry, the remaining Horrel boys declared war on Lincoln. They came again one night with some fighting Texas friends at their back, not for fun this time, but for revenge. There was a dance going on in an adobe house that still stands under the shadow of San Juan Church. The fiddles were playing a waltz when the Horrels stalked in and assisted with a six-shooter obbligato which left one woman and four men lifeless on the dancing floor, one of them the father of Juan Patron. Soon afterward, the Horrel boys turned their backs on their foolish but tragic little war and went home to Texas. They still speak in Lincoln of this two-act blood-and-thunder melodrama that grew out of a joke as the Horrel war.

Many men died with their boots on in Lincoln; some went out fighting; others mysteriously disappeared; and they were buried here and there about the town. Lincoln somehow never achieved a cemetery until recent years. The secretly murdered men were secretly buried; the graves of others were marked at first with little wooden crosses bearing names. These crosses crumbled away in time; they were never replaced because nobody cared; the names of the dead passed out of the memories of the living, and their graves were forgotten. You will hear in Lincoln that a certain man in his days of power had in his hire picked killers who acted as his Destroying Angels or Danites and quietly removed any of his foes he marked for destruction. The tale is generally discredited as an invention of enemies and no evidence whatever remains to substantiate it; but in its most definite version it estimates the number of these disappearances at “about twenty-five”: Mexicans mostly who, it is said, were rolled in blankets, dumped into shallow holes, and covered with earth.

From time to time the bones of the nameless dead sleeping in their forgotten graves are turned up by some Mexican ploughing or spading in a garden. Such discoveries are so numerous they pass almost without comment. “José Castro ploughed up a skull in his corn patch to-day.” “Juan Silva dug up a thigh bone while hoeing his onions.” Humph! That is all. And graves seem to be everywhere, their sites vaguely known.

“There is some man buried over there in the corner of my front yard,” says Mrs. Lena Morgan, mine hostess of Bonito Inn. “Who? Oh, I haven’t the slightest idea. I don’t know the exact spot. Somewhere near that clump of rose bushes. But that’s nothing. There are three or four more graves out in the orchard.”

It taxes the imagination to-day to picture Lincoln as the alive, bustling mart it was fifty years ago. The village went to sleep at the close of the Lincoln County war and has never awakened again. It is still at its nap in its pleasant cañon, dreaming, perhaps, of the crimson past. If a railroad never comes to link it with the far-away world, it may slumber on for a thousand years.

You will find Lincoln now just as it was when Murphy and McSween and Billy the Kid knew it. The village is an anachronism; a sort of mummy town looking as if it had been as carefully embalmed as some old Pharaoh, to preserve for modern eyes a meticulously vivid picture of the frontier past of a half century ago.

A winding country road serves as its single street, once a mile of tragedies. Its three hundred people, mostly Mexicans, live in quaint adobe houses. There are no sidewalks, no electric lights, no piped water. Old-fashioned kerosene lamps and candles burn in the homes at night. Frugal housewives set tubs to catch foaming streams guttering from the roofs when it rains. Murphy’s old store is weather-stained and dilapidated, its outer plastering crumbled off in patches revealing the adobe bricks. It is called the courthouse; a great hall on its second floor is used for judicial purposes on court days; its ground-floor rooms are living quarters for several families, whose numerous progeny whoop at their play about scenes of murder and in the cobwebby, haunted emptiness of the upper chambers.

All day long, picturesque Mexicans lounge in sun and shade on the long front porch of Penfield’s store, which was once the McSween store, built as a rival of Murphy’s, and smoke endless cigarettes of yellow paper and gossip endlessly in Spanish. If you look closely at the solid wooden window shutters of the old building, you will find a thick sheet of steel between outer and inner layers of timber, meant to turn bullets in the days of feud when the store was, after a fashion, a fortress. Only now and then are any signs of life in the empty, silent street. Perhaps a woman in a sunbonnet with a basket on her arm on her way to market. Or a load of alfalfa piled high on a creaking, rattletrap wagon drawn by scarecrow ponies ready for the boneyard. Or a Mexican in a steeple hat bringing in firewood from the hills on a burro. The air is so still you can hear the gurgle of the asequia at the back of the roadside gardens and the drowsy song the Bonito sings among its willows in the bottoms. The tall, gray cañon walls are stippled with piñon and oak brush. Up the cañon, Capitan Mountain shows a purple giant shoulder through a gap in the hills.

You can hardly believe that this peaceful village was once the stage setting of a bloody vendetta. Only a few old-timers are left who know, in anything like accurate detail, the stories of the old, wild days. If you should ever happen to go to Lincoln, hunt up Miguel Luna or Florencio Chavez. They have lived there since they were boys and know every spot in town that has a history. Their quaint talk will make the forgotten past live again for you.

Right out there in the road where that hen is dusting herself in a rut, they will tell you, Sheriff Brady was killed. Yonder in front of the little Church of San Juan, George Hindman fell dead with a bullet through his heart. Almost directly across the road is the spot where Lawyer Chapman was murdered. In the backyard of the little vine-swung home of Julio Sales is where five men met death on the night the McSween residence went up in flames. From that upper window near the corner of the courthouse Billy the Kid shot Ollinger; at the foot of a stairway inside the dingy old building you will find the hole in the wall made by the Kid’s bullet after it had passed through Deputy Bell’s heart. Down the street on the lintel of the door in the Montaña House, half-hidden beneath white paint now, are the letters “K-I-D” which the Kid carved there in an idle moment with his pocketknife. The only physical evidences of the Kid’s life work left in Lincoln are the bullet hole and the three letters cut in the doorpost. The Kid was not a constructive genius.

“You see where that roan horse is standing under that cottonwood down by the river,” says Miguel Luna. “Well, right there is where they found Bill Horrel lying dead the morning after the fight. Some fellow had cut his finger off to steal his ring.”