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THE SAGA OF BILLY THE KID

armed to the teeth, sat up with them all night long to prevent any possibility of escape. These poor boys—both nice-looking fellows, too—knew they were doomed and didn't have a chance on earth. Nobody told me but I knew it, too, and everybody at the ranch knew it. We sensed it in the grim looks and the silence of the possemen.

"Morton and Baker were as pale as corpses when they came out of the prison room for breakfast in the morning. When they had eaten, Baker came to me and gave me his gold watch, his horsehair bridle, and a letter he had written in the night to his sweetheart.

"'I want to make my last request on earth to you, Miss Chisum,' he said. 'I will never live to get to Lincoln. When you hear of my death, I wish you would send my watch and bridle, which I plaited myself, to my sweetheart and mail this letter to her.'

"The letter was addressed to Miss Lizzie N. Lester, Syracuse, New York. I mailed it to her a little later and sent her the watch and bridle, and we kept up a correspondence for quite a while. I never saw her and never learned a great deal about her, but from her letters she must have been a sweet, fine, educated girl. When Morton told me good-bye, he merely gripped my hand hard: he couldn't talk."

The posse set out for Lincoln with their prisoners that morning. They halted in Roswell, then a straggling village, five miles away, to allow Morton an opportunity to write a letter to his cousin, H. H. Marshall of Richmond, Virginia, a lawyer, and a wealthy man, according to report, of an old and aristocratic family of which Morton had turned out to be the black sheep. In the letter, as was learned afterward, Morton informed his relative he was on his way to death and bade him a last farewell.