The Pot Thief Who Studied Billy the Kid (40 page)

The roast was narrow
on the end
where a bone protruded and
basketball-sized at the other end. It looked like a drumstick from a
p
terodactyl
, which would be a good Scrabble word if you ever faced a situation where you needed one that starts
with ‘pt’.

The bowls were passed around family-style. I gave myself
diet-sized
helpings
of potatoes and salad and one ear of corn. I passed on the bread.

Then Gus asked me to
hand
him my plate because he was carv
ing
.

“I see you left a lot of room on you
r
plate for the lamb,
”
he said
and sawed off a caveman p
ortion.

I’ve never liked gravy, but when the gravy boat left my hand, it had been reduced
from a boat
to a small canoe.
The consistenc
y was standard for gravy,
which is to say it had the mouthfeel of warm glue. But the taste was okay
–
herbs, gar
lic and something pungent like W
orchestershire
.

I cut a tidbit of lamb and
dredged it through the
gravy.
The texture was like beef, but there
was an
od
d taste
, like
beef from a steer with a hormone imbalance.
I was able to finish the lamb. The gravy helped.

Susannah’s smirks did not. I was beginning to suspect her hand in this menu.

The pie never had a chance. I should have bought two.

They turned in early in rancher style. Probably had to get up early to milk the sheep.

I read the Walter Noble Burns book and discovered a Billy the Kid far

different from the popular legend.

41

Breakfast at the Inchaustigui ranch is
designed to sustain the body for a long
day of digging fence post
holes and dragging calves out of mud
bogs
.

I’m not sure they actually do those things, but the eggs, bacon, sausage and biscuits had me ready to give it a try.

And I could have used the exercise. Days of sitting in a truck interrupted
only by stops for high-calorie
food had me struggling with the top button of my blue
jeans.

The truck had taken us to Rio Doloroso where we discovered an empty grave, to La Reina where we discovered that Alvar Nuñez was Father Jerome and to Lincoln County where I discovered Cactus Truesdell.

I asked Susannah to keep it for one more trip.

“To?”

I stood there by her car bu
t
didn’t say anything.

“You want to go back to that cliff d
welling,” she said.

“Not to it. Just by it.”

“Why?”

“Call it a hunch.”

“Sounds like fun,” she said.

“I’ve got a bone to pick with you,” I said once we
w
ere on pavement and headed back to Albuquerque.

I could see the mischief
in her eyes even in profile.

“Would that be a lamb bone?” she asked in her little-miss-innocent voice.

“You set me up. Me, your best friend. Do I give you margaritas made with
mixto
tequila?
Do I give you salsa made with canned tomatoes?
Stop laughing. It’s difficult to scold you when you’re laughing.”

“Admit it, you liked it. You ate every bite of that huge piece.”

“Only because I didn’t want to offend your mom.”

She was still laughing. “You ate so much lamb you couldn’t even finish your potatoes or your corn. You actually liked it.”

After she finally stopped laughing, I told her about the
Walter Noble Burns book
.

“So the locals considered Billy the Kid a hero?” she asked.

“Most of them
. E
specially the Hispanics.”

“Why?”

“
You know about the Lincoln County War, right?”

“
Some
.
We studied it in
school,
and
part of it took place on our land.”

“Then you know the gang led by
Murphy and Dolan ran Lincoln
county like a fiefdom. Murphy had the only store, so any business transaction went though him. They controlled the sheriff and the court. One resident was quoted in the book as saying, ‘
They intimidated, oppressed, and crushed people who were obliged to deal with them
’
.
”

“And mos
t of those people were Hispanic?
”

“Right.
The
Dolan and Murphy
gang
were Johnny-come-lately gringos who basically took over the area
and treated the original inhabitants
, both Hispanics and Indians,
as peons.
T
hen the powerful Texas cattleman John Chisum brought a large herd up from Texas, creating competition for the Murphy faction. Murphy’s lawyer, a man of principle name
d
McSween,
was fed up with
Mu
rphy’s crooked ways, so he went to work for Chisum.
Billy the Kid also quit the Murphy gang and went over to Chisum. And the Chisum
camp was strengthened when
an eccentric Englishman named John Tun
stall bought a ranch in the area and allied himself with Chisum. In addition to ranching, Tunstall set
up a mercantile store
in competition with
Murphy.
The locals abandoned Murphy’
s
store because Tunstall
offered decent prices and
fair dealings.”

“And that’
s why they killed him,
”
she said.

“
Yes.
They trumped up some phony charge against him and sent a posse of drunk
en hooligans
to arrest him.
They found Tunstall riding among his cattle. Tu
n
stall saw them coming and rode over to greet them. ‘Howdy, boys,’ he said, and they shot him in the head. He was unarmed. In fact, he had never carried a gun in his life. Then for good measure, they used a big rock to smash in his skull, killed his horse and lined the two up together
on the ground
.”

“How can people do things like that?”

“I have no idea. When Billy the Kid found Tunstall, he vowed to kill every man who had anything to do with the murder.”

“Tunstall’s murder set off the Lincoln County War,” she said.

“Yes, and led to Billy the Kid’s reputation as a killer. But from his point of view – and the point of view of the locals – he was just avenging a friend. It
’s
normally
wrong to take the law into you
r
own hands, but w
hat do you do when the law is i
n the hands of the bad guys?”

S
usannah
told me about some cattle rustled by Bill
y
from a herd Murphy was running on a spread near Progresso that he had no right to
use
.
The land belonged to an Hispanic family, but they dared not complain for fear of retribution.
S
o
me of Murphy’s men were positioned to ambush Billy when he drove the cattle south to Lincol
n. But a friend
from P
rogresso named Ponciano Chavez alerted Bill
y
. So he drove the cattle northwest
around
Juman
e
s
Knob then
south
,
blazing a trail through Rogers canyon and Deuson Draw that the Inchaustiguis still use today
to drive their cattle and sheep to the lower ground on the south of their ranch.

I eventually worked up the nerve to b
r
oach the subject I had been dreading.

“What did you think of the toast you
r
dad made to the two of us
?”

“Typical dad. He loves to make toasts and announcements.”

“When I greeted him on the porch, he said he and I were going to be seeing a lot of each other, so I should call him Gus.”

“Yep. He’s not one for formalities.”

Hmm. Either she hadn’t picked up on what I took to be her family’s misinterpretation of our relationship, or I was the one who had misinterpreted. So I went to the one statement that seemed the most obvious.

“When Matt and Mark got our luggage out of the truck
, Mark said, ‘
We’ve put you two in the front guestroom. We’re sort of old-fashioned, but we decided it’s okay if you two bunk together
’
.”

“Sure. They know we shared a room at the Lawrence Ranch
,
and I told them we would both be in the Apple House down in San Patricio.” She laughed. “I guess they decided you’re not a threat to my honor.”

This was harder than I expected.

I
decided to abandon my futile effort to
convince her that her family

thought we were an item.

42

Whit Fletcher came to my shop about an hour after Susannah dropped me off.

His first words were, “You got any coffee?”