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here every year to see it. You might think it was some kind of a shrine, to hear them talk. There was one lady I brought out here once who got all riled up when she didn't find no tombstone. 'It's a shame,' says she. 'It ain't decent. The State of New Mexico or the State Historical Society or somebody owes it to posterity,' she says, 'to set up some kind of a tablet or a monument or a tombstone. Why,' says she, 'Billy the Kid's grave is one of the shrines of romance of the Southwest.' I never heard nobody carry on so. She seemed real disturbed about it.

"Well," concludes Old Man Foor, shooting a stream of tobacco smoke out into the sunshine, "the Kid was a bad feller; I ain't disputin' that. But he made considerable history in New Mexico as long as his trigger finger held out. I wouldn't say the kind of history he made entitled him to no monument, but it does seem to me that a fellow that raised as much hell as he did in early days deserves some kind of a marker over his last resting place. It don't have to be a equestrian statue nor nothing big and fine. Just a plain little slab of gray granite would do. If they don't hurry up and put up some kind of stone the site of his grave will be lost. The old-timers who know where it is are dying off mighty fast these days."

Romance weaves no magic glamour in this Hell's Half-Acre where the Kid sleeps his last sleep. From this coign of disillusion one sees his tragic life in stark perspective, crowded with outlawry, vendetta, hatreds, murders; twenty-one dead men like ghostly mile posts marking his brief journey of twenty-one years, a journey that through all the twists and turns of its crimson trail marched inevitably toward this lozenge of cactus-shadowed desolation.

As you stand in a mood of reverie above the lonely spot,