Enter now to win a copy of
Frontier Teachers: Stories of Heroic Women of the Old West
Sister Blandina stood over the pale, bullet-ridden body of a young gunman and mopped the sweat off his brow with a white cloth. He smiled benignly up at her, then turned his attention to the outlaws surrounding his bed. The renegades stared back at him quietly, all wearing grave expressions that reflected the severity of his physical condition.
Sister Blandina’s eyes shifted from the injured youth to the teenage boy standing next to him, tapping his holstered gun with his hat. “Sister Blandina,” the weak patient began, “Billy, our captain . . . .” Teenage outlaw Billy the Kid nodded politely to the nun. “We are glad to see you, sister, and I want to say, it would give me pleasure to be able to do you any favor.” For more than a month Sister Blandina had been caring for the wounded member of Billy the Kid’s gang known only as Happy Jack.
After being shot in the thigh he had been dumped in an abandoned adobe hut near Trinidad, Colorado, and left for dead. A boy from the school where Sister Blandina taught had found him and brought her to the location to help. In addition to fresh bandages and water, she had furnished the hurt desperado with food and linens. She had tended to his spiritual as well as physical needs, and for that she was rewarded with an audience with Happy Jack’s partner in crime. “He has steel-blue eyes and a peach complexion,” she recalled later in her journal. “. . . One would take him to be seventeen— innocent looking, save for the corners of his eyes, which tell a set purpose, good or bad.”
The purpose Sister Blandina had learned for one of Billy’s upcoming rides was definitely bad. According to Jack, the gang was going to kill the four physicians living in the area who had refused to call on the gunshot gang member. She was thinking of those men when she exchanged cordialities with Billy. “Yes, there is a favor you can grant me,” she said responding to his offer. “He reached his hand toward me,” she recounted later. “The favor is granted,” the Kid promised.
