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"I repeat that I will pardon you if the verdict goes against you. But I want you first to stand trial like a man."

The Kid thought for a moment in silence. Abstractedly, he lifted his rifle and blew a fleck of dust off the magazine.

"No, Governor," he said, "I can't do it. No use. It's too late. I've got to go on as I am, and when the time comes, die with my boots on."

Neither spoke for a moment.

"I'm sorry, Billy," said the governor. "You are wrong in your attitude. But if I can't persuade you to change it, that would seem to end the matter."

They rose and shook hands.

"Good-bye, Governor," said the Kid.

"Good-bye, my boy," said the governor.

Governor Wallace watched the Kid as he rode off along the cañon road until he disappeared.

"If that boy would take my advice," he said, turning to his companions with a note of sadness in his voice, "I believe he has in him the making of a fine man."

Two years later, Billy, in the shadow of the gallows, recalled the governor's promise of a pardon. But the pardon did not come and his friendship turned to hate.

"The Lincoln County reign of terror is not over," wrote Mrs. Susan E. Wallace, the governor's wife, in a letter from Fort Stanton, "and we hold our lives at the mercy of desperadoes and outlaws, chief among them Billy the Kid, whose boast is that he has killed a man for every year of his life. Once he was captured and escaped and now he swears, when he has killed the sheriff and the judge who passed sentence upon him and Governor Wallace, he will surrender and be hanged.