s what he might expect. He knew also that sheriff Garrett would never
give him up now, and that one or the other of the two must die.

Yet, knowing all these things, the Kid, by means of stolen horses, broke
back once more to his old stamping grounds around Fort Sumner. Garrett
again got on his trail, and as the Kid, with incredible fatuity, still
hung around his old haunts, he was at length able to close with him once
more. With his deputies, John Poe and Thomas P. McKinney, he located the
Kid in Sumner, although no one seemed to be explicit as to his
whereabouts. He went to Pete Maxwell's house himself, and there, as his
two deputies were sitting at the edge of the gallery in the moonlight,
he killed the Kid at Maxwell's bedside.

Billy the Kid had very many actual friends, whom he won by his pleasant
and cheerful manners and his liberality, when he had anything with which
to be liberal, although that was not often. He was very popular among
the Mexicans of the Pecos valley. As to the men the Kid killed in his
short twenty-one years, that is a matter of disagreement. The usual
story is twenty-one, and the Kid is said to have declared he wanted
to kill two more--Bob Ollinger and "Bonnie" Baca--before he died, to
make it twenty-three in all. Pat Garrett says the Kid had killed eleven
men. Others say he had killed nine. A very few say that the Kid never
killed any man without full justification and in self-defense. They
regard the Kid as a scapegoat for the sins of others. Indeed, he was
less fortunate than some others, but his deeds brought him his deserts
at last, even as they left him an enduring reputation as one of the most
desperate desperadoes ever known in the West.

[Illustration: From a painting by John W. Norton
"THE NEXT INSTANT HE FIRED AND SHOT OLLINGER DEAD"]

Central and eastern New Mexico, from 1860 to 1880, probably held more
desperate and dangerous men than any other corner of the West ever did.
It was a region then more remote and less known than Africa is to-day,
and no record exists of more than a small portion of its deeds of blood.
Nowhere in the world was human life ever held cheaper, and never was any
population more lawless. There were no courts and no officers, and most
of the scattered inhabitants of that time had come thither to escape
courts and officers. This environment which produced Billy the Kid
brought out others scarcely less dangerous, and of a few of these there
may be made pass