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"I believe you, Billy," said the sheriff. "I've done my part. Now you do yours. Live straight. Make good. That'll be all the thanks I want."

So, with his slate wiped clean, Wilson went back to his home in Texas and, still under his assumed name, lived cleanly and honestly and prosperously ever after. He may be living yet.

Tom Pickett, another of the Kid's followers who was in the Stinking Spring affair and who rode into Fort Sumner with Tom O'Folliard the night the latter was killed by Garrett, also turned straight after the Kid's death. In the little town in New Mexico where he settled down, it tickled his vanity to be pointed out as one of the Kid's old buccaneers, and he swaggered about the streets with two heavy six-shooters buckled around him. He handled his weapons neatly and was a crack shot, and his fellow townsmen treated him with the cautious consideration usually accorded a bad man. Sheriff Garrett unexpectedly dropped into Pickett's home town one day. Whereupon, to everyone's surprise, Pickett mounted his pony in a hurry and rode off into the hills, where he remained in hiding until Garrett departed. His neighbours made unmerciful fun of Pickett for running away. "We thought you were a bad man and a fighter," they laughed, "and the first chance you get to show us how brave you are, you take to the tall timber." Pickett accepted the ridicule with good-humoured frankness. "I know that long-legged fellow," he said, "and don't want his game." The panic into which Garrett threw him unintentionally had a salutary effect. He was laughed out of his reputation as a bad man, laid aside his guns, and went seriously to work. When, years afterward, he was gathered to his fathers, he was a well-to-do and respected citizen.