he territory a mockery of
civilization. If the truth were known, it might perhaps be found that
sometimes Garrett arrested a bad man and got his warrant for it later,
when he went to the settlements. He found a straight six-shooter the
best sort of warrant, and in effect he took the matter of establishing a
government in southwestern New Mexico in his own hands, and did it in
his own way. He was the whole machinery of the law. Sometimes he boarded
his prisoners out of his own pocket. He himself was the state! His word
was good, even to the worst cutthroat that ever he captured. Often he
had in his care prisoners whom, under the law, he could not legally have
held, had they been demanded of him; but he held them in spite of any
demand; and the worst prisoner on that border knew that he was safe in
Pat Garrett's hands, no matter what happened, and that if Pat said he
would take him through to any given point, he would take him through.

After he had finished his first season of work as sheriff and as United
States marshal, Garrett ranched it for a time. In 1884, his reputation
as a criminal-taker being now a wide one, he organized and took charge
of a company of Texas rangers in Wheeler county, Texas, and made Atacosa
and thereabouts headquarters for a year and a half. So great became his
fame now as a man-taker that he was employed to manage the affairs of a
cattle detective agency; it being now so far along in civilization that
men were beginning to be careful about their cows. He was offered ten
thousand dollars to break up a certain band of raiders working in upper
Texas, and he did it; but he found that he was really being paid to kill
one or two men, and not to capture them; and, being unwilling to act as
the agent of any man's revenge, he quit this work and went into the
employment of the "V" ranch in the White mountains. He then moved down
to Roswell again, in the spring of 1887. Here he organized the Pecos
Valley Irrigation Company. He was the first man to suspect the presence
of artesian water in this country, where the great Spring rivers push up
from the ground; and through his efforts wells were bored which
revolutionized all that valley. He ran for sheriff of Chaves county, and
was defeated. Angry at his first reverse in politics, he pulled up at
Roswell, and sacrificed his land for what he could get for it. To-day it
is covered with crops and fruits and worth sixty to one hundred dollars
an acre.

Garrett