Border agent first saddled up in '42 Forty miles was the route. Horseback was the preferred mode of transportation. "You rode with a partner. You were seldom alone," says Robert "Bobby" Jarratt, who rode for the Border Patrol in 1942 and '43 back when the border was a barbed-wire fence, nothing more. "We looked for signs — broken branches, footprints. Then we'd pick up the trail heading north," says Jarratt, who would work his way up to the state's top job in the Border Patrol before retiring on the last day of 1970. In late December of 1941, he signed up for the Border Patrol and spent the next 30 days training in El Paso, learning, among other things, elementary Spanish and immigration law. On probation for a year, he spent the first few months in Nogales and Gila Bend before heading to the Texas Gulf Coast, looking for wartime saboteurs. Pay to start out was $2,000 a year. "You had to buy your own uniform. The only thing furnished was the hardware, like your gun and handcuffs."....