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A TKINS SADDLES THE OCEAN + 17 ∂ After the capture of Elzy Lay at Chimney Wlls, Tom Capehart rode hard across country until he reached the WS ranch in western Socorro County. At the horse camp, twenty miles from the ranch headquarters, he met Butch Cassidy, who was still in the employ of the WS. Red Weaver was also in the locality, having reappeared in Alma shortly after parting from Marshal Foraker. For this phase of the story, we are entirely in the hands of William French, uncorroborated but uncontradicted. Since what he has to say is not inherently unlikely, we may reasonably accept it as true in outline. French states that he left Cimarron to return to Alma several days after the Turkey Canyon affray. Some three or four weeks afterwards—not quite French’s “more than a month later”—Cassidy and Capehart came to him with the news that “Mac” was a prisoner. Capehart gave French a quite extensive but purposely incomplete account of the capture, which the rancher related in his memoirs thirty years after hearing it. Whether errors in French’s version came from failings of memory, or from misunderstanding or misstatement on Capehart’s part, becomes unimportant once we have elected to believe that some such conversation did take place. Tom had arrived late the previous night on a worn-out horse, the last of several he must have ridden in covering four hundred miles in three days; that is to say (although French did not), he must have reached Alma late on August 19. Cassidy and Capehart wanted French to go bond for“Mac”when his case came up for trial. French demurred. He thought, correctly, that a capital charge was not bailable in New Mexico. Moreover, he believed that Reno suspected him of complicity in his former employee’s crimes. He told them that the best he could do was certify to the defendant’s good conduct during his term of employment on the WS. Since Capehart was telling him no more than he thought necessary—for example, he did not explain how, when, or where “Mac” came by his wounds, not realizing that French already knew; and, rather than deny being the wanted “Franks,” he said only that he was afraid of being taken for him—French concluded that Capehart “must be the man the authorities called Franks.”The mistake was made easier and more understandable by the fact that, as far 247 248 The Deadliest Outlaws as can be judged from his Recollections, Will Carver was unknown to him in person and in name.1` Carver, as we have seen, had given Cicero Stewart’s posse the slip. Stewart set out from Carlsbad at three in the afternoon of August 16 with J.J. Rascoe, Dee Harkey, D.D. Clark, and Harry Morrison. The posse had a clear trail to Carlsbad and onto the road to Seven Rivers. They continued into Seven Rivers, pressed on westward to Hope, thence to Weed, sixty miles west of Hope, and finally to Musgrave’s Camp. This brought them to a point two hundred miles west of Chimney Wells, only two full days after their departure from Carlsbad. Fast time, indeed, but to no useful end; they had been following a hunch, not a trail, and the hunch turned out to be a bad one. It was obvious from the complete absence of sign and sightings that Carver could not have taken that route. Three of the posse returned to Carlsbad on Sunday night, August 20. Stewart and Rascoe were twenty-four hours behind them, having paused to make further inquiries in the Seven Rivers vicinity. They concluded that Carver had duped them by making himself conspicuous on the road to Seven Rivers and then sliding away to the northeast when he was lost to sight. The search for him ended with the reasonable but untested assumption that he would continue northeast as far as the Panhandle of Texas, a destination that need take him no more than 150 miles from Carlsbad.2 Whether or not he did enter Texas, Carver was back in the southern border country of Arizona and New Mexico by fall. In the time left to him he neither forgot nor forgave Rufus Thomas’s part in the arrest of Elzy Lay.3 Events eight hundred miles to the north brought a succession of new faces to the WS ranch and its locality. The Wilcox, Wyoming, train robbery of Friday, June 2...

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