Next morning they started drinking again (we had not destroyed the liquor as we could not fight the whole crowd), but by noon we got them started home. Most of these young fellows would have been quiet enough in different surroundings. But the little town of Uvalde had turned out more “bad-men” than any town of its size in the West, and the fathers of these young men had been handy with a gun and mixed up in some shooting or other, so the sons thought it behoved them to keep up the family reputation. One young fellow, John Garnet (who was later my shift mate in the extracting house), was the only survivor of a large family, every member of which had died by violence. His father was a large sheep-owner and very brutal to his Mexican herders. One night the boys, coming home from a barbecue in town, found the old man tied in his arm-chair with his throat cut, and every herder on the place gone. There and then the eldest boy made a vow to kill every Mexican he met. He went over to C. P. Diaz, across the Mexican line from Eagle Pass, and shot two or three Mexicans who, he thought, had been implicated in his father’s killing. The Rurales tried to arrest him, and he killed two and wounded three before they finally killed him. John himself I saw once in Uvalde, some years later, have a fight with his Cousin Joe, whom he licked. Joe said, "John, you are too big for me to fight with my fists, but I’ll get my gun and fix you." The rest of us got round John, and finally got him into his buggy and started off to his ranch, but fifteen minutes later I saw him drive round the plaza with a shot-gun across his knees. We remonstrated with him, but all he would say was, "Boys, it’s no use; I cannot leave town as long as Joe is looking for me." Luckily, some other friends had worked on Joe by telling him how bad it looked for the last two members of the family to be fighting, and got him to go home. It is this feeling that they cannot back down that makes so many young fellows who are naturally decent enough become killers and bad-men. For once you had killed some one and got a reputation as a fighter, your gun had to guard your life, for there were plenty of would-be fighters willing to try you out, and if they killed you they got the reputation you had and their own as well. The reader wonders probably why the city marshal or the sheriff did not interfere in a case like this. The reason is twofold: in the first place, whoever moved would make an enemy of both men if he interfered before there was any shooting done, and it would hurt his chances at elections; in the second place, because a fair, square “shooting-scrape” was even at that time not thought a very serious matter in West Texas. And how could it be otherwise in a community like Uvalde, where the man who was sheriff while I was there, and had held the office for twenty-two years, had killed more than one man in his youth in a private feud which his father had started; in a