To Hell on a Fast Horse Read Online Free PDF

version of the shoot-out. One of the men asked Billy why he killed Roberts, a simple question that the Kid could not find an answer for. He just shook his head, saying he didnot know. Later that day, the prisoner and guards pulled into Fort Stanton. Pat Garrett was waiting there for the man he had famously brought to justice four months earlier. Then, after a short journey of nine more miles down the valley of the Rio Bonito, Garrett, Bob Olinger, and Billy arrived in the county seat of Lincoln.
    Garrett now had a dilemma. Lincoln County had never had a jail that, as he later wrote, “would hold a cripple,” yet he was charged with confining the Territory’s slipperiest criminal for the next twenty-two days. Whether it could be done remained to be seen. Garrett was confident that he could, and that the execution would come off at the appointed time as planned. But Billy thought differently. One day, his guards allowed Mrs. Annie E. Lesnett, a friend of Billy’s from Dowlin’s Mill on the Ruidoso, to see their prisoner. In a sick sort of joke, Bob Olinger invited the woman to the hanging. Unfazed, Billy spoke up: “Mrs. Lesnett, they can’t hang me if I’m not there, can they?”
    No matter the odds, the shackles, the armed guards, Billy the Kid’s old optimism was back. He somehow believed he could escape the gallows, and that belief was a very dangerous thing.

2
Trails West
    His voice was as soft as a woman’s, and he rarely used it to talk of himself.
    — PAT DONAN
    T HE CAPTURE OF THE in gold. Yet for all the public attention, hardly anyone really knew the lawman, and Garrett was not much of a talker, at least when asked to talk about himself. He seemed to have blown in off the plains and was just suddenly there, the right man at the right place. And that was pretty much how it happened.
    Garrett was born in another place and time, in Chambers County, Alabama, on June 5, 1850. And although he would come to sign his name P. F. Garrett, the name given to him at birth was Patrick Floyd Jarvis Garrett, a name that had belonged to his maternal grandfather. Grandfather Jarvis died two years after the birth of his grandson, butnot before willing his young namesake a rifle, a saddle, and a bridle. As young Pat would eventually learn, such basic items were crucial for a man to survive on his own. Garrett’s father, John Lumpkin Garrett, a native of Georgia, was an ambitious Southern planter. Just three years later, though, perhaps prompted by the death of wife Elizabeth Ann’s father, the Garretts pulled up stakes and moved to Claiborne Parish, Louisiana. The Garrett caravan that rattled over the rough roads to their new home included a long column of human chattel. Pat Garrett’s father was a slave owner.
    In Louisiana, John Garrett purchased the cotton plantation of John Greer, consisting of eighteen hundred acres eight miles northeast of the parish seat of Homer. Pat Garrett earned his first dollar working in his father’s plantation store. And as he got bigger, so did the Garrett family; Pat would have seven brothers and sisters (Pat was the second oldest and the first son).
    The Garrett plantation prospered as well. The 1860 census records the value of John Garrett’s real estate at $15,000, but his personal property was estimated at a whopping $40,000, which is not so surprising considering that it included thirty-four slaves. Pat Garrett grew up, then, in a relatively privileged world. With slaves to tend to the household and cooking, and to cultivate and harvest the vast fields of cotton, the Garretts probably never wanted for anything. The Civil War changed all that.
    As a large slave owner, John Garrett was exempt from Confederate military service, but he lost his overseer to the Twenty-seventh Regiment, Louisiana Infantry. The fall of the port of New Orleans to Union forces in April 1862 brought additional hardships, forcing Louisiana cotton planters to transport their crops overland through Texas to