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within a few feet and face to face. In this crisis Barney did some quick thinking. While the Kid was still far off, Barney jerked her black mantilla off his wife and draped it about his own shoulders and clapped her sun bonnet on his own head. Then he snuggled down into his seat, made himself look as small as possible, and clucked up his horses into a brisk trot. With his face concealed beneath the sunbonnet, he drove past the Kid and was greatly relieved when he arrived in Fort Sumner to find himself still alive. Then he went strutting about town, telling how he had met the Kid on the road and had opened fire on him and the Kid had taken to his heels and had been lucky to escape behind a hill. 'I told you what I'd do to that fellow if we ever met,' boasted Barney.
"And along toward evening, the Kid came jogging into Fort Sumner and, as usual, the panic-stricken Barney got on his horse and ran away and hid himself in the hills. Everybody, of course, wanted to hear from the Kid all about his narrow escape from death at Barney Mason's hands. When the Kid heard the story Barney had been telling, he bent double with laughter.
"'I recognized him the minute I saw him,' he said. 'His mantilla and sunbonnet didn't fool me. I would have killed him if his wife hadn't been with him. I didn't want to drop him over dead in his wife's arms. His wife was all that saved him. But with his mantilla and his nice pink sunbonnet, wouldn't he have made a pretty corpse?'"
The only photograph Billy the Kid ever had taken was in possession of the Maxwell family for many years.
"It was taken by a travelling photographer who came through Fort Sumner in 1880," says Mrs. Jaramillo. "Billy posed for it standing in the street near old Beaver