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"Jesse Evans and his brother, George Davis—Davis being the family name—got mixed up in a robbery down around Pecos City," Garrett went on, "and in a fight with Texas Rangers, George was killed and Jesse sent to the Texas penitentiary for twenty years. While he was serving his term, a queer little incident occurred that always puzzled me. I was sitting in my office in Lincoln one day in 1882 when a Mexican came in and told me Jesse Evans was in town and he and several other Mexicans had talked with him. I hurried out and searched everywhere, but not a trace of Evans could I find. There is no doubt that Jesse was then in the Texas penitentiary, but the Mexicans, who knew him well, swore they had met him face to face in Lincoln and could not have been mistaken. Mexicans are a superstitious lot and believe in ghosts, witches, wraiths, and such things, and there is an old myth among them that by some kind of magic certain persons have appeared at the same time in places a thousand miles apart. When I told my Mexican friends that Evans was in the Texas penitentiary at the moment they thought they were talking with him in Lincoln, they were sure they had seen a wraith. If it wasn't a wraith, I don't know what it was. Certainly it was not Jesse Evans."

What became of this former crony of Billy the Kid is not definitely known. Some say he died in the penitentiary; others that he served out his twenty-year sentence. When he was released, according to one story, he went to his native town of Texarkana, where he found that his wife, who had supposed him dead, had taken a new husband. He did not reveal himself to her, it is said, but leaving her happy with the other man, took himself off quietly to Arizona, where all trace of him was lost.