Chapter 3 Bill Harrigan

Arizona is bigger than anywhere: Arizona and New Mexico are famous for their gold and silver deposits, their majestic plateaus are dark and dazzling in color, and the skeletons of animals that have been stripped of their flesh by birds of prey shine white.In those lands, there are still recent images of "boys": riders sitting motionless on horseback, young people whose gunshots disturb the desert, and young people who play magic and emit invisible and lethal bullets from afar. The desert, criss-crossed by veins of metal, is desolate and gleaming.The man who died at the age of twenty-one, almost as a child, is the most despised of late and owes twenty-one lives—"not counting the Mexicans."

early years The most recent person who would become the "boy" of the Weizhen side was born in 1859 in the basement of a large courtyard in New York.His mother was said to have been an Irishwoman with many children, but he had been raised among blacks.Among the sweaty, curly-haired black kids, the freckled, red-haired ones stood out from the crowd.He was proud of being white; but he was also weak, wild, and dirty.At the age of twelve, he joined the "Swamp Angels" gang that operated in the sewer system. Out of the fetid maze of sewers on a foggy and scorched night, they followed a German sailor, knocked him unconscious with a blow to the head, stripped him of his underwear, and returned to the sewers.Their leader was a grizzled black man, Garth Houser Jonas, who was also known for poisoning racehorses.

Sometimes, on the attic of a rickety house by the river, a woman pours a bucket of ashes over the heads of passers-by.The man was flustered, choking and out of breath. The "Swamp Angels" immediately swarmed him, dragged him to a basement door, and stripped him of his clothes. That was Bill Harrigan, the future "boy" who had a fondness for the theater during his recent apprenticeship; go west! If the crowded small theaters on New York's Bowery Street (where the audience booed at the slightest delay in the show) staged a large number of farces with horsemen and guns, the simplest reason is that there was a Western fever in the United States at that time.Beyond the western horizon lies the gold of Nevada and California.On the western horizon are large cedar forests available for logging, American bison with huge faces and indifferent expressions, top hats and three wives and four concubines of Mormon leader Brigham Young, the mysterious ritual and anger of the red race, The boundless desert, like the ocean, is a hot land that makes your heart beat faster when you approach it.The West is calling.Throughout the years, a rhythmic sound echoed: the sound of tens of thousands of Americans occupying the West. In 1872, Bill Harrigan, who had long been eager to try, escaped from prison and joined the ranks of going west.

the destruction of a mexican History, like a film director, proceeds in disjointed scenes and now sets the scene in a dangerous hotel in the middle of a desert as powerful as the high seas.It was a restless night in 1873; the exact location was Stake Plains, New Mexico.The land is almost unnaturally flat, while the sky with scattered clouds, torn apart by the storm and reflected by the moonlight, is full of cracked gullies and steep mountains.There was a cow's skull on the ground, coyotes howled and green eyes came from the dark, and a few tall horses could be vaguely seen under the slanted lights of the hotel.Inside the hotel, hardy, overworked men leaned on their elbows on the single counter, drinking troublesome liquor and showing off big Mexican dollars with eagles and snakes on them.A drunken man sang impassively, and a few people spoke a language with many hisses, which must have been Spanish, and Spanish speakers were looked down upon here.Bill Harrigan, the red-haired rat from the yard, was among the drinkers.He had already had two glasses of soju, and perhaps he wanted another because he had nothing left.Those people in the desert surprised him.They look so fierce, violent, happy, and good at manipulating wild animals and tall horses, it makes people's teeth itch.There was a sudden silence in the store, only the drunk man was still singing nonsense.A Mexican came in, strong as an ox with a face like an Indian.He wore a surprisingly large hat on his head, and a pistol stuck in each side of his waist.He said goodnight in broken English to all the bitch Yankees who were drinking.No one dared speak up.Bill asked the people around him who it was, and they whispered fearfully that it was Belisario Villagrande from Chihuahua.Suddenly there was a gunshot.Bill shot the intruder behind a line of taller men.The wine glass in Villagrande's hand fell to the ground first; then the whole person also fell down.The man died on the spot, and there was no need for a second shot.Bill didn't even look at the majestic dead man, and went on talking, "Really? I'm Bill Harrigan from New York." The drunk was still singing to himself.

A wonderful ending can already be expected.Bill shook hands, accepted flattery, cheers, and toasted his whiskey.Someone reminded him that there was no mark on the pistol, and that a line should be engraved to indicate that Villagrande was killed by him. "The Kid" recently accepted the knife the man handed him, saying, "Mexicans aren't worth counting." As if that wasn't enough.That night, Bill spread his blanket beside the body, and slept astonishingly until dawn. kill to kill With this shot, the "hero boy" Bilai (who was only fourteen years old at the time) came into being, the fugitive Bill.Harrigan just disappeared.The young man who haunted the sewers and specialized in punching sticks suddenly became a frontier hero.He became a rider; he learned to sit upright in the saddle like a Wyoming or a Texas cowboy, instead of leaning back like an Oregon or California cowboy.He did not reach the legendary image at all, but gradually approached it.The traces of the New York hooligans are still present in the cowboy; the old hatred of the Negro is now transferred to the Mexican, but his dying words are curse words in Spanish.He learned the knack of the vagabond life of a cattleman, and the more difficult art of commanding people; both helped him to become a good cattle thief.Guitars and Mexican whorehouses also fascinated him at times.

He couldn't sleep at night, and he gathered people to drink and revel, often for four days and four nights.He was the most feared (and perhaps the loneliest, most insignificant) man on this frontier as long as the trigger finger was still on point.His friend Garrett, the sheriff who later killed him, once said to him: "I practice shooting a lot, and I shoot bison." "I practice shooting more often than you, and I shoot people." He said He replied calmly, but there is no way to check the details.But we know that he owed twenty-one lives—"not counting the Mexicans."During the seven dangerous years, he got through only by courage.

On the night of July 25, 1880, "The Kid" recently rode his pinto horse through the only main street in Fort Sumner.The weather was sweltering, and the houses were still unlit; Sheriff Garrett sat in a canvas chair on the verandah, drew his revolver, and sent a bullet into Biel's stomach.The pinto horse galloped on; the rider fell on the dirt street.Garrett fired again.Residents, knowing that the injured were "less than" Bilai, kept their windows shut.Recently, he kept cursing and didn't die for a long time.The next day the sun was quite high, and men approached cautiously, and took off his arms; the man was dead.They noticed that ridiculous and useless look that dead people usually have.

They shaved him, dressed him in ready-made clothes, and put him in the window of one of the largest shops for the astonished people to look at and laugh at. Within a few miles, people came to watch on horseback or in two-wheeled carriages.On the third day, the body began to decompose, and make-up had to be applied to his face.On the fourth day, people happily buried him.