After he had finished his first season of work as sheriff and as United States marshal, Garrett ranched it for a time. In 1884, his reputation as a criminal-taker being now a wide one, he organized and took charge of a company of Texas rangers in Wheeler county, Texas, and made Atacosa and thereabouts headquarters for a year and a half. So great became his fame now as a man-taker that he was employed to manage the affairs of a cattle detective agency; it being now so far along in civilization that men were beginning to be careful about their cows. He was offered ten thousand dollars to break up a certain band of raiders working in upper Texas, and he did it; but he found that he was really being paid to kill one or two men, and not to capture them; and, being unwilling to act as the agent of any man's revenge, he quit this work and went into the employment of the "V" ranch in the White mountains. He then moved down to Roswell again, in the spring of 1887. Here he organized the Pecos Valley Irrigation Company. He was the first man to suspect the presence of artesian water in this country, where the great Spring rivers push up from the ground; and through his efforts wells were bored which revolutionized all that valley. He ran for sheriff of Chaves county, and was defeated. Angry at his first reverse in politics, he pulled up at Roswell, and sacrificed his land for what he could get for it. To-day it is covered with crops and fruits and worth sixty to one hundred dollars an acre. Garrett now went back to Texas, and settled near Uvalde, where he engaged once more in an irrigation enterprise. He was here five years, ranching and losing money. W. T. Thornton, the governor of New Mexico, sent for him and asked him if he would take the office of sheriff of Donna Ana county, to fill the unexpired term of Numa Raymond. He was elected to serve two subsequent terms as sheriff of Donna Ana county, and no frontier officer has a better record for bravery. In the month of December, 1901, President Theodore Roosevelt, who had heard of Garrett, met him and liked him, and without any ado or consultation appointed him collector of customs at El Paso, Texas. Here for the next four years Garrett made a popular collector, and an honest and fearless one. The main reputation gained by Garrett was through his killing the desperado, Billy the Kid. It is proper to set down here the chronicle of that undertaking, because that will best serve to show the manner in which a frontier sheriff gets a bad man.