To Hell on a Fast Horse by Mark Lee Gardner Page A

stock they were after and rode away. Tunstall’s men waited until it was good and dark and then headed to Lincoln. They would see to Tunstall’s remains later. Billy and Widenmann arrived in the county seat between ten and eleven that evening. Despite the tensions building in Lincoln for some time, the news they brought startled the town. The posse members would later claim that Tunstall had fired upon them first, but as far as the Kid and the others in the McSween camp were concerned—as well as nearly everyone else in Lincoln—Tunstall’s death was nothing short of cold-blooded murder.
    Tunstall’s body arrived in the county seat the following day. Because the corpse had been strapped to the back of a horse for part of its final journey, the Englishman’s fine clothes were torn, and his face was scratched from going through the brush and scrub oak in themountains. Billy stared down at the corpse after it was laid out on a table in McSween’s home.
    “I’ll get some of them before I die,” he said, and then he turned away.
    Billy had known Tunstall less than three months, but by all accounts, he liked him a great deal. Frank Collinson, a Texas cowpuncher who first met Billy on the Pecos in 1878, remembered years later the few words the Kid spoke about his former employer: “I heard him say that Tunstall was the only man who ever treated him as if he were freeborn and white.”
    It was no use going to Sheriff Brady for help—after all, the posse that killed Tunstall was acting under the sheriff’s authority—but McSween was just as good at manipulating the legal system as Dolan. He marched Billy, Brewer, and Middleton over to Justice of the Peace John B. Wilson, and they swore out affidavits naming those in the posse. Warrants were issued for the accused and turned over to Atanacio Martínez, the town constable. Martínez did not especially want to confront Brady and his well-armed men, but some in the McSween crowd threatened to kill him if he did not do his duty. On Wednesday, February 20, Martínez, with “deputies” Frederick Waite (a twenty-four-year-old, part Chickasaw Tunstall man from Indian Territory), and Billy Bonney, walked to the two-story Dolan store in Lincoln to make the arrests. It did not go well. Brady refused to let the constable arrest any members of his posse, and the sheriff showed that he had the firepower advantage and arrested them.
    “You little son of a bitch, give me your gun!” Brady growled at the Kid.
    “Take it, you old son of a bitch!” Billy said, handing over his weapon.
    Both the Kid and Waite were released after thirty hours, but they were still in jail when Tunstall’s funeral took place the following afternoon. If the wind was just right, they may have heard Susan McSween’s parlor organ, which had been carried outside to the burial place behind Tunstall’s store. And perhaps the two comrades faintly heard the singing of hymns, all the while growing increasingly determined to have their revenge.

    Sheriff William Brady.
Robert G. McCubbin Collection
     
    BY THE FIRST OF March, both sides were seething with hatred and neither would be satisfied until the other was completely ruined. Alexander McSween was so scared that Sheriff Brady would arrest him—after which he believed he would be assassinated—that he had temporarily fled his home in Lincoln, although he did not go far. Well known to never carry a gun, McSween nevertheless accepted his role as the leader in the fight against the Dolan faction, even though that fight had turned into a bloody war. Tunstall’s twenty-eight-year-old ranch foreman, Dick Brewer, furious that the Englishman’s killers were still at large, went to see Justice Wilson and had himself appointed a special constable. Brewer began recruiting several Tunstall men for his posse. And for the second time in less than two weeks,Billy Bonney found himself working on the right side of the law, or so he and his companions believed. The posse