Clyde Barrow and his gun woman companion, Bonnie Parker, went by the way of all killers Wednesday. Alive one minute, their battered bodies fighting for life the next. Dead at the hands of shotgun justice.

     And so the great southwest has the birth of another legend. With the years it will grow, with the years it will be warped and reshaped and enlarged until children of another generation will chant of Bonnie and Clyde.

     This generation has no regret that Clyde and Bonnie have passed on. They did that passing with their boots on causes little concern. They died as they lived. They killed and they were killed. They caused untold bloodshed and their own blood was spilled on the rock and sand of a dirt highway.

     This generation knows there was no romance wrapped around Clyde and Bonnie. There was nothing glamorous, surely nothing to bewitch or enchant those who followed their tally of crime. To the person with even a little degree of intelligence and respect for law and life, they were gun laden killers, not romantic robbers as existed in the days when the express car keeper never knew how many times he would be robbed before his train reached the next station.

     Texas and the entire southwest has the greatest applause for the body of officers who accomplished what so many tried. They bow in reverence to those officers who fell in the line of duty, trying to bring Clyde and Bonnie into tolls of the law.

     Many years ago in the New Mexico region there was a young outlaw named Billy the Kid. He killed his first man when he was twelve years old. From then on it was Billy shooting, fleeing, killing, fighting back, and finally ambush and death. Death with his boots on.

     Billy the Kid wasn't glamorous when he reached too late for his gun. Yet out of his death grew the greatest legends of the southwest. Time did that.

     Maybe time will weave something like that as a shroud for Clyde and Bonnie. But today, it is not so.

Clyde Barrow's Death Photo

Bonnie Parker's Death Photo