What does a kid do if he is between twelve and sixteen and has no friends, no money, and no place to go? Well we don't know as a kid would do but we know out our Kid did. He headed for Arizona.

That actually made a lot of sense. In that day and age, a good way to avoid the law was simply to move to another state or territory. Extradition from one state or territory was not the routine procedure it's become, and today cooperation between states is much more highly coordinated more than most people realize. Recently a citizen of New England had been in one of the less populated Southwestern states and was briefly detained because he had been exceeding the legally posted speed limit. But since he didn't plan on returning any time soon, he simply tore the ticket and caught his plane home. Naturally he was greatly chagrined to receive a rather testy note from his own state's transportation department saying that if he didn't pay the ticket he would have is driving license revoked. He paid the ticket.

But in the nineteenth century American West once you crossed the border into another state or territory, you were pretty much safe from the law. Even murder was strictly a state or territorial affair. Few people know that Wyatt Earp had been indicted for the murder of an Arizona deputy sheriff, Frank Stilwell, in Tuscon in 1882, but had escaped to Colorado. Attempts by Arizona authorities to extradite him were unsuccessful, and eventually Wyatt made his way to California. He avoided Arizona the rest of his life and died in 1921 in Los Angles, still a fugitive from justice.

So there was no way anyone in New Mexico was going to bother trying to find a kid who had stolen some clothes who had skipped out to Arizona. But the big question was how well could Henry manage on his own. From what we read, it was as well as could be expected provided you didn't expect too much.

According to Robert "Ad" Casey, who met the Kid in 1877, "He was nothing but a kid and bum when I knowed him back then." Since Ad himself was only sixteen at the time, we again wonder if Henry was indeed a full seventeen years of age. But when Ad called Henry a bum, he was being quite accurate. In Arizona Henry quite literally bummed around, living on what he could borrow, beg, or steal.

However, given Henry's tender age and his later history, we need to point out that from the time he left his stepfather, Henry was inevitably armed. In fact, his first handgun may have been stolen from William. What type of pistol Henry carried then we don't know, but later his favorite handgun was the 1877 .41 calibre Colt double action revolver. This put Henry a bit out of mainstream among Old West outlaws since double action revolvers - that is a gun that fired simply by pulling the trigger without having to manually cock the hammer - were not favored by most gunfighters. Generally the extra force needed to pull the trigger reduced the accuracy. However, the extra speed of the double action revolver was evidently what Henry liked and eventually would stand him in good stead.

In Arizona, Henry - the name he still usually went by - got by doing what he could. Although he found some employment on the various ranches, it would be doing odd jobs or maybe acting as cook. The working cowboys didn't see him as a full ranch hand as he was too small and slight to do routine cowboy work.

But if he was in town, the young boy would gravitate toward the saloon. Once more his ability to be more or less accepted by older men and his own willingness to do whatever they wanted - whether it was to get into a game of monte or steal a horse - played to his advantage. But then as now, barrooms were not really places where kids should hang out.

For Henry, his life as a saddle bum in Arizona lasted for about two years and might have continued longer except for what became his first documented verifiable killing. In 1877, Henry moved into Camp Grant where as usual he hung out with the more raffish crowed. Here he became involved in horse stealing on a professional level. But his youth again came to his advantage, and once when he was caught with a stolen horse he was just let go on the spot. Later though the commander of the camp had enough of the young wiseacre squirt who was stealing the army's horses and put him in the guardhouse. Henry escaped, was recaptured, and then put in shackles that were riveted in place. But Henry had relatively large wrists - or rather very small hands - and could often slip cuffs. When the guard went back to the cells to check on Henry, Henry was gone.