During his time as a Ranger, Tom investigated several murders.
Tom’s brother Doc recalled, “We had nothing—not even
fingerprints. We had to use mostly witnesses, and they were
sometimes hard to come by.” Even more troublesome, some
Rangers had no patience for the niceties of the law. One member
of Tom’s company would seek out the most ruthless bad man in
town and then provoke a fight, so he could kill him. Tom, who
believed that a lawman could usually “avoid killing if you didn’t
lose your head,” later told a writer that he had heated discussions
with this Ranger. It didn’t seem right for any man to play judge,
jury, and executioner.
In 1908, while Tom was stationed in Weatherford, a town east
of Abilene, he met a young woman named Bessie Patterson. She
was petite, at least beside him, and she had short brown hair and
sincere eyes. Tom, who’d spent much of his life in male company,
was taken with her. Where he was a man of stillness, she was
outspoken and a whirl of motion. She ordered him around in a
way that few dared, but he didn’t seem to mind; for once, it was
not incumbent upon him to be in command of the world around
him or the emotions inside him. His job, however, was ill-suited
for marriage. Doc’s captain once said, “An officer who hunts
desperate criminals has no business having a wife and family.”
Before long, Tom was tugged away from her. With N. P. Thomas,
a Ranger who was one of his closest friends, he was sent to deal
with a plague of rascality in Amarillo, in the Texas Panhandle. A
Ranger reported that the city had some of the hardest crooks
around and that the sheriff’s office had provided no assistance in
removing them; what’s more, the Ranger noted, “the Sheriff has
two sons who live at the whore house.”
Thomas had already had several run-ins with the deputy sheriff,