258

"The Next Instant He Fired and Shot Ollinger Dead" 272

Pat F. Garrett 294

A Typical Western Man-Hunt 302

The Old Chisum Ranch 330

The Old Fritz Ranch 358

A Border Fortress 358

"Afterward" 398

Chapter I

The Desperado--_Analysis of His Make-up_--_How the Desperado Got to Be
Bad and Why_--_Some Men Naturally Skillful with Weapons_--_Typical
Desperadoes_.

Energy and action may be of two sorts, good or bad; this being as well
as we can phrase it in human affairs. The live wires that net our
streets are more dangerous than all the bad men the country ever knew,
but we call electricity on the whole good in its action. We lay it under
law, but sometimes it breaks out and has its own way. These outbreaks
will occur until the end of time, in live wires and vital men. Each land
in the world produces its own men individually bad--and, in time, other
bad men who kill them for the general good.

There are bad Chinamen, bad Filipinos, bad Mexicans, and Indians, and
negroes, and bad white men. The white bad man is the worst bad man of
the world, and the prize-taking bad man of the lot is the Western white
bad man. Turn the white man loose in a land free of restraint--such as
was always that Golden Fleece land, vague, shifting and transitory,
known as the American West--and he simply reverts to the ways of
Teutonic and Gothic forests. The civilized empire of the West has grown
in spite of this, because of that other strange germ, the love of law,
anciently implanted in the soul of the Anglo-Saxon. That there was
little difference between the bad man and the good man who went out
after him was frequently demonstrated in the early roaring days of the
West. The religion of progress and civilization meant very little to the
Western town marshal, who sometimes, or often, was a peace officer
chiefly because he was a good fighting man.

We band together and "elect" political representatives who do not
represent us at all. We "elect" executive officers who execute nothing
but their own wishes. We pay innumerable policemen to take from our
shoulders the burden of self-protection; and the policemen do not do
this thing. Back of all the law is