I was there and I know; and yet Tully is believed and I’m not. What makes it all the harder to fathom is that Tully was generally an honest man; still, he not only convinced himself of a wild lie, he convinced the public too.

Of course “eyewitnesses” kept popping up for years—cowboys who happened to be passing Greasy Corners at just the right moment and saw it all happen from behind one of the huts, unobserved by any of the people who were actually there that morning, though all of us had perfectly adequate vision and might have been primed to notice lurking strangers.

Because of the conflicting accounts of all these “eyewitnesses”—and also because newspapermen and historians, jealous of the fact that novelists get to make things up and they don’t, encroach into fiction whenever they think they can get away with it—the brief, clear events of that morning in Greasy Corners have spawned at least a dozen theories already, and no doubt will spawn more. Every person in the town that morning has been championed by some “authority” as being the one who shot Billy down.

Some hold that Bloody Feathers shot him from atop the buffalo hides, and merely jumped down with the knife to take his scalp. Some hold that Isinglass shot him from behind the tent, or Cecily Snow through a slit in the tent, or Long Dog Hawkins from behind the hut. One man claims La Tulipe poisoned him; and the radical fellow from Roswell thinks I shot him because I was jealous of his advantage with Cecily. The fact that I had fifty opportunities to shoot him before we arrived in Greasy Corners has not occurred to the man.

But most of the “eyewitnesses” seem to favor Tully’s account—you’d have to say it’s the accepted account now—and maybe for the same reason that Billy himself favored making Tully his official killer: no one wants to admit that a Mexican girl killed the greatest outlaw of the era. The Liebestod business is hardly favored in our Old West.

They’d rather have it a man—it’s that simple—though Katie, wild in her heartbreak, went on to a distinguished career in massacre, joining Villa and then Zapata, shooting down federales whenever they got in her way, and finally plunging all the way south to Nicaragua to foment revolution and blow up Yankee banana boats.

Of course, the books give her that: they allow her any number of federales and banana boats; they just don’t want to give her the white star of the West, Billy the Kid.

No more was heard of La Tulipe, and little more of Bloody Feathers, the great Jicarilla; he never became one of the parade Indians so popular in Washington a little later, though he was mentioned as being at his father’s funeral, which occurred more than a dozen years after Billy’s death.