Governor's Palace

The Governor’s Palace is a landmark in Santa Fe whose narrative importance grows from its place in the town’s civic landscape: near it, Lizzy encounters a prisoner identified as Billy the Kid, and later a mob gathers at the jail beside it. The building links the town’s visible landmarks with the violence carried out behind the jail’s grillwork and in the streets around it.

A Landmark on the Way Through Santa Fe

When Lizzy and Mr. Enders arrive in Santa Fe, Elinora points out the Governor’s Palace from the wagon and urges Lizzy to look. Lizzy judges that it does not look much like a palace, establishing a gap between the grand name and her first impression of the town. Elinora’s enthusiasm for the landmark contrasts with Lizzy’s disappointment in the small, squat houses around them.

The Palace is later located on Central Plaza. Its presence is woven into ordinary movement through Santa Fe: Lizzy and Mrs. Lacey walk past it as they look around town. The building is not described at length, but its repeated appearance makes it a recognizable point of orientation as the story’s mood shifts from sightseeing to danger.

The Prisoner Behind the Grillwork

At the end of the Palace building, a large grillwork door fronts the jail. Mrs. Lacey knows the prisoner held behind it and calls him Billy the Kid. He comes to the grillwork to greet her; she chats with him and praises his part with the Regulators in the Lincoln County War, telling him that people had not appreciated what they had done. She gives him candy before she and Lizzy continue on.

Mrs. Lacey predicts that he will escape from prison and calls him New Mexico’s Jesse James. Lizzy doubts that the prisoner can really be Billy the Kid, reasoning that the girls at school would have heard if he were in Santa Fe. The encounter therefore gives the Palace a role in a small conflict over recognition and belief: Mrs. Lacey speaks with confidence, while Lizzy measures the claim against the gossip she expects to have reached the school.

The Jail and the Mob

Later, while Lizzy and Elinora are walking with an old man, they see a crowd assembling at the end of the Palace, where the jail is. The old man advises them to take another street; they follow his suggestion and avoid the crowd. From the direction they have left, they hear a man’s long, agonized cry. The jail’s location beside the Palace turns the earlier landmark into the point of reference for a violence the girls do not witness directly.

The Bishop subsequently explains that a prisoner was dragged from his cell and hanged by a mob on the night Lizzy and Elinora were out. Lizzy asks whether the prisoner was Billy the Kid, but the Bishop says he has heard only that the sole prisoner in the jail was hanged, not that it was Billy. The connection between the prisoner Mrs. Lacey knew and the victim of the lynching is thus left uncertain in the account; the Palace remains associated with both the encounter and the mob’s deadly action.