d as
sheriff. He lived with McSween part of the time. It was understood that
he was sheriff for the purpose of bothering nobody but the Murphy
people.

Meantime, the other party were not thus to be surpassed. In June, 1878,
Governor Axtell appointed George W. Peppin as sheriff of Lincoln county.
Peppin qualified at Mesilla, came back to Lincoln, and demanded of
Copeland the warrants in his possession. He had, on his part, twelve
warrants for the arrest of members of the McSween gang. Little lacked
now to add confusion in this bloody coil. The country was split into two
factions. Each had a sheriff as a figurehead! What and where was the
law?

Peppin had to get fighting men to serve his warrants, and he could not
always be particular about the social standing of his posses. He had a
thankless and dangerous position as the "Murphy sheriff." Most of his
posses were recruited from among the small ranchers and cow boys of the
lower Pecos. Peppin was sheriff only a few months, and threw up the job
$2,800 in debt.

The men of both parties were now scouting about for each other here and
there over a district more than a hundred miles square; but presently
the war was to take on the dignity of a pitched battle. Early in July,
1878, the Kid and his gang rounded up at the McSween house. There were a
dozen white desperadoes in their party. There were about forty Mexicans
also identified with the McSween faction. These were quartered in the
Montana and Ellis residences, well down the street.

The Murphy forces now surrounded the McSween house, and at once a
pitched battle began. The McSween men started the firing from the
windows and loopholes of their fortress. The Peppin men replied. The
town, divided against itself, held under cover. For three days the two
little armies lay here, separated by the distance of the street, perhaps
sixty men in all on the McSween side, perhaps thirty or forty in all on
the Murphy-Peppin side, of whom nineteen were Americans.

To keep the McSween men inside their fortifications, Peppin had three
men posted on the mountain side, whence they could look down directly
upon the top of the houses, as the mountain here rises up sharply back
of the narrow line of adobe buildings. These pickets were Charlie
Crawford, Lucillo Montoye, and another Mexican, and with their
long-range buffalo guns they threw a good many heavy slugs of lead into
the McSween house. At last, one Fernando Herrera, a McSween Mexic