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Murphy's dishonesty in the matter of government contracts—took exception to the governor's partisanship and carried the war to Washington. There he laid the whole Lincoln County embroglio before President Rutherford B. Hayes. Convinced that Governor Axtell had been influenced by his friendship for leaders of the Murphy faction, that his method of intervention was unwise and unwarranted, and that, in the removal of Sheriff Copeland and the appointment of Sheriff Peppin, he had exceeded his authority, President Hayes removed the executive from office and sent out General Lew Wallace as governor with "extraordinary powers" and instructions to bring to an end as speedily as possible the bloody vendetta that had brought disgrace upon the territory and reëstablish law and order.

So the echoes of Billy the Kid's six-shooters were heard two thousand miles away and reverberated in the White House and the legislative halls of the national capital.

Sheriff Peppin burned some gunpowder in honour of his new job. Having organized a posse of twenty men in the lower Pecos Valley, he started back for Lincoln, where Billy the Kid and a number of McSween men were in quarters. He was halting for early supper at the Fritz ranch in Bonito Cañon, a few miles south of Lincoln, when Frank McNab, Frank Coe, and Jim Saunders, riding by, stopped for a drink at the Fritz spring, which comes gushing from a rocky cliff by the road in such volume of crystal-clear water that it was used then, and is still used, to irrigate the farm. The three men had their first intimation of the proximity of enemies when bullets began to knock up dust about them. Springing into their saddles, they dashed down the cañon with the Peppin men in pursuit, eager to kill McNab, an old Chisum foreman who had