To Hell on a Fast Horse Updated Edition: The Untold Story of Billy the Kid and Pat Garrett

“So richly detailed, you can almost smell the gunsmoke and the sweat of the saddles.”—Hampton Sides, New York Times bestselling author

From Spur Award-winning author Mark Lee Gardner, his classic dual biography of Billy the Kid and Sheriff Pat Garrett, detailing Garrett’s riveting chase of the notorious bandit—now updated with a new afterword covering new developments in the Billy the Kid story.

Billy the Kid—a.k.a. Henry McCarty, Henry Antrim, and William Bonney—was a horse thief, cattle rustler, charismatic rogue, and cold-blooded killer. A superb shot, the Kid gunned down four men single handedly and five others with the help of cronies. Two of his victims were Lincoln County, NM, deputies, killed during the Kid’s brazen daylight escape from the courthouse jail on April 28, 1881. After dspensing with his guards and filing through the chain securing his leg irons, The Kid danced a macabre jig on the jail’s porch before riding away on a stolen horse as terrified townspeople—and many sympathizers—watched. For new sheriff, Pat Garrett, the chase was on . . .

To Hell on a Fast Horse recreates the thrilling manhunt for the Wild West’s most iconic outlaw. It is also the first “dual biography” of the Kid and Garrett, two larger-than-life figures who would not have become the stuff of legend without the other. Drawing on voluminous primary sources and a wealth of published scholarship, Mark L. Gardner digs beneath the myth to take a fresh look at these two men, their relationship, and what they would come to mean to a public enamored of a violent national past.

But who were the real men behind the legends, and what forces drove them to their final, fatal encounter?

• Lawman vs. Outlaw: Go inside the complex relationship between the charismatic outlaw Billy the Kid and the relentless sheriff Pat Garrett, two men whose lives were fated to collide.
• A Historic Manhunt: Follow Garrett's determined pursuit across New Mexico, from Billy’s brazen courthouse escape to the final, tense standoff at Stinking Spring.
• Myth vs. Reality: Discover the true story, meticulously pieced together from primary sources that separate the facts of the American West from the tall tales.
• The Wild West: Experience the grit and gunsmoke of 19th-century New Mexico during the violent Lincoln County War, a bloody feud that shaped the legends of both men.