, these men
discovered and captured a band of five men, including Frank Baker and
Billy Morton, both old friends of the Kid, at the lower crossing of the
Rio Penasco, some six miles from the Pecos. The prisoners were kept
over night at Chisum's ranch, and then the posse started with them for
Lincoln, not taking the Hondo-Bonito trail, but one _via_ the Agua
Negra, on the east side of the Capitans; proof enough that something
bloody was in contemplation, for that was far from any settlements.
Apologists of the Kid say that Morton and Baker "tried to escape," and
that the Kid followed and killed them. The truth in all probability is
that the party, sullen and bloody-minded, rode on, waiting until wrath
or whiskey should inflame them so as to give resolution for the act they
all along intended. The Kid, youngest but most determined of the band,
no doubt did the killing of Billy Morton and Frank Baker; and in all
likelihood there is truth in the assertion that they were on their knees
and begging for their lives when he shot them. McClosky was killed by
McNab, on the principle that dead men tell no tales. This killing was on
March 9, 1878. The murder of Sheriff William Brady and George Hindman by
the Kid and his half-dozen companions occurred April 1, 1878, and it is
another act which can have no palliation whatever.

The Kid was now assuming prominence as a gun fighter and leader, young
as he was. After the big fight in Lincoln was over, and the McSween
house in flames, the Kid was leader of the sortie which took him and a
few of his companions to safety. The list of killings back of him was
now steadily lengthening, and, indeed, one murder followed another so
fast all over that country that it was hard to keep track of them all.

The killing of the Indian agency clerk, Bernstein, August 5, 1878, on a
horse-stealing expedition, was the next act of the Kid and his men, who
thereafter fled northeast, out through the Capitan Gap, to certain old
haunts around Fort Sumner, some ninety miles north of Roswell, up the
Pecos valley. Here a little band of outlaws, led by the Kid, lived for a
time as they could by stealing horses along the Bonito and around the
Capitans, and running them off north and east. There were in this band
at the time the Kid, Charlie Bowdre, Doc Skurlock, Wayt, Tom O'Folliard,
Hendry Brown and Jack Middleton. Some or all of these were in the march
with stolen horses which the Kid engineered that fall, going