"I had the singular experience, once in my life, of eating dinner at the same table with the man who brutally shot me down and left me for dead. J. B. Chamberlain, the man who shot me, and who thought he had killed me, came in with a friend and sat down at the same table in a Leavenworth, Kansas, restaurant, where I was eating. My opportunity for revenge was there. I did not take it. Chamberlain and his friend did not know who I was. I left the matter to the law, with what results the records of the law's failure in these matters has shown. "Of those who were tried for these murders, J. B. Chamberlain is now dead. C. E. Cook, who was much alarmed lest the cases might be reinstated in the year 1898, claims Quincy, Illinois, as his home, but has interests in Florida. O. J. Cook is dead. Jack Lawrence is dead. John Kelley is dead. Other actors in the drama, unconvicted, are also dead or nameless wanderers. As the indictments were all quashed in 1898, Sam Robinson, whose whereabouts is unknown, will never be brought to trial for his deeds in the Hay Meadow butchery. He was not tried at Paris, being then in the Colorado penitentiary. His friend and partner, Bert Nobel, who was sent to the penitentiary for seven years for participating in the postoffice robbery, was pardoned out, and later killed a policeman at Trinidad, Colorado. He was tried there and hanged. So far as I know, this is the only legal punishment ever inflicted upon any of the Hugoton or Woodsdale men, who outvied each other in a lawlessness for which anarchy would be a mild name." Chapter XVI Biographies of Bad Men--_Desperadoes of the Deserts_--_Billy the Kid, Jesse Evans, Joel Fowler, and Others Skilled in the Art of Gun Fighting_. The desert regions of the West seemed always to breed truculence and touchiness. Some of the most desperate outlaws have been those of western Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. These have sometimes been Mexicans, sometimes half-breed Indians, very rarely full-blood or half-blood negroes. The latter race breeds criminals, but lacks in the initiative required in the character of the desperado. Texas and the great arid regions west of Texas produced rather more than their full quota of bad white men who took naturally to the gun. By all means the most prominent figure in the general fighting along the Southwestern border, which found climax in the Lincoln County War, was that historic and somewhat romantic character known as Billy the Kid, who had more than a score of killings to his credit at the time of his death at the age of twenty-one. His character may not be chosen as an exemplar for youth, but he affords an instance hardly to be surpassed of the typical bad man.