The Saga of Billy the Kid/Chapter 21

History, that records the long fight of sheriffs and and marshals and peacemakers of all kinds to tame the West and establish law and order, furnishes few finer examples of the frontier sheriff than Pat Garrett. He was brave, resourceful, tireless, and in the conscientious performance of his duty, as cold and impersonal as the law itself. His psychology was that of a sheriff. The law was explicit; it pointed out his path of duty clearly; and he carried out the law to the last letter without sentiment or malice or resentment. No personal feeling of any kind ever clouded his ideas of the law or his duty under the law. He was in a way a legal machine. He moved along his path of duty as crushingly and inexorably as a steam-roller. If he set out to arrest a man, he arrested him or killed him. When he took a trail, he followed it to the end.

Cold and relentless as he undoubtedly was, he was not instinctively a killer. He killed only three men in his life—Tom O'Folliard, Charlie Bowdre, and Billy the Kid—and in each instance the killing was justified by the circumstances. He was free of any taint of blood-thirstiness. In that time and country, it was "Hands up!" with every man he arrested, and if he had been dominated by a murderous spirit, he could have killed many men with impunity and within the law. But beneath his hard surface was a certain kindly humanity, ​and in many crises he refrained from bloodshed when a less merciful man in his position would have killed without hesitation.

Garrett was virtually unknown when he killed Billy the Kid, and the Kid's death made him famous overnight. The report of the six shooter that ended the outlaw's career was heard throughout the nation. Newspaper readers everywhere knew of New Mexico's desperado who had killed twenty-one men when he was twenty one years old, and to whatever far corner the Kid's name had been borne, there also travelled the name of the man who had killed him. It was as if Garrett had become heir to the Kid's fame.

Fame, in fact, came to Garrett in a sort of deluge. He became suddenly a heroic and outstanding figure. Distinguished people sought his acquaintance. Everybody was eager to know him. His advent in any town caused a stir of excited interest and people pointed him out and whispered, "There goes Pat Garrett, the man who killed Billy the Kid." Visitors to New Mexico who had never heard of Glorietta Pass or Truches Peak or Taos or the Zuni villages had heard of Pat Garrett and wanted to see him, to meet him, to shake his hand. He was honoured everywhere. He walked in an aura of glory.

But Garrett had a level head on his shoulders that was not to be turned by flattery and applause. He took glory as coolly as he took danger. He remained the same calm, poised, homespun personality, the same Pat Garrett who had been a professional buffalo hunter in the Panhandle and a saloon keeper in old Fort Sumner. Though he had moods of taciturnity, he was, on the whole, an easy going, good-natured man, who loved the society of boon companions, a drink, a joke, a good story. He had a ​drawling speech and a dry, sly humour, and though his gray eyes looked rather tragic and the expression of his asymmetrical face was saturnine, there was usually a smile or a laugh just beneath the surface.

It is interesting to know that Garrett, who was Billy the Kid's friend for two years, who played monte with him, drank with him, and danced with the same Mexican girls at Fort Sumner, and who at last stalked him and killed him, placed a high estimate on the Kid as a man and a fighter.

"The Kid was a likable fellow," said Garrett. "He was quiet. There wasn't any fuss or bluster in him. He was not quarrelsome; he never hunted trouble. If you'd never met him before or heard of him, you'd have thought him a mild, inoffensive sort of boy. You certainly never would have taken him for a fighter or a killer. But there was something about him even when he was friendliest that made you feel that he was mighty dangerous to take any liberties with. I don't know what it was, but it was something and you could feel it. I never saw him mad in my life; I hardly remember him when he wasn't smiling; but he was the most murderous youth that ever stood in shoe leather, and he was game all the way through. He had everything that goes into the make-up of a desperado—cold nerve, the killer's instinct, and marvellous quickness and sureness with a six shooter.

"When I was elected sheriff, he and I broke friendship. When I started in to hunt him down, I hoped to capture him; I didn't want to kill him. I was happy when I took him alive at Stinking Spring. I expected he'd be put away in prison for a long term. Just when I thought my troubles were over, he made his escape at Lincoln. If there was ever any such marvellous escape as that before, ​I never heard of it. I don't know yet how, with his hands and feet manacled, he managed to kill Ollinger and Bell. I don't believe many men ever lived who could have done the same thing under the same circumstances. After that I knew that if ever I cornered him again, I'd have to kill him or he'd kill me.

"When he finally came in on me in Pete Maxwell's bedroom, I played in luck. I knew him and he didn't know me. My eyes had grown used to the darkness and I could see him from the time he came in the door. He couldn't see me at first. When at last he caught a vague glimpse of me and threw his gun on me, I was nearer death than I ever was in my life. But still he didn't recognize me; that's all that saved me. He must have thought I was some friend of Maxwell's. I killed him before he changed his mind. I had to kill him; if he had remained alive a second longer, they'd have carried me out of that room feet first. I had a shade the best of the situation. That's the only reason he's dead and I'm alive. But just as I say, he was a good, game boy—rest his soul! I wish him luck in the other world."

Garrett knew, from much personal experience, "the virtue of the drop." He never underestimated it but he viewed it philosophically, much as he did a gambler's "system" at faro—sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn't.

"There's no doubt about the importance of the drop in professional matters," said Garrett. "In the old days, an officer who didn't get it when he could was a fool. With the drop on your man, you were absolute master of the situation. The crook of your trigger finger could settle all argument. But the drop didn't always have the effect you might think it would. Say a man was ​wanted for murder and knew he would be hanged if taken. That man might have made up his mind that he preferred to die by a bullet rather than be dropped through the trapdoor of a gallows. If you got the drop on that kind of fellow, he was pretty sure to make a break to get away or put up a fight. Other men when covered wouldn't give in because there was a doubt in their minds that the sheriff had the nerve to pull the trigger. Others were just naturally reckless and not afraid of a gun. There was always this gambling uncertainty about a sheriff's work, but as a rule the drop was good medicine and the man who had a six-shooter shoved in his belly usually threw up his hands.

"I remember over in Alamogordo once I saw a man l wanted. His offense was not serious and I didn't look for any trouble in taking him. I stepped up to him and, tapping him on the arm, told him he was under arrest. But that fellow, thinking I was unarmed, my gun being out of sight in my hip pocket, turned on me like a wildcat and ranted and swore and abused me something scandalous. I took it for a minute. It had been a long time since I had been in a row. I hardly knew what to do; I didn't want to kill him. Says I to myself, 'Pat, you must be getting old; you're losing your nerve.' Then, all of a sudden, the feeling of old times came over me. Maybe I got a little mad; I don't know. But I jerked out my gun and stuck it against his stomach so hard it made him bend double. His hands went up like I'd touched a spring. 'It's all right, old man,' he said as meek as a lamb, 'but I'd give just a hundred dollars to know where you got that gun.' I guess I was a little quick for him.

"I once got word from a Texas sheriff," Garrett went on, "that a man wanted for murder was supposed to be ​in my part of the country. He was red-headed, freckled, and had a red spot in the pupil of his left eye, so the description said, and there was a reward of twelve hundred dollars for him. I heard that a red-headed man had opened a little cantina on the Pecos a few miles below Fort Sumner and, taking a deputy, I went out there. I told my deputy not to go for his gun till I gave him the sign; I didn't want to make a foolish mistake and arrest the wrong man. A red head and freckles weren't enough; I had to see that red spot in the left eye.

"The red-headed man was behind the bar when we walked in and called for a drink. He hardly looked at us. While he was setting out the bottle and glasses, he kept his eyes lowered. I pretended not to pay any attention to him. I poured out my liquor and as I raised my glass to my mouth, I looked at him. He stood with his two hands spread out on the bar and was looking at me. There, as plain as day, was the red spot in his left eye. I let the liquor gurgle down my throat and set down my glass. Then I reached below the bar as if for a handkerchief to wipe my lips, and came up with my six-shooter.

"'Throw up your hands!' I said.

"But he didn't throw them up. He just stood there looking at me with his hands spread out on the bar. I kept telling him to throw 'em up or I'd kill him. But he didn't make a move. I knew that just below the bar he had a six-shooter and I could read his mind. He was figuring whether it was better to go back to Texas and be hanged or get killed right there. He finally decided it was wiser to take a chance on death several months off than to die on the spot. His hands went up slowly; he came out from behind the bar holding them in the air ​and my six shooter on him all the time. I put the irons on him. On the way to Las Vegas he confessed and, later on, he was hanged in Texas. But that fellow had guts. The drop didn't scare him at all, but it saved my life. "While I was sheriff of Doña Ana County," Garrett said, dropping into another reminiscence, "a sheriff from over in the Indian Nations rode into Las Cruces one day. He was trailing a convict who had broken out of the penitentiary back there after killing a guard and had sworn he'd never be taken alive. I located the fugitive on a ranch a few miles from town where he was cooking for a cattle outfit. Leaving the officer behind because the convict knew him, I rode out to the ranch with a Mexican deputy. I posted my deputy on guard outside and I stepped into the house.

"I sneaked along the hall with my six-shooter in my hand and ran on to my man in the kitchen. He was a strapping, powerful fellow and was wiping his hands on a towel, having just finished washing the dinner dishes. As I cracked down on him with my gun, he leaped at me and smashed me in the face with his fist. It was a punch like the kick of a mule. I staggered against the wall; he jumped out of the window. I clawed at him with my hands and tore the shirt off his back but he wriggled out of my grip. I rushed out the door and we met again head on on the porch. I smashed him over the head with my revolver and knocked him flat. But he I could have done it any time. We fought all over the porch. Finally he broke away and darted into a door. He was running through a hall to his room to get his gun. But my Mexican stepped inside just then and put a bullet ​in his back between the shoulder blades, dropping him dead. I was glad, because if the Mexican hadn't killed him, I'd have had to do it myself.

"The reward was a sizable sum of money and the Indian Nations sheriff offered to give it all to me; but I wouldn't take it nor any part of it. I didn't want any pay for doing a fellow officer a little courtesy like that. I had done only what I'd have expected him to do if I had happened to drop over into his country on a little matter of business. That sheriff, after that, always thought pretty well of me. A little politeness goes a long ways."

Billy Wilson was one man who held Garrett in an esteem little short of worship. Wilson had ridden with Billy the Kid and was captured in the fight at Stinking Spring. He was a handsome, dashing young outlaw, but of his many adventures none was more dramatic than the episode that occurred long after his days of adventure were supposed to be over and through which he learned for the first time the kindly generous human side of the sheriff who had once pursued him with deadly purpose.

After Wilson had been released from the Santa Fé jail, he settled down under a new name to peaceful pursuits near Uvalde in Texas. He was at first a cowboy, then a ranch foreman, and eventually acquired a ranch and cattle of his own. When Garrett, then sheriff of Doña Ana County in New Mexico, visited Uvalde, Wilson was married and prosperous, his outlaw past a dim memory to himself and known only to one or two intimate friends in that part of the country who guarded his secret closely.

One old Federal warrant charging mail robbery still stood against Wilson. It was like a past reaching out clutching fingers for him. As long as that old warrant ​remained valid, all his years of honest effort and good citizenship might be swallowed up at any time in the shadows of prison tragedy.

When Wilson heard of Garrett's presence in Uvalde, he supposed the sword that had hung above his life by a thread was about to fall and sent a friend to plead his cause. This friend, a former merchant of White Oaks, laid the facts before Garrett and asked that Wilson be left unmolested to pursue his career as a good citizen.

"Go back," said Garrett, "and tell Wilson to rest his mind in peace. I wouldn't for money put a stumbling block in his way. I believe I know a way to make his future safe. I'll see what I can do."

Months afterward, Wilson received a letter from Garrett. It read: "Would like to see you at my office in Mesilla." That was all. What the message meant Wilson did not know, but he had faith in Garrett and answered the summons.

"Hello, Billy," said Garrett as Wilson walked into the sheriff's office in Mesilla. "I've got a little something for you."

Garrett stepped over to his safe, drew out a paper, and laid it in Wilson's hand. It was a pardon signed by President Grover Cleveland. Wilson read it through a haze of tears. For a moment, he stood white-faced and silent.

"Pat," he said at length brokenly, "I don't know how to thank you. You can have anything I've got any time—my last dollar, the shirt off my back. You've made no mistake. I'll live up to this piece of paper the rest of my life. You can gamble on that."

He reached out a hand that trembled as if he had the ague, and Garrett gripped it. ​"I believe you, Billy," said the sheriff. "I've done my part. Now you do yours. Live straight. Make good. That'll be all the thanks I want."

So, with his slate wiped clean, Wilson went back to his home in Texas and, still under his assumed name, lived cleanly and honestly and prosperously ever after. He may be living yet.

Tom Pickett, another of the Kid's followers who was in the Stinking Spring affair and who rode into Fort Sumner with Tom O'Folliard the night the latter was killed by Garrett, also turned straight after the Kid's death. In the little town in New Mexico where he settled down, it tickled his vanity to be pointed out as one of the Kid's old buccaneers, and he swaggered about the streets with two heavy six-shooters buckled around him. He handled his weapons neatly and was a crack shot, and his fellow townsmen treated him with the cautious consideration usually accorded a bad man. Sheriff Garrett unexpectedly dropped into Pickett's home town one day. Whereupon, to everyone's surprise, Pickett mounted his pony in a hurry and rode off into the hills, where he remained in hiding until Garrett departed. His neighbours made unmerciful fun of Pickett for running away. "We thought you were a bad man and a fighter," they laughed, "and the first chance you get to show us how brave you are, you take to the tall timber." Pickett accepted the ridicule with good-humoured frankness. "I know that long-legged fellow," he said, "and don't want his game." The panic into which Garrett threw him unintentionally had a salutary effect. He was laughed out of his reputation as a bad man, laid aside his guns, and went seriously to work. When, years afterward, he was gathered to his fathers, he was a well-to-do and respected citizen. ​Garrett had an invincible sense of humour, oblique at times perhaps, but always keen. There was not more fun in his life than might be, but what there was he enjoyed with huge gusto. There were ridiculous murders and absurd tragedies that appealed to him as jokes. He was not to be denied his laugh when Death played the clown.

"Tom Hill's death," said Garrett, "was as funny as a farce-comedy on the stage. After the Lincoln County war, he doubled up with Jesse Evans and they started out as regular highwaymen. Hill was the man who killed Tunstall and had besides two or three other notches on his gun. Evans was a jolly kind of daredevil but he was as tough as Hill. These two famous fighters and bad men picked out an old German living down Alamogordo way as an easy fellow to rob. The old German used to drive about the country selling goods and usually carried quite a large sum of money in a box under his wagon seat. He never went armed, and to these two bold desperadoes he seemed such a harmless, helpless old chap that they would have been ashamed to rob him if they hadn't needed the money. But they did need it and they figured it would be about the easiest money they ever stole.

"They ran on to his camp while the old German was off a ways in the hills gathering some wood for his fire. When the old fellow came back and saw Hill and Evans rummaging through his wagon, he hardly knew what to make of it at first. He had never had any personal experience with robbers before. 'Hey, vat you do dere?' he called, more in curiosity than anger. Hill and Evans didn't pay any attention to him. Both being crack shots, they could have killed him, but they didn't think this 'harmless old Dutchman' was worth shooting. The old ​fellow stood staring at them for quite a while before he could bring himself to believe that he was being robbed. "'Py golly,' he cried out, 'you iss robbers, ain'd it? Yah. Raus mit you.'

"Hill and Evans went on quietly looking for the money box. The old man spied Hill's rifle leaning against one of the wagon wheels. He had a sudden idea that the rifle spoke a language that maybe the robbers could understand better than his broken English. Just as the old German grabbed the rifle, Hill rose up from beneath the wagon seat with the money box in his hands. There was a look of pained surprise on Hill's face as a bullet caught him just over the left eye and he pitched dead out of the wagon on his head, scattering money all over the ground.

"Evans was not too surprised to jerk out his six-shooter, but the gun fell out of his hand when one of the old German's bullets broke his right arm and another crashed through his lungs. Evans toppled out of the wagon almost on top of Hill, but, badly wounded as he was, he bolted for his pony and, managing somehow to scramble into the saddle, never stopped going until he had put sixty miles between himself and this 'harmless old Dutchman.' He found refuge at a ranch in the San Augustine Mountains, where Deputy Sheriff Dave Wood arrested him a few days later. He was taken to the hospital at Fort Stanton, where he was kept until he got well. Then he strolled away and disappeared.

"Hill was generally hated. The only tears shed over his death were tears of laughter. The frontier split its sides at the way this bad man cashed out. The old German was greeted everywhere with laughter and applause. People seemed to think him a sort of humorist. ​"Jesse Evans and his brother, George Davis—Davis being the family name—got mixed up in a robbery down around Pecos City," Garrett went on, "and in a fight with Texas Rangers, George was killed and Jesse sent to the Texas penitentiary for twenty years. While he was serving his term, a queer little incident occurred that always puzzled me. I was sitting in my office in Lincoln one day in 1882 when a Mexican came in and told me Jesse Evans was in town and he and several other Mexicans had talked with him. I hurried out and searched everywhere, but not a trace of Evans could I find. There is no doubt that Jesse was then in the Texas penitentiary, but the Mexicans, who knew him well, swore they had met him face to face in Lincoln and could not have been mistaken. Mexicans are a superstitious lot and believe in ghosts, witches, wraiths, and such things, and there is an old myth among them that by some kind of magic certain persons have appeared at the same time in places a thousand miles apart. When I told my Mexican friends that Evans was in the Texas penitentiary at the moment they thought they were talking with him in Lincoln, they were sure they had seen a wraith. If it wasn't a wraith, I don't know what it was. Certainly it was not Jesse Evans."

What became of this former crony of Billy the Kid is not definitely known. Some say he died in the penitentiary; others that he served out his twenty-year sentence. When he was released, according to one story, he went to his native town of Texarkana, where he found that his wife, who had supposed him dead, had taken a new husband. He did not reveal himself to her, it is said, but leaving her happy with the other man, took himself off quietly to Arizona, where all trace of him was lost. ​A little before his election as sheriff of Lincoln County, Garrett had settled on a ranch a mile east of Roswell. Land was worth almost nothing, and he eventually acquired twelve hundred and fifty acres along the Hondo River not far from its junction with the Pecos. Afterm his term as sheriff had expired, he came back to his ranch, but the lure of a more exciting life led him, in 1884, to accept the captainey of a company of Texas Rangers with headquarters at Atacosa. A year and a half passed in this capacity and he became manager of a cattle detective agency in the Panhandle and did effective work in breaking up a band of cattle rustlers and trail cutters that preyed on herds bound north from Texas ranges to the Kansas railroads. He later managed a cattle ranch in the White Mountains, and in 1887 returned to his Roswell ranch.

He was credited with the discovery of the great reservoir of artesian water underlying the country about Roswell, and was one of the organizers of the Pecos Valley Irrigation Company, an enterprise which twenty years later would have made his fortune but which, in that day of meagre settlement, did not realize the bonanza hopes of its promoters. Embittered by defeat when he ran for sheriff of the newly formed county of Chavez, which had been cut out of Lincoln County, he sold his land and moved to Uvalde, Texas. His new trail led him away from the wealth that inevitably would have come to him if he had waited patiently on his ranch. Artesian water eventually transformed the region around Roswell into a rich agricultural oasis. The land he owned is valued today at one hundred and fifty dollars an acre. For five years he was a rancher near Uvalde. Then Governor W. T. Thornton of New Mexico appointed ​him sheriff of Doña Ana County to fill the unexpired term of Numa Raymond. For two subsequent terms Garrett was elected to the office. When President Roosevelt visited new Mexico in 1901, he met the famous frontier sheriff, conceived for him one of his impulsive but warm and lasting friendships, and soon afterward appointed Garrett Collector of Customs at El Paso. Garrett held this position four years.

At the close of his El Paso collectorship, Garrett settled in Las Cruces. He had saved a little money; he acquired several ranches and mining properties. For a few years his affairs were prosperous. He lived in a comfortable home with his wife and five children. Miss Elizabeth Garrett, a blind daughter, was a talented musician; after her father's death, she won some celebrity on the concert stage, singing songs of her own composition. But toward the close of his life, Garrett lost most of his money—he was a soldier of fortune rather than a business man—and in cramped circumstances, worries and anxieties preyed upon him.

He rented one of his ranches in 1907 to Wayne Brazel, a young stockman, who ran sheep and goats on it. Six months later, Brazel sublet the property to J. P. Turner of Fort Worth and Carl Adamson of Roswell, who agreed to buy his sheep and goats. This subletting of his land angered Garrett. He maintained that Brazel by this action had forfeited his lease. He had several stormy interviews with Brazel. He demanded that Brazel surrender his lease. Brazel refused. Garrett quibbled over Brazel's goats. Running goats on the land, Garrett insisted, was contrary to the terms of the lease. He threatened court action. It is said, also, on what seems good authority, that he made threats against Brazel's life. ​Still Brazel stood firm, convinced that legally he had the better side of the argument.

Garrett was in his fifty-ninth year. Old age was upon him. He had slowed down in mind and body. His eye was growing dim; his trigger finger had lost its quickness. As a gunman, he had little left but his indomitable courage and his reputation. His life had been hard; the years had not mellowed him. He was no longer the calmly poised soul that in old days had taken "the thunder and the sunshine" with equal temper. His old geniality and spirit of comradeship were gone. He had become a sombre man, sour of outlook, embittered, irascible, easily stirred to dangerous moods.

Brazel, on the other hand, was thirty. Born and brought up in the range country of New Mexico, he had dealt with hard conditions and hard men all his life. He was reserved, cool, resolute, mindful of his own affairs, neither courting trouble nor inclined to avoid it—a quietly dangerous man. On his side were the quick resources of youth. He was not afraid either of Garrett's reputation or of Garrett himself. The cause of quarrel between the two men seems, in retrospect, to have been rather trivial, but out of its stupidity and triviality flamed the ultimate tragedy of Garrett's life.

Accompanied by Carl Adamson, Garrett, driving a pair of horses to a buckboard, set out for Las Cruces from his Bear Cañon ranch in the Organ Mountains on the morning of February 28, 1908. Before starting, he slipped two cartridges loaded with buckshot into his shotgun, which he stowed in the bottom of the buggy. "I might need this gun before I get to Las Cruces," he remarked to Adamson. As the team trotted along a lonely stretch of road between the little village of Organ and Las Cruces, ​Garrett spied a solitary horseman jogging ahead in the same direction.

"I wonder who that is," he said.

He soon recognized the bay horse as Brazel's and the stalwart young figure sitting in the saddle with the nonchalant grace of a veteran range rider as Brazel himself. As his team, moving at a smart clip, cut down the intervening distance, Garrett was soon able to note the details of the horseman's attire—gray sombrero set squarely on the head, tan overalls, gray coat beneath which projected the yellow leather holster of a six-shooter, a red-and-black knitted scarf around the throat against a tang of cold in the February morning. Hard lines appeared about Garrett's eyes, and his lips tightened as he clucked up his horses. He seemed grimly pleased at the prospect of this accidental meeting.

"I'll give that young fellow a piece of my mind," he said.

Brazel looked surprised but in no wise disconcerted as Garrett drew alongside and pulled his team to a walk.

"I am goin' to give you mighty little more time to get off my land," said Garrett.

"I'll take all the time I want," Brazel replied with crisp deliberation. "You ain't goin' to get that land back till my lease is up. I've told you that before."

"I'll show you. If the law don't put you off, I will."

"You can't bluff me and no use trying."

"Moreover, you've got no right running goats on my land."

"I'll run any kind of stock on it I please."

"And you can't sublet it under the lease."

"I've already sublet it."

So they snarled and snapped at each other. Their angry argument was two miles long with the horses at a ​walk. The backing-strap of one of Garrett's horses became unbuckled. He stopped his team, climbed out, and rebuckled it. Brazel reined his horse to a standstill at the side of the road and waited for the journey and the argument to begin again. He sat in his saddle, silent, watchful, defiant. Garrett stepped back to the space between the wheels. He stood for a moment facing his enemy, his tall, lank form rigid, his face twisted with rage, murder blazing in his eyes. His words had been wasted; it was time for buckshot.

"God damn you," he said, "if I can't get you off my land one way, I will another."

He reached into the buckboard and snatched up his gun. He wheeled with the gun almost to his shoulder. But quick as he was, the old fighter was not quick enough for his young antagonist. At Garrett's first hostile move, Brazel jerked out his six-shooter and, at a distance of ten feet, fired twice. The first bullet drove through Garrett's heart, the second struck him between the eyes. Either would have been fatal. Garrett crashed to the ground at full length on his face, almost against the fore feet of Brazel's horse, both hands still gripping his shotgun firmly, a finger of his right hand against the trigger.

Levelling the six-shooter at Adamson, who still sat in the buckboard, Brazel said, "You'll come on with me to Las Cruces and tell this thing exactly as it happened." So, leaving the dead man lying in the road, Brazel and Adamson journeyed on to Las Cruces, where Brazel surrendered to Sheriff Lucero, who locked him in jail. Garrett's body lay in the lonely mountain road for five hours; a party of his friends drove out from Las Cruces in a wagon and brought it into town toward sunset. The killing plunged Las Cruces into a fever of excitement. There was some ​talk of lynching Brazel, but it soon died out; Brazel himself had many friends among the town people.

At the coroner's inquest next day, Brazel told the story of the tragedy as it has been set down here, and Adamson, the only other eyewitness, corroborated it in every detail. Brazel was released on ten-thousand-dollar bonds on March 4th, after a preliminary hearing before Justice Manuel Lopez, Attorney-General Harvey representing the territory. Adamson repeated the story he had told at the inquest and made out a clear case of self-defense. Brazel's bondsmen were cattlemen and merchants of Las Cruces.

Garrett's death stirred the Southwest. From Yuma to Brownsville and from the Rio Grande to the Ratons, no man was better known. He was sincerely mourned by thousands. Many of his old friends came from all over New Mexico, from Texas and Arizona, to pay their last respects at his grave. His funeral was one of the largest that part of the country ever knew. Governor George Curry of New Mexico was one of the pallbearers. Followed by a long cortège of buggies, wagons, and men and women on foot, his body was borne to the little cemetery on the outskirts of Las Cruces. It was a barren enclosure; you see such little campo santos all over the Southwest—many wooden crosses, a few gravestones, little grass or shrubbery, no flowers except those left upon the graves by those who mourn for the dead.

Tom Powers of El Paso acted as master of ceremonies. Everybody in the crowd knew Powers; there were few in all that land who did not know him. For years he kept a saloon in El Paso; he was a kindly, hospitable man; over his bar he dispensed good fellowship as well as good liquor. His saloon was famous; it was the meeting place for old​timers—Texas Rangers, cowboys, cattlemen, mining men, men of the deserts and mountains of all the country along the Mexican border, who wore the white steeple hat with a rolling brim that marked them as the breed of the Southwest, native and to the manner born. Powers is dead now—rest his soul—but every one in the Southwest will tell you that a friendlier, whiter, squarer man never lived.

So, at the open grave, Powers read Robert Ingersoll's oration on the burial of his brother—a beautiful, eloquent address filled with human charity and kindliness and love and the sadness of farewell. It seemed fitting; Garrett, it is said—though certain of his friends deny it—had been an atheist. The solemn service over, the grave was filled, the rounded mound of earth above it was heaped with flowers, and the crowd filed back to town, leaving the dead man to his long sleep. In pace requiescat.

Brazel was placed on trial in Las Cruces on a charge of murder on May 4, 1909. A. B. Fall, one of the political powers of New Mexico, later United States Senator and Secretary of the Interior under President Harding, appeared as counsel for the defense and District Attorney Mark B. Thompson for the territory. Brazel took the stand and testified that Garrett had made threats on several occasions to kill him and said that he shot only when it became necessary to save his own life. The only other witnesses were Sheriff Lucero, W. C. Field, Hugh Clarey, S. S. Pedregon, and Fay Sperry, the last four, members of the coroner's jury. Carl Adamson, the only eyewitness except Brazel himself, did not appear. Garrett's friends made much of this fact and started the report that Adamson had been influenced to remain absent. As he already had told his story twice under oath, however, it is not probable that his testimony would have changed the ver​dict. The trial lasted only one day. The jury deliberated only fifteen minutes and returned a verdict of acquittal.

Shortly after Garrett's death, a rumour became rife that he was murdered as the result of a conspiracy. It was said that Garrett was hunted to his death by men who had been arrested and prosecuted by Garrett while he was sheriff of Doña Ana County. It became known that when he was killed, he was on his way to Las Cruces to have a conference with J. B. Miller, who was said to have killed several men and was known as "Killing Miller." According to the conspiracy theory, Miller had hired Brazel to kill Garrett, and then, as part of the plot, had summoned Garrett to Las Cruces to afford Brazel an opportunity to commit the murder on the lonely road. This story was again bruited when, a short time before Brazel's trial, Miller, with three other men, charged with the murder of A. A. Babbitt, a cattleman, was taken from jail at Ada, Oklahoma, and lynched by a mob. The unexpected and unexplained absence of eyewitness Adamson from Brazel's trial seemed to many to lend colour to the suspicion that Garrett's death had been planned. No case of conspiracy, however, was ever definitely made out, and from all the evidence there is every reason to believe that Brazel shot in self-defense and was justly acquitted. Brazel continued to live near Las Cruces and is to-day a prosperous ranchman of the region.

New Mexico owes much to Garrett. He brought law and order west of the Pecos. He stabilized the land, made it safe to live in and build homes in, cleared the way for statehood. He was the last great sheriff of the old frontier, constructive through destruction, establishing peace on a foundation of graves, the leaping flame from the ​muzzle of his six-shooter the beacon of prosperity. He had a job to do and he did it; a mission to fulfil and he fulfilled it. His death was a period to completed labours, tragically in keeping with his tragic life, "last scene of all that ends this strange, eventful history."