Читать книгу The Saga of Billy the Kid - Walter Noble Burns - Страница 5

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John Chisum charged Murphy with stealing his cattle. There was no mincing of words in these charges. Chisum flung them broadcast to the four winds. And Murphy in his mountains laughed defiance. Where was the proof? And if there were proof, where was the law to punish him?

Murphy had his cattle ranch at first some thirty miles west of Lincoln on the Carrizozo plains. That was inconvenient to the Pecos Valley—and Chisum’s herds. He moved it to the Seven Rivers country flanking the Pecos Valley; and his herd of three thousand gained fame as the miracle herd. When it was mentioned, mountain people who were friends of Murphy laughed behind their palms; valley people who were friends of Chisum glared savagely. Strangely enough, according to the story, the number of cattle in the herd never varied. Murphy sold cattle by the thousand annually but, like the widow’s cruse of oil, his herd remained the same.

There was neither difficulty nor danger in stealing Chisum’s cattle. Rustlers did not wait for the light of the moon. They made their raids in broad daylight. The cattle roamed unguarded over boundless, fenceless plains. There was no one to see the thieves. They had but to round up a bunch, run it into the hills, and the thing was done.

Jesse Evans, George Davis, his brother—Evans was a frontier nom-de-guerre—Frank Baker, and Billy Morton, were, it was said, leaders of the thieves and kept their pockets lined with gold by stealing Chisum’s cattle. Many others of the same kidney were said to do as well. Hardly a day passed that somewhere between Bosque Redondo and the Guadalupes freebooters did not levy toll on Chisum’s herds in greater or lesser measure. Chisum’s rage was futile. Once back in their mountains, the rustlers were safe among friends. The sheriff of Lincoln County was James A. Brady of Lincoln town. As sheriff he represented what semblance of law there was. But he owed his office to Murphy’s political favour and Murphy’s wish was to Brady a command.

Chisum at times swore out warrants for the thieves. When Sheriff Brady could find no way to avoid it, he arrested the culprits and lodged them in the Lincoln jail. Having done this much, he was legally absolved from neglect of duty. But the Lincoln jail was as great a joke as Murphy’s miracle herd. It was a little two-by-four adobe hut situated just back of Murphy’s store. It would have been possible for a man confined in it to whittle his way out through the brittle adobe bricks with a good pocketknife. But few prisoners cared to take such trouble. They usually preferred to kick down the door.

Such escapes, becoming common, laid the sheriff open to a charge of negligence, and he finally installed a good door which was immune to pedal assaults. Then, upon the incarceration of cattle thieves on Chisum warrants, it became fashionable for their friends to ride into town at night with great show of daredeviltry and the shooting off of guns, go through the form of forcing an obliging Murphy jailer to deliver the keys, and rescue the prisoners in style.

There came at last an impasse. Chisum brought about the arrest of thieves who failed to kick or whittle their way out of jail and whom their friends carelessly neglected to rescue. The situation seemed approaching a crisis. Murphy grew perturbed and summoned McSween, his lawyer.

“You will defend these men in court,” he said.

“I will not defend them,” replied McSween.

Murphy’s eyes hardened. This was rebellion.

“I retain you under pay as my attorney,” he observed coldly. “Men on my payroll obey my orders.”

“These men are thieves,” retorted McSween. “I know it; you know it. As a lawyer, I refuse to defend men who have neither legal nor moral defense.”

From that moment McSween’s services as Murphy’s lawyer ended.

Chisum retained McSween at once. For Chisum, McSween prosecuted the thieves Murphy had ordered him to defend. They were convicted and sent to prison. It was established by evidence at their trial that Murphy was their patron and sponsor, and not only bought their stolen cattle, but did a regular business in buying stolen cattle from thieves who lived by plundering Chisum’s herds.

Later on, after the first blood had been spilled in the feud and McSween had been secretly marked as the next victim of Murphy’s vengeance, John Riley, still ostensibly friendly for reasons of his own, dropped in at the McSween home on what he explained was merely a social call. There was no six-shooter at his belt; as far as appearances went, his mission was peaceable. But his social call was at eleven o’clock at night, when he might reasonably have expected to catch McSween and his wife alone.

But instead he found McSween sitting in his parlour with a company of pleasant friends. The pleasant friends were suspicious of Murphy’s subterranean associate, who, nevertheless, masked with cordial garrulity whatever surprise he may have felt. They unanimously covered Riley with their six-shooters in a sociable sort of way and, as he stood with his hands in the air, relieved him of a large revolver which had been concealed, not in the customary hip pocket, but in the inner pocket of his coat, from which, if one cares to make deductions, he could have whipped it out unexpectedly by a commonplace gesture not likely to arouse suspicion.

As the gun was lifted from his pocket, a notebook fell on the floor. The which Sam Corbett retrieved. After Riley had been shown the door, protesting against his inhospitable reception and proclaiming his innocence of any sinister design, McSween and his friends examined the book with interest. It contained a long list of names—twenty-five or thirty, it was said—of notorious cattle rustlers; and set down against each name was the number of cattle Murphy had bought for five dollars a head with the amount of each purchase neatly totalled in the manner of good, businesslike bookkeeping.

The illuminating entries in Riley’s pocket ledger gave a tangible clue to Murphy’s success in obtaining government contracts. Murphy’s bids were invariably the lowest. How he was able to quote prices that represented the rock-bottom minimum on beef and supplies for army posts and Indian reservations was, for a long time, a riddle to his defeated competitors. Now the cat was out of the bag. Here was the answer in plain black and white. But cattle bought at five dollars a head were only one item in Murphy’s business strategy. A United States government investigation threw additional light on his methods.

 The Mescalero Apaches occupying a reservation forty miles south of Lincoln complained that the “flour” with which Murphy had supplied them was bran. On top of this, Murphy’s enemies charged that on his contract he had been paid for supplies for two thousand Indians when there were only nine hundred on the reservation. The Department of Indian Affairs sent Mr. Angell from Washington to investigate. Murphy, suave, ingratiating, met the government representative at Lincoln, showered him with polite attentions, and accompanied him to the agency post. Mr. Angell examined the “flour” first. It was bran; no doubt about it. Murphy appeared astonished. Secret machinations of his enemies doubtless were responsible for the substitution. He would guard his shipments more carefully in the future. Nothing like this would happen again. All right.

Mr. Angell prepared next to count the Indians. Murphy volunteered assistance. The Indians were rounded up from every corner of the big reservation and assembled at the house of the agent. Seated on the front porch with Murphy at his side, Mr. Angell counted the Indians as they walked by in single file. The tally reached nine hundred. Still they filed by. When the procession ended, the count showed two thousand. Murphy beamed in triumph. His honesty apparently had been vindicated.

It was not until several weeks later that Mr. Angell learned that he had been tricked. In filing past him, the Indians, under coaching of Murphy emissaries, had disappeared from sight behind a hill and, doubling back, had marched past him again in a continuous circle. He hurried back to the reservation, rounded up the Indians a second time, and impounded them under guard in a great corral built for the purpose. Then he let them out one by one. There was no chance for a mistake this time, and the count showed nine hundred. Mr. Angell’s official report of his investigation became a part of the government archives at Washington.

Soon after McSween had broken with Murphy, J. H. Tunstall, an Englishman of wealth and social position in England, arrived in Lincoln. He was pronouncedly British in appearance, speech, and dress, and the town folks regarded him with amused curiosity as he strolled about insouciantly in checkered cap and knickerbockers with bulldog pipe between his teeth. But he won the villagers with his jovial good humour, bluff camaraderie, and openheartedness. Frontier life fascinated him. The drypoint landscape with its white sunlight and black shadows laid its spell upon him. He drank the pure air like a tippler. The extraordinary cowboys, the extraordinary Mexicans, the extraordinary mountains delighted him. So he decided to make the extraordinary country his home. He bought a ranch on the Rio Feliz, thirty miles south of Lincoln, stocked it with horses and cattle, and settled down.

Tunstall and McSween were drawn together by common sympathies and ideas and were soon close friends. When Tunstall proposed that they enter into a business partnership and open a general merchandise store in Lincoln, which he consented to finance in major part, McSween agreed with enthusiasm, though his wife counselled against it, foreseeing perilous possibilities. But the two men carried out the plan, built the store, a great squat adobe building, and laid in an extensive stock of goods, the whole representing a rather heavy investment. From the day the new firm threw open its doors, business flourished, and the McSween-Tunstall store was soon making heavy inroads upon Murphy’s trade and developing into a formidable rival of the Murphy establishment. Then, in partnership with John Chisum and Tunstall, McSween opened a bank in one end of his store, of which Chisum was president, Tunstall vice-president, and himself secretary, treasurer, and general manager. With bank and store on a prosperous basis, McSween felt that at last he was on the high road to fortune.

But Sir Galahad was riding serenely for a fall. Since his acts had been open and aboveboard, contravened no moral or legal code, and had the imprimatur of his own conscience, he was blind to their sinister effect upon Murphy. He had sent Murphy’s hirelings to prison. He had exposed his dishonesty. He had set himself up as a rival merchant. He had allied himself with Chisum. As a lawyer, he continued zealously to guard Chisum’s interests under Murphy’s very nose. He had organized a powerful financial combination which was bound to react unfavourably, if not disastrously, on Murphy’s business. But in his unsophistication and childlike faith in the inherent goodness of men, he did not realize, and was not capable of realizing, that his course had inspired Murphy with bitterness and deadly hatred and must eventually drive that overlord of the mountains to plans of retaliation and revenge. He remained unconscious of the rising danger. Wolves were dogging his footsteps unseen in the underbrush, but he pursued his heedless way whistling a careless tune.

Came now the matter of the Fritz will to add the final twist to an intricately tangled situation. Colonel Emil Fritz had been Murphy’s partner in the sutler’s store at Fort Stanton. He had later bought a ranch a few miles below Lincoln on the Bonito, where he lived prosperously for a number of years. In advanced age and feeble health, Colonel Fritz went back to his boyhood home in Germany, where he died, leaving a will and an insurance policy for $10,000, both of which he had entrusted for safe keeping to his old friend Murphy. Aside from his ranch and stock in Bonito Cañon, the insurance policy which had been bequeathed to his sister, Mrs. Fred Scholland, constituted the principal asset of Colonel Fritz’s estate.

Upon his death, Charles Fritz, his brother, set about to wind up Colonel Fritz’s affairs. But when he sought to obtain the will and insurance policy, Murphy refused to surrender either and justified his refusal on the grounds that Colonel Fritz had died owing him a large sum of money. No proof of such a debt was ever produced but Murphy declared the will contained a provision that he be reimbursed from the insurance. Murphy, it is said, kept the will in a tin can concealed in a secret crypt in the walls of his store in Lincoln, as there were few safes in the country at that time, either for private or public funds. Whether there was such a provision in the will or not never was publicly known, as the will never was probated and Murphy was charged with having destroyed it. As for the insurance policy, the thrifty Murphy had hypothecated it with Spiegelberg Brothers, merchants of Santa Fé, for merchandise billed at $900.

McSween, employed by Charles Fritz and Mrs. Scholland as their lawyers, undertook the collection of the insurance. He paid the $900 out of his own pocket to the Spiegelbergs to square Murphy’s account and, gaining possession of the policy, cashed it in full on a trip to the East and deposited the $10,000 in his own name in a bank in St. Louis. Murphy, it is said, still owed a considerable sum of money to McSween for legal services in the past. McSween’s fee for collecting the insurance was set by agreement with Mrs. Scholland and Charles Fritz at $3,000 and he was to be reimbursed for the money it had been necessary to pay the Spiegelbergs in addition to the expenses of his Eastern trip. However, when he returned to Lincoln, Murphy demanded the entire amount of the insurance policy to liquidate the debt he alleged Colonel Fritz had owed him. Murphy’s claim was the match which touched off the powder magazine of a dangerous situation.

Whatever became of the $10,000 insurance money, the people of Lincoln County never learned. Neither Murphy nor the Fritz heirs nor McSween, it is said, ever received a dollar of it. When the McSween home in Lincoln was burned by the Murphy faction in the vendetta, McSween, it is declared, threw the certificates of deposit out of a window to save them from the flames, and they were found by a Murphy henchman named Hart who, in some way, managed to get them cashed. Hart, according to the story, went to Seven Rivers, where he boasted of his sudden fortune. He spent money with riotous freedom in the saloons and was found dead one day in the Pecos River, his throat cut and his pockets turned inside out.

Murphy’s affairs had reached a crisis. He had been defeated all along the line. Everything had gone wrong. His enemies were gaining the upper hand. He must act decisively if he was to save himself from eclipse and ruin. The time for diplomacy had passed. Only desperate measures would answer his desperate problems. Like a wolf driven from his secret covert into the open with the pack close at his heels, he turned at bay.