thing it was.

Jesse Evans was another bad man of this date, a young fellow in his
early twenties when he first came to the Pecos country, but good enough
at gun work to make his services desirable. He was one of the very few
men who did not fear Billy the Kid. He always said that the Kid might
beat him with the Winchester, but that he feared no man living with the
six-shooter. Evans came very near meeting an inglorious death. He and
the notorious Tom Hill once held up an old German in a sheep camp near
what is now Alamagordo, New Mexico. The old man did not know that they
were bad men, and while they were looting his wagon, looking for the
money he had in a box under the wagon seat, he slipped up and killed Tom
Hill with his own gun, which had been left resting against a bush near
by, nearly shooting Hill's spine out. Then he opened fire on Jesse, who
was close by, shooting him twice, through the arm and through the lungs.
The latter managed to get on his horse, bareback, and rode that night,
wounded as he was, and partly trailed by the blood from his lungs,
sixty miles or more to the San Augustine mountains, where he holed up at
a friendly ranch, later to be arrested by Constable Dave Wood, from the
railway settlements. In default of better jurisdiction, he was taken to
Fort Stanton, where he lay in the hospital until he got ready to escape,
when he seems to have walked away. Evans and his brother, who was known
as George Davis--the latter being the true name of both--then went down
toward Pecos City and got into a fight with some rangers, who killed his
brother on the spot and captured Jesse, who was confined in the Texas
penitentiary for twenty years. He escaped and was returned; yet in the
year 1882, when he should have been in the Texas prison, he is said to
have been seen and recognized on the streets of Lincoln. Evans, or
Davis, is said to have been a Texarkana man, and to have returned to his
home soon after this, only to find his wife living with another man, and
supposing her first husband dead. He did not tell the new husband of his
presence, but took away with him his boy, whom he found now well grown.
It was stated that he went to Arizona, and nothing more is known of him.

Tom Hill, the man above mentioned as killed by the sheep man, was a
typical rough, dark, swarthy, low-browed, as loud-mouthed as he was
ignorant. He was a braggart, but none the less a killer.

Charlie Bowdre is supposed to have been a