A Question of Bounty: The Shadow of Doubt Read online

  A QUESTION OF BOUNTY:

  THE SHADOW OF DOUBT

  A QUESTION

  OF BOUNTY:

  THE SHADOW OF DOUBT

  PAUL COLT

  FIVE STAR

  A part of Gale, Cengage Learning

  Copyright © 2014 by Paul Colt.

  Author’s notes and selected sources are located at the back of the book.

  Five Star™ Publishing, a part of Gale, Cengage Learning.

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

  This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination, or, if real, used fictitiously.

  No part of this work covered by the copyright herein may be reproduced, transmitted, stored, or used in any form or by any means graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including but not limited to photocopying, recording, scanning, digitizing, taping, Web distribution, information networks, or information storage and retrieval systems, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  The publisher bears no responsibility for the quality of information provided through author or third-party Web sites and does not have any control over, nor assume any responsibility for, information contained in these sites. Providing these sites should not be construed as an endorsement or approval by the publisher of these organizations or of the positions they may take on various issues.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Colt, Paul.

  A question of bounty : the shadow of doubt / by Paul Colt. — First edition.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-1-4328-2857-8 (hardcover) — ISBN 1-4328-2857-6 (hardcover)

  eISBN-13: 978-1-4328-2994-0 eISBN-10: 1-4328-2994-7

  1. Billy, the Kid—Death and burial—Fiction. 2. Outlaws—Southwest, New—Biography—Fiction. 3. Garrett, Pat F. (Pat Floyd), 1850–1908—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3603.O4673Q84 2014

  813′.6—dc23 2014003145

  First Edition. First Printing: June 2014

  This title is available as an e-book.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4328-2994-0 ISBN-10: 1-4328-2994-7

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  Printed in the United States of America

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 18 17 16 15 14

  A QUESTION OF BOUNTY:

  THE SHADOW OF DOUBT

  FOREWORD

  Las Vegas, New Mexico

  September 23, 2010

  The familiar brown delivery truck wound its way up a quiet, hilly suburban street. The driver carefully ticked off the house numbers until he found his address. He turned into the drive of a modest, neatly kept ranch house done in the Southwestern architecture suggestive of traditional adobe. He grabbed a thick manila envelope off the passenger seat and stepped out of the air-conditioned cab into the late afternoon heat. He crunched up a stone walkway to the portico shaded front entrance and rang the bell.

  Moments later retired police detective Rick Ledger opened the door. He signed for the delivery, thanked the driver and took the envelope to the small office he maintained in a back bedroom looking out on a small backyard pool. He laid the envelope on the desk, took his seat and gazed out the window.

  This was it. After all the years of mystery and controversy, could it be he now held in his hands another important piece to the puzzle? Had it been worth it? Had it been worth the lawyers, the courts, the public outcry, the ridicule? Soon he would have his answer. In the end they’d prevailed. Not in the quest to exhume the grave reported to be the victim’s. Their opponents argued successfully that flood damage to the cemetery had so disturbed the remains of those buried there as to render the task of identification impossible. Still they’d found another way. They obtained the necessary samples. Blood from a bench believed to be the one from the carpenter’s shop in Pete Maxwell’s home. The second sample came from an old hat they found stuffed in a box of discarded clothing and personal effects in a back room of the Pioneer Nursing Home in Prescott, Arizona. The hatband inside was inscribed J. Miller. They’d found a hair sample sufficient enough to analyze. Matching the DNA would end at least part of the mystery.

  The controversy had raged for nearly a hundred and thirty years. Did Pat Garrett really kill Billy the Kid on July 14, 1881? The question gained notoriety in the 1930s, when a man in Texas, “Brushy” Bill Roberts, claimed he was Billy the Kid. Roberts’ claim on the Kid’s identity was subsequently discredited.

  Rick’s grandfather, Brock Ledger wasn’t surprised. He’d heard a different story from his grandpa Ty, a rancher and deputy US marshal in the New Mexico Territory at the time of the Lincoln County War. For Rick, the controversy always centered on the story he’d heard from his grandfather.

  He closed his eyes and remembered a summer night, sitting on a creaky porch step at his grandfather’s knee. He must have been eleven, maybe twelve. Summer vacations on Grandpa’s ranch in those carefree childhood years happily ran together. Those days were almost like rolling back the calendar to the last century and a time when rugged men rode these hills, taming a raw land to a new way of life. He felt a part of it back then, joining in the cowboy work by day and riding the past by night in his grandfather’s stories. This story had stayed with him. The story he heard on magical nights more than fifty years ago.

  He could almost taste the chilled Coca-Cola in the little green bottle. He saw insects swarm around the bare bulb porch light. He smelled sweet hay and horse scents drift up from the corral. He listened to quiet night sounds, as he waited for Grandpa to begin his yarn. Grandpa Brock gazed into the darkness as he brought the story back from another long-ago time. He recalled the words of the tall handsome cowboy in the faded tintype, framed in filigree on a parlor end table. It was a story Great-grandpa Ty told his grandson. A story that happened some eighty years before the night he first heard . . .

  ONE

  Blazer’s Mill

  New Mexico Territory

  August 5, 1878

  The Lincoln County War was over, the legend making had only just begun. John Tunstall and Alexander McSween were dead. John Chisum’s men had withdrawn to his South Spring ranch in the Pecos valley. The Dolan faction had won. The Tunstall Regulators were mostly scattered, gone back to peaceful pursuits. The last remnant of the Tunstall McSween faction, the so-called Ironclad Regulators remained. They were Tunstall loyalists; men who fought to the last. They’d left more than a few of their friends dead at the hands of Jimmy Dolan and his men. Then again, they’d taken their share of the boys who rode for the Dolan faction, known as the House. William Bonney, now better known as Billy the Kid, had informally taken over for the last official Regulator captain. The gang included Doc Scurlock, Charlie Bowdre and Tom O’Folliard. They drifted toward the Mescalaro Apache agency at Blazer’s Mill accompanied by a gang of no-account Mexican toughs, curious to see what the gringos would do now that the fighting was over.

  Blazer’s Mill appeared out of the distant sun shimmers, ragged shapes climbing a low hill. Billy winced at the memory. The Regulators caught Dolan man Buckshot Roberts in the tiny settlement during the height of the war. The old gunman had put up a hell of a fight. Badly outnumbered, he’d shot up a handful of them including the Kid. Roberts died, gut shot in the encounter, but not before killing the Regulator captain Dick Brewer. The bad memory stood out fresh as a bloodstain on that old hill.

  The sprawling Mescalaro agency building sat atop the hill beside Dr. Bl
azer’s fine two-story home. Further down the slope, a sawmill powered by Tularosa Creek stood beside a small general store and post office. Across the dusty ruts that passed for a street, two small adobe homes sprawled up the side of the hill to a blacksmith shop, barn and corral below the crest. Doc signaled a halt. He stepped down followed by Billy and the rest of the Ironclads.

  Antanacio Martinez, leader of the Mexicans, leaned down from his saddle. “Why stop here, amigo?” He pointed with his thinly whiskered chin. “There is a hot meal in sight.”

  Scurlock spat. “These horses is about played out. We need to figure how to replace them.”

  The Mexican laughed. “Nothing could be easier compadre. There you can see the corral for yourself. Where they have a corral, they have horses, fresh for the taking.” He turned to his men. “Vaminos muchachos!” He spurred off at a lope.

  Josiah ‘Doc’ Scurlock watched them go. He might have been mistaken for a school teacher. Clean shaven and sober of expression, he had a prominent nose, chiseled cheekbones, square jaw and neatly trimmed brown hair. He wore a dark frock coat he had a habit of pushing open behind the butts of his guns.

  “I know you get on with Mexicans, Billy, but it might be best if we didn’t hang so close with them bastards. They’re trouble sure as sin.”

  William “Billy the Kid” Bonney patted his big roan and nodded. A boyish-looking young man ladies found fetching, he had light brown hair, a gap-toothed grin, cherub cheeks and eyes a-glint, somewhere between mischief and murder. His attempt at a beard amounted to patches of fuzz on his lip and chin. He wore a battered sombrero perched on his head at a jaunty angle. Plain spun britches, shirt and a stained canvas vest hung on a slight frame of average height. He wore a .41 Colt self-cocker known as the Thunderer slung low on his hip.

  “Where do we go from here, Billy?” Bowdre said. “I’m feelin’ like it’s time to go home.”

  Billy understood. Charlie had a wife, Doc’s half-sister Manuela. Average height and plain featured, Charlie Bowdre had a broad forehead and questioning eyes. Drooping mustaches accentuated a weak chin. He wore a double-breasted shirt, baggy canvas britches and a Colt .44 holstered butt forward on his hip.

  “Old Fort Sumner might make as good a hideout as any.” Charlie called the old fort home. Manuela lived there.

  “Get out of Lincoln County and the heat will simmer down,” O’Folliard said. A pudgy, ruddy Irishman, Tom O’Folliard had a ready laugh. He had red hair, green eyes and a splash of freckles across the bridge of his nose. He looked more like a mischievous schoolboy than a hardened gunfighter. Like the Kid, his appearance might lead a man to dangerous misestimation. He took gleeful pleasure in pulling pranks all right, often at the business end of a gun.

  Shots sounded softly in the distance. All eyes cut toward Blazer’s Mill.

  “Sounds like trouble,” Charlie said.

  “Maybe them folks objected to givin’ up their horses,” Tom said.

  “I had a hunch,” Scurlock said. “Mount up.”

  The Ironclads rode into Blazer’s Mill to find the Indian agent dead, the corral cleaned out and the Mexicans gone. They fed and watered their horses. Laid in a few supplies and rode northeast bound for Old Fort Sumner.

  The postmaster ambled across the rutted dirt street to the blacksmith shop.

  “That looked like Billy the Kid.”

  The blacksmith spat a tobacco stream. “Sure ’nuf.”

  Lincoln

  They camped in the hills northwest of town. No point in riding in there at the risk of stirring up trouble. The war might be over, but there were plenty of gunmen on both sides still around, nursing long memories and vengeful tempers. Billy sent Bowdre into town for supplies and to find out how things had settled out.

  He sat cross-legged in front of a small fire, just enough to heat coffee. The air was still. The day’s heat lingered. Heat lightning winked out of a dark cloud bank off to the northwest. His stomach growled. Supper had to wait until Charlie got back. Doc had gone off on one of his walks down their back trail. He smelled trouble creeping up behind them like spooks in the night. Billy guessed the precaution couldn’t hurt. It gave Doc something to do. Tom lounged beyond the circle of firelight cleaning his guns.

  The Kid shook his head. How had it come to this? He hadn’t been party to the bad blood between Mr. Tunstall and Dolan. At least not until Mr. Tunstall gave him a job. The man treated him better than most anyone ever had. He took it real bad when Dolan men, posing as a sheriff’s posse, killed his benefactor in cold blood. It was Dolan’s doing. Everybody knew it. You could never prove it, though, not that anybody tried. Dolan owned Sheriff Brady. Brady might have worn the star, but Dolan was the law in Lincoln County. Brady wouldn’t shit unless Dolan said he could. So Dolan had Mr. Tunstall killed over his mercantile and bank. Dolan probably figured that would be the end of it. He didn’t count on Mr. McSween and the Regulators.

  The Regulators went after the murderers and got most of them. Once the shooting started, blood spilled on both sides, including that rat-bastard Brady. Things kind of ran together for a while until the big shoot-out in Lincoln a month ago. McSween and the Regulators figured to force a showdown in town. Dolan found a way to call in the army. Dolan men, backed by the army, shot the shit out of McSween and the Regulators.

  Mr. McSween died in the five-day battle. The Kid and the Ironclads escaped. Escaped to what? They had no jobs. They’d never even gotten their last pay. Dolan still had the law in his pocket. George Peppin was his new puppet with the star.

  The sound of an approaching horse drew the Kid back from his thoughts. Bowdre rode in. He handed O’Folliard two flour sacks of supplies and stepped down. O’Folliard followed his nose into the sack with the fatback and set about slicing long strips into a frying pan. Scurlock crunched out of the shadows into the firelight, drawn back to camp by Bowdre’s arrival.

  “What news from town?” Doc asked.

  Charlie poured himself a cup of coffee. “Well in case you didn’t know, we’re now Billy the Kid’s gang. We shot up Blazer’s Mill, killed the Indian agent and run off their stock.”

  “Don’t s’pose we can get by claimin’ it wasn’t us,” Doc said.

  They all laughed.

  “Well if we’d done all that, at least we’d have money to show for the horses them Mexicans stole,” Billy said.

  Tom put a smoky pan of fatback to sizzling on the fire and stirred a little water into a pot of beans. He pulled a bottle of whiskey out of the sack with the beans. “Hey, Charlie, you been holdin’ out on us.” He poured some in his cup and passed it along.

  Bowdre shook his head. “Looks like we cain’t keep out of trouble for not gettin’ in any.”

  Doc took a swallow of his drink and poured another. “It’s Dolan’s doin’. He wants us on the run and out of his way.”

  “I cain’t figure what he’s got to gain by that. Hell, he won,” Billy said.

  “Well, I’m goin’ home,” Charlie said. “I ain’t goin’ back to Lincoln anytime soon.”

  Heads nodded around.

  Old Fort Sumner

  August 1878

  Patrick Floyd Garrett tended bar at Beaver Smith’s Sumner Saloon. Old Fort Sumner was a two-saloon town. Bob Hargove’s place set the standard for modest. The Sumner made a measure of shabby. The air smelled of stale tobacco smoke, sweat and beer. Late afternoon sun fought its way through dirt streaked windows giving the room a muddy yellow glow. A few scarred tables dotted a stained rough cut plank floor. The bar Garrett served had a once polished top, blistered and cracked by the abuse of harsh climate and harder use. At that, it was the only finished surface in the Sumner.

  Tall and lean, Garrett carried himself with a quiet competence despite his humble circumstances. He wore his brown hair and mustache neatly trimmed. He had alert brown eyes that missed little. He knew trouble when he saw it and he knew how to handle it. Old Beaver Smith kept a baseball bat and sawed-off shotgun under the bar in case of trouble, no
t that much of that happened with Pat on duty.

  The Ironclads looked the part when they came in. Garrett had heard Bowdre was home. He wasn’t with the other three. Word was they’d come to Sumner to lie low. He doubted they’d cause any trouble, unless somebody caused trouble for them. They sidled up to the bar. He put on his best welcome and moved down the bar.

  “What’ll it be, gents?”

  “Whiskey,” the redhead said.

  “Same.” The cool quiet one nodded.

  “Make it three.” The gap-toothed kid grinned.

  Garrett set out glasses and poured. He set down the bottle. “You boys new in town?”

  “Rode in yesterday,” the Kid said.

  The redhead took the bottle. He and the quiet one took themselves off to a corner table.

  “Billy Bonney.” The Kid stuck out his hand.

  “Pat Garrett, Billy. Welcome to Fort Sumner.”

  “Pleased to meet you, Pat. Seems like a real nice little town.”

  “It is. We like to keep it that way.”

  The Kid’s eyes twinkled. “We surely do appreciate that.”

  “Good. Then we understand one another.” Garrett moved down the bar and went back to polishing glasses.

  “Say, you’re Billy the Kid, ain’t you?”

  He glanced over his shoulder at the slight young man who’d quietly come up to the bar. “What’s it to you?”

  “My name’s Billy too.” He stuck out his hand. “Billy Barlow, pleased to meet you.”

  He eyed the young man. Apart from dark hair and dark skin, he might have been looking at a slope-shouldered, gap-toothed brother.

  “Is it true what they’re sayin’, Billy?”

  “Is what true?”

  “That you killed that reservation agent over to Blazer’s Mill.”

  He shook his head. “Ain’t true. Mexicans shot him. He was dead by the time me and the boys rode in.”