To Hell on a Fast Horse (3 page)

Mesilla, the county seat, just three miles farther, was reached that evening, and the two Billys were shown to their new quarters. The Kid would later describe the Mesilla jail as “the worst place he had ever struck.” By the time the Kid arrived, the weather had turned god-awful hot, and the flies and mosquitoes were out in full force.

THE KID WOULD NOT
have to endure the Mesilla jail for long. Judge Warren Bristol would see to that. Billy was certainly familiar with Bristol, the fifty-eight-year-old judge for New Mexico’s Third Judicial District, and, most important, a Jimmy Dolan sympathizer, the man whose forces Billy fought in the Lincoln County War. Bristol, a New York native, was known to occasionally bend or ignore the law, and, naturally, controversy seemed to follow him throughout his career. He could rightly be called “New Mexico’s hanging judge,” because by 1882, his courtroom had a record of more convictions for first-degree murder than all the other districts in the Territory combined.

The day after the Kid’s arrival in Mesilla, March 30, he was escorted into Bristol’s court, a cramped room within a narrow, one-story
adobe on the southeast corner of Mesilla’s plaza. Billy faced a federal charge first, for the murder of Andrew Roberts during a gun battle at Blazer’s Mill on April 4, 1878. Bristol appointed Ira Leonard as the Kid’s counsel, and the attorney entered a plea of not guilty. Because time was needed to bring defense witnesses from Lincoln County, the judge granted a delay, a holdup that did not sit well with Simeon H. Newman, editor of a fledgling Las Cruces paper that carried the creative title
Newman’s Semi-Weekly
. Newman urged the court to use the interim to quickly proceed with the territorial indictments against the Kid, the murder charges for the killings of Sheriff Brady and Deputy George Hindman.

“The prisoner is a notoriously dangerous character,” Newman reminded his readers, “and has on several occasions before escaped justice where escape appeared even more improbable than now, and has made his brags that he only wants to get free in order to kill three more men—one of them being Governor Wallace. Should he break jail now, there is no doubt that he would immediately proceed to execute his threat. Lincoln county, which has suffered so long from his crimes, cannot afford to see him escape; and yet every hour that he is confined in the Mesilla jail is a threat to the peace of that community. There are a hundred good citizens of Lincoln who would not sleep soundly in their beds did they know that he were at large.”

As for the charges the Kid currently faced, Newman assured his readers that, “Other indictments will be found if these are not sufficient.”

On April 5, the Kid, through his attorney, withdrew his plea of not guilty and entered a plea of no jurisdiction for the Roberts murder charge. Leonard, with the assistance of Mesilla lawyer Albert J. Fountain, put forward several arguments why the United States had no right to prosecute the case (Blazer’s Mill was situated within the Mescalero Apache Indian reservation). The judge sided with the defense. No one, including U.S. District Attorney Sidney M. Barnes, appeared
to be upset with this outcome, which cleared the way for the territorial cases. The general consensus was that Billy had no hope of getting off on that latter charge.

And Judge Bristol would continue to preside in the courtroom at the Kid’s trial for the murder of Sheriff Brady. District Attorney Simon B. Newcomb would head the prosecution. Newcomb, a pleasant forty-two-year-old native of Nova Scotia and former Texas judge, was more popular with the Hispanic population of Mesilla and Las Cruces than any other lawyer in the area. Billy’s jury, interestingly enough, was made up of native New Mexicans (what was called in local parlance a “Mexican jury”), a good thing if his trial was happening in Lincoln, but the Hispanos of Doña Ana County had no special relationship with Billy or any of the other gringo cowboys they saw riding around their part of the Territory.

Albert J. Fountain and John D. Bail (an attorney from Silver City) replaced Ira Leonard as the Kid’s court-appointed legal representatives. Fountain had been appointed the Kid’s counsel in the Brady murder case two years earlier, just before Billy rode out of Lincoln a fugitive. Although Ira Leonard may have had a closer relationship with the Kid, Fountain was the best man to defend him in Mesilla. He had had some successes there as a defense attorney (Fountain had already helped Leonard get the Kid off on the Roberts murder charge). Fountain was a handsome, respectable-looking man with a broad forehead, blue eyes, and large mustache. He liked hopeless cases and was good at swaying “Mexican juries,” in part because of his Spanish language skills but also because he had married the daughter in a prominent Hispanic family. Additionally, Fountain was well familiar with the events and personalities of the Lincoln County War. In a strange connection to the case, Fountain had been blamed for inciting Brady’s killers with an editorial in the
Mesilla Valley Independent
that condoned the use of “mob law” in Lincoln County—saying it was better than no law at all.

Before the trial, someone heard the Kid tell Fountain that he sure “wished somebody would come into his cell with a six-shooter.” Billy may have thought he was being funny, although down deep, he must have thought of such a scenario; he was closer to a death sentence than he had ever been before.

Simeon Newman took the Kid’s words seriously. “He ought to be most carefully watched,” Newman wrote in his
Semi-Weekly,
“as he is liable at any time to make a break for liberty. We advise the sheriff to keep an eye on him when he takes him into court.”

The Doña Ana County sheriff, James W. Southwick, did just that and more. Throughout the Brady murder trial, the Kid, his wrists kept in handcuffs, was surrounded by several armed guards. It is not hard to imagine what kind of impression these extraordinary security precautions made on the jurors.

The trial began on Wednesday, April 8, 1881, and the spectators were a mix of Hispanic and Anglo folks from around the area. They filled the long wooden seats facing Judge Bristol’s bench, which consisted of a flat-topped desk on a raised platform at one end of the narrow room. The defendant, William H. Bonney, sat to one side of Bristol’s desk. Court Clerk George Bowman remembered Billy as a pleasant-looking young man whose eyes seemed sullen and defiant. “It looked almost ridiculous,” Bowman recalled, “all those armed men sitting around a harmless looking youth with the down still on his chin.”

The Kid silently watched the court proceedings—remarkably, the first time he had ever been tried for any crime—fully aware that his fate was in the hands of the twelve strangers in the jurors’ box. They knew nothing of the injustices of the Lincoln County War, of his close scrapes and firefights, of the bloody deaths of his friends, or of the broken promise of a governor. Yet they were to judge him, to decide whether he would live or die.

Most of what happened in Judge Bristol’s courtroom—witness
testimony, objections from counsel, defense and prosecution arguments—is unknown. Strange for a trial that was eagerly anticipated at the time and now ranks as one of the most famed criminal trials in New Mexico history. At least three witnesses testified for the Territory, and there is no indication that Billy took the stand. What is known revolves around the instructions given to the jury at the trial’s conclusion, which came on the second day. In nine long pages, Bristol gave the jury little leeway to return with anything but a “guilty” verdict. If Billy was present and involved in any way in the Brady killing, Bristol instructed the jurors, he should be considered “as much guilty as though he fired the fatal shot.” After deliberating for three hours, the jury found the Kid guilty of murder in the first degree and recommended death as his punishment.

Three days later, at 5:15
P.M
., Billy appeared before Judge Bristol to receive his sentence. When asked if he had anything to say, the outlaw, who invariably had
something
to say, spoke not a word.

Bristol then ordered that the Kid be taken to Lincoln County, where he was to be incarcerated by Sheriff Pat Garrett until Friday, May 13. On that unlucky day, between the hours of 9:00
A.M
. and 3:00
P.M
., the said William Bonney was to be “hanged by the neck until his body be dead.”

Editor Newman happily speculated that the wooden gallows would be erected over the spot where Sheriff Brady fell.

Before Billy was transported to Lincoln, he wrote to Edgar Caypless to ask about the lawsuit over his bay mare. “Mr. A. J. Fountain was appointed to defend me and has done the best he could for me,” he informed Caypless. “He is willing to carry the case further if I can raise the money to bear his expense. The mare is about all I can depend on at present.” Billy closed his letter by asking the attorney to excuse his bad handwriting, as he was wearing his handcuffs—his guards were not about to take any chances with their condemned prisoner.

The Kid also talked to the local newspapers, playing to both the public and Governor Wallace. Simeon Newman promised to publish Billy’s statements following the outcome of his appeal to Wallace for a pardon (or a commutation of his sentence).

“We do not believe that the Governor should or will either pardon him or commute his sentence,” wrote Newman, “but we cannot refuse to a dying man the same fair play we should expect for ourselves.”

When the
Mesilla News
asked Billy if he expected Wallace to pardon him, Billy said that, “Considering the active part Governor Wallace took on our side and the friendly relations that existed between him and me, and the promise he made me, I think he ought to pardon me. Don’t know that he will do it…. Think it hard I should be the only one to suffer the extreme penalties of the law.” Wallace had a much different take on the Kid’s plight, and he revealed as much to a
Las Vegas Gazette
reporter later that same month:

“It looks as though he would hang, Governor,” the
Gazette
man commented to Wallace.

“Yes, the chances seem good that the 13th of May would finish him.”

“He appears to look to you to save his neck,” the reporter said.

“Yes,” the governor replied, smiling, “but I can’t see how a fellow like him should expect any clemency from me.”

The time for Billy’s departure for Lincoln—kept secret from the public—was set for Saturday, April 16, at approximately 10:00
P.M
. To throw off possible rescue attempts, officials let it slip that Billy was not leaving Mesilla before the middle of the next week. Billy Wilson was not traveling with the Kid on this trip. Wilson was granted a continuance in his counterfeiting trial and would go back to Santa Fe on a change of venue. Several months later, Wilson escaped, never to be brought to trial again. No such luck for the Kid, who was uncharacteristically doubtful about his future.

“I expect to be lynched in going to Lincoln,” he told the
Mesilla
News
. And then, somewhat despairingly, he added, “Advise persons never to engage in killing.”

Seven men, bristling with all manner of weapons, formed Billy’s escort for the 145 miles that stretched between Mesilla and Lincoln: Deputy Sheriff David Wood, Tom Williams, Billy Mathews, John Kinney, D. M. Reade, W. A. Lockhart, and Deputy U.S. Marshal Robert Olinger. These men were being paid $2.00 a day, plus $1.50 per day board and ten cents for each mile traveled. Billy had more than a little history with a few of his guards—they had been on opposite sides in the Lincoln County troubles—but the Kid seemed to get along with most of them all right. However, if there was any trouble, either from a rescue attempt or a lynching party, the guards had made it very clear that the first shots they fired would be directed at the Kid.

Billy, handcuffed and shackled, rode in an ambulance (a covered spring wagon with seats that could be folded down to make a bed). A chain secured him to the ambulance’s backseat. Three guards rode horseback, one on each side of the vehicle and one at the rear. Inside the ambulance, Kinney sat beside the Kid. On the middle bench, facing Kinney was Billy Mathews. And sitting next to Mathews, staring straight into the Kid’s boyish face, was Bob Olinger, the one man with whom the Kid definitely did not get along.

Their route took them through San Augustin Pass, across the Tularosa Basin (famed for its immense, shifting dunes of white sand), over the Sacramento Mountains, and through the Mescalero Apache reservation. On April 20, they spent the night at Blazer’s Mill, an old Regulator stomping ground and the scene of its infamous gun battle with Andrew Roberts. Early the next morning, with Joseph and Almer Blazer, a few idle mill workers, and his guards for an audience, Billy graphically recounted his version of the shoot-out. One of the men asked Billy why he killed Roberts, a simple question that the Kid could not find an answer for. He just shook his head, saying he did
not know. Later that day, the prisoner and guards pulled into Fort Stanton. Pat Garrett was waiting there for the man he had famously brought to justice four months earlier. Then, after a short journey of nine more miles down the valley of the Rio Bonito, Garrett, Bob Olinger, and Billy arrived in the county seat of Lincoln.

Garrett now had a dilemma. Lincoln County had never had a jail that, as he later wrote, “would hold a cripple,” yet he was charged with confining the Territory’s slipperiest criminal for the next twenty-two days. Whether it could be done remained to be seen. Garrett was confident that he could, and that the execution would come off at the appointed time as planned. But Billy thought differently. One day, his guards allowed Mrs. Annie E. Lesnett, a friend of Billy’s from Dowlin’s Mill on the Ruidoso, to see their prisoner. In a sick sort of joke, Bob Olinger invited the woman to the hanging. Unfazed, Billy spoke up: “Mrs. Lesnett, they can’t hang me if I’m not there, can they?”

No matter the odds, the shackles, the armed guards, Billy the Kid’s old optimism was back. He somehow believed he could escape the gallows, and that belief was a very dangerous thing.