At the age of seventeen, Cal Polk joined lawman Pat Garrett’s posse, which was hot on the trail of Billy the Kid in the winter of 1880. He told the tale in a manuscript held at the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum, in Canyon. “Pat, why don’t you come up like a man and give us a fair fight,” he remembered Billy the Kid calling out while holed up in a stone shack in Stinking Springs, New Mexico, before his eventual surrender and arrest. Polk returned to working with cattle on the LX Ranch, in the Texas Panhandle, after the search, and he eventually returned to Prairie Lea, in his native Caldwell County, to serve as constable and deputy sheriff. In 1897, Polk opened a meat market…