Demise of Billy the Kid

Book One of The Memoirs of H.H. Lomax

Preston Lewis

• Publisher: Wild Horse Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781681790138
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Letteratura generale

H.H. Lomax never claimed to have won the West, but he sure made it fun through his intriguing memoirs of offbeat encounters with many of the frontier's most enduring heroes and scoundrels. Starting with Billy the Kid, Lomax knocks some of the Old West's biggest legends out of the saddle with both his wit and his wits, providing a hilarious romp over new trails through familiar territory. After a murky incident involving the killing of a Colorado lawyer, Lomax rides into New Mexico Territory in 1877 astride his mule Flash and soon finds himself roped into a band of rustlers until Billy the Kid drafts Lomax as the first member of his own gang. Though their trails soon part, Lomax and the Kid cross paths time and again as each in his own way navigates the corruption and violence of the Lincoln County War. Each survives until they both take a liking to the same hot-tempered señorita. At least that's how Lomax tells the story! Whether you believe him or not, Lomax is sure to entertain anyone who takes up his trail of calamity and hilarity as he stumbles across some of the biggest names of the Old West.

Chapter One

Of all the fellows I met during my years wandering about, not one was more likable than Billy the Kid. Something about the Kid—maybe his squirrel-toothed grin, his big ears, his infectious laugh—won you over. That’s why I’m glad I didn’t kill him when I had the chance. Maybe I should have because he had threatened me, but it was nothing personal, just that we had both taken a fancy to the same señorita.

I never intended to ride into New Mexico Territory, but I didn’t intend to get hanged, either, and that’s what would’ve happened had I stayed around Leadville, Colorado, after the killing. It seems a lawyer up there, who was no more than a polecat in a fancy suit, took a shotgun blast to the back. He didn’t take it well because he just up and died. But like all skunks his killing raised a stink, and folks figured I was the man who had performed this valuable public service. These folks, a lot of good and decent people when they were sober, decided to throw a necktie party in my honor, but I declined the invitation, thanks to a little help from a friend and a mule I called Flash.

As fast as Flash could carry me, which was a little quicker than I could walk and a lot slower than I could run, I angled southeast toward Trinidad and the New Mexico line. From my buffalo-hunting days in West Texas I knew the southeast corner of New Mexico Territory was a good place to hide, an outlaw’s paradise. Of course I didn’t feel like an outlaw, but those fine folks in Trinidad hadn’t really considered my thoughts when they decided otherwise. I wasn’t an outlaw. An outlaw galloped away from trouble on some fine stallion, but there I was trotting through Colorado on a damned mule. A few years later when I ran into an acquaintance from Leadville, I learned that Flash, slow as he was, probably saved my life; the law couldn’t figure out how I could have gotten out of town since no horses were reported stolen and nobody had seen me get on the stage.

This was back in the fall of 1877—I remember it because just a few weeks earlier we had celebrated the first anniversary of Colorado’s becoming a state—and the trains still hadn’t reached Leadville, in large part because of a dispute between the Santa Fe and the Denver and Rio Grande railroads. Everybody thought the railroad was progress, and maybe it was for law-abiding citizens, but on this trip I had my doubts. The problem was, the telegraph followed the railroad wherever it went, and the railroad was planning to go everywhere, if you believed every land speculator with a deed and every promoter with a dream. The telegraph sure limited a man’s freedom, especially when he couldn’t escape one county without the sheriff in the next learning of his departure.

Without any problem I made it past El Moro, a little burg that was the southern terminus of the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad and the end of the infernal telegraph. In Trinidad, though, I wasn’t so lucky. I was just riding through town, hunkered low on the mule’s bare back, my hat pulled down over my eyes, when a clump of schoolboys started hurrahing me for riding such a superb animal as Flash. I don’t know that it hurt the mule’s feelings, Flash being no faster of mind than he was of foot, but it kind of riled me that here I was minding my own business and these six yearlings were laughing at my mode of transportation. It didn’t help my dignity any when Flash broke wind, and those six whistles took to slapping their knees. I didn’t have a razor strop to impart some manners on their backsides, but I had a pistol tucked in my britches. The problem was, I only had three bullets and I couldn’t get those boys to line up single file for me. If I was going to get blamed for a positive contribution to society, like shooting a lawyer, I might just as well do something bad so when the law caught up with me I wouldn’t be going to jail for nothing. I jerked the halter on my mule, figuring to teach those schoolboys a lesson in manners, but Flash just kept trotting. For a mule, he had good sense for avoiding trouble.

Outside of Trinidad, Flash began the ascent up the rugged trail leading to Raton Pass and New Mexico Territory. That trail was carved out of the mountain almost single-handedly by Uncle Dick Wootton, a grizzled pioneer who was so damned proud of his work that he charged a toll of everyone passing his place. It was getting dark, but that was fine because I was broke and figured I would have to slide past the wooden gate and hope Uncle Dick Wootton and his hounds didn’t discover my trespass. Getting by Wootton’s gate unpaid was akin to slipping daylight past a rooster, but I was lucky. It took to storming and raining, driving the dogs to shelter and Wootton to his stove. I squeezed past the tollgate free and got a cold shower to boot. On the downward slope of Raton Pass I breathed easier, knowing I was in New Mexico Territory and beyond the reach of the telegraph.

By then I’d about worn my neck out looking over my shoulder, but I kept riding south toward Lincoln County. At that time it took up the southeast quarter of the territory and was said to be the largest county in all of the United States. The eastern half was grassland broken down the middle by the Pecos River valley. Without owning a single acre, the cowman John Chisum controlled this grazing land from south of Fort Sumner to near the Texas border. The county’s western half was a series of mountains and valleys where the Mexicans had lived pretty much peacefully for decades and where white men were moving in to set up farms. The county was a paradise for rustlers because of John Chisum’s huge herds to the east and all the mountainous hiding places to the west.

A man on the dodge grows suspicious of everyone, so I had gone out of my way to avoid people, trouble, and, the way it worked out, food. After two weeks on the owl hoot trail, the back side of my belly button began to rub against the front side of my backbone, I was that hungry. I stuck to the foothills in the western half of Lincoln County, figuring Flash could never outrun a good horse on the flat land, but he could at least carry me to cover where I could defend myself with my three bullets.

Hunger can cloud your judgment like a thunderstorm blots out the sun. One evening just before dusk I caught a whiff of the best thing I had ever smelled in my life—roasting beef. By then I didn’t care if the devil himself was cook as long as I could have a few bites.

Riding down a draw, I saw a half-dozen men lounging around a big camp fire, the carcass of a dead yearling nearby. For rustlers they were rather lackadaisical, me getting within fifty yards of them before a single one noticed me and then only after Flash broke wind. A couple of them grabbed at their six-guns, but when they saw the mule I was riding, they didn’t think me much of a threat and let their revolvers slide back into their holsters. All but one of them, a redheaded fellow, returned to cooking. The redhead, though, angled away from the fire and toward me. He eyed me pretty closely, never saying a word until I pulled back the halter on Flash. The mule stopped not twenty feet from the man, whom I took to be the leader. For what seemed like forever, he stared at me and I stared back.

“Fine-looking mule you’re riding,” he finally said, then narrowed his eyes at me. “You lost or just get tired of plowing?”

Well, I’d plowed enough to know what the backside of a mule looked like, and I’d lived long enough to know a thief when I saw one. This fellow would’ve stolen flies from a blind spider. No doubt he and his cohorts were bad men, but I was downright hungry and not too choosy about who I took as friends as long as they shared their food.

“Is this Wyoming?” I asked him.

“Why, hell yes,” he lied.

I just grimaced. “Damnation, then I am lost. I was trying to find New Mexico Territory.”

The fellow just grinned. “Jesse Evans is my name, and I’m from Texas. You ever rustle any cattle?”

Well, I’d done some cowboying in past years, even helping drive one of the first herds from Texas to Abilene, Kansas, so I knew a little bit about that line of work. I shook my head. “Can’t say I ever did rustle any cattle.”

Evans’s face clouded for a moment.

“Branding strays is what I always called it,” I continued. “In fact, there’s no better steak than one from another man’s beef.”

“Then, hell, you ought to love supper, compliments of John Chisum himself.”

Taking that as an invitation, I started to slide off my mule until Evans’s voice turned cold as ice. I froze atop Flash.

“No man eats beef I’ve butchered without telling me his name.” He stood there staring with his cold gray eyes. He was a modest-sized man, maybe five feet six and a hundred and fifty pounds at most, but like most men that claimed to be Texans he looked bigger and meaner. The problem with Texans was they were easily insulted. Call one a bastard and he might not think a thing of it, likely because it was true or he didn’t know the meaning of such a big word. But forget to introduce yourself, and it was like spitting on the Alamo.

To make amends for my lack of social graces, I announced myself. “Henry Lomax.” Instantly the five men hunkered around the campfire shot to their feet and lined up in a semicircle behind Evans, their hands sliding toward the guns in their holsters.

Evans’s gray eyes became narrow slits as his hand fell to the butt of his pistol. Apparently I had now insulted his fragile Texas disposition as well as that of all his thieving partners.

“You any kin to a fellow named Gadrich Lomax?”

I could honestly say I wasn’t, my kin not being stupid enough to name a kid Gadrich. I shook my head. “Never heard of him.”

“A damned swindler. If I ever catch him, I’m gonna kill him. Where you from?”

“Arkansas,” I said.

Evans’s hard gaze softened. “Gadrich Lomax was a damn Yankee, New York or New Jersey.” He paused, spitting with disgust at the ground. “I sold him a blind horse for a good wad of greenbacks—counterfeit greenbacks, it turned out. The sheriff threw me in jail for passing the bad money.”

I fought the urge to laugh. Here a cattle thief was complaining about being taken by another crook.

Evans lifted his finger and pointed it at my nose. “If I ever find Gadrich Lomax, I’ll kill him, or if I find out you’re his kin, I’ll kill you.” Behind him his cohorts dropped their guard and gathered back around the fire, pulling slabs of meat out and chowing down.

I was about to pass out from hunger before the cloud of Gadrich Lomax passed from Evans’s strange disposition. Finally he nodded that I could join in the meal. I fairly fell off Flash and darted for the fire, but Evans kept me from taking a steak until he had introduced me all around. I don’t remember all their names, but three of them—Tom Hill, Frank Baker, and Buck Morton—would later join Jesse Evans in the killing that lit the Lincoln County War.

I knew these were all bad men, and I didn’t much care for them, but I sure liked their food. I rode with them for two weeks because I was hungry and because I figured if I tried to leave them, they just might up and shoot me in honor of Gadrich Lomax, whoever the hell he was. Further, Flash could never outrun their horses in an escape. All the rustlers seemed amused by me riding a mule and carrying a gun with only three cartridges. They went around loaded down with enough ammunition to feed a Gatling gun for a week.

We’d generally have beef two or three times a week, whenever Jesse got the urge to kill someone else’s animal. Mostly we’d steal cattle for Lawrence G. Murphy, who ran a big store in Lincoln and held the government contracts to sell beef to the Mescalero Apache Reservation in the mountains and Fort Stanton in the foothills. Murphy made almost pure profit on those contracts, since he used somebody else’s cattle to fill them. Though he paid the rustlers good money, they mostly returned it to him through the overpriced goods he sold in his store and the watered-down liquor he dispensed in his saloon. There was a lot of talk, though, about an upstart Englishman who was opening a competing store and jeopardizing Murphy’s virtual economic monopoly on the entire county.

In the two weeks I rode with them, we stole maybe three hundred head of cattle, and I had put a little distance between my belly button and my backbone. I was getting itchy to leave, figuring the sheriff would run into us sooner or later and throw us in jail.

Well, I was half right. Sheriff William Brady rode out one day just as we were butchering a stolen calf. I was beginning to think a military brass band could slip up on the Evans gang, with no harder a time than the sheriff and I had had. Well, the sheriff caught us dead to rights, and I figured he might even be looking for me because of the Leadville incident. Like a skunk when the wind changes, I thought my past had blown back to me. But instead of arresting us, the sheriff did an odd thing. He gathered wood and started the fire that cooked us all a good beefsteak. There’s nothing tastier than a stolen beefsteak. It rests good on the stomach if not on the conscience.

We were eating around the fire when the sheriff asked me my name. Not accustomed to running from the law, I never thought I ought to use an alias. Of course the whole gang knew my name by then, so I admitted to being Henry Lomax.

“You been up in Colorado within the past month or so?” Brady asked. “I got a flier at the office on a Lomax that killed a lawyer up Leadville way.”

All the heads around the campfire jerked toward me, and I saw a look of newfound respect in the rustlers’ hard eyes. I shrugged, then stammered a moment before Jesse Evans interrupted.

“Lomax’s been riding with us for six weeks,” he said. “You sure it wasn’t Gadrich Lomax? Now, there’s a son of a bitch.”

The sheriff shrugged and asked for another slab of steak.

We had just about finished supper when a rifle blast pierced the night air. Everybody dove for cover and their guns. All of a sudden the night was still as death, with us trying to find the location of our assailant amidst the broken and rocky terrain. Suddenly we heard this giggling, then laughing, out there behind a couple of rocks. Cursing, several of the men picked themselves up, dusted themselves off, and shoved their pistols back in their holsters. With the barrel of his rifle this fellow raised his hat above the top of the rock. When no one fired, he stood up and walked into camp, slapping his thigh with his hat and carrying on as proudly as a puppy with two peters.

That was the first time I ever saw Billy the Kid. He had a gangly, awkward look about him, and he damn sure wasn’t a handsome kid, not with those two buckteeth and big ears, but what he lacked in looks he more than made up for in spirit. I still had my pistol pointed at his heart and could’ve killed him as he sauntered in, but Jesse Evans strolled by and pushed the barrel of my gun toward the ground. “It’s just the Kid,” he said, as if no more explanation was needed.

“You boys better hope we stay on the same side of things,” the Kid said as he ambled into camp, howdying everyone he knew and eyeing me suspiciously. Approaching me, he pointed his finger at my nose. “You’re the man I’m looking for.”

My flesh began to crawl. Did he know about Leadville? My gun was still in my hand, but I didn’t feel too secure about my chances, not with the cool confidence in the Kid’s eyes and the sheriff squatting over his stolen beefsteak not twenty feet away.

“I’ve been looking for a partner,” he informed me, “and you’re the one.”

Before I said I wanted anything to do with him, the Kid told me to be ready to head out come morning. Engaging and confident, he had a way of dragging folks along for the ride.

Just after sunrise I left with the Kid, him funning me for Flash and promising to trade the animal for a horse, just in case we had some hard riding to do.

“Why’d you want me for a partner?” I finally asked.

“I didn’t,” he answered. “You just don’t have the look of the hard types you were riding with. I figured they would get you in more trouble than you could get out of.”

The Kid was right. Jesse Evans and his gang were nothing but trouble.

Chapter Two

Billy was no more than seventeen years old at the time, a full decade younger than me. I mean, Billy wasn’t many years removed from clinging to his momma’s skirt or eating dirt outside, yet here I was throwing in with him like he was a U.S. Senator. He had a winning personality and could’ve well become a politician except for one flaw—he was basically honest. Unlike Jesse Evans and his men, the Kid had a sense of right and wrong. Most men drifting through Lincoln County had no more conscience than a Democrat had sense.

Billy was a natural lead steer. I’d been on enough trail drives to know that no matter how big the herd, one animal always emerged as the leader. A good lead steer can start a herd moving when some animals are balky, can keep a herd calm when there’s reason to panic, and can give a herd direction. The Kid was a good lead steer, and though many older men would eventually follow him, I was the first.

For all his...