as found under the horse's head. His body,
lashed on a burro's back, was brought over the mountains by his friends
that night into Lincoln, twenty miles distant. Fifty men took up the
McSween fight that night; for, in truth, the killing of Tunstall was
murder and without justification.

That was the beginning of the actual Lincoln County War. Dick Brewer,
Tunstall's foreman, was now leader of the McSween fighting men. McSween,
of course, supplied him with color of "legal" authority. He was
appointed "special constable." Neither party had difficulty in obtaining
all the legal papers required. Each party was presently to have a
sheriff of its own. Meantime, there was at Lincoln an accommodating
justice of the peace, John P. Wilson, who was ready to give either
faction any sort of legal paper it demanded. Dick Brewer, Billy the Kid,
and nearly a dozen others of the first McSween posse started to the
lower country, where lived a good many of Murphy's friends, small cow
men and others. On the Rio Penasco, about six miles from the Pecos, they
came across a party of five men, two of whom, Billy Morton and Frank
Baker, had been present at the killing of Tunstall. Baker and Morton
surrendered under promise of safekeeping, and were held for a time at
Roswell. On the trail from Roswell to Lincoln, at a point near the Agua
Negra, both these men, while kneeling and pleading for their lives, were
deliberately shot and killed by Billy the Kid. There was with the
Brewer posse a buffalo-hunter by the name of McClosky, who had promised
to take care of these prisoners. Joe McNab, of the posse, shot and
killed McClosky in cold blood. In this McSween posse were "Doc"
Skurlock, Charlie Bowdre, Billy the Kid, Hendry Brown, Jim French, John
Middleton, with McNab, Wait and Smith, besides McClosky, who seems not
to have been loyal enough to them to sanction cold blooded murder. These
victims were killed March 7th, 1878.

There had now been deliberate murder committed upon the one side and
upon the other. There were many men implicated on each side. These men,
in self-interest, now drew apart together. The factions, of necessity,
became more firmly established. It may be seen that there was very
little principle at stake on either side. The country was now simply
going wild again. It meant to take the law into its own hands; and the
population was divided into these two factions, to one or the other of
which every resident must perforce belong.