The Story of the Outlaw by Emerson Hough (read aloud .txt) 📕

The most famous peace officer of the Southwest

Pat and his friends were hungry, but all the cash they could find was just one dollar and a half between them. They gave it to Pat and sent him over to the store to see about eating. He asked the price of meals, and they told him fifty cents per meal. They would permit them to eat but once. He concluded to buy a dollar and a half's worth of flour and bacon, which would last for two or three meals. He joined his friends, and they went into camp on the river bank, where they cooked and ate, perfectly happy and quite careless about the future.

As they finished their breakfast, they saw up the river the dust of a cattle herd, and noted that a party were working a herd, cutting out cattle for some purpose or other.

"Go up there and get a job," said Pat to one of the boys. The latter did go up, but came back reporting that the boss did not want any help.

"Well, he's got to have help," said Pat. So saying, he arose and started up stream himself.

Garrett was at that time, as has been said, of very great height, six feet four and one-half inches, and very slender. Unable to get trousers long enough for his legs, he had pieced down his best pair with about three feet of buffalo leggins with the hair out. Gaunt, dusty, and unshaven, he looked hard, and when he approached the herd owner and asked for work, the other was as much alarmed as pleased. He declined again, but Pat firmly told him he had come to go to work, and was sorry, but it could not be helped. Something in the quiet voice of Garrett seemed to arrest the attention of the cow man. "What can you do, Lengthy?" he asked.

"Ride anything with hair, and rope better than any man you've got here," answered Garrett, casting a critical glance at the other men.

The cow man hesitated a moment and then said, "Get in." Pat got in. He stayed in. Two years later he was still at Fort Sumner, and married.

Garrett moved down from Fort Sumner soon after his marriage, and settled a mile east of what is now the flourishing city of Roswell, at a spring on the bank of the Hondo, and in the middle of what was then the virgin plains. Here he picked up land, until he had in all more than twelve hundred and fifty acres. If he owned it now, he would be worth a half million dollars.

He was not, however, to live the steady life of the frontier farmer. His friend, Captain J. C. Lea, of Roswell, came to him and asked if he would run as sheriff of Lincoln county. Garrett consented and was elected. He was warned not to take this office, and word was sent to him by the bands of hard-riding outlaws of that region that if he attempted to serve any processes on them he would be killed. He paid no attention to this, and, as he was still an unknown quantity in the country, which was new and thinly settled, he seemed sure to be killed. He won the absolute confidence of the governor, who told him to go ahead, not to stand on technicalities, but to break up the gang that had been rendering life and property unsafe for years and making the territory a mockery of civilization. If the truth were known, it might perhaps be found that sometimes Garrett arrested a bad man and got his warrant for it later, when he went to the settlements. He found a straight six-shooter the best sort of warrant, and in effect he took the matter of establishing a government in southwestern New Mexico in his own hands, and did it in his own way. He was the whole machinery of the law. Sometimes he boarded his prisoners out of his own pocket. He himself was the state! His word was good, even to the worst cutthroat that ever he captured. Often he had in his care prisoners whom, under the law, he could not legally have held, had they been demanded of him; but he held them in spite of any demand; and the worst prisoner on that border knew that he was safe in Pat Garrett's hands, no matter what happened, and that if Pat said he would take him through to any given point, he would take him through.

After he had finished his first season of work as sheriff and as United States marshal, Garrett ranched it for a time. In 1884, his reputation as a criminal-taker being now a wide one, he organized and took charge of a company of Texas rangers in Wheeler county, Texas, and made Atacosa and thereabouts headquarters for a year and a half. So great became his fame now as a man-taker that he was employed to manage the affairs of a cattle detective agency; it being now so far along in civilization that men were beginning to be careful about their cows. He was offered ten thousand dollars to break up a certain band of raiders working in upper Texas, and he did it; but he found that he was really being paid to kill one or two men, and not to capture them; and, being unwilling to act as the agent of any man's revenge, he quit this work and went into the employment of the "V" ranch in the White mountains. He then moved down to Roswell again, in the spring of 1887. Here he organized the Pecos Valley Irrigation Company. He was the first man to suspect the presence of artesian water in this country, where the great Spring rivers push up from the ground; and through his efforts wells were bored which revolutionized all that valley. He ran for sheriff of Chaves county, and was defeated. Angry at his first reverse in politics, he pulled up at Roswell, and sacrificed his land for what he could get for it. To-day it is covered with crops and fruits and worth sixty to one hundred dollars an acre.

Garrett now went back to Texas, and settled near Uvalde, where he engaged once more in an irrigation enterprise. He was here five years, ranching and losing money. W. T. Thornton, the governor of New Mexico, sent for him and asked him if he would take the office of sheriff of Donna Aña county, to fill the unexpired term of Numa Raymond. He was elected to serve two subsequent terms as sheriff of Donna Aña county, and no frontier officer has a better record for bravery.

In the month of December, 1901, President Theodore Roosevelt, who had heard of Garrett, met him and liked him, and without any ado or consultation appointed him collector of customs at El Paso, Texas. Here for the next four years Garrett made a popular collector, and an honest and fearless one.

The main reputation gained by Garrett was through his killing the desperado, Billy the Kid. It is proper to set down here the chronicle of that undertaking, because that will best serve to show the manner in which a frontier sheriff gets a bad man.

When the Kid and his gang killed the agency clerk, Bernstein, on the Mescalero reservation, they committed a murder on United States government ground and an offense against the United States law. A United States warrant was placed in the hands of Pat Garrett, then deputy United States marshal and sheriff-elect, and he took up the trail, locating the men near Fort Sumner, at the ranch of one Brazil, about nine miles east of the settlement. With the Kid were Charlie Bowdre, Tom O'Folliard, Tom Pickett and Dave Rudabaugh, fellows of like kidney. Rudabaugh had just broken jail at Las Vegas, and had killed his jailer. Not a man of the band had ever hesitated at murder. They were now eager to kill Garrett and kept watch, as best they could, on all his movements.

One day Garrett and some of his improvised posse were riding eastward of the town when they jumped Tom O'Folliard, who was mounted on a horse that proved too good for them in a chase of several miles. Garrett at last was left alone following O'Folliard, and fired at him twice. The latter later admitted that he fired twenty times at Garrett with his Winchester; but it was hard to do good shooting from the saddle at two or three hundred yards range, so neither man was hit. O'Folliard did not learn his lesson. A few nights later, in company with Tom Pickett, he rode into town. Warned of his approach, Garrett with another man was waiting, hidden in the shadow of a building. As O'Folliard rode up, he was ordered to throw up his hands, but went after his gun instead, and on the instant Garrett shot him through the body. "You never heard a man scream the way he did," said Garrett. "He dropped his gun when he was hit, but we did not know that, and as we ran up to catch