On the evening of April 28, 1881, a twenty-one-year-old prisoner known as Billy the Kid sat in a second-floor room of the Lincoln County courthouse, days away from the gallows. Pat Garrett, the sheriff who had captured him, was out of town on county business. Deputy Bob Olinger, the man assigned to guard him, was across the street eating dinner. Only one deputy remained in the building: J.

W. Bell, a man who had been warned time and again about the prisoner in his charge. Garrett had drilled the warning into his deputies more than once. Do not be taken in by this guy’s charm.

I don’t care how charming he is—at the first chance he gets, he’ll kill the both of you and leave. Billy the Kid was extremely intelligent, and he had a gift for making people underestimate him. And even now, sitting in that cell with a rope waiting for him, he believed he would get out. Escaping was always on the agenda.

The Kid asked to use the outhouse. Bell took him down, then back up the stairs. At the top of the stairs, the Kid surprised him. He got Bell’s gun.

Bell panicked, ran down the stairs, and took a bullet that did not kill him outright. The Kid grabbed Olinger’s shotgun and moved to a window that looked out across the street, knowing Olinger would have heard the shots. Olinger came running from the Wortley Hotel. Someone yelled that the Kid had killed Bill.

Then Olinger heard a voice from above: “Hello, Bob. ” He looked up into the twin barrels of his own shotgun. Thirty-six buckshot—about a quarter pound of lead—hit him. He was dead before he hit the ground.

The Kid walked out, commandeered a horse, and rode out of town singing. He was very good at getting away. Escape was one of his great talents. In that moment, as he passed out of sight, he passed into legend.

The story would never be the same after that. He had been on the run from the law since the age of fifteen. In just a few short years, he had become the most wanted man west of the Pecos. Demonized by a popular press set on cleaning up New Mexico, he was portrayed as a bloodthirsty killer, a ruthless cuss hell-bent on anarchy.

But to many, he was a voice for the disenfranchised, the Robin Hood of New Mexico. You have to separate the romantic, mythical side of Billy the Kid from the fact that he was a cop killer, that he murdered people. What was forming in America in those years was something powerful: the idea of the gangster as hero, the notion that the man of violence is the man of action, and that there is no real difference between fame and infamy. The young man who would come to symbolize the freedom and rebellion of the Wild West likely began his life in the teeming slums of New York City.

He was born Henry McCarty, the son of Irish immigrants. His mother, Catherine, had fled Ireland to escape the devastating famine of the 1840s, only to find squalor and hardship in America. It is not known who Henry’s father was or how he died. But Catherine was determined to give her son a better life.

Shortly after the Civil War, Henry and his mother joined a wave of humanity heading west. On the trail, young Henry learned to survive the hardscrabble life of a Western pioneer. Catherine made sure he learned to read and write. To pass the time, the two sang Irish folk songs as they crossed the vast open spaces of America.

Lured by the promise of silver, fourteen-year-old Henry, his mother, and her new husband—a prospector named William Antrim—settled in the remote outpost of Silver City in southwestern New Mexico. By 1873, New Mexico had been a territory of the United States for over two decades, but to American settlers fresh off the Santa Fe Trail, the region seemed like an exotic foreign country. Americans in their journals and diaries were patronizing and dismissive of the culture they found there. The New Mexicans were dark, their religious practices mysterious, and civilization, as the newcomers customarily thought of it, seemed to halt at the territory’s border.

In the bustling plazas of the capital, traders bartered for livestock in Spanish, French, and Navajo. Rustic dwellings carved into the mesas were home to Pueblo Indians, and Mescalero Apaches still roamed the countryside. It was a wild, unbelievable land of great violence and great beauty. Young Henry McCarty was captivated by the world he discovered.

He instantly embraced New Mexican culture, becoming a familiar presence in the Hispanic district of Silver City, known as Chihuahua Hill. Within months he was speaking Spanish fluently. He took to wearing sombreros and beaded moccasins, and he would while away his nights learning to dance the Mexican fandango. He went to the dances with his mother, and they would dance and sing together.

He caught the eye of many señoritas. The Hispanic mothers, the old aunts, and the fathers liked him enough to let him court and dance with their protected daughters. He embraced their culture and their people. He was respectful, proper, and formal in a Mexican sort of way, which they liked.

He had a unique charm. People talked about his teeth and the shape of his mouth, but it was always in a smile. That is what the Hispanic community always says: he was always smiling, always laughing. When Henry was just fifteen, his mother became gravely ill with tuberculosis.

She had hoped the dry mountain air would restore her health, but the galloping consumption, as it was then known, proved too much for Catherine. She died in Silver City in 1874. Catherine was his one connection to stability—the mother who had raised him, made sure he was fed, sent him to school. Once she was gone, his stepfather, William Antrim, did not care about the upbringing of his stepson.

Antrim abandoned the boy. To be out in that distant and strange land, and to have lost the only connection to who you were and to your past, was devastating. An orphan in a tough and transient mining town, it did not take long for Henry to find trouble, or for trouble to find him. In the saloons and brothels at the center of town, he hustled to make a few bucks however he could.

At night he bunked down in boarding houses with a revolving cast of strangers, one of them a streetwise petty thief named Sombrero Jack. On the afternoon of September 4, 1875, Henry acted as lookout while Sombrero Jack robbed a Chinese laundry. When some of the plunder, including a loaded revolver, was discovered in Henry’s room, he was arrested. Alone in a cramped four-by-five-foot cell, Henry could hear the bustle of downtown Silver City through the tiny barred window.

He knew it might take up to three months for a traveling judge to reach this part of New Mexico. That was a lifetime to a sixteen-year-old. He was able to deceive people, to make them think he was inconsequential. He conned the prison guard into granting him some time outside his cell.

When the coast was clear, Henry—no more than 130 pounds with his boots on—forced his tiny frame up the chimney. The sheriff returned to an empty cell and an empty hallway. Had he stayed, it probably would have been a slap on the wrist. But with that jailbreak, he was a wanted man at sixteen.

Henry decided to head west for Arizona, hoping for a fresh start. With no horse, no gun, and little money, he was on the run in some of the most hostile land in the country. This was a country so bad, so wild, so dangerous that just staying alive was a trick. Everybody was against you.

If you had anything worth taking and you were alone, you had to be a unique individual to survive. After five hundred miles of unforgiving desert, Henry arrived at a remote army outpost in Arizona known as Camp Grant, where he stopped running long enough to look for honest work. Like a lot of kids in his time, he wanted to be a cowboy. But he was not very good at it, apparently; the best work he could get was on the chuck line as a cook.

They thought he was too small and frail to work with the other cowboys. Once again, Henry was back to hustling for money. He became a skilled gambler and dealer of three-card monte, and he fell in with a gang of seasoned outlaws who taught him the finer points of stealing horses. Soon he earned enough to buy the one thing he would need most to survive: a six-shooter.

It was an equalizer. If you wanted instant respect, you put on a six-shooter and you got that respect. He quickly became very good with a gun, learning how to handle himself because he had to in order to get along in that raw country. In the years since escaping the Silver City jail, Henry had started to make a name for himself as an outlaw.

He took to wearing a gambler’s ring on his pinky and brightly colored scarves around his neck. He spent his nights in raucous saloons, where he picked up the nickname “the Kid. ”

On the evening of August 17, 1877, the Kid crossed a line from which he could never return when he ran into a local thug named Frank Cahill. Windy Cahill was a boastful, outspoken bully who thought it was fun to slap this little guy around to amuse the other patrons.

He did it one time too many. He started really in on the Kid. One thing led to another, and Cahill got him down and was pounding him. The Kid was working his hand toward a gun in his belt.

Cahill tried to stop him but could not. A belly shot is not a way to die. It took Cahill all night to die, but by that time the Kid had fled. Murder was a hanging offense.

This was quite a bit different than stealing something from a laundry. The Kid had real reasons to be afraid of being caught. Even if he had stayed, an argument could have been made for self-defense, but he was not willing to take that chance. The Kid had killed a man.

He had undergone a quick and fiery baptism from orphan boy to desperado. Now he could only count on his wits, his gun, and his horse. It must have had a profound psychological impact on him. He was still young, very impressionable, very vulnerable.

What did it mean to kill a man? After that, there was no turning back. New Mexico was a great place to be a fugitive. The distances were vast, and there were so many places to hide.

It was a great playground for a getaway artist, especially if you were friendly with the locals, spoke their language, and had endeared yourself to them. In 1877, riding a stolen gray mare, the Kid crossed the Arizona border back into New Mexico. He had changed his name and was now going by the alias William H. Bonney.

Quietly he made his way across the territory, relying on the hospitality of the Hispanic farmers whose ranches had dotted the countryside for generations. But times were changing in New Mexico. At the end of the Civil War, American businessmen had flocked to the territory looking to profit off this vast new land. The men of this new Anglo establishment quickly became the largest property owners in New Mexico, often wresting land from Hispanic ranchers with the aid of unscrupulous bankers, a rigged legal system, and, when all else failed, the business end of a gun.

They got into railroading, mining, cattle—all of it. But land was at the very cornerstone of their empire. Some of the most lucrative holdings were in Lincoln County, the largest county in New Mexico. For the past decade, the whole county had been run by tough Irish immigrants, Lawrence Murphy and James Dolan.

Their business was primarily cattle ranching and government beef contracts, but there was barely a dollar spent for 30,000 square miles that they did not get a piece of. Their enterprise came to be known as “the House,” named for their headquarters, a giant timber-frame building in the town of Lincoln. The House owned everything in the county and had a stranglehold on it. They had no real competition.

They simply ruled the place like a fiefdom. They were good to their friends, but everyone else had better watch out. You did not want to get in their way, that was for certain. But someone was getting in their way.

John Tunstall, the twenty-three-year-old son of a wealthy British merchant, had recently arrived with grand plans to build a cattle empire and seemingly limitless funds to match. Though young and inexperienced in ranching, Tunstall knew that competing with the House could get rough. He was looking for good cowboys, men not only good with a rope but also handy with a pistol and a rifle. The Kid arrived in Lincoln in 1877 and was soon arrested for stealing horses from the Tunstall ranch.

Much to his surprise, instead of pressing charges, Tunstall offered him a job. Billy could not believe his luck. When he got the chance to go straight, he took it. Later, the Kid would say that Tunstall was the only man who treated him like he was decent and white.

Tunstall did not treat him like riffraff or scum or a horse thief. He treated him like a human being. For a teenager like the Kid, that was a very big deal. The Kid joined a group of young men who, like himself, were outsiders—young men who had been drifting, trying to scrape together a living out on the plains.

Together they learned to be proper cowboys. At night they told stories and slept under the stars. Tunstall provided money to keep them in boots and bullets. Most of all, he gave them the promise of a future.

To Murphy and Dolan, the idea of a well-heeled Englishman moving in on their turf was unthinkable. Both men had grown up in rural Ireland and experienced the most deadly famine in human history. That sort of experience does not make people nice; it makes them incredibly ruthless. It gives them an extraordinary hunger—a hunger never to let that happen to you again.

You think they were going to sit still and let this Englishman come in and take it all off them? This was the very kind of Englishman that had kept their people under its heel, ground them into the dirt, made them starve. And now he thought he was going to come out here and take this off them, after what they had to do to get it? You have to be kidding.

The House concocted a plan to get rid of Tunstall once and for all. They enlisted Sheriff William Brady to enforce a phony court order confiscating all of Tunstall’s horses and cattle. On the afternoon of February 18, 1878, John Tunstall rode into town to challenge the claim on his property. Along the way he ran into the sheriff’s posse.

He rode forward to talk to them—a man who actually believed the law would protect him. They never gave him a chance. They shot him out of the saddle. One of them dismounted, walked over, and put a bullet in Tunstall’s head.

Then, just out of sheer meanness, they shot Tunstall’s horse. They arranged the bodies as though man and horse were taking a nap together, putting Tunstall’s hat under the horse’s head and folding his coat up underneath. They thought it was a good joke. Tunstall’s men retrieved his body and buried him at his ranch.

The Kid had learned a hard truth about the way the world worked in New Mexico. To him, Murphy, Dolan, the House, and the whole system were corrupt. He made a pact with Dick Brewer, Doc Scurlock, and the other men who had worked for Tunstall. Together they would form their own cowboy army.

Calling themselves the Regulators, they vowed to dispense their own brand of justice. Billy had one capacity above others: loyalty. He was extremely loyal to everyone who gave him the chance to be loyal. When Tunstall was killed, he was hell-bent on revenge.

He was going to get every man involved in the killing, and he had a particular hit list. William Brady, the sheriff of Lincoln County—the man the Regulators believed had ordered Tunstall’s murder—was number one on that list. On April Fools’ Day, 1878, they got their chance. In Lincoln, the Kid and several Regulators hid behind an adobe wall, knowing Brady’s patterns, knowing he took that morning stroll every day.

As Sheriff Brady walked down the street with several deputies, the Kid and his fellow Regulators put over a dozen slugs into him. He was dead before he hit the ground. It was an assassination, no question about it. But why would they think Brady deserved any better, after he had sent known killers out to murder Tunstall?

Brady was a murderer, even though he wore a badge. They shot him down like a dog. This was a war. The only way to get decent law around there was to kill the law they had and put their own law in its place.

What started as a revenge killing sparked by an old-world rivalry between the Irish and the English quickly spiraled into anarchy. The Regulators and the House were engaged in gang warfare, ambushing each other in the countryside and squaring off in the center of town. With each encounter the body count rose. Within a few weeks, the press began calling the conflict the Lincoln County War.

It was the finality of a decade of hostility that had been bubbling. Finally everybody took arms and said, “Let’s finish this. ” It was an open free-for-all, one former regulator recalled. Everyone had to line up on one side or the other.

There were hard feelings not only between the Irish and the Englishman Tunstall, but also between the Mescaleros and the Hispanics. It did not take much to get an argument going, which is why so many dead bodies piled up so quickly. Law completely broke down in Lincoln County. Every son of a bitch up there wanted to kill somebody.

The Kid watched many of his friends die in the relentless violence. Simply by staying alive, he became one of the leaders of the Regulators. In the process, he made a name for himself as a fearsome fighter. He was the only one of the soldiers who was in every single skirmish—every fight, every face-off.

He was there, and he just kept getting better at it. He got stuck in the logic of the conflict, and he did what young men of his age have done throughout history: he fought for the dead. He kept going because his mates had been killed. It was an incredibly intimate conflict.

There was a sense that Billy did not have anywhere to go. The people he was connected to, who might have been able to help him, give him a job, get him up the ladder, had been killed. Blending into the darkness of the New Mexico night, the Kid could always find comfort and refuge with the Hispanic ranchers. On the tiny sheep farms surrounding Lincoln, he was becoming a heroic figure in another struggle.

The Hispanos would have seen in the Kid a person who was fighting their enemies. The people he was fighting against, even the ones on the side of the law, were crooks—the Hispanos knew that. These were not fine, outstanding citizens being gunned down. He was engaging against people who had stolen a whole country, who had stolen their lands.

When he struck against the House, he was striking a blow for those who were being dispossessed, the Mexican sheep herders. It was not a very long journey to make him into a fighter for justice. The Hispanos gave him shelter and hid him. They were able to use the Kid and construct a hero at a time when heroes were in short supply, a time when they had no heroes.

Five months after the Tunstall murder, the violence of the Lincoln County War reached its peak. A bloody siege in the center of Lincoln, known as the Big Killing, left five more men dead. The Kid narrowly escaped with his life. To the anxious American politicians and businessmen in the territory, the vigilante violence was bad for business and needed to be stopped.

Indictments were handed down against the Kid and three other Regulators for the killing of Sheriff Brady. Still, the bloodshed continued unabated. All the murder and mayhem made its way back to Washington. The federal government’s response was to put an end to it.

President Rutherford B. Hayes himself intervened, appointing a new governor to the New Mexico Territory: former Union Army General Lew Wallace. Wallace traveled to Lincoln with a mandate to restore order as quickly as possible. He began taking testimony from everybody, interested in who killed whom and when, but he could not get anybody to testify.

Everybody was frightened. Finally, he found a willing witness. In Lew Wallace, the Kid saw an opportunity to clear his name. He wrote a letter to the governor offering to testify against members of the House in exchange for a full pardon.

He was trying not to be on the run. He was trying to go straight. Let’s quit this, he was saying. Let me live a life.

I’m not even twenty years of age yet. I don’t want to be dead. Wallace agreed to the deal, and the Kid appeared before a grand jury. Due in part to his testimony, more than two hundred indictments, many for murder, were returned against fifty men, including the House leader Jimmy Dolan.

But when it came time to grant the Kid his pardon, Wallace was nowhere to be found. He had returned to the governor’s mansion in Santa Fe, leaving the Kid’s fate in the hands of the authorities in Lincoln. Lew Wallace did not give a damn about Billy the Kid. He just wanted to get out of there, and out of there he went.

With the governor gone, the local district attorney—a close associate of Murphy and Dolan—dropped most of the charges against members of the House. But the indictments against the Kid and the Regulators remained. Before Billy could be taken back into custody, he slipped out of town. There was a last gathering of the gang, where they all decided to get the hell out of New Mexico.

They said they were going to Colorado, Kansas, Texas—get the hell out of there. Billy said, “Well, boys, I’m going to stay here and steal myself a living. ”

The Kid went back to stealing horses and rustling cattle, quickly becoming a nuisance to the wealthy Anglo ranchers in the territory. He was a consistent rebel all the way.

He had not backed down from the House, and he was not going to back away now. He was a real thorn in the power structure of New Mexico, and they were determined to get him. Over the next few months, newspapers were filled with accounts about the Kid, mostly embellished. He was portrayed as a murderous villain terrorizing the countryside, a desperate cuss hell-bent on anarchy in charge of a ruthless gang of criminals.

There was scarcely a violent crime committed in the whole of New Mexico that was not blamed on him. The majority of the territorial press were mouthpieces for the House, for the big bosses up in Santa Fe. They were beating the war drums: “Let’s civilize this territory. Let’s get rid of that Kid.

Let’s get rid of Billy the Kid. ”

In 1880, an enterprising newspaper editor named J. H. Kugler gave the Kid his most famous alias.

Soon a notice appeared in town squares across the territory: Wanted, dead or alive, Billy the Kid. In the spring of 1880, a traveling photographer arrived in Fort Sumner, New Mexico. Dusty and bedraggled, the Kid decided to pose for a twenty-five-cent tintype. For the past several months, he had counted on his close relationship with the Hispanic ranchers in Fort Sumner to elude capture.

It was rumored that he had fallen in love with a sixteen-year-old Hispanic girl named Paulita Maxwell. Years later, Paulita would say the photo taken that day did not do him justice. She would have seen a slim, attractive young man with dancing, mischievous eyes. Yes, he was scarred, yes he was battered, but he was a man who still had his dreams.

Billy was always looking for a family. He wanted a home, and that was the one thing he never really had and could not get. But he felt that Fort Sumner was home. A hundred miles away, the town of Lincoln had a new sheriff determined to make a name for himself.

Pat Garrett was a man on the make, a man who wanted respectability. He wanted to be a famous lawman like Wild Bill Hickok, and in capturing the Kid he could do so. By December of 1880, Garrett had assembled a gang of lawmen. Dubbed the Panhandle Posse, it included some of the toughest cowboys from Texas.

The newspapers followed their every move, providing details to a public eager to see Billy the Kid brought to justice. It was no simple feat. This was winter—November, December—out on the trail. But through a combination of stealth and sleuthing, Garrett tracked him down.

Garrett and his posse killed two of Billy’s friends, Tom O’Folliard and Charlie Bowdre. In just a matter of days, they backed the Kid into a corner in a tiny cabin in a desolate area known as Stinking Spring. The Kid and the others were trapped inside with nowhere to go. Garrett shot one of their horses right in the doorway.

After a night with no food, no water, and no fire, the Kid finally ran out of options. He walked out, threw his hands in the air, and surrendered. When he came out, he said, “Hell, Pat, I thought you had 200 Texans out here. Otherwise, I’d have never given up.

” He was actually going to jail, probably going to be hanged, and yet he was laughing about it. Because somewhere in there, he thought, I’m going to get out of this. News of the Kid’s capture spread across the territory. When Garrett arrived in Las Vegas, New Mexico, with the Kid in irons, the sheriff was greeted as a conquering hero.

Crowds lined the streets to see the famous manhunter and gawk at the mythic outlaw. Newspaper reporters were allowed in to talk to the Kid. As he spoke with them, he said, “This is good. Maybe people will think I’m half human now, because they haven’t thought I was human before.

They considered me an animal. Maybe now they’ll think I’m half human. ” He did look human indeed, one reporter wrote. There was nothing very mannish about his appearance, for he looked and acted like a schoolboy, with the traditional silky fuzz on his upper lip and clear blue eyes with a roguish snap about them.

Billy was loaded onto a train bound for Santa Fe, where he would await trial for murder. As the train pulled away from the station, the defiant Kid smiled and laughed, inviting reporters to come visit him in jail. The train was the machine in the garden, the change that was coming to the entire West. Now he was placed on this machine, and it would take him to Santa Fe, where they would chain him and prepare him for execution.

Once he was on that train, it was a one-way trip. Billy was convicted of first-degree murder for the killing of Sheriff Brady. He was sent back to Lincoln in the custody of Pat Garrett and two well-armed deputies, J. W.

Bell and Bob Olinger. At only twenty-one years of age, he was a dead man walking, scheduled to hang in a matter of days. But he believed he was going to get away. All he had to do was recognize the opportunity.

It was a matter of time, and he picked his time well. That came on the afternoon of April 28, 1881, when Garrett was out of town and Olinger was across the street eating dinner. Within minutes, two deputies lay dead, and Billy the Kid had escaped from the Lincoln County courthouse. The story took less than a day to make front-page headlines across the country.

The telegraph gave electric life to the details of his escape. He became nationally famous. Instantaneously, people knew about Billy and what he had done. He was glamorized and made into a mythical character.

He was in the New York Times, even the London Times. Big towns, small towns—Fredericksburg, Illinois, whatever town you like. Chicago, sure. San Francisco, certainly.

He became an absolute icon of American outlawry. Just a few years earlier he had been a skinny orphan boy from New York City. Now Billy was the most feared man in New Mexico. He knew it would not be long before someone came looking for him.

But he still refused to leave the territory. Friends urged him not to let the sun set on him in New Mexico, but he made no attempt to get away, and he could have. Most people know exactly why he stayed. Two words: Paulita Maxwell.

His true love. He was not going to go down to Mexico—that would have been the smart thing to do. But sometimes a kid is not always smart. Sometimes the heart rules, and I think it certainly did in that case.

It had been nearly three months since Billy escaped from Lincoln. Some began to wonder if Pat Garrett was too afraid to go after him again. But Garrett was biding his time, and he knew exactly where Billy was. Garrett kept getting persistent tips from Fort Sumner that the Kid was up there.

It turned out the tips were coming from Pete Maxwell, Paulita’s big brother, who did not approve of the relationship. Finally, Garrett decided he had to act on it. Garrett and two new deputies headed north along the Pecos River. They arrived in Fort Sumner on the night of July 14, 1881, and went directly to the Maxwell home.

Garrett posted his two men on the front porch. So as not to be noticed, he snuck in through the back and found his way to Pete Maxwell’s bedroom. At that same moment, Billy, in his stocking feet, approached the porch where Garrett’s men were stationed. He had come into Maxwell’s house in the dead of night, presumably to cut a piece of meat from a beef hanging on the porch.

He saw the two silhouettes hunkered down and asked them in Spanish, “¿Quién es? ” Who is it? There was no answer. The Kid backed away, and backed away, until he backed into the doorway.

From inside the room, he was framed in the moonlight. Garrett was sitting on the bed with Pete Maxwell. Maxwell leaned over and said, “It’s him. ” Garrett took his gun and blasted.

There fell dead Billy the Kid, right on that floor, with that question on his lips, “¿Quién es? ” Never knowing who killed him. The folks in the local community were horrified by what had happened. The local señoritas, including Paulita Maxwell, gathered up Billy’s body.

They anointed him, laid him out, and prayed over him that night. They loved the Kid. New Mexicans felt that he was one of us—lo nuestro, one of ours. News of his killing spread fast.

Everyone from preachers in pulpits to kids in schoolyards retold the story of how the legendary outlaw Billy the Kid was gunned down. One woman recalled how her brothers ran into the house in Kansas City, Missouri, and said, “Two days ago, out in New Mexico territory, they killed Billy the Kid. ” She remembered that day as clear as a bell when she was an old, old woman. A lot of people did.

For killing Billy the Kid, Pat Garrett enjoyed momentary fame as America’s greatest lawman. But in 1908, mired in gambling debts, he was mysteriously shot dead along a remote stretch of road in the New Mexican desert. For the big businessmen in Santa Fe, economic progress was slow to come to the territory, and they would have to wait another thirty years for statehood. The House and its beef empire went bankrupt, and the names Lawrence Murphy and James Dolan faded from memory.

Only the legend of Billy the Kid endured. It was Henry McCarty who died. It was Billy Bonney who died. Billy the Kid rode on.

And he rides on forever.