The killing of the Indian agency clerk, Bernstein, August 5, 1878, on a horse-stealing expedition, was the next act of the Kid and his men, who thereafter fled northeast, out through the Capitan Gap, to certain old haunts around Fort Sumner, some ninety miles north of Roswell, up the Pecos valley. Here a little band of outlaws, led by the Kid, lived for a time as they could by stealing horses along the Bonito and around the Capitans, and running them off north and east. There were in this band at the time the Kid, Charlie Bowdre, Doc Skurlock, Wayt, Tom O'Folliard, Hendry Brown and Jack Middleton. Some or all of these were in the march with stolen horses which the Kid engineered that fall, going as far east as Atacosa, on the Canadian, before the stock was all gotten rid of. Middleton, Wayt, and Hendry Brown there left the Kid's gang, telling him that he would get killed before long; but the latter laughed at them and returned to his old grounds, alternating between Lincoln and Fort Sumner, and now and then stealing some cows from the Chisum herd. In January, 1880, the Kid enlarged his list of victims by killing, in a very justifiable encounter, a bad man from the Panhandle by the name of Grant, who had been loafing around in his country, and who, no doubt, intended to kill the Kid for the glory of it. The Kid had, a few moments before he shot Grant, taken the precaution to set the hammer of the latter's revolver on an "empty," as he whirled it over in examination. They were apparently friends, but the Kid knew that Grant was drunk and bloodthirsty. He shot Grant twice through the throat, as Grant snapped his pistol in his face. Nothing was done with the Kid for this, of course. Birds of a feather now began to appear in the neighborhood of Fort Sumner, and the Kid's gang was increased by the addition of Tom Pickett, and later by Billy Wilson, Dave Rudabaugh, Buck Edwards, and one or two others. These men stole cattle now from ranges as far east as the Canadian, and sold them to obliging butcher-shops at the new mining camp of White Oaks, just coming into prominence; or, again, they took cattle from the lower Pecos herds and sold them north at Las Vegas; or perhaps they stole horses at the Indian reservation and distributed them along the Pecos valley. Their operations covered a country more than two hundred miles across in either direction. They had accomplices and friends in nearly every little _placita_ of the country. Sometimes they gave a man a horse as a present. If he took it, it meant that they could depend upon him to keep silent. Partly by friendliness and partly by terrorizing, their influence was extended until they became a power in all that portion of the country; and their self-confidence had now arisen to the point that they thought none dared to molest them, while in general they behaved in the high-handed fashion of true border bandits. This was the heyday of the Kid's career.