Bobby Jarratt, 88, worked in the 1940s as a Border Patrol agent riding horseback along barbed-wire fences on the border.

David Sanders / Arizona Daily Star

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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 almost three decades, his job would take him everywhere from Nogales to Texas to Mexico City, doing everything from checking buses to posing as a drug buyer in Yuma.

"I made a deal to buy seven pounds of opium, but I wouldn't pick it up in Mexico. I told them to bring it to San Luis." After the deal was made, Jarratt took off with both the opium and the money — and the drug dealer in hot pursuit. "He jumped over the bar after me. My backup got him, but they were a little slow."

He tells the tale in a slow and laconic manner, just the way you figure it would be told by someone who started his job in the saddle.

Born at St. Mary's Hospital, Jarratt, now 88, got as far as his freshman year playing on the University of Arizona football team before breaking his ankle. That was the end of his scholarship.

He married the following year and went to work for Southern Pacific for a couple of years. "I hated it," says Jarratt.

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."

In October of 1942, he came to the San Rafael Valley, on the border, about 40 miles east of Nogales.

Home for him, wife Frances and young daughters Judy and Susan was a three-room adobe, with well and outhouse out back.

A garden and chickens kept the family fed, along with an occasional quarter-side of beef provided by a rancher. "We'd hang it on the porch at night and put it under the bed during the day. The longer it was stored, the better it got."

Frances, his late wife, loved this life, says Jarratt. "She was up for anything." Good thing, since she never knew when he left when he'd be back.

"One time we followed two men for almost three days, almost to the Santa Rita Mountains," says Jarratt. "We slept with our horse blankets, tried to find something to eat."

They got their men. "They were ready to be found. They were out of water and hungry."

But the usual routine was to ride 20 miles west of the house along the border, then ride back that same day. The next day, he and his partner would ride 20 miles in the other direction.

His biggest year on horseback came in 1943. "We caught six illegals that year," says Jarratt. "We caught two at one time; the rest were all singles."

In February of '44, he joined the U.S. Army Air Forces, but by 1946 he was back with the Border Patrol.

His first supervisory job came in Casa Grande in 1950. "That was the only time I ever pulled my gun," says Jarratt, who never had to fire one. "Some of the transients in some of those bars got rough."

From 1952 to 1954, he served as senior patrol inspector in Nogales, overseeing five — count 'em — five other agents.

Other jobs, other dates followed, from San Pedro, Calif., to Brownsville, Texas, to Chula Vista, back in California.

"My daughters were in 17 different schools in all those moves," says Jarratt.

Mexico City was where he worked from 1963 to 1965. "One of my jobs was interviewing the Cuban-born coming into Mexico who wanted to go to the United States. One of them was Fidel Castro's sister."

In 1965, he made his final move, this time to Phoenix, where he became district director of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service.

Now living in Pearce, Jarratt returned a few weeks ago to the site of that little adobe house, now gone.

But one thing remains. "They still use horses, but not for routine patrol work," says Jarratt. "After the war, they started using Jeeps. For a time they did not use horses. But they found out you can't go everywhere."